Three years and seven months AV
Alliance Embassy Station, Sol
Rylee Jackson woke, and groaned. Talamay must have been stronger than it had tasted.
She groaned even louder when the previous night’s conversation came back to her, and buried her face in her pillow for a second, then rolled over and look up at Pandora’s wing, flung over her cot like a protective lover’s arm.
She spoke the word that heralded a bad start to any day: “Shit.”
Civilian Trade Station 1039: “Infinity Awaits”
Fear was a sickly sensation in Kttrvk’s long throat as he read the message again to be certain of its content.
He read it a third time, just in case.
When a fourth reading still produced no miraculous change in its content, he concluded that its content must therefore be real, and set about writing a reply.
It was a simple reply:
Sir,
As I explained in my previous letter, the trade route you have designated for our shipment is currently the target of Hunter raids. Four more vesselss have been hit since I sent that letter, all comparatively small: A freighter the size of the Nkvcqtz will be a target they cannot resist.
Our cargo of mineral ores is non-perishable and will come to no harm should we take the slightly longer route that I suggested. I appreciate that the client expects prompt delivery, but I feel certain that they would prefer the shipment arrive slightly delayed, than never arrive at all because the freighter carrying it was raided by Hunters and the personnel and children on board, devoured.
I object in the strongest possible terms to these orders, and request—again—that you authorise us to take the longer route.
-Shipmaster Kttrvk.
He sent it, and the message was scooped up by a handler program, to be updated onto the galactic network in the next regular synchronization, and from there to the desk of his supervisor.
He knew in his bones, however, that the appeal was futile.
Cimbrean
Jennifer Delaney. Mid-twenties, entirely out of fucks to give about being a pirate queen, colonial governor or immortal, but not letting go of the space-babe part. Currently wearing fatigues, army boots and a thick black woollen jumper, and contemplating the bar of actual chocolate on the table in front of her, waiting for the alarm to ring or the spaceship to land or whatever else would interrupt her attempt to enjoy it.
She was also reflecting that, while showing up completely arse-naked and demanding to be clothed wouldn’t have been her first choice in ice-breakers—wouldn’t even have made the top hundred—it had undeniably worked. Apparently the soldiers respected a woman who didn’t give two shits for embarrassment and just asked for a pair of pants. She would have expected to be on the receiving end of a lot of lecherous jokes and sly side-of-the-eye stares, but in fact they were, on the whole, treating her with deference and respect.
“Tastes better if you eat it with your mouth, love.”
Somewhere deep inside her, Old Jen was impressed and a little scared by the way that she didn’t jump, just turned in her seat to quickly assess whether the voice that had snuck up on her was a threat. Captain Owen Powell gave her a winning smile full of Yorkshire arrogance, and she relaxed a bit.
“Just…enjoying the moment.” she said. “And don’t call me ‘love’.”
Powell nodded. “Aye, sorry. Force of habit. I’d ask if I can come in, but this is my office, so…”
He entered and sat down on the other stool, on the opposite side of the desk. “So, are you going to eat that?”
“Promise me nothing’s going to start exploding if I do?”
She wasn’t sure what she had expected Powell’s reaction to be: a laugh, maybe, or a joke. Not an understanding look in his eye. “Wish I could.” he said. “You’d best eat it fast, enjoy it while you can. In the army they trained us to brew a cup of tea every chance we get, because you never know when the next one’s going to show up.”
Jen breathed a little half-laugh. “That’s so fecking English…” she said.
Powell snorted. “Ten thousand lightyears from home and the Irish are still being fookin’ Irish.”
That got a genuine laugh. “Alright, fine. I’ll eat the fecking thing.” Jen conceded, and promptly made good on that promise.
Chocolate. Fuck yeah.
Mount Hope Cemetery, San Diego
“May her soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God, rest in peace.”
The solemn “Amen” which followed that petition was joined by all bar one of the graveside mourners. The priest closed his book, bowed solemnly, and turned away, leaving only the small knot of family and friends.
It was a good headstone, understated and handsome: just the name “Terri Boone” flanked by carved lilies, her dates of birth and death, and the quote “A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.” on round-topped blue slate.
“You’re not a praying man, Mister Jenkins?”
“I’m not, detective. Let’s…just leave it at that.”
“Fair enough.”
Gabriel Arés shuffled his feet and exhaled, feeling in his bones that the occasion should have really warranted something other than a glorious sunny day.
“Do you come to the funerals of all your cases?” Jenkins asked him.
“Not all, no. Just the ones that really get to me. You know, the stupid kid who got caught up in gang violence, or the young mother who died of a bleed on the brain after her husband hit her for the hundredth time…The streetwise P.I. who I kind of feel like I could have helped if I’d only listened.”
