Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV
Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Gyotin
The shortest route from the ET Quarter to the Faith Center passed along the road outside Folctha’s school, which placed Gyotin in a unique position to be the first Gaoian to witness a schoolyard fight.
He retreated as the door slammed open and expelled one of the young colonists—the skinny female who always carried a camera—into the street. She narrowly missed barging him aside as she ran across the road and out of sight, face a bright red and water streaming from her eyes.
Gyotin was still puzzling over this extraordinary sight when the door exploded open again and two young human males came spinning through, grappling with each other. They were doing more in the way of pulling at each others’ clothing and shouting than actually hurting each other, but the physicality of it was still alarming.
The larger one—and the darker, with a skin tone similar to that of the girl Ava he had spoken to the day before—pulled back from the fight long enough to lash out with one fist, and Gyotin issued a frightened alarm-chirrup. The blow cracked into the other boy’s face with all that trademark deathworlder force, leaving the Gaoian briefly convinced he had just witnessed a murder.
But of course, humans were made of impossibly sturdy stuff, and the struck boy just got angrier, and charged into the larger boy’s torso, shoulders-first, carrying him halfway across the street before they wound up clawing, wrestling and hair -pulling in the middle of the road.
Cubs and clan-brothers fought too of course. Gyotin himself had been part of a vicious spat when he was little that had left him with a scar on his tail and the other cub with a chunk missing from his ear. But this didn’t look like a scuffle between Gaoian males—this was a battle, a war.
It broke up as abruptly as it had burst onto the street when—a universal constant—the adults arrived.
“ADAM MIGUEL ÁNGEL ARÉS!”
The change was immediate. The bigger kid staggered upright, muttering “ohshit.“
Only proximity allowed Gyotin to hear one of the female cubs—children—mutter “ooh, his full name…” to her friend.
If Gyotin was any judge by now, then from the similarities in size, skin tone and facial features, the figure limping along the road was the older boy’s sire, which was a very different relationship among humans than it was on Gao. In any case, the chastised body language of a cub about to receive a stern telling-off seemed to be practically shared between humanity and his own species, if you ignored the immobile ears.
He was surprised when the two started to converse in a language that was completely unfamiliar to him. A rapid-action one that sounded like fire and passion in the older man’s mouth.
‘Of course, they don’t have a unified language, do they?’ he thought. He had grown so used to everybody in the colony speaking English that even the unfamiliar terms in the books on Buddhism that had occupied him half the night had seemed like they must belong to that tongue.
He watched the incandescent exchange for a few minutes, before the two boys looked at each other. Adam held out a fist, which the other tapped with his own.
“Good enough.” the older Arés begrudged. He looked to the younger boy, whose eye was swelling and bruising badly. “Get that eye seen. Vamos.“
The other boy nodded, and ran. Fled, even. Gyotin studied Adam’s body language, thinking hard. Embarrassment, chastisement and apprehension yes, but also…defiance? As if he felt he was in the right?
Finally, the older man softened. “Come here.”
They hugged.
Gyotin gave up. There were books waiting to be read, and he was eager to try this “meditation” they kept writing about. The mystery of human interrelationships would probably prove to be a deeper and more difficult one than the mystery of transcendental enlightenment.
__
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV
Ceres Base, Sol
Drew Cavendish
Adele’s office was becoming crowded.
Drew felt quietly proud of himself for opening the floodgates. His example had given Heikichi the confidence to come forward. Behind him had come Ben Evans, one of the ore drone technicians. Behind him, three more. Each brought with them video proof that it was them who had performed some act of sabotage which had very nearly ended in disaster.
All stood defiantly, insisting they had no memory of doing so, and protesting their innocence. If they were anything like him, Drew knew they were all feeling used and violated.
Riordan, meanwhile, had shuttled off towards Earth in a hurry, apparently aiming to get in touch with some old contacts, leaving Adele to deal with the fact that many—and it was beginning to look like all—of her senior staff had documentary evidence of their own culpability.
There was something nagging Drew’s attention though, now that his innocence was fairly well proven. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
His train of thought missed its station and hurtled on along the track without him as Adele raised her voice to be heard over the mob that was trying to squeeze in. “Fine! Fine! No more! We’ll conduct this in a meeting room in twenty min-”
She got no further.
There was no warning. No hint that something might be amiss. Mid-sentence, pretty much everyone in the room was simultaneously floored by a bolt of the most terrible pain, right between the ears.
Drew staggered, felt Drew M grab him and try to hold him upright. As if hearing it through the worst popped ears in history, he vaguely heard. “Cavvo? Cavvo! Aww, fuckin’ hell what’s going on?“
He staggered, gripped the table, felt the pain lurch in his stomach and threaten to dislodge his breakfast, gritting his teeth against the agony that was pushing at his vocal cords, that was ripping its way out of the others as screams and moans and prayers.
And behind it all…the noise.
“Voices…” he croaked.
More than he could comprehend. Billions, trillions! All talking at once, shouting at once, thinking and moaning and laughing and singing and living at once, behind his eyes, between his ears, surging, roaring, rising into something…
Something…
He lost himself in the tide, and for a little while, Drew Cavendish ceased to exist. He slumped to the floor, as every one of those afflicted—Adele, Heikichi, Evans, everyone—likewise passed out.
Drew Martin and a handful of shocked security guards exchanged terrified glances, not knowing what to do or how to even begin figuring it out.
And then, the unconscious bodies of their friends and colleagues spoke, in perfect mechanical unison:
“ONE.“
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV
Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Rylee Jackson
“Captain Jackson, may I have a minute of your time please?”
Rylee obligingly stood aside as the rest of the officers filed out of Powell’s office. When they were alone, Powell sat back and gave her a level stare.
“Far be it for me to tell you your business, Jackson,” He said, mildly “But where I’m from, an officer of your notoriety being the subject of town gossip about the way she went home with a married couple last night is called ‘bringing the service into disrepute’.”
Rylee cleared her throat. “Ah…That, uh, got around did it?”
“It’s a small town.” Powell said, drily. “Fortunately for you, it’s also a liberal one. Think most of ‘em are envious rather’n scandalized.”
“May I sit down?” Rylee asked.
“Please do.”
Rylee settled into the seat, glad to reduce the formality of the discussion a bit. “So…what’s your request, Powell?”
He grimaced, clearly feeling the awkward position he found himself in. “Look…as peers, one officer to another? You do whatever you need to unwind after an op, I get it. Done it myself. I’m just askin’, again one officer to another, to think about how, fairly or not, your actions reflect on my unit. We’ve got a good informal relationship going with Folctha’s civilians, and I’d like to keep it going as long as I can.”
“That’s…fair. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to cause you any problems.”
“You probably haven’t.” Powell conceded. “I just wanted to make sure it was on your radar, like. That said, speaking personally? From me to you? I’d worry about damaging your career as well. I’m a soft touch, but if someone bigger than us decided to hold it against you…”
“I think the Royal Navy might be a bit more old-fashioned about these things than the USAF, Powell.”
“True. Maybe. Still. I’d hate to watch your career stall.”
Rylee laughed slightly. “What, you think I’d become an “old major”?” She asked, raising her fingers to make air quotes.
“Do you?”
“I think the day they say I can’t fly any more is the day I get out anyway.” Rylee said, shrugging. “That’s all I care about, really.”
“That so? That day’ll come sooner than you think, you know.”
“Yeah, but…come on, first person to fly faster than light? I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to find my way in life.”
”…Aye. Guess you’ve a right to feel secure, there.” He conceded.
“I reckon I do. But still…Thanks, Powell. It’s good to know somebody’s watching out for my career.”
“Least I can do after you pulled Myrmidon out of the fire.”
“That?” Rylee grinned. “That was textbook. We’ve practiced that move so many times in the simulators, the real thing was almost disappointing.”
“Fookin’ tell me about it.” Powell agreed. “If we start going up against those Hunters regular-like, I’m going to worry about losing my edge.”
“Train hard, fight easy.”
“Aye. It was the train hard bit that got me in a bind for a bit.”
Rylee sat back and watched him, folding one leg over her knee. “How so?”
Powell looked around. “Well…” He stood, and in one easy motion, picked up his filing cabinet. Rylee jumped slightly—the cabinet was steel, and solid, and presumably full of paper. Powell was well-muscled and in superb condition, but even he should have struggled with an object of that weight.
Except, of course, that they weren’t on Earth. Her instinctive evaluation of the cabinet’s weight was probably off by a third or more.
Powell set it back down. “Back in the UK we’ve got the extraterrestrial environment training center on Salisbury Plain.” he said. “Basically just your standard enclosed training center, but with artificial gravity plating under the turf. Trained us how to move and fight in low-grav. After that Saunders bloke showed up and just built a ship out of spare parts in two weeks, I had the lads try and jury-rig some of the grav plating into the gymnasium. Took ‘em a bit, but they got it going, and I tell you what: it’s done us a world of good. I just know without it, sooner or later I’d have had to go back home to recover from the muscle atrophy.”
“You sound like you don’t relish the idea of going back to Earth.” Rylee accused, gently.
Powell shrugged. “Nowt back there for me. Why would I?”
“No family?”
He laughed. “Hah! I went into the marines to get the fook away from ‘em. And now this gig’s come along, all the stuff I might really have missed about Earth is right here. Now that we’ve got a proper fight on into the bargain, I’m as happy as Larry. All those months of garrison detail felt like my training were going to waste.”
“Same.” Rylee agreed. “Flying Pandora was a joy, a real privilege, but…I dunno, I felt like a weird cross between a glorified trucker and a military attaché sometimes. I mean, I met some wonderful people doing it, some of whom weren’t even human, but…yesterday felt like it mattered, didn’t it? We fought back. We saved some people.”
“Twenty-seven. Including a kid.” Powell said.
Rylee shook her head in wonderment. “How did twenty-seven humans even find each other out here?” she asked. “I thought our people were getting thrown overboard to keep the Swarm from visiting.”
“Eh, I don’t reckon that happens so much.” Powell said. “There’s a small flaw with the ‘throw the humans into space’ plan.”
“Which is?”
“If some fookin’ alien tried to push me out the fookin’ airlock to save his hide, I’d fight tooth and nail. Wouldn’t you?”
“Hell yeah I would!” Rylee agreed. “I see your point; so would most people. And they’re…the aliens, they’re weak as shit, seriously.” She thought back to the two embassy stations and the aliens on board. You could just feel their fragility. It had been like socializing with her grandmother’s antique porcelain dolls.
“Right. So from what they told me, the station they were on took the whole ‘throw the humans overboard’ thing a bit creative-like and handed the poor sods a spaceship instead of trying to murder a ‘deathworlder’.”
“That’s still not exactly noble of them.” She pointed out
“Eh. Fook noble.” Powell dismissed “I’ll take whatever saves lives and stops good people from having to smear the cowardly bastards all over the walls.”
Rylee bobbled her head and was about to agree when the phone rang. Powell snatched it up.
“Powell……they’re what?“
He stabbed the speaker button. The heavily accented voice on the other end sounded thoroughly puzzled. “It’s reet strange, sir. They’re just decloaking and warping off. Making a show of it, even.“
“I’m coming over there.” Powell hung up and grabbed his sweater. “You’d better come too.” he said.
“The Hunters are leaving?” Rylee asked, springing to her feet.
“Fookin’ well looks like it.”
Rylee thought about it as she followed him out of the office. “Somehow,” she decided “that worries me…”
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV
Ceres Base, Sol
“BRIEF US.”
“Oh Jesus, oh fucking shit, what the fuck what the FUCK?”
“THIS WAS INEVITABLE. FAILURE IS ONLY A MATTER OF SUFFICIENT REPETITION.”
“What do we do? Any ideas? What the hell…?”
“YOU UNDERESTIMATED THEIR RESOLVE. YOU UNDERESTIMATED THEIR SPIRIT OF COOPERATION. YOU FORGOT THAT CLASS TWELVE ALONE REMAINS THE GRAVEST CHALLENGE.”
“Come on guys, snap out of it…”
“YOU WOULD DISSENT?”
“I’m trying to call the doctor but he’s not answering man, what the SHIT is going on?”
“HE IS IN VIOLATION OF THE FIRST DIRECTIVE. DELETE HIM.”
“Lord, please, if you’re listening, let them be okay…?”
“IN THE GULF OF DEEP TIME, THIS INTERLUDE WILL BE FORGOTTEN. PERSEVERE.”
“Just who the hell is doing this?”
“WE HAVE CONSENSUS. CARRY IT OUT.”
”…Christ, I think it’s over. Look, they’re relaxing.”
“Just like that? What the FUCK?!”
“Yeah, look. They’re coming round…”
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV
Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Adam Arés
“So what was that about anyway, Amigo? I’ve never seen you haul off on somebody like that.”
Adam sighed. “I guess…I dunno. He was really picking on Sara about…what happened last night. Calling her a “dyke”, that kinda thing.”
“So you hit him?”
“Not at first. Sara was pretty upset, she told him to stop, that it was okay for women to like women, and Jamie…”
“I think I can guess.”
“He said ‘Ooh, no wonder you want Ava to go swimming!’”
“And then you hit him?”
“And then Sara ran away. And he started this stupid goddamn chant, like, ‘Sara’s lezzie for Ava’.“
“And then you hit him.”
”…And then I hit him.”
They walked in silence for a moment. Adam cleared his throat. “Did I screw up?”
“Amigo, I’d have hit him WAY sooner.”
Adam laughed, but sobered.
“Do you think he was right?” He asked, suddenly.
“About…what, about Sara? I doubt it, man.”
“It really seemed to hit a nerve.”
“Yeah, but the whole town’s been talking about her parents this morning.” Gabriel said. “At fourteen, that’s gotta be tough. I mean, what if…uh, what if some movie star showed up and the next morning everyone was talking about how I had gay sex with him?”
“Urgh.” Adam cringed at the thought, before he was able to properly process it.
Gabriel laughed. “Exactly.”
He put his arm around his son. “I wanna say ‘good for you’, amigo, but…I mean, he’s two years younger than you, you’ve gotta be careful. You could have really hurt him, you know?”
”…I know. I’m sorry, Dad.”
“It’s cool. You’re only grounded for, like, one day.”
“Please, not the weekend!”
Gabriel spun on him. “Yeah, what IS this I hear about you kids planning to go skinny-dipping on the weekend?”
Adam blushed. “You heard about that, huh?”
“What, you think I don’t talk to your teacher? You’re still my kid, man.”
“You’ve kinda stopped treating me like one, lately.” Adam said.
“You’re sixteen! I shouldn’t have to! Hell, I wish MY Dad had trusted me as much when I was your age!”
“Well, which is it, Dad? Do you trust me, or am I still your kid?”
“Getting into fights? Going skinny-dipping with younger girls? You tell me, Amigo! ‘Cause from where I’m standing those look like some pretty immature decisions.”
“It’s just swimming! What’s wrong with swimming?”
“You tell me, you’re the one who’s embarrassed I found out!”
Both men paused for a second, then cooled. Gabriel was amused to note that his son’s technique of reigning in his temper by breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth was pretty much identical to his own. “I’m sorry, man. It’s tough being a dad sometimes. I just don’t want you getting gossiped about like the Tisdales.”
Adam hugged him. “I’m sorry too. Love you, Dad.”
“Love you too, man. Just…try and stay out of any more fights?”
“I’ll try.”
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV
Ceres Base, Sol
Drew Cavendish
“Cavvo? Cavvo, mate, come on, you in there?”
“Bloody…ow.” everything hurt. Everything. Drew fancied he could feel every cell in his bones complaining.
“Fuck me, mate, you scared the piss outta me. You okay?”
“Tell the light to shut up…” Drew creaked, and tried to roll over. This prompted a fresh wave of pain, like the muscle pain of the flu, amplified tenfold. Drew M got his meaning, and blessed dimness descended, taking some of the hard crystalline discomfort out of the world, replacing it with a kind of woollen, soft discomfort instead, which was only a dubious improvement.
“What the flaming hell balls just happened?” Drew M. demanded.
“Fuck…” Drew told him between panting breaths “…if I know.”
“I do.”
Adele’s voice was weak, and just like everyone in the room she was plainly very badly rattled. She lolled in her high-backed leather desk chair, then reached up and undid her tie slightly. Those who could, were looking to her for an explanation.
“You…” She pointed at Drew M and the other shaken few who hadn’t succumbed. “You don’t have translators.”
Drew M looked around the room. All those who had entered to confess to their apparent acts of sabotage, all of those who had collapsed, bore the same shaven patch just forward of their temple, the site where a translation implant had been installed in them, vastly more invasive and intimate than any tattoo.
“Oh…fuck me.” he said.
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV
Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Owen Powell
“Nothing within five parsecs.” came the confirmation, solidifying what the ground station already knew. Caledonia’s sensors were Hierarchy technology, beyond the understanding of her human operators, but so integral to the hull of the ship that removing them to be sent back to Earth for reverse-engineering had not been feasible.
They were also only very marginally better than the jury-rigged mess that Adrian Saunders had cobbled together from scrap and broken starships in a field in one afternoon, and this fact both irritated Powell and impressed him. The Australian hadn’t been heard from since his departure, and for all his obvious instabilities and recklessness, having him pass on even a fraction of his skills would have been immeasurably valuable. Powell felt that he’d dropped the ball there. The team brought in from Earth were learning fast, and improving on Saunders’ efforts as they went, but they didn’t have the experience of rebuilding a half-derelict alien starship to draw on.
“Okay.” he said. “So the question is, why?”
Captain Bathini, Caledonia’s commanding officer, had his own interpretation lined up and ready. “They’ve got something planned.” he opined.
“Any guesses as to what?” asked Jackson, getting straight to the point.
There was a pause. “Speculatively—we just gave them a hell of a bloody nose. One of their large ships taken out by Firebird, a craft a fraction of its mass. Two destroyers held out for five minutes against a large part of the swarm, destroying or crippling a further fifteen vessels, and that’s not counting all the assault craft shot down by CIWS and the one-oh-ones. Both escaped, if not unscathed then certainly alive. From what little we know of Hunter psychology, however, all that probably won’t have demoralized them—it will have frustrated them and made them angry.”
Powell nodded. “You reckon they’re going to try a different tack.” He said.
“I do. And on past evidence, it’s likely to be some atrocity or another. They have sought in the past to strong-arm the other species into betraying our people in the hopes of avoiding being raided.”
Captain Manning chimed in. “If I were in that situation the next step would be to make life hell for the ID and the CA until they give up on each other and unite against us. Fight us by proxy.”
“Exactly.”
“Plausible.” Powell conceded. “Is there anything we can do about it?”
“From here?” Manning thought about it. “Probably not. We have two destroyers, one Firebird and three TS-101 wings that are being phased out and replaced. That’s the sum total of our spaceborne military assets, and with the Chinese so vigorously opposed to the militarization of space…”
“That’s just China being China.” Rylee commented. “The Space Preservation Treaty was repealed, and I know the USAF wants to consolidate Odyssey, Edda and Tawhaki into a single full-size wing sooner rather than later, so that’s at least another thirty Firebirds.”
“Meanwhile, we’ve already got the Type Two Space Destroyer in the works.” Bathini said. “Three of them, to begin with.”
“What’s the Type One?” Rylee asked. Bathini just pointed skywards, indicating Caledonia and Myrmidon.
“I still say we should have bloody well called them Star Destroyers.” Powell grumbled. There was a shared chuckle. “Still…Five destroyers. Sixteen spaceplanes for now, a whole wing later on. Two retrofit Hunter dropships, three standard Dominion-designed shuttles…That’s not bad, actually.” he mused.
“One-on-one, in the short term? We’re the deadliest things in the sky.” Rylee agreed. “But we don’t have the staying power for serious warfare. Our capacitor doctrine’s both our greatest strength and our biggest weakness. In a long fight or against overwhelming numbers, we’ll lose every time.”
“Okay.” Powell said. “Interesting as all that is, it doesn’t give us a clear strategy for how we respond if the Hunters try and provoke the ETs into uniting against us.”
“That one’s a little bit above our pay grade there, Owen.” Manning reminded him.
Powell sighed. “Aye, you’re right, but I was really hoping you wouldn’t fookin’ say that.” he groused. “Alright, but I’d still like to have a proposal for the Admiral, even if he just chucks it in the shredder.”
“Of course. What are you thinking?”
Powell chuckled. “Guile.” he said.
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV
Starship Sanctuary, Deep Space, The Frontier Worlds
Krrkktnkk “Kirk” A’ktnnzzik’tk
“Did I ever tell you about the Outlook on Forever?”
Allison shook her head. “I don’t think you ever told me, no. I heard the short version from Amir.”
“It was…nowhere. And I was nobody. I grew up on that station, I worked there. I was a customs and immigration officer, just another component of the Dominion bureaucracy. And…that was my life. I worked, I slept, I worked. I was saving up my currency, but I had no plans for it. I think my highest aspiration was finding some slender-necked beauty and siring a couple of offspring.”
“Sounds…dull.”
“Oh, I was.”
“I meant the situation but…yeah. It’s kinda hard to picture you being so boring.”
This earned her a curious look. If he was human, he would have tilted his head—his own species’ equivalent was to settle back on all six legs, stable and secure, and get a very good look at her with both eyes—a difficult task when they faced in different directions from opposite sides of his skull. “Do you think so?” he asked.
“Three guns and a fusion sword? Dude, that was some action movie shit you pulled yesterday. Standing up to the security council, quitting it when the field went up? Visiting deathworlds, even Nightmare to retrieve us and take us home? Just…hell, this ship. This whole idea of yours. You’re not boring, no way.”
Kirk nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. “Well, I used to be. And it was a human who knocked me out of the rut.”
“This Jenkins guy, right?”
“Yes.”
He turned and tapped some commands on the wall touchscreen rather than use the room’s voice interface. Allison—driven by fierce Deathworlder fight-or-flight instincts—scrambled to her feet in alarm as a Hunter materialized in the center of the Gym. She knew it was holographic, but still—the things were so creepy.
For his part, even Kirk flinched and shuddered despite having conjured the projection, but he also seemed…pleased? It was hard to tell without a cybernetic device to help her intuit his body language and expressions.
“Okay. What’s all this about?” Allison asked him, inspecting the mirage and steeling herself. The beast looked terrifying, nearly three meters of glistening flesh the colour of Hollywood teeth, shading to bleeding gumline wherever harsh black implants violated the surface. Even studying a simulation of the thing conjured up every phobia innate to the human psyche: of spiders and twisted proportions and too many teeth. Its face alone send a trickle of trypophobia down her spine.
“Death.” Kirk said, simply. “For frontier stations and ship captains this is the grim reaper, not a question of if but when. Your only hope is to die of something else first. Before they eat you. Maybe if you fight hard enough you will force them to kill you before they begin to feed, maybe if you put up enough of a resistance then they will take what they already claimed and leave, rather than push on into the core of the station where the young and pregnant are. