~7,200y BV
He hadn’t earned his name yet. Not his adult one. His test of manhood was still ahead of him, and so the men called him “little runner.”
Not so little any more, though. Every time the great heat rose, he seemed to himself to be that little bit taller, that little bit stronger, that little bit faster.
And he dreamed of being the one to run down the meat. To be named for providing a feast for his people.
And so he ran. The more he ran, the easier running became, the further he could go. He knew that if he needed to, he could run from darkness to darkness, but you only did that if you have to. And you certainly didn’t run through the worst of the high day’s heat.
Even men had their limits. Boys, even more so. No water skin could hold enough to keep cool during the fiercest of the great heat’s glare. Even sitting in the cool and waving away the flies could leave men and wives feeling sick on the worst days.
Which was why, when he heard the voices, his first response was to stop, step into the shelter of a fat man tree, and spend a little water cooling his head. He didn’t feel strange in the way that usually preceded the heat-sickness, but to hear voices when he had run for most of the morning? He was not near his village, and not stupid enough to stray onto the land of any other tribe. At best they would have beaten him before sending him home. At worst, only his head would have been sent back to his mother. He didn’t run towards the sunset for that reason.
The voices did not speak words he knew. There were two of them, quite clear, not fuzzy and strange like dream-voices. He could glean nothing from their words, but he could hear something in them, the sounds made when a man and his wife squabbled. The word “cadence” would have been appropriate, had he known it.
Now confident that his head was cool and clear, and that the arguers did not know of him, his thoughts turned to knowledge. Who were these voices? Where were they? Why were they on his tribe’s land?
The unknown was dangerous. He stepped closer, caressing the ground with his feet as the old men had shown him. The voices continued to bicker, oblivious to his approach.
What he saw when he peeked around the fat man tree very nearly sent him fleeing for the village, crying his alarm like a startled bird.
They did not touch the ground.
There were two of them, in the air like a fly but as large as Little Runner himself. Their skins shone like the sun on wet rock, or maybe like mirage. Bright and strange, beyond his understanding. It was the first time any of his tribe had ever seen metal.
Whatever these things were—gods or demons or something else—they scared him, and so he retreated, as stealthy as before…until his spear rattled on a branch.
The impossible flying wet-rock beasts turned, and green eyes glared at him. Both raised up into the air and began to move closer, chattering excitedly at one another.
He had two options. Flee, or fight.
He fought.
Some minutes later, after the surprise had worn off, he gingerly approached the fallen wet-rock beast and prodded it. His thrown spear had penetrated its eye, killing it at once. The other had vanished like a spark coiling up to the night and its stars.
When his prod elicited no response, he gripped his spear and pulled. It came away with a crunch and a horrible noise, and light flashed inside the dead beast’s eye.
Some minutes later, he found the courage to approach again, and prodded it with his spear, achieving nothing.
He tried to lift his prey—it was heavy, but he managed it. Though, it was a morning’s good run back to the village. Carrying this strange, meatless carcass the whole way would be a challenge.
He knew exactly where he was of course. Coming back with the men to show them this thing he had slain would be easy. But the other one had simply gone like spilled water soaking into the thirsty earth. This dead one might do something similar while he was away. Or perhaps its vanished companion would return and take it.
A trophy was called for. Gingerly, he reached for the broken green eye.
He made a startled sound of pain and sucked at his finger, sliced open as easily as would be done by even the best of the stone-former’s spearheads. Even dead, this thing was clearly dangerous. But a dead eye that could cut like that would be the perfect trophy.
It took some trial and error, but eventually he managed to smash out all of the strange, rock-like material of the eye to carry home in his back. A bit of force and grunting broke off one of the beast’s lower legs, made of that strange wet-rock. Any more would only tire him on the run home.
The old men would know about these things, he knew.
When he had finally gone, the cloaked Corti field drone finally became visible again, and inspected the body of its destroyed counterpart.