“Are you listening now?”
Jenkins was a good two heads taller than the diminutive Hispanic homicide cop, who looked up at him curiously.
“Listening to…who, now?” He asked.
“Ravi Singh, for one.”
“How do you…? Right, you had the login details.”
“I do, yeah. Downloaded the lot. You HAVE read it all?”
“Three times.” Arés told him. “She makes a…compelling case. But come on, secret aliens murdering people in San Diego?”
“What, as opposed to alien monsters on TV getting the shit kicked out of them by hockey players? As opposed to alien embassies orbiting the moon?”
“I know!” Arés exclaimed. A few startled gasps and glances from the other mourners moderated his volume. “I know. I agree. You’re preaching to the choir, compañero. But I have to answer to people, and even if they were persuaded, which they’re not, there’s this little thing called ‘Jurisdiction’ biting me in the culo.“
“What about the FBI?”
“The feds?” Gabriel made a scornful noise through his nose. “The pendejo I spoke to said he’d put me through to Special Agent Mulder and then hung up. They’ve got enough to worry about without alien conspiracy theories. People didn’t stop murdering each other just because there’s a couple of alien space stations up there.”
“Need a hand?”
“You’d go all the way to New Jersey?”
“If it got us to the bottom of this, I’d even go back into space.” Jenkins told him, firmly. “I want these fuckers to fry, Arés.”
The detective stared at the headstone for a long while, and then shook his head. “I’m not…You realise I can’t authorise that, right?Not officially. This is a police matter, I can’t bring in civilians to interrogate a witness.”
“That wouldn’t be by-the-book, huh?”
“Lo tienes.“
“Does going by the book always work?”
“No. But going against it NEVER works, Jenkins, to hell with what cop shows and movie writers think.”
“So you won’t help me.”
“Can’t.” Arés corrected.
They stood in silence for a while. Most of the mourners paid their final respects and departed.
“Of course…” Jenkins mused. “Seeing as New Jersey is outside of your jurisdiction, if I were to go talk with this guy, it’s not like you could arrest me for it anyway.”
Arés half-laughed and half-huffed. “If having a conversation with some guy in New Jersey was illegal then I could arrest you right now for planning to commit an offense.” he said. “IF,” he added, turning to look Jenkins right in the eye “having a conversation with some guy in New Jersey was illegal.”
They considered each other’s expressions for a moment, and then both men stuck out their hands to be shaken at the same time.
“I’ll let you know if I think of anything that could be useful to your investigation, Detective Arés.”
“I’d appreciate that, Mr. Jenkins. Buena suerte.”
Civilian Trade Station 1039: “Infinity Awaits”
“Shipmaster Kttrvk,
“You have received your orders. As per your contract with the corporation, failure to follow your assigned route is punishable by demotion, confiscation of your ship and fines up to 5% of the value of the cargo per [day] of late delivery”
”—Ikktik, Deputy Shipping Executive”
Kttrvk knew at that exact moment that nobody in the corporation even bothered to read their mail.
He weighed up the possibility of refusing and then counter-suing the corporation for reckless endangerment of his and his family’s lives when they took action against him. A fair court would surely come down on his side.
But of course, Long Stars Shipping would never see the inside of a fair court in a case like this, would they? They owned the judges, they could afford the best lawyers, they lobbied for the laws that worked in their favour.
For long minutes he sat, thinking, while his mate Ikkzziki slumbered, rotund with what would be their fourth child.
There was only one possible course of action.
Alliance Embassy Station, Sol
“Good morning, Rylee.”
Rylee flinched. She knew that the voice she heard wasn’t exactly Niral so much as a computer simulation of what Niral’s voice might sound like if she was speaking English, cunningly conveyed to her ears by harmonic trickery in a way that completely overruled the original voice, but the simulation was totally consistent in giving Niral an identifiable voice.
”…Niral! Hey. Good morning.”
“A very good morning.” Niral’s ears were flattened sideways. The effect looked either mischievous or smug to Rylee. Her tall posture, shoulders thrown back and head held high, suggested the latter.
“Oh! You guys, uh…?”
“That we most certainly did.” The Gaoian purred. “The first of many I hope, before we’re certain I’m with cub.”
“That’s umm…Great. I’m happy for you.” Rylee found she couldn’t meet the Sister’s gaze. She was surprised when Niral issued a low keening sound and took her hands.
“Rylee, are you all right?”
“I made a complete ass of myself last night, didn’t I?”
”…A backside? Oh! Um…I don’t know, did you?”
“That’s usually what we call it when somebody makes someone else feel uncomfortable by confessing to being…interested in them. And all the rest. I’m sorry Niral, I was drunk, I wasn’t thinking straight and I ran off at the mouth.”
Niral keened softly again and hugged her. Presumably she was hugging quite hard by Gaoian standards, but to Rylee the effect was of being gently hugged by an anorexic teenager—under all that fur, the Gaoian’s body was small, wiry, feather-light and frail. “I don’t think I understand this ‘drunk’ thing.” Niral told her. “But I wasn’t drunk last night, and I still say you’re my friend.”
“You’re not upset?”
“If I’m going to have alien friends, I need to be okay with them behaving in alien ways.” Niral replied, stroking Rylee’s hair. “I’m not upset.”
Rylee broke the hug very gently, and wiped away a grateful tear, pulling herself together. “Oh, I needed to hear that.” she smiled, then a thought struck her. “Shit, you didn’t tell Goruu what I said, did you?”
Niral tittered a Gaoian giggle. “We were too busy.” she teased. “But…no, I wouldn’t. Not if you don’t want him to know.”
“I don’t.” Rylee said firmly.
There was a moment of comfortable silence, faintly amused on Niral’s part. Then she looked up at the space-plane wing that Rylee had been sleeping under.
“So this is Pandora?”
“This is Pandora.“
“Does the name mean anything special? The first Gaoian warp craft was named Tiritya, after the first Mother-Supreme, who united the females of all clans into one clan.”
Rylee smiled. “Pandora was the first woman, according to Greek mythology.”
“The…how can there be a first woman? And what’s a Greek? One of your clans?”
“Yeah, sort of. Mythology means…kind of, fanciful stories, an entertaining way of getting points across using fiction. It doesn’t always have to be scientifically accurate. Besides, they didn’t really understand evolution by natural selection back in ancient Greece. It’s a very old story.”
“Oh. So, your first warp craft is named to honour the first female and not the first male?” The idea seemed to have Niral’s approval, and not for the first time Rylee was struck by the notion that Gaoian females were maybe a bit sexist.
“Well, she was more than just the first woman.” Rylee said, beginning to pack up her cot and stow it away in the ship’s small cargo compartment. “She was a curious soul who opened a box in which Zeus, the father of the gods, had sealed away all the evils and negativity of mankind. When they all flew away to plague humanity, the only thing that was left behind was hope, which she kept.”
She glanced at Niral. “It’s all supposed to be metaphorical.” she clarified.
“I guessed as much. But what was hope doing in a box full of evil things?”
“Hope can’t exist without evil.” Rylee said. She rubbed her hand fondly along the fuselage of the modern Pandora. “Just like up can’t exist without down, or how fast only exists relative to slow.”
“And I suppose your species is in a sort of box…” Niral mused.
“Exactly. I choose to believe that Pandora here is our promise that when the box is opened, we’ll be a force for hope and positivity in the galaxy, rather than a plague of evils.”
Niral allowed the human a few seconds of distant misty-eyed happiness. “I’m sure you will be.” She said.
Cimbrean
“So, how much do you know about what’s been going on back home?”
Jennifer Delaney, mid-twenties, space-babe with a mouthful of the first chocolate she’d tasted in years, regretfully swallowed it.
“Not much.” She confessed. “The alien news only covered the big things: the Hunters attacked Vancouver?” when Powell nodded, she continued. “Then there’s a fecking big force-field, we have warp travel now…That’s about it. I know that our ambassador to the Dominion is called Doctor Anees Hussein because he wrote me a letter, and he hinted that we’re maybe wanting to play both sides to our advantage, but other than that, I’m pretty well in the dark.”
“Right. Well, it’s mostly business as usual.” Powell said. “The usual political gobshites, same sports, same celebrity gossip, same bullshit in the Middle East. The Russians are still fookin’ crazy, the Chinese still have a stick up their arses, the Yanks are still fookin’ reckless and there’s still a Marvel movie three times a year like fookin’ clockwork.”
“Nothing’s changed at all?”
“I didn’t say that. NASA and the European Space Agency merged to form the North Atlantic Space Agency, the Chinese, Russians and Japanese are all stepping up their space programs, as are the South Americans and the Australians, and there’s even the Pan-Africa Space Organisation now. I think they’re mostly looking at trying to build space elevators, which is easier at the equator or something.”
He sniffed. “A whole bunch of private companies are pushing into space as fast as they can, too. BAE, Virgin, Mitsubishi, Shenyang, Red Bull…”
“Red Bull?!“
“Dont ask. And the cutting edge military technology is…fook me sideways, if you were cleared to know about half of it, you’d shit your new pants.”
“How much AM I cleared to know about?”
“Right, so we took a look at the way business is done out here and promptly said “fook that”, right? Giant fookin’ spaceships with giant fookin’ guns and even gianter fookin’ armour plates pounding the living shite out of each other at spittin’ distance. They’ve got missiles and mines nowadays—apparently they picked that trick up off one of us—but their whole approach is pretty bloody direct.”
“Oh. Really? One of, um, us?”
“Yep. Like to get my hands on that wanker, whoever he was. Give him a lesson in keeping his fookin’ mouth shut.” Powell’s tone was light, but he had a dangerous look in his eye that reminded her a bit of Adrian, though not in a happy way.
Jen suddenly became very grateful for the practice she’d had in the art of lying, and bobbled her head in a way that could mean anything but didn’t really meaning anything specific. Powell apparently took it agreeably.
“Anyway,” he continued “the ships we’re putting up—or, at least, the Lockheed ones that NATO are buying—are built around not that. Long-range weaponry, evasive maneuvers, fookloads of electronic warfare. We use capacitors full of reserve power rather than big reactors, so our ships are small and agile little buggers, built to hit and fade, rip things a new one in the opening seconds, then jump out, recharge, come back and do it again.”
“Our weapons stack up to theirs?” Jen asked. That part was genuine news. She’d known for some time that most weapons that she might find pointed at her were nowhere near as deadly as their equivalent on Earth, but she had always assumed that with thousands of years of science behind them, spaceship guns would be far in advance of anything humanity had yet invented.
“In theory.” Powell said, clearly unhappy about not being able to give a more emphatically positive answer. “Because all their stuff’s based around railguns and plasma cannons, our own weapons, which are neither of those things, should be something they don’t know how to handle. Their shields are tuned to stop slow-firing high-energy projectiles traveling at like, one percent of lightspeed, and the armour’s designed for heat dissipation: it’s all ceramic tiles, fragile as balls.”
“So, if we fire a howitzer at them or something?” Jen asked him, latching on to the first “big gun” word she could think of.
“I see what you’re thinking, but nah. It’d just explode against the shields: too slow-firing. But in theory, if we just chuck a load of lower-energy projectiles at them it’ll overwhelm the shields and smash the armour. See?”
“I’ll…have to take your word on all of that.”
Powell smiled. “I take it you’re not a military hardware geek?
“Not really.”
“Well, I am, and the Lockheed TS-101 gives me a hell of a chubby.”
“Charming.” she deadpanned, trying to give the impression that there were more important matters on her mind than the state of his junk. It seemed to work, because Powell cleared his throat and his smile faded.
“Right. Sorry.” He scratched his upper lip with his thumb, lips pursed in thought. “Anyway, back on topic. There’s…a lot of legal questions about Cimbrean here.”
“Like what?” Jen asked, surprised. She had assumed that all of those questions would have been sorted out long before the soldiers came here.
Powell ticked each question off on his fingers as he asked them. “Is this a colony of any one nation? And if so, which one? Or is it its own nation? in which case are you going to have a constitution, are you going to be a democracy? What’s your immigration policy? What are you going to export and import? What’s the customs policy on things like, say, seeds and foodstuffs, because from what I’m told our native Terran species would go through this lot -” he waved an arm, expansively indicating the ecosystem of an entire planet “-like vindaloo through a short grandma.”
“There are questions about you, too.” he added, looking her in the eye. “You were given the job because you were here and because we heard you’d built something, but seeing as what you apparently built is a battlefield, do you even want it any more? Do you want to go home to Earth? Because the next time Kirk swings by here he’ll be able to send you back, no problem. Do you want to stay on as governor, or hand the job off to somebody else?”
Jen’s brow creased as she considered this. “I hadn’t even thought of any of those questions.” she confessed. “How much of being a colonial governor would be like that? Desk work, lawmaking, thinking about all the fiddly little details and all that?” She asked.
“Fookin’ near all of it, I’d imagine.” Powell said.
“Then I want to be replaced as soon as possible.” Jen said, firmly. There was no way she could go back to a job that even looked and smelled faintly like I.T., not after her experiences out here.
“You sure? Could be a nice desk. Big salary. Power, fame and influence?”
For once, Old Jen and New Jen were in total agreement. “I’d rather just be a space-babe.” She demurred, her voice completely full of resolve.
Powell nodded approvingly. “Good for you.”
Brick, New Jersey.
Ravi Singh’s apartment wasn’t hard to find. In a building of cheap wooden doors, his was the solid, expensive one with three locks and a camera above it.
The response to Kevin’s knock wasn’t a querying “who’s there?” or a friendly “Hello?”, but a moment of wary silence, and then:
“Who are you?”
Kevin held his tattoo up towards the camera. “Not one of them.” he asserted.
He waited patiently throughout the long consideration that followed, and then the undoing of three locks.
After a few more thumps, there was a buzz, and the door opened…revealing another door.
“Uhmmm…”
“Step inside.” Singh instructed, his voice muffled through the door.
Kevin paused, shrugged, then complied. The space between the two doors contained nothing except an almost absonant magnetic lock with a keypad, and a shelf on which a metal detector wand was charging.
“Run the wand over your scalp.” Singh insisted.
Kevin Jenkins found that the limits of his patience were being approached, but he sighed and did so, completely bemused as to what he could be looking for.
Singh wasn’t satisfied until the wand had gone over his whole cranium twice, and over the bald patch where his translation implant had once been a good three times, before finally there was a beep from the magnetic lock and the inner door swung open.
Kevin wasn’t sure what he expected from the interior of the apartment. After the extravagant security and clear paranoia, he had expected a gust of stench and a study in dingy squalor inhabited by an emaciated neurotic disaster of a man. In fact, the apartment was clean and tidy, decorated in light and airy cream and a warm maroon.
Ravi Singh himself was similarly clean, dressed in jeans and a white shirt, but the bags under his eyes were exactly in keeping with the suspicious reception: he had the face and body language of a man for whom sleep had long since ceased to be anything other than sporadic, shallow and brief.
He welcomed Kevin into his apartment with a surprisingly warm handshake given his apparent exhaustion and the paranoia of the previous few minutes, then glanced out of the front door, and shut and locked both.
“So. What’s your name, mister not-one-of-them?” he asked. “Can I offer you a cup of tea?”
“I’m more of a coffee man, myself…” Kevin said.
“Of course. How do you take it?”
“Uh, black, strong and sweet, please. And my name’s Kevin, Kevin Jenkins.”
“Oh?” Singh arched an eyebrow as he busied himself with a steel and glass cafetiere. “Well, this is an honour. The Butterfly himself. Please, sit down.”
Kevin did so, conscious that his street clothes were a good deal shabbier than the apparent recluse’s black leather couch. “Butterfly?”
“You’ve surely heard the term ‘Butterfly effect’? From chaos theory. The notion of a little insect in a field in France flapping his wings and several months later that little eddy has grown into quite the mighty storm and poof! There goes half of Bangladesh.” Singh smiled grimly, a distinctive closed-lipped smile that Kevin recognised immediately as that of a fellow abductee. You learned to keep your teeth hidden out there.
“I never bought that story.” he retorted. “Sounds too much like the fantasy of a little man wanting to believe he’s important.”
“Does it? But you’re a living example of the principle in action.” Singh said, pouring hot water into the cafetiere. “I truly believe that had you not been aboard the Outlook on Forever that day, we would still be here. The sky would still be open, but we would still be generations away from exploring it.”
“How d’you figure?”
“Without Kevin Jenkins, that would have just been another successful Hunter raid. Without Kevin Jenkins, the galaxy’s media would not have taken an interest in our species. Without that, there would have been no uptick in abductions. No uptick in abductions would mean no warp trail to lead a stray Hunter vessel to Vancouver in search of prey. It’s all quite narrative, really.”
He depressed the cafetiere’s filter and poured a cup of steaming black Blue Mountain.
“If that’s how it works, then what about the patrol officer who kicked me off the Churthuarg station for vagrancy?” Jenkins asked. “Or the Corti who abducted me, or my ex-wife or my lawyer or…you know what, I didn’t come here for this conversation.”
“No, you came here about the Hierarchy.” Singh handed over the coffee in an elegant glass cup. The aroma was perfection itself. “I told the last person who came knocking in no uncertain terms that her death was really only a matter of time once she started probing into this, but she said she accepted that.” He sipped the coffee. “I hope she was truthful.”
“She was prepared for it. Terri left her notes for us to find.”
“You knew her?” Singh asked.
“She and I were…we fucked.”
“Ah!” Singh looked sympathetic. “It must have been a complicated relationship, if all you’ll reveal is what you did, rather than how you felt. And so blunt, too. You must be in a lot of pain.”
“Dude!” Kevin threw his head back in frustration, then leaned forward. “I don’t want psychoanalyzing. I came here for information.”
“That information will kill you.”
“If they’re what I suspect they are, then knocking on your door probably killed me.” Kevin said. “So how about you drop the guru half-speak and get on with the movie.”
Singh smiled again, this time allowing his teeth to show—a genuine, human expression of delight. “Certainly.” he said.