Cimbrean
Jennifer Delaney. Mid-twenties, space-babe pirate queen, colonial governor, wilderness survival expert, full of alien medicine and thus possibly immortal, and all alone.
Well, except that the last time she’d done piracy was months ago now, so that maybe didn’t count any longer, and the colony in question had been a pile of smoking rubble the last time she laid eyes on it. Being bombarded from orbit and then invaded tended to do that to a place. They’d made a good escape there, after an “out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire” fashion.
The point was that the pirate queen and colonial governor bits maybe didn’t apply any longer. But she was keeping the space-babe part.
And then there had been…other stuff. Honestly, it was all kind of a blur, now. A long, confusing, relentlessly violent blur that she knew had involved nearly dying a couple of times. She’d lost track of Darragh who was maybe kind of useless but at least he’d have been something resembling company right now. And she was trying not to think about Adrian’s fate, with all that fecking fire foam that did weird things to their brains, and the ship venting atmosphere, and the way she’d left him to die because if she’d tried to save him they’d have both perished…
She was trying, she reminded herself irritably, not to think about it.
She had only ever bothered to remember one planet’s coordinates, and that fact had saved her life…but then the bastard escape pod had landed on the wrong end of the continent.
Bereft of alternatives, she’d squared her shoulders, hoisted her gear and started walking.
At least Cimbrean was a Class 4 world, which meant that survival wasn’t exactly difficult…But her four-month trek across half a hemisphere had turned up a leaf that, when boiled, produced something that tasted almost like a cup of sweet tea. Which was nice.
On reflection, Jennifer Delaney, mid-twenties, space-babe discoverer of almost tea, ex-pirate and governor of a hole in the ground just didn’t have the same ring to it.
“Shut up, Jen.” She chastised herself. That muddled second-guessing of herself was an Old Jen habit. But the old Jen would have dithered and died alongside Adrian aboard that cruiser. The old Jen wouldn’t have seen a five-thousand-whatever hike across a whole continent and just accepted it as the next in a long series of trials she would overcome. The old Jen would have broken down in tears at least twice as often during these last four months as the new Jen had.
Pirate queen and colonial governor or not, she was toughened, a survivor, somebody who knew how to keep putting one foot in front of the other no matter what a sadistic universe decided to throw at her. She had all of that that going for her.
Everything else, not so much. Her shoes had given up their ghosts inside the first week of hiking, and while the foot-wraps she had fashioned from the sleeves of her shirt had stopped her feet getting cut up and bloody, they hadn’t stopped her soles from hardening to the consistency of her nan’s patent ossified soda bread. The datapad that had been guiding her back to the only thing that even vaguely resembled civilisation on this world was a more recent casualty, lost in a cliff-based accident.
That had been four valleys ago. It was remarkable just how hard it was to find the bombed-out ruin of a mansion without a map. At least she had been all but on top of it when the little device had gone bouncing down the rocks, never to be recovered. She had only needed to explore four valleys before the fourth finally yielded her glimpse of home…at the other end of it, a good day’s trek away, and night was falling.
Oh well, it wouldn’t be the last time she made camp anyway. And at least there were lots of the sort-of-tea bush around.
She set up her camp with the practiced skill of somebody who had done it every night in a row for four months, boiled herself a cup of tea-ish and a healthy vegetable stew, and fell asleep beside the fire.
Morning brought warm sunshine and morning mist, which she set off through in the best mood she’d felt for some time, walking stick in hand. Something birdlike thrummed past her head and perched in a nearby tree, angled its multifaceted eyes at her and preened a shimmering wing, singing a warbling song that reminded her of a Nightingale. It was beautiful.
Her well-thrown rock knocked it off its perch with a squawk.
Happily singing the chorus to “Linger”—the only part of the song she could remember—she strapped the bird-ish’s broken carcass to her bag. “Meat stew tonight!” she told it.
Somewhere inside her, the old Jen, the I.T. girl who had been inconsolable for a week when her gerbil had died, whimpered. The new Jen, however, was a practical, weathered survivor and ignored the old Jen’s objections in favour of valuable protein.
That was her day, walking along the soft sort-of-grass by a burbling stream in the warm summer sunshine of an alien world, collecting alien plants, herbs and sort-of-mushrooms and telling a dead alien sort-of-bird about how she was going to cook it. It was mid-afternoon when she stepped out of the woods and found herself standing in front of the palace ruins. The front gardens, originally a gorgeous masterwork of horticulture tended by little drones and automated systems, had been bombed down to a muddy paste, and were now grown over by a thicket of small bushes and tall sort-of-grass.
“And you thought you’d never make it on your own, you eejit.” she told herself aloud, grinning at her own success.
Despite the bombardment, the landscaping was still mostly intact, as were the stone steps that curved around what had once been an ornamental pond but was now a crater, and up to the front of the building itself, which was basically an expanse of rubble interestingly punctuated by half-intact walls.
Oh well, at least there was the material here to get a roof over her head, if nothing else.
She set her bag down by what had once been the front entrance, leaned her walking stick against it, and began to explore the ruins. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, exactly: a change of clothes, maybe, or some emergency rations. What she found instead was her bath.
It was almost perfectly intact, standing proud in the middle of its tiled bathroom floor, though the rest of the bathroom was long gone. A few shrapnel scars notwithstanding, there it was: her bath.
Hardly daring to hope, she crept up to it, and turned the faucet on. There was a gurgle, and horrible brown sludge vomited out of the tap.
Oh well. You couldn’t have everything in life. She’d just have to haul and boil the water herself.
Fetching enough water to fill the bath was a job that took most of her remaining daylight hours. She made and ate her not-quite-bird stew, slept, feeling filthy and gritty, and dreamed of hot water.
It was a dream that she spent the whole of the next day’s morning and afternoon turning into a reality. From the moment she woke she set to work on it, building her campfire and setting up the small boiling tin that had been in her escape pod right next to the bath. For hours, she got into a rhythm of scooping out some water, boiling it, pouring it in, scooping some out, boiling it, foraging for firewood…The water heated so slowly, but it definitely heated, and if there was one thing that Jen had learned from her months of cross-country hiking, it was how to let her mind entertain itself while the body worked.
Finally, by the early evening, the bath was the perfect temperature: steaming, but not painful. She had no soap, no bubble-bath foam or bath bombs, but it was still a hot bath, the first she’d had in months and months.
Smiling like all was right with the world, she disrobed, stepped up onto the bath’s plinth, raised her foot and dipped it gently in. A long sigh of the deepest contentment escaped from her.
B-BOOMMmm..
She looked up. There was a speck of brightness in the sky, a spaceship that gleamed in the sunlight, casting its sonic boom ahead of it as it lost speed and turned.
Jennifer Delaney addressed the universe in general: “Fuck. You.”
Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility
The middle of the chamber was a careful scaffolding, built to millimeter tolerances, all of which had been filled by vehicles. Three Navistar 7000 trucks were squeezed in, each full of crates, bags, boxes and, here and there, just enough room for the soldiers to sit, each hugging his gear. Most of the remaining space was taken up by a pair of Kawasaki Mules, and the last was occupied by an example of the very latest in human military technology.
Tremblay was considering it when the troopers arrived. They had all pitched in with parking and loading the trucks the night before, and were now shaved, rested, geared up, well fed and as ready for indefinite deployment off-world as anybody ever could be.
It wasn’t an occasion for pomp or speeches. The project was top-secret for a reason. There were no politicians present, only soldiers ready for deployment, and the gaggle of military scientists who would be sending them there.
Captain Powell joined him by the weapon system.
“I’m amazed they agreed to release one of these for the colony’s use.” Tremblay commented.
“Bit disappointing really. I was pushing for a WERBS.” Powell said, drawing a laugh from the general.
“You may as well have asked for a couple of nukes, eh?” Tremblay told him. “Besides, ET’s going to brown his pants enough when they see this thing in action.”