“A sharp stick, right through the optical sensor and into the primary processor.” Ngilt commented. “I don’t know whether to be impressed or offended.”
“Tool use, curiosity, obvious attempts to think about the situation…Oh dear.” Trifflo added. “Oh very dear.“?
“You can’t be suggesting that thing was sapient?”
“You may not have got a clear view of it through your damaged drone, partner, but I did. It was wearing clothes. It was carrying tools. If that thing was a mere nonsapient animal then I’m a Dizi rat.”
“But this is a class twelve!”
Trifflo sneered across the laboratory at his counterpart. “The impossibility of sapient life on deathworlds was only ever a hypothesis.” he remarked. “and any hypothesis which contradicts reality…”
”…Is wrong.” Ngilt finished for him. “Still. The damage to our careers if we start claiming to have found an intelligent—albeit primitive—deathworlder?”
“Ghastly.” Trifflo agreed. “To be shared only among our most trusted contacts. If the Directorate heard us saying such things, we’d both be stuck on frontier survey ships indefinitely.”
“Yes. Best to keep it a secret. It won’t be secret forever, but at least our own advancement won’t be adversely affected.”
“Mark this world as unusable and move on?”
“Oh, yes. Different star system, I think.”
“I quite agree.”
That conversation, all by itself, saved the human race from extinction.
Seven thousand years later
HMS Myrmidon , Cimbrean system, The Far Reaches
It would have surprised Lance-Corporal Rob Garland to learn that he was, very distantly indeed, a direct male-line descendant of the first human ever to encounter alien life.
Given the situation, however, he would not have been thinking about it, even if there had been any way for him to know.
The hull screamed. It was exactly the right word—a kind of high, singing noise of pain that sounded like it belonged to the mouth of something alive, rather than to steel and ceramic.
“There! Pull back!”
Royal Marines were a well-drilled and professional fighting unit among the very best Earth had to offer. The order was damn near redundant, but Garland was glad for it anyway. By twos, the team moved away from the offending bulkhead, which was starting to shake alarmingly as Hunter boarding craft violated Myrmidon. The Hunters would almost certainly open with a volley of nervejam grenades, and they did not want to be caught in that.
The ship was in serious trouble, and everyone knew it, but all that meant to a marine was that you fought harder.
He heard Sergeant Vickery report the breach, calm and level. “Contact D deck forward.” In a movie, he would have yelled it, but this was real life. In real life, you stayed ice-cold, reported the facts, stayed on target.
The other team further down Myrmidon’s length reported contact of their own. He noted the fact, sticking a mental pin in his imaginary map of the ship, another contact in front of them. None flanking them, yet.
The bulkhead gave, devoured by a hungry whirl of grinding devices that chewed it away from the outside. The maw thus revealed vomited out, as predicted, a spread of little white coins, and ever man diverted their eyes. Even so, the exotic energies of Nervejam stung, like a really hard sneeze, but their fighting efficiency wasn’t impaired at all, which was why when the Hunters charged from their assault craft, they weren’t met with a carpet of convulsing and dying men, but with a disciplined volley of shotgun fire.
Shipboard combat was close quarters, and the vacuum outside was death. Weaponry that could pierce the hull was absolutely verboten, but 12 gauge flechette rounds were absolutely ideal—hardly any risk of hull penetration, very little ricochet, damn near impossible to miss, and the sheer volume of projectiles overwhelmed alien combat shielding, leaving the bare flesh to be ripped and ruined.
The first wave of Hunters barely managed to get a shot off. The one that did fired some kind of sizzling short spear that jammed quivering in the metal bulkhead behind Garland’s ear, having missed him only because of adrenaline-heightened reflexes and luck.
“Jimmy! Get a grenade in there!” Vickery ordered. Rob pulled back into cover to thumb some more shells into his magazine—he wouldn’t be able to fire while Corporal David James was up in front.
