Date Point: 14Y 5D AV….early
Peterson Residence, Folctha, Cimbrean
Mornings were something that Gillian had never really had a problem with. In Tucson, the latitude meant that their range of daylight hours didn’t vary as much as places further north, and she’d never had a problem bouncing out of bed as soon as the sun was coming up. She was like her mom that way – Clara also had a fine internal clock and only slept in when she’d been up most of the night. Even the move to Cimbrean with its longer day and night hadn’t really slowed either of them down. They’d both adjusted handily.
Together, they were the bane of Samuel Peterson’s love of sleeping in, a fact that he privately found both endearing and immensely irritating.
The flip side of that, he reflected to himself while sipping his third cup of Earl Grey and watching the sun come up through the high windows of his study, was that both of them were also typically able to sleep on time and didn’t have the insomnia he’d battled for most of his adult life. Nights like last night were…not the stuff of nightmares, they were the stuff of wakefulness. No matter how hard he’d tried to get some sleep, it had eluded him until he’d given up entirely and gotten back up. Knowing that in a few short hours his busy, buzzing eleven year old daughter and a nine-year-old Gaoian were going to be (probably) literally bouncing off the walls hadn’t helped at all.
Uncharacteristically, the sun was nearly a finger-width above the horizon before he heard the first stirrings of life from inside Gillian’s room. He realized belatedly that he had not gotten anything going for breakfast yet, and rose from his very comfortable chair to make his way downstairs to the kitchen.
Crepes, he thought to himself. That’s a good thing to make a new best friend with, and we have everything. Suiting intent to action, he retrieved several bowls and assorted implements of destruction and set about making a mess. A sudden flash of inspiration hit him, and instead of cream cheese, he set out some nava paste that was supposed to have a subtle sweetness to it.
On reflection he added the strawberries that they’d picked from their backyard greenhouse two days before. The Gaoian condiment had been Clara’s idea, and she’d been bugging him to find a way to sneak it into something without Gillian noticing – she had a tendency to be stubborn about food, but was typically okay if she decided she liked it without knowing what it was first. Having an actual Gaoian at their table to try it was a bonus.
“Okay, Google,” he addressed his phone, sitting on top of the microwave where he’d left it the night before, forgotten in the hubbub. “Play Pink Floyd’s ‘Momentary Lapse of Reason’ album from Amazon Music.”
”Okay. Playing Pink Floyd ‘Momentary Lapse of Reason’.” came the reply. A moment later, his favorite Floyd album started up, the sounds of David Gilmour rowing a boat on the Thames over synthesizers softly setting an introspective, creative mood.
He started a cast iron pan heating on the induction stove, and began to whip up the batter.
Upstairs, Gillian lay under her blanket, quite awake. Normally she would have bounced out of bed, but…her new friend Liina was asleep and had moved during the night to lay across her legs. She wasn’t sure if this was like cat rules, where one didn’t move from under a sleeping cat unless the house was on fire, but it seemed like it.
When she had awoken, at the first peek of the sun on the horizon through her window, she had realized that Liina probably hadn’t had a safe place to sleep in a while, and was probably really tired, and she didn’t want to wake her up.
But she did need to pee, and it was getting worse. She heard Papa get up and start bustling around in the kitchen, and heard what he called his thinking music start. About halfway through “On The Turning Away”, as if in answer to her increasingly desperate prayers, Liina groaned, stretched out to an impossible length, and sat up. She blinked a few times at the unfamiliar settings. Gillian sat up too.
“You’re awake,” she said. It sounded stupid as soon as she said it.
“I’m alive,” Liina said reflectively. She sniffed at the unfamiliar scent wafting its way under the door. “What is that?”
“I dunno. Papa is making breakfast downstairs I think. I’m ‘posed to be quiet when I get up, because Mama is probably still sleeping. She had to work last night, that’s why she wasn’t here when you got here last night.” She stood up and stretched. “I have to pee really bad.”
“I’ll wait for you downstairs,” Liina said, one ear twitching to catch the fascinating sounds coming from the kitchen.
“Okay! I’ll be down in a minute.” Gillian got up and was just putting her hand on the door when Liina spoke again.
“Gillian?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
Gillian beamed a big smile, forgetting completely to keep her lips together, and went to do her morning ablutions. Liina padded down the stairs to the dining table, and sat, unsure of what to do next. Samuel looked over at her from the counter as he rapidly sliced strawberries, a taktaktaktaktaktak from the knife on the cutting board making an odd counterpoint to the music coming from behind him
“Good morning,” he said, smiling a little.
“Good morning,” she replied. “What…is the music you’re listening to? I like it.”
“This? This is a band called Pink Floyd, and this is their album from…1987, I think, by our reckoning. Pre-contact, of course. Human music made some big changes after meeting the rest of the galaxy,” he chuckled. “It’s one of my favorite albums.”
“It’s…very different than our music,” she said. “What are the instruments they’re using? I’ve never heard anything like that.”
“That’s an electric guitar, honey. It…um….it uses several long strings that are different thicknesses and tightened differently to make different sounds, and then the signals are passed through electronic processing to make what you’re hearing. The bass guitar, the low notes, is similar.”
The song they were listening to wound down, and another started, a single guitar chord modulating into another, then another. Liina listened, and then her ears went back as first lower notes joined in, and then drums, and a man began singing.
The sweet smell of a great sorrow lies over the land,
Plumes of smoke rise and merge into the leaden sky,
A man lies and dreams of green fields and rivers,
But awakes to a morning with no reason for waking.
Samuel suddenly realized what song he was listening to and spun. “Okay Google. Stop playback, play Pentatonix ‘Deluxe Edition’.”
”Okay, playing Pentatonix ‘Deluxe Edition’.” his phone replied, and a moment later something considerably more upbeat filled the kitchen. At the table behind him, Liina whimpered, her ears wilted back against her skull and lost in her own internal trauma. She curled up under the lip of the table on the chair. Samuel came out of the kitchen and slid the chair out, putting one hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry, Liina. I had forgotten what the song at the end of that album was, and how it might affect you,” he said softly. “You’re safe here.”
“What’s going on?” Gillian asked from the base of the stairs, having come down while he was distracted.
“I had music playing that made Liina sad, Peanut,” Samuel said. “Totally my fault. I’m sorry, honey, it’s okay.” He shot Gillian a look, as she rounded the table and sat down next to Liina. “Can you sit with her, Peanut? I’ll finish making some breakfast, and I think we need more hot chocolate.”
“Yes, Papa,” she replied. She put a hesitant hand on Liina’s head, scratching the Gaoian’s ears awkwardly, aware that she wasn’t a dog or a cat, but a person, and yet it felt really natural. Evidently Liina felt the same way, because she slowly stopped shuddering, and her head eventually came up, nose twitching as it caught the approach of another pair of mugs filled with steaming hot chocolate.
“That song…was horrible,” Liina finally managed in her little voice. Samuel winced, his back to them as he poured a ladeful of batter onto the oiled pan with a sssssssss.
“Definitely not the best choice for today, I agree. I’m sorry. I should have thought about it – that band has a lot of military imagery in their music, because their fathers fought in one of the biggest planetary wars humanity has ever had. Millions died. They’re dedicated to keeping the memory of that alive in some ways, I think hoping it’ll never happen again.”
“It always happens again,” Liina replied in a tone far too adult for her years. “I didn’t understand that before. I hadn’t even gotten to that section of our history yet, when…”
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Gillian said. “Papa said I’m not s’posed to ask you questions about it, but I can listen if you feel like talking about it.”
“I don’t,” Liina said a little fiercely, which was spoiled only a little by her gulping some of the hot chocolate. “This is amazing.”
“You like hot chocolate, huh?” Samuel asked.
“I’ve smelled it before, but the Mothers never let us have any. They said it was a grownup drink. I think it was just because they didn’t have enough for everyone.” Liina chittered a little.
The front door opened, throwing a long line of sunlight across the living room, and a surprisingly dry Clara came in, already unbuckling her equipment belt with a relieved sigh.
“Mama! Look who’s here! Her name is Liina, and she’s a Gaoian, and she said she doesn’t like barbecue sauce at all, ‘cause it hurts her face, but she likes hot chocolate and we’re having crepes, Papa is making them, and Liina is staying in my room..,” Gillian blurted out in one breathless run-on, getting up and flying across the room to give her mother a fierce hug.
“I see that. Okay, let go of me now, Peanut, let me get my boots off and change before you give me the executive summary of your evening, okay?” Clara took her cap off and tousled sweaty hair with her other hand. “I’m gonna go take a shower, honey.”
“Sounds like a plan. Don’t be long, or you aren’t gonna get any of these.” He gestured with a spatula to a growing plate full of golden crepes and a bowl of cut strawberries.
“I’ll be back down in a minute.” She came over to the table and draped her waterproof work coat over one chair, setting her hat on the table next to it. “Liina, is it?”
“Yes, Mother,” Liina replied automatically.
“I need to go clean up. I’m hot, sweaty, and tired, and I’m sure I smell dreadful. Give me a few minutes, and I’ll greet you properly, okay?” Clara said with a smile.
Liina duck-nodded, saying nothing. Clara disappeared into the upstairs, and they heard the shower start up almost immediately, the sounds of bathing and Electric Light Orchestra wafting down from inside the closed bathroom. Gillian looked at her, realizing that the tilt of her ears was a humorous one.
“What?” Gillian whispered, leaning over.
“Nothing.”
“No, what?”
“Well. I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“But?”
“But she did smell pretty…” Liina trailed off, and she and Gillian shared a giggling fit.
“Awful?”
“I don’t know. You all smell pretty different to me. She smelled like she had been sitting somewhere hot and sweating, and like something else, I don’t know.”
“Probably coffee. Mama only really drinks that when she’s at work.” On that note, her father set down a plate in front of each of them, with three rolled crepes stuffed with something pinkish and pasty-looking, and drowning in strawberries, with a big dollop of whipped cream over the top. Liina’s ears went up in shock.
“Pancakes!” she blurted out. “Um…..” she looked at Samuel, up the stairs at the closed bathroom door, at Gillian, and everywhere except the plate of food in front of her.
“Is that okay? I thought it sounded good, and we had everything we needed for it,” Samuel said.
Liina’s ears did a complicated little dance atop her head, and she cast around for something to say. She was saved by Gillian, who was already a third of the way into the first one and as usual couldn’t wait to keep talking through a mouthful.
“Papa makes them all the time, but usually they’re, like, the flat ones in a stack, and these are all rolly…what do you call them…crepes, right? Best breakfast ever, better even than cereal and cartoons.”
“I wasn’t sure if this was a special event. The Mothers have pancakes for special times, and they’re always laughing when they make them.” Liina took an exploratory bite of the unfamiliar pastry with the bright red berries. Her eyes rolled back as she savored it, her ears splaying back and forth as she worked out the smells and tastes, then her eyes opened.
“Is that…nava paste in these?” she asked.
Samuel grinned. “Indeed it is, young lady. And by the look of things, it agrees with Gillian too.” Gillian paused mid-bite, fork in the air halfway to her mouth with a dripping glob of crepe, filling, and several berries suspended.
“Wait. This isn’t cream cheese?” She looked down at it. “What’s nava paste?”
“It’s a Gaoian treat, Peanut. You liked it just fine a minute ago. Finish your plate.” Samuel went back to the kitchen and dished up two more plates, busying himself pouring two more mugs of hot chocolate and adding something from a bottle on the top shelf to both. At the table, Gillian thought about it, then shrugged and continued eating, although a little more slowly. Liina dug in, enjoying the sweetness of the berries, the subtle flavor of the nava with its slight bitter aftertaste, and the crunch of the crepes that were just a little bit crispy over the soft fluffy inside.
Clara came back downstairs in flannel pajamas with a fluffy robe over the top, hair still damp from her shower, and sat down just as Samuel plopped a plate and mug in front of her. She took a long sniff of the mug, held in both hands, and gave her husband a grateful look. She rolled her head side to side, stretching things out and took a long sip of the hot beverage.
“Oooooooooh….I needed that,” she said. “What a night. And speaking of nights….I’m very glad to meet you, Liina, and you’re very welcome here.”
“Thank you, Mother Clara,” Liina piped. Both adults smiled.
“Are you girls finished?” Samuel asked. Their plates were clean, and Liina visibly restrained herself from picking her plate up and licking it. “Okay. Dishes in the sink please, and you’re excused.”
Gillian and Liina moved as one to the kitchen, neatly piling their dishes and mugs in the sink, then looked at each other.
“What do we do now?” Liina asked quietly.
“I know! Come on, let’s go upstairs! I have stuff we can play with, c’mon!” With that, the two raced upstairs. Liina dropped to fourpaw on the way up the stairs and beat Gillian handily, taking the steps three at a time. There was a shriek of delighted laughter, and then the playroom door closed with them on the other side of it, and the house was again mostly quiet.
Back at the table below, the adults shared a relieved and tired sigh. Clara sipped her hot chocolate and looked at her husband with one eyebrow raised.
“How much brandy did you put in this?” she asked archly.
“Enough. I could tell you needed that when you walked in the door,” he grinned. “Tell Mike he scared the piss out of me, coming to the door like that, will you?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t get a chance to tell you. Last night was crazy. The Airborne troops on Gao started mass evacuations yesterday afternoon, and everywhere we could think of to put them was full almost immediately. There’ll be a refugee camp outside town in the next couple of days, you watch.”
“How bad is it?” he asked.
“It’s pretty bad. The SOR base is totally locked down, of course, no word in or out, but the messages that SEC keeps sending back through to Colonial Security get worse and worse, what Chief Ares shares with us anyway. I don’t blame them a bit for wanting to get their females and cubs out while they can, with their genetics the way they are. It’s the only way they’ll avoid extinction.” She took a bite of a crepe finally, and mmmmm-ed with appreciation. “Hey, the nava paste in that is really good. Sweet and kinda…nutty.”
“Yeah, I thought so. Did you see Gillian’s face when I told her it wasn’t cream cheese?” He laughed. “Honestly, I kinda like it better than the cream cheese, and it’s got a way better protein content with a lot less fat.” They ate quietly for a moment, savoring a reprieve from the constant chatter and questions that were the norm at the table.
“So, um…” Samuel asked, once he had finished his. “What’s next? Where do we go from here? Is there like, a foster care system or worker or something that’s going to come visit us, or what?”
“Mmm…” Clara replied around a mouthful, waving her fork at him. “So, what we were told is that the Clan of Females will oversee things, and they’ll send a Mother around to check on us, check on Liina, and be available for anything. We’re being encouraged to integrate her fully. She’s going to be with us for a long time, Sam. This isn’t a short term thing. They may never be able to take her back.”
“Did they tell you…you know…anything about what happened to her? When Mike brought her here, she was filthy from head to toe, fur matted, covered in blood, ash, dirt, and God only knows what else. Wasn’t until I got her mostly clean that she started talking at all.”
“Only a bare minimum. I know she was from a small commune that got totally wiped out. They had a dossier on what they found when they found her there, but she was the only survivor, I know that much.”
“Who would…well, I guess we know who, huh?”
“Honest to God space monsters, Sam.” She scooted her chair back and took her plate over to the sink. “You know, sometimes, I want to take writers for shows like Star Trek with their optimism and naive writing, and plant a boot in their ass. This is how it really is, motherfuckers!” She pantomimed kicking someone with one slipper-clad foot.
“She’s a sweet kid,” Samuel said, draining his mug and putting his dishes in the sink with hers. “She and Gillian get along pretty well, looks like. Thank God.” He looked at her. “You look pretty wiped out. Why don’t you go upstairs and get some rest? You know. Sleep?”
Clara yawned and nodded. “You better get some rest too, mister. Scuttlebutt says the Governor-General is going to have some work for you, when they end up doing a refugee camp. Somebody’s gonna have to survey it out.”
“I’ll stay up with the kids and clean up. Go to bed.” He kissed her forehead. “Go on. Git.”
“Yes, sir,” she said with a mock salute, waggling her hips at him on her way out of the kitchen. “Don’t let me sleep more than six hours, and wake me if anything important happens.”
“Okay, fine, fine. You know I’m not gonna.” She paused halfway up the stairs.
“I’m serious, Sam. If anything important happens, you need to wake me up.” He pointed up in the general direction of the bedroom.
“Git!”
“Fine!” She mock-pouted, and made like she was going to stomp up the stairs, blew him a kiss, and disappeared into the bedroom. He heard the door close, and the distant rustle of the blankets as she plopped into their bed and turned on the white noise machine. Turning and surveying the kitchen that really had been clean just an hour before, he pursed his lips and sighed.
This called for some cleaning music.
“Okay, Google. Play Queen ‘A Night At The Opera’.”
Gaoian fingers, Gillian and Liina discovered, weren’t quite as long or nimble as human ones. Playing cat’s cradle in any of its infinite incarnations between four hands was, therefore, not happening. Liina did manage a credible attempt at using a yo-yo, however, and when Gillian dragged out her massive organizer full of Legos…that was that. They were both hooked.
It helped that Gillian’s father had been a Lego nut for years, and she had inherited both his love of them and the toys themselves, and had expanded on his already-large collection with the sets that had sprung up post-First Contact. Models of actual ships abounded, and most of the Dominion races had smaller sets of their own with suitable figurines. The Gaoian ones, naturally, were some of the more popular – the visit of two notable Gaoians to Earth a couple of years before had shot a dose of adrenaline into things. Now, Lego had expanded their robotics and playsets to include miniaturized capacitors, third-generation field emitters, and other similar advances, and the actual robotics kits had gotten increasingly sophisticated along with it.
Liina’s fingers, while shorter than Gillian’s, had one massive advantage in dealing with stuck Legos, and that was that she had sharp, curved claws at the end of each finger. Getting them apart, the bane of every hobby builder, was little more than the flick of a claw for her. Gillian had been trying to work out the suspensor module on a simple flying platform as a proof of concept of sorts; she knew it could be done, and didn’t want to read the instructions on how to do it, because figuring it out was, like, half the fun.
“Can I try?” she asked, unable to restrain her need to fix it and make it work.
“Sure,” Gillian said, handing it over. Liina looked it over, cocking her head a little to get a better look.
“Can…I….” she gestured with it a little, indicating she wanted to take it apart again.
“Go for it. I can’t get it to work right, and I don’t want to look at the dumb instructions,” Gillian pouted a little. “Stupid things are written for little kids in pictures. Papa says I’m smart. I should be able to figure out a dumb Lego set, right?”
“Well, if you haven’t done it before,” Liina started. Her fingers tweaked things this way and that, removed a couple of unnecessary connecting pieces, and reconnected the capacitor to the emitter with a color-coded line that snapped together. “I haven’t seen these before, but they’re…actually better in some ways than the stuff I had on Gao.”
“Really?” Gillian asked. “I thought you guys were, like, way ahead of us and stuff.”
“We’ve been space-faring for a lot longer, and our computers are more advanced, but…” she held up the now-working toy, the power conduit lit up in a soft blue. “These are way more basic, but you can make way more stuff with it, I think. And everything is compatible with everything else. It’s amazing.”
“Hey, it works!” Gillian said. “Here, hang on.” She pulled her tablet out, fired up the app, and connected the flier to the app via the house Wifi. “What should we name it?”
“Name it? What do you mean?” Liina asked. Her ears had a perplexed tilt to them.
“Our first ship. Flying thing. Whatever. It needs a name,” Gillian persisted.
“Airborne,” Liina said without hesitation. The fact that she used the word in English wasn’t lost on Gillian, but she wisely said nothing.
“Okay!” Gillian tapped at her tablet and held it up. “There. See? It has a name now. What should we make it do? I have some other pieces and stuff, I think the capacitor has enough power to run them too.” She left the little thing hovering in the middle of the room, and pulled out a smaller case with a locking clasp on it.
“What’s that?” asked Liina
“Look!” was the reply, as Gillian unfastened the clasp and opened the case. Within, sitting nested in foam covered dividers were several little blocky looking electronic things. Gillian pried one of them out and held it up. “This one’s a camera. See? The little connector thingy is here, and then..,” she paused, hunting around a little, then pried another one out that was about the same size. “This one’s a controller and antenna. We can make a drone and spy on things, and be secret agents!”
Imagination kindled, they brought the little flying platform down, turned the field emitters off, and set about connecting everything together. Liina found her new friend’s enthusiasm infectious. Gillian got her connectors turned around as they added parts, which Liina corrected.
“No, this one goes here, see? That’s the port for…right.”
“Ohhhh, so then this one…I see it. I can’t get that, my finger’s too big. Thanks!”
“We need…um…one of these for that connector?”
“Yup. …that down….and…wait, hang on. That doesn’t look right.”
Liina made a growly noise of frustration. “No, it doesn’t. What if…” she trailed off, sticking a finger into the maze of blocky plastic parts and unhooking the troublesome bit. “Here. This.”
“Ohhhh….hey, you’re really good at this.” They shared a chittering giggle. The final part went into place with an audible snap. Liina went to touch the ‘on’ switch, but Gillian put a hand out.
“Hang on. Papa says I’m always s’posed to, ‘check the circuit to make sure there isn’t a short’. That means I’m s’posed to do this.” She held up the tablet and hit an icon that Liina had no difficulty identifying as a stylized gear with a magnifying glass over it. She couldn’t read the label on it, but it was obviously a diagnostic function of some kind; Domain user interfaces were similarly simplistic and intuitive. Some things were the same everywhere.
The tablet had a green status bar that filled quickly. It made a soft ping noise, and displayed a big green check mark in the middle of the screen. Gillian waved at their creation, and Liina pushed the button that engaged the power again. It lit up again, the power conduits glowing a soft blue again, and lifted off the ground perhaps two hand-spans in the air, just hanging there on invisible strings of electromagnetic wizardry. Gillian clapped her hands in excitement, and Liina stared at it with big shining excited eyes.
“Okay. Let’s see if it’ll connect to the camera.” Gillian turned the Bluetooth on her tablet on, set it to search for active devices, and a moment later, their little drone’s name Airborne came up. She selected it, and they synced easily, with a tiny blue light on the drone lighting up to show that it was receiving. She clapped her hands with excitement again. “It’s working! Omigosh, it’s working, now what are we gonna do with it?”
She looked up at Liina. “Here. I’ll pull up the controller app, and you pilot it around!” She tapped away at it, and presently another utility launched, and the girls found themselves looking at a view on the tablet of themselves looking at the tablet. It was a little dizzying.
Liina’s ears had taken on a mischievous set. “Let’s spy on your Father,” she said with what was unmistakably a smirk. Gillian nodded excitedly.
“Do it! Here, I’ll get the door. Shhhhh…” She opened the door, and the little device floated out onto the landing, wobbled up and down a bit as Liina experimented with the controls. She quickly got the hang of it – they were designed to be easy to use – and floated it out above the living room to spy on Papa below. Gillian pushed the door most of the way shut so as not to give the game away.
Below, Papa had finished the kitchen and was sitting drinking something hot in his big chair, and frowning at something on his own tablet that wasn’t in the camera’s view. He tapped at it, and then did that finger-pinch thing to zoom in, and sat reading. Gillian giggled a little, and Liina looked at her inquisitively.
“He always does that thing when he’s reading something he doesn’t agree with. Mama always asks him if someone is ‘wrong on the Internet’, ‘cause usually he starts looking really grumpy and types really hard on his keyboard.” Liina giggled back. They both looked at the screen in time to see something outside pass by one of the windows, followed by a ding of the doorbell. Papa got up out of his chair, and opened the door. The girls watched through the camera and audio feed intently.
”Oh! Hi!” he said below. ”I was expecting someone from the Commune, but I didn’t think it’d be this morning. Come in, please.”
”Thank you, Mr Peterson,” said the person at the door in unaccented English, who, stepping inside, proved to be a slender silverfur Female. ”I’m Leya.”
”Call me Samuel, please. Let me run upstairs and get my wife up. She had to work last night, and was pretty tired when she came in this morning. I’ll be back in a moment – please, have a seat.” Papa came up the stairs two at a time, and the girls busied themselves looking at anything other than the video feed on the tablet. As soon as he had gone past the door, Liina quickly tapped on the controls and had the drone silently hover near the ceiling where the chandelier provided a little cover from anyone looking up.
In her parents’ bedroom, Gillian heard her mother groan and roll her way out of bed. A moment later, both adults came padding on slippered feet past her playroom door and down the stairs. She and Liina watched and listened through the tablet’s feed as the adults sat at the table.
”I apologize for dropping in without calling first,” began Leya. ”I’m trying to get to as many of the placements this morning as I can to follow up. Chief Ares was most helpful in that regard. I suppose I should ask if you have any questions. I’m sure you do.”
Papa and Mama looked at one another, and then at their guest. ”I don’t think I do, really. We understand what’s at stake, and although we don’t know much of what’s happening to your people, we want to help in any way we can. Taking Liina in was the least we could do,” Papa said finally.
”And you understand, I’m a Colonial Security Officer,” said Mama. ”I…was helping your first wave of refugees come in most of last night, actually. If their condition is anything to go by, then your ki…cubs…need us. We couldn’t possibly say no.”
Leya made an almost human gesture and rubbed the space between her own eyes with finger and thumb. ”You have no idea what this means to us. Personally, although I’ve never had a cub, I’ve always loved them and hope to someday. Right now the Sisters and Mothers at the Commune are literally hip deep in cubs, and we’ve put as many of them at the Interfaith Center, the school gymnasium, and the Thing as we can.”
”No idea how long she will need to be with us, then?” Mama asked.
”I’m afraid not. It may be a month or two before we even figure out what we’re doing for those coming through. The Mother-Supreme hasn’t sent out anything. If she’s even still alive. I heard she got attacked in the first wave and most of her Guard-Sisters were killed.”
”Do we forward questions, if we have them, to you?” Papa asked.
”Yes. Here is my local net ID,” she said, handing a card over. Papa took it and held onto it between his fingers. ”I should meet her before I go.”
”That’s a good idea,” Papa said. He raised his voice. “Gillian! Liina! Come downstairs please.”
Gillian and Liina exchanged a look, and Liina set the tablet down carefully behind the door where a quick look into the room wouldn’t make it too obvious they’d been watching. They got up and sidled out the door and down the stairs.
Leya stood as they came down the stairs. Liina all but ran to her, keening the whole way, and they stood embracing one another desperately for a long minute. Gillian continued to the table and stood with her mother’s arm around her waist, leaning into her. Eventually, the two Gaoians separated, with Leya holding Liina’s head between her paws.
“You’re so brave,” she said. “I read the report from the humans that found you. You did what was most important, little one. You survived.”
“Yes, Mother,” Liina choked out.
“I don’t know when you’ll be able to come back to the Commune, Liina,” Leya continued, bending down and looking her in the eye. “You’re safe here with the humans. Just like when Sister Xiu came to live with us and we protected her, all those years ago, you and so many others will be taking refuge with them.”
“Yes, Mother,” Liina said. “Were any of my creche…saved, Mother?”
A great sorrow filled Leya’s eyes. “No, Liina. You were the only one they found alive.”
Liina gulped some air. “I didn’t think so. I tried sav..saving Gemma and Navi, but they were t…too little and they couldn’t get aw..away in time.” She continued keening and buried her head into Leya’s chest. Gillian broke free of her mother’s grasp and circled around to hold her new friend in her arms too. They stood, unmoving and tears being soaked up by fur and clothing alike, for some time.
Eventually, Leya broke the embrace and stepped back. She leaned down again to look Liina in the eyes. “I have other cubs I have to go see now, Liina, and a lot of them have been through really similar things as you. When we have time, we’ll get as many of you together as we can.”
Liina nodded, still snuffling and trying not to whimper too loudly. Gillian moved around to her side and just hugged her gently. Leya straightened and looked back to the adults.
“Please contact me if you need anything that we can provide. I’ll be working on setting up communication, but more than that I just don’t know right now. As soon as I do, I’ll send word,” she said.
“Thank you for coming, Leya,” Papa said. She went out, and he shut the door behind her. Liina’s sniffling came slowly to an end, and the three humans traded looks of helplessness.
“Come on,” Gillian said finally. “I want to change and go play outside for a while.”
Liina wiped her nose with the back of one paw. “I’m not…sure I’m up for much playing.”
“Then let’s just go outside, and if we don’t feel like playing, we’ll do something else. I don’t want to be inside anymore today.”
“I don’t really need to change…” Liina said, looking back and forth from herself to Gillian. “But I guess you do. Okay.”
The two new friends walked back up the stairs at a considerably more sedate pace than the previous time, with arms around each other.