“If, sir.” Powell said, not bothering to disguise his smug confidence. “If they see it in action.”
“Fair point.” Tremblay turned to the SBS officer and extended a hand, which Powell shook. “It’s been a pleasure having you on base, Captain.”
“I bet it has.” Powell grinned.
Tremblay suppressed his smirk. “Carry on, captain.”
“Sir.”
As the captain shouted his men into place on the trucks, Tremblay stepped back across the concrete to where Ted Bartlett was tapping on a tablet computer, looking thoughtful.
“You’re certain you got that inertia problem sorted out?” Tremblay asked him, quietly so none of the soldiers could hear.
“Two months ago, general.” Bartlett reassured him.
”…Good.” Tremblay said, watching the men load up. “Good.”
Bartlett tapped out a few last things, then looked up. “All aboard? Zone clear?” He shouted. There was a general thumbs-up and nodding. “Zone clear!” He shouted, and tapped a button on the tablet.
A block of purest possible black immediately enclosed the trucks, Mules, soldiers and weapon system.
“Don’t you think a countdown might have been appropriate?” Tremblay asked as the scientists and technicians began to vacate the vacuum chamber. “Give it a sense of occasion?”
They were the last to step through the pressure door, which Bartlett closed and locked, before acknowledging the question with a shrug.
“Woops.”
“That was definitely a camp back there…look, here’s a pack and walking stick.”
Kirk looked around, holding some kind of scanning device, then pointed with one of his longer arms. “There’s a heat signature over…that way.” he said, and stepped daintily over the rubble to pursue it.
Julian followed, weaving through the bombed-out shell of what had obviously been a lavishly grand and expensive property once upon a time.
The heat signature turned out to be a huge stone bath, steaming gently. Relaxing in it was a red-haired woman, head resting on the side, eyes closed, floating gently with her arms splayed and her breasts just breaking the surface of the water.
“Woah!” Julian exclaimed and turned a one-eighty, feeling heat rush to his cheeks.
“You boys are either an hour too early, or four months too late, and I don’t know which.” said the woman. Irishness lilted off every syllable, heavy with weary resignation. “Go away, I’m having a bath.”
Kirk leaned down and whispered in Julian’s ear: “Any advice on how to deal with…this?”
Julian shook his head, eyes wide as he stared desperately off towards the distant mountains—no! Not the mountains, the hills—no! The wall, yes. The wall seemed safe. “You’re on your own.”
Kirk chuffed a loud coughing sound, which Julian had learned was the equivalent of clearing his throat. “Jennifer Delaney, I presume.” He stated, making a good shot at seeming to be completely unfazed. Julian knew there was no reason why he should be—she wasn’t his species, and aliens seemed to have no hangups about nudity, but after that reception, being fazed should have gone as read.
There was a sigh, and a sloshing of water. “I’m not going to persuade you to go away, am I? Aye, that’s me. Oh for crying out loud man, you can turn around. Am I the first woman you’ve seen in years or something?”
“Um…yes.” Julian said.
“Oh. Really? Well you can turn around anyway.”
Julian did so, carefully. She had turned and folded her arms atop the edge of the bath, and sunk down into the water a little. Technically, she was just as modest now as if she had been fully clothed, but that did little to pacify Julian’s starved libido.
“So who are you two, anyway?” she asked.
“I’m, uh. Julian.” he said. “Julian Etsicitty. This is Kirk.”
“Kirk?”
“Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk.” clarified the man himself. “…Kirk. And yes, I’ve seen Star Trek.”
“I always preferred Doctor Who.” Jen said. “Etsicitty, that’s…what, Navajo?”
“Uh…yeah. I’m impressed.”
“I used to work in I.T.” she said, plainly convinced that this was an explanation. When their blank expressions told her that it wasn’t, she sighed and clarified: “lots of boring office hours sat on a computer with nothing to do, lots of clicks on the “random” button on Wikipedia because there are only so many cat pictures a girl can look…at…look, I’m trying to take a bath here.”