Jimmy had the best throwing arm in the squad, and it sent an antipersonnel grenade thumping and skittering up the Hunters’ ramp an instant before another one of those spears caught him right in the middle of his Osprey’s chest plate, smashing him back.
He was dragged to cover in a second as the grenade went off, but it had no apparent effect on these Hunters. These ones were more machine than flesh, covered in equipment and their forcefields were visible as a turquoise iridescence in the gunsmoke haze. They pounced and danced on mechanical feet that never stopped moving, buying them speed and agility even in the narrow confines of the ship. One of them actually sidestepped onto the wall and then along the ceiling, cradling a heavy weapon in its two “natural” limbs while a pair of some kind of light projectile weapon whined at the ends of two artificial arachnoid appendages that grew out of his back and over its shoulders.
Doing so it exposed it, and the human firepower smashed its shielding, and the creature itself a second later, but not before one of the little crescent shuriken projectiles from those guns nicked Garland’s leg, drawing blood. He hissed, but ignored it.
A second of the larger Hunters was knocked staggering by another grenade, and was dismembered by the gunshots, but the third one leapt over its fallen comrade, scuttled inverted along the ceiling for three paces, dropped as the shotgun rounds converged, rolled, came up, and fired the big gun that it was carrying in its organic arms.
Sergeant Vickery died instantly as a wad of high-pressure incandescent copper plasma struck him center-mass, flinging his burning corpse down the deck with a horrific charred cavity where his chest had been, setting the fire alarms wailing and immediately leaving squad leadership in Rob Garland’s hands.
There were four more of the enhanced ones behind the one that had just killed the sergeant, even as it was finally cut down. The marines ducked for cover as those Hunters fired their own volleys of lethal plasma, which scored and ruined Myrmidon’s bulkheads and left the steel running like candle wax. And behind them, a small horde of the “basic” hunters was taking its time down the ramp, content to let the heavies do all the work.
There was no second volley, though, and Rob could see that their weapons were glowing like a forge. He guessed that they had just long enough while those guns cooled down to try something insane.
“Knives out! CHARGE!!”
He felt the ship shift and the curious dropping sensation that always accompanied a displacement as his team leapt from cover.
The move caught the Hunters completely off-guard, and they recoiled from the assault, spraying their shard-throwers uselessly into the ceiling as they flinched, and went down in a dog-pile as the marines crashed into them, plunging their F-S fighting-knives into eyes, throats and anywhere that looked vital.
The lesser Hunters in the rear, armed only with pulse guns against a team of determined professional killers in full Osprey armour, didn’t stand a prayer. Marine Atwell checked their boarding vessel.
“Ship’s empty!” he called
Garland nodded and took stock. Corporal James was alive and being tended by the medics, but too wounded to keep fighting, and he could still hear shooting from amidships. Most of the lads had injuries of some kind, mostly burns from the close heat of the plasma guns, but nothing to slow them down.
“D-deck forward clear, one man down. Moving to clear D-deck mid.” He reported. “Come on, lads.”
A minute later, when his men crashed into the flank of the Hunters laying siege to the stairwell which led straight to the CIC, theirs was the last kill of the failed Hunter boarding action on HMS Myrmidon.
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 1d AV
The Grand Conclave, Hunter Space
The Alpha of Alphas
<Due respect> +The sensor records as requested, Greatest.+
From the perspective of the Alpha-of-Alphas, assimilating the data and analysing it was a sensation not dissimilar to popping a morsel of flesh into its mouth and investigating the unique flavours. That sensation was no accident, having been deliberately engineered into the firmware of its own personal and highly customized suite of cybernetics.
Its lofty position granted it the luxury of being an epicure, in many different respects. Meat, obviously, was the visible focus of its gourmand appetites, but it had not become Alpha-of-Alphas only by eating meat. The position had been won ultimately by the fruits of its other, more urgent hunger: a thirst for insight and knowledge that would remain unquenched even if the Alpha-of-Alphas spent the rest of its days figuratively drowning in data.
These particular data were full of tender mysteries, which it peeled apart, turning the juicy enigmas over in its mind and slowly stripping them down layer by succulent layer, savouring the exquisite spices of elucidation as they blossomed in its mind.
There was much that could not be determined. The feast of information was tainted, riddled with sour gaps in the logs brought on by exotic manipulations of the electromagnetic spectrum which had dazzled and confuse the swarm’s sensors. The early records of the fight were meager fare indeed, barely an aperitif—it was only when the Swarm-craft began to arrive in earnest and overload the beleaguered human craft’s resources that the information began to become coherent, and that state only lasted a few seconds before the wave of smaller Human ships had arrived, reversing the flow of not only the physical battle, but also the digital one.
What could be gleaned, however, thoroughly impressed it. Chemical-propellant weaponry using warp fields to overcome the problem of their relatively glacial velocity across the huge distances involved in space combat. The precision timing of bringing a Brood-Transport’s ship down with a storm of weak firepower an instant before a hurtling kinetic missile ended the ship and the lives of every one of the two-hundred strong Ripping-Brood.
The tactics were exceptional. These humans understood the Hunt in a way that even Hunters themselves sometimes failed to. Information was controlled, traps laid, escapes predicted and retaliations, evaded. The opening ambush was simply masterful, reminding the Alpha-of-Alphas of the overwhelming strike from hiding that had won the victory against the Vulza atop whose chemically treated and preserved skull the Alpha-of-Alphas now sat.
It took note of the data from inside the wounded human vessel, sent back from the doomed broods that had assaulted it. There was little that could be done about the Deathworlder firearms—so much kinetic ammunition filling the air would overwhelm anything less than starship shielding, but the information as to which tactics had been effective and which had not was invaluable.
The fusion-tipped spear throwers clearly were inadequate. Too similar to human ballistic armour, they would wound, but not kill, and a live Deathworlder was still unacceptably dangerous. The rapid-fire shuriken guns had not scored a single kill. Only the plasma weaponry seemed to be reliably dangerous to them, but it ruined the meat and was slow to cool down between shots. Hardly surprising, considering that the weapons were designed to destroy heavy ground vehicles.
Nervejam was clearly their greatest fear, but it was equally dangerous to the Hunters themselves. Worse, in some ways—feeling the agony of one of the Brood caught in a Nervejam could stun the survivors for a few fatal seconds. It was reluctant to order more widespread deployment of the grenade launchers.
Though it stuck in the craw, the only sensible solution seemed to be to try and develop an analog of the Deathworlders’ own weaponry. If they had built it to kill one another, then it would presumably be effective.
Some questions remained. The human ship had plainly lost power at some point, and yet had still kept firing before jumping out. This raised an interesting conundrum about the nature of its internal systems.
One mystery above all, however, was truly fascinating. The human vessels had danced across the combat volume, blinking from place to place the moment they came under fire. Only sheer numbers had defeated that trick, but there was nothing in the data to suggest how it was done. Only displacement wormholes could move a ship in such a way, and yet there was no sign of any corresponding beacon—the alien vessels simply jumped, without apparently having anything to guide them.
The Alpha-of-Alphas was undoubtedly among the most intelligent beings in the galaxy, but it was a very focused intelligence—within its own intellectual demesnes, nothing in the galaxy was its equal. Outside of them, however…
<resignation; distaste> +Bring me the Alpha of the Brood-That-Builds+ it commanded.
<Information> +that one is far away, greatest. I will send for it at once, but it will not arrive for some (days).+ one of the subordinates sent.
<impatient tolerance> +stress upon it that I desire its presence as soon as possible. If I am kept waiting, the Brood-That-Builds will need to find a new Alpha.+
<Obedience> +It shall be as the Alpha-of-Alphas commands.+
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 1d AV
Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Rylee Jackson
“Did you see the muscles on that one?”
Rylee laughed. She sure had, and as she watched Sergeant Jones—“Legsy”—spin a tall tale to a laughing audience about how Corporal Murray had hurt his hand, the mental image flashed into her head of herself, wrapped around his waist and gasping.
She shook it away. Jones was a non-com vastly junior to her in rank and from a coalition unit. She’d be risking a ruined reputation and a seriously truncated career, and that was the best case scenario. Jones’ CO, Powell, struck her as the kind of by-the-book hardass who’d have her wings thrown in the fire if he found out, fame be damned. Jones, meanwhile, would be risking prison. While the rationale behind those regulations had never really convinced her, she wasn’t about to start ignoring them.
Not worth it, she decided. She was just processing the hormonal residue of an intense and dangerous combat operation, but there were options for working that out without violating regulations, even if she was especially fond of big, muscular comedians.
Folctha colony had thrown a big party for the newcomers from the freighter and all of the military personnel who’d been able to get leave, which included Rylee. Most of the colony was there, enjoying what was actually some very old-fashioned fun. A big fire, a pig roast—or some local Cimbrean equivalent of a pig, anyway—lots of beer, some instruments, singing and dancing…
And sex. That much was obvious, there was going to be a fair bit of that tonight. She was damned if she was going to miss out.
To fight the temptation posed by Jones, she hauled herself to her feet, excused herself, and made a slow bee-line for the kegs of local brew, paying attention to the locals.
Folctha had attracted a certain sort of person, she noticed. They were mostly young or in their early forties at the oldest. There was a certain…liberalness. It wasn’t anything explicit, and it wasn’t universal, but there was definitely the sense that the people here really did have the adventurous mindset and open-minded attitude which might drive them to leave Earth in pursuit of an uncertain future on an alien world. Some of that cavalier attitude manifested itself in the way they dressed, stood and spoke.
She found what she was looking for flipping burgers on one of the charcoal barbeques—six and a half feet tall, middle-length blond hair and a bit of a well-groomed beard. Beefy, strong-looking, and covered in tattoos. If he hadn’t been wearing a ring on his left hand to match the girl with the pierced lip and partly-shaved, braided brown hair who was sitting next to him watching the grill’s fire glowing on his muscles, he would have been perfect.
Still. Rylee wasn’t afraid to strike out and who knew? If she was very lucky, maybe those rings would just turn out to be the icing on the cake.
Who dared, won.
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV
Starship Sanctuary , deep space, the Frontier Worlds
Krrkktnkk “Kirk” A’ktnnzzik’tk
“Here we go again…”
Kirk looked around. Amir had taken to piloting Sanctuary with remarkable skill, which he attributed to video games and hanging out with “the boy racers” whatever they were. The cockpit, designed for Kirk’s proportions, sometimes gave him trouble in reaching a few of the ancillary controls, but the ship’s control systems were designed to be used by anything, and intuitively. He was shaping up to be an excellent pilot.
Unfortunately, when it came to interstellar travel, piloting consisted of just sitting in the seat and watching the stars go by, staying in the chair only in case of gravity spikes—which Sanctuary’s Directorate-made blackbox drive ignored—or sudden unexpected masses directly in the line of travel, which were statistically the closest thing to being an impossibility, and in any case the computer navigated around long before any organic pilot needed to become involved.
Human science fiction had long imagined exciting and dramatic FTL travel full of rushing sparks of light, or maybe a tunnel of somewhere else. The reality was much less visually impressive: The stars moved, slowly. That was it.
Sanctuary was incomprehensibly fast, with a cruising speed of nearly five hundred kilolights. Only the human TS-2 could match her speeds of fifty light years per hour or more, and only for an extraordinarily brief sprint. Even at her velocious pace, though, the movement of the stars was slow enough to swiftly become boring.
In an emergency, if they wanted to risk a few burned out systems, Kirk reckoned that a million lights was within his “yacht”’s grasp, though there was no conceivable reason why they would need to travel so fast.
The result was tedium, and the ship’s occupants had to spend most of their time finding ways to entertain themselves. For Kirk, that was trawling through the vast archived tracts of the Terran Internet that he’d collected, studying humanity in all its fascinating detail. He’d just encountered something called “League of Legends” and while figuring out the basics of this electronic sport had been trivial, it was clear that the players were operating several meta-levels above his own current understanding.
Lewis, manning the ship’s sensors, seemed to be quite content to giggle at footage of gricka—cats—all day, though he’d once tried to engage Kirk by playing an album called “Dark Side of the Moon” alongside a movie called “The Wizard of Oz”. Kirk had readily agreed that both were fascinating artistic experiences by themselves, though he wasn’t at all clear what additional stimulus Lewis was getting out of playing them simultaneously.
Amir, for his part, rarely shared whatever it was he watched or listened to. Now, seeing Kirk and Lewis turn towards him with questioning expressions, he turned his monitor to show them.
“Julian and Allison again.” he explained.
“Oh, shit.” Lewis laughed, scooting over for a better view. “Hey, we got any popcorn?”
“What is ‘pop corn’ please?” Vedreg asked, a cautious tendril of light green curiosity infiltrating up his expression bands.
“Light snack, traditionally consumed when about to watch something interesting.” Kirk said. “What are they doing, Amir?”
The englishman sighed. “She’s turned a training session into an excuse to tease him again.” he said.
Kirk inspected the monitor, and sighed.
Building Julian a prosthetic foot had been trivial: Sanctuary’s workshop was outfitted in the cutting edge of nanofabrication tools, and a medical bay just pseudo-intelligent enough to perform the surgery itself, under careful supervision.
The hardest part, in fact, had been designing it so as to minimize his rehabilitation time. Tactile and kinesthetic feedback sensors had been crucial, as had matching the weight, the angles of motion, even the way that a human foot naturally spread out and contracted as the weight of the body shifted around. They had spent the whole morning just fine-tuning those functions, dismantling and reassembling dozens of trivially different designs until finally Julian was able to mount one onto the cuff at the end of his truncated leg and immediately say “Yeah. That feels like a real foot.”
Just to make sure he was properly acclimatized however, Allison had insisted that he should do some Yoga with her.
Now, it looked like she had an ulterior motive. Kirk’s nostrils narrowed, a direct equivalent to the human frown. He hauled himself out of his seat, squeezed past Vedreg, and trotted off towards the gym. This had gone on long enough.
Sure enough, he met Julian in the corridor, stumping back toward his bunk with a furious expression, though Kirk was pleased to note that his gait seemed entirely normal and comfortable on his new prosthetic.
“I’ll talk to her” he promised, as Julian stopped and gave him an exasperated shrug.
“Do. I’m getting sick of this shit.”
In the gym, Allison was cooling down with some stretches and gentler, easier Yoga poses as he entered. “Back already Etsicitty?” she asked. “I figured you’d…oh. Hey, Kirk.”
Kirk gave her his best glare as he entered, hearing the gravity plates automatically adjust around him to keep him safe.
“I cannot have this, Allison.” he informed her. “We are on a mission here, I need both your minds on the job, and right now you are the problem. You have gone from genuine concern for him to taunting him overnight, now that he is mending.”
There was a long pause. Finally, Allison’s shoulders dropped, and she uncoiled from her cross-legged position on the floor, stood and turned to face him.
“Okay, I hear ya,” she said slowly. “but, Kirk, I’ma let you in on a secret. Julian is fucking hot.” She looked up at the ceiling. “like, oh my god, the things I’d do to that man…” she spaced out for a second, lower lip caught between her teeth.
”…And?” Kirk had no idea where she was going with this. She snapped back to reality.
“Well, that’s the problem.”
“I really do not follow you.”
Allison sighed. “Kirk, I didn’t get back on this ship to fuck that guy.”
“Well, I guessed as much. But why did you? Most of the others left. This ship feels empty with only the four of you still on it, and I cannot remember the last time Lewis or Amir even left the ship.”
“Because I’d forgotten just how shitty Earth is.” She confided, tucking a stray strand of hair back behind her ear
“Shitty?”
Allison exhaled, picking up a towel and mopping her forehead with it. “What have I got waiting for me back there?” She asked. “Serving lattes twenty hours a week and fixing bikes the other twenty? All so I can afford rent and, if I’m not too tired for it, some time down at the gun range? Busting my ass at the gym four times a week because booty means tips? I felt like a goddamn porn star the way some of the customers used to stare at me! And the blacktop warrior assholes who used to try and get me on their bikes, ugh!”
She flung her towel at the laundry basket and it seemed to personally offend her when she missed. “There’s more to life than having to put up with the same fat scarf-wearing poser every day who came in to order a fucking tall fucking caramel fucking zero-fat fucking frappucino in a venti cup! I swear that greasy asshole only ordered it because I had to dig through three fridges to make it all so he could stare at my ass while I was bending over! And he was just one of, like, ten! ten fucksticks just like him! For minimum goddamn piece of shit fucking wage!”
Kirk had instinctively retreated to the opposite side of the room, propelled by an instinct shared both by herbivores facing a raging predator, and men facing a raging woman.
Somehow, she was worse when she suddenly got quiet. “There’s more to life.” she repeated. “There’s…making a difference, like we are here. There’s being more than just somebody else’s wage-slave piece of eye candy. Like…if I’m gonna be sexy, I just…I want it to be on my terms. You know?”
She took a deep, cleansing breath, and picked up the towel. “Julian’s a really nice guy, but he puts me off balance. I know I shouldn’t tease him like I do but…I mean, it puts me back in control.” Kirk watched her as she opened the laundry basket and dropped the towel into it. “I’m sorry.”
“Apologize to him. He is the one you are making uncomfortable.”
“I know, I know…I just…” she tidied some stray hair out of her face. “We’d get along great, I think. And a big part of me wants that. I kinda feel like I have to put a wall there, y’know? Keep him at a distance.”
“Would it really be so bad if you gave in?” Kirk asked.
“Yeah. I’d be risking this. I’d be risking mattering, don’t you see?”
“Risking?”
“Oh come on! Sex Equals Babies! I don’t CARE how careful you are, all the pills and condoms in the world aren’t perfectly safe!”
“The odds…”
“ANY odds is odds I’m not willing to take.” Allison snapped. “I will not risk a lifetime of obscurity as some hard-working nobody back on Earth versus this, no matter how good the odds.”
“I…think I understand. I do not think I approve, but I at least understand where you are coming from.”
Allison gave him a tired smile. “Thanks. I’m not sure I do myself, but…thanks.”
“Just…try to dial it back at least. You two work well together. I would like you to keep working well together, yes?”
”…Yeah. I’ll try.”
She turned towards the door towards the quarters and was halfway across the room before a thought seemed to strike her.
“Okay, hey.” she said, turning back. “Your turn.”
Kirk tilted his head at her. “…My turn?” he asked.
“Yeah!” She sank down cross-legged on the yoga mat. “Come on, I just got, like, all my baggage out there, and I tell you, it feels pretty good just venting to someone who’ll listen. So…I’m here for you buddy, come on.” She waved an arm towards herself. “Get it off your chest.”
After she’d had time to correctly interpret his expression as incredulity, she followed up with: “…What?”
“Nobody has ever offered me something like that before.” Kirk admitted. “You are asking how I am feeling?”
“Well…yeah.” Allison agreed. “What, is that weird or something?”
“Unprecedented.”
“For real?”
”…Yes.”
“Wow. That’s…kinda depressing.”
Kirk paced around the room, pausing by one of the small windows. “My baggage.” He mused.
“Yeah.”
“I…do not know if I am ready. I do not think I can put it into words, yet.”
“Oooh, dramatic.” She winced at herself, as Kirk gave her what was unmistakably a tired glare. “Sorry.”
Kirk exhaled a sigh. “I will share. In time. I think you are right that I need to,” he said. “But I need to sort it out for myself first.”
She nodded her understanding and stood again. “I’ll be here.” she promised. “and…I’ll apologise to Julian and try to, y’know…go easy on him.”
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 1d AV
Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Ava Rios
“Hey, Ava!”
Ava had volunteered to help with the cooking, and was quietly growing very sick indeed of slicing the burger buns by the time that Hayley, Sara’s mom, tapped her on the shoulder.
“Hi Hayley. How’re you…” She trailed off, noticing who was standing a little ways behind Hayley, alongside her huge husband, Mark.
Fortunately, Hayley took it for a straightforward ‘How’re you?’.
“Oh, we’re great. Having a great time. I was just…do you think you could do us a favour?” She asked.
“What favor?” Ava asked.
“Could you, er…could the kids sleep round your place tonight? We’re having a guest over.”
Floating in a kind of stunned emptiness as she processed the implications of that request, Ava heard her mouth say “Yeah, uh…sure! Yeah, we, uh, we can do that for you.”
“You’re the best!” Hayley exclaimed, and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
She left, in the company of her husband and one of the most famous women in the world. Just before the three of them vanished into the dark, Ava could have sworn she saw the two women kiss.
She excused herself from burger-bun duty and squeezed through the crowd until she found Adam, who was hanging out with his dad.
“You won’t believe who I just saw going home with Hayley and Mark…” she began.
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV
Ceres Base, Sol
Drew Cavendish
Adele Park was not, in Drew’s opinion, a pretty woman. The features inherited from her Korean father contrasted a little too strangely with those of her Czech mother for that word to apply, but she used them well, combining them with her tailored suit and businesslike haircut to present the absolute picture of poised corporate refinement.
Seeing her so distressed was a new and appalling experience.
“You, of all people?!” She demanded, looking him in the eye after watching the video. Drew could swear he saw a tear there.
“No.” he said firmly. “Not me. I don’t remember doing it, and more to the point, I wouldn’t do it.”
Jim Riordan, the LLC’s security director, didn’t look convinced. “I’ve had this looked at by experts back on Earth.” He said, mild and unflappable as ever. “There’s no digital artefacts, no sign of any editing, nothing. According to them, this is what the cameras really saw. And you’re going to tell us it wasn’t you?”
“Cavvo wouldn’t.” Drew M piped up. He’d been the first person that Cavendish had gone to, and been trusted immediately.
“Every man has his price, Drew.” Riordan said.
“Well God Himself couldn’t afford mine!” Cavendish snapped. “Endanger one of my team? Never.”
He glared at them both. “Why do you think I came to you with this? I know what it means. It means I’m getting fired and probably charged and imprisoned. But if some bastard is somehow using me to endanger my crew?! I won’t. Not by my hands.”
“Using you? That’s your excuse? That’s the best you can come up with?” Adele asked, clearly reaching the end of her own patience. “What’s it going to be, Mr. Cavendish? Alien mind-control rays? Voodoo? Nanotechnology in the coffee machine?”
Drew met her fierce gaze with a quiet firmness of his own. “Nothing short of that would cause me to harm one of my crew, Adele. And if I have to go to prison to rob whoever’s doing this of their puppet? I bloody well will.”
Nobody seemed to quite know how to react to that, and Drew was still glaring at each of them in turn when there was a knock on the door. It turned out to be one of Riordan’s security staff.
“Boss? Miss Park? I’ve got one of the Mitsubishi guys here, Heikichi Togo? He says he wants to confess to sabotaging the base.”
“He…what?” Riordan frowned at his man, caught off-guard.
“He says he’s got CCTV footage proving it was him…”