“Here? Now?” Julian asked.
“I hiked for four months halfway across a continent to get to this bath. I spent all day filling it myself by boiling water in a tin this big.” She spread her hands to demonstrate and Julian cursed his eyes for their traitorous flash downwards. Fortunately, she didn’t seem to notice. “I’m not getting out until I’m good and soaked, not even if the planet’s exploding.”
“We, ah…came here to help you get Cimbrean up and running as a colony of Earth…” Kirk said, looking around at the desolation.
“Great! Thank you! I could use the help. But right now I. Am. Taking. A. Bath.” she repeated. “If you boys would be so kind as to go get started on doing whatever it is you’re going to do, I’ll join you as soon as I’m done here, how does that sound?”
It sounded absurd to Julian, but he would have sooner gone back to Nightmare armed with nothing more than a toothpick than say so to Jen’s face. Fortunately, Kirk seemed able to take almost anything in his stride, and so he simply bowed and said “As you wish, governor. I’ll oversee the deployment personally.”
“Thank you.”
“Hang on!” Julian protested. “What happened here? Kirk said this was a mansion last time he saw it.”
“Taking a bath.”
“But…!”
“Bath!”
“Come on, Julian.” Kirk said, gripping him by the arm and politely pulling him away. Julian emphatically did not look back as Delaney rolled back over with a splash and a happy sigh.
“CONSIG is green!”
“On schedule, too.” Bartlett said, happily. “Pressure is at…twenty millibar. We’ve passed the line, go to send.”
“Capacitors primed, ready to release, stage one field at niner-eight per cent.”
“Right.” Bartlett acknowledged General Tremblay with a nod. “Sending in three…two…one…Send.”
Inside the Jump Array chamber, vast amounts of energy were shunted from alien-derived supercapacitors into an arch of exotic equipment that swept up and over the black cuboid of stasis-enclosed man and machine. There was a ripple, like light on the surface of a lake, and the stasis field and everything inside it vanished.
The floor shook with a solid thump, and in the total silence of near-vacuum, a centimeter-long piece of truck wing mirror fell to the concrete, neatly snipped off by the edge of the spacetime distortion field..
“Major…” Tremblay said.
Bartlett grimaced. “Woops.”
Jennifer Delaney, mid twenties, space-babe pirate queen, planetary governor, wilderness survival expert, possibly immortal, discoverer of alien space tea and feeling truly clean for the first time in much too long.
Her clothes, however, were not clean. Not even remotely. They were stained, greasy, torn, and, not unsurprisingly, had an undignified aroma to them as if they had been worn by a sweaty young woman for four whole months, along with all that entailed.
Why did she even still have them? Why didn’t she have a towel? She’d had plenty of time to look for one.
She threw the vile garments into the bath in the (probably forlorn) hope that this might result in them becoming at least cleaner to the point of being viable to wear until a replacement showed up, and then marched nude out of the bathroom and towards where her bedroom had once been. Hopefully something of the small wardrobe she had accumulated there might still be intact enough to salvage, or fashion some crude clothing from.
Navigating a demolished alien palace by memory turned out to be trickier than simply remembering where the walls and stuff had been, though, and pretty soon she found herself thoroughly lost. She was just debating swallowing her pride and calling for this “Kirk” fella to help her out when she rounded a corner and found herself on the back patio.
There were at least thirty men there, all unloading crates and equipment from the back of several large green military trucks that had been parked on what was once the lawn. They gave a general impression of soldier-ness, and were all staring at her.
The old Jen, who’d had nightmares about pretty much this exact scenario, surfaced long enough to mutter, under her breath, the complaint. “Oh, fuck everything”, but then the new Jen was back in control.
She planted her hands firmly on her hips, issued a death glare which caused a platoon of hardened veteran special-forces soldiers to start desperately looking at everything but her, and demanded:
“Well? Which one of you eejits wants to stop gawking first and hand me some fecking clothes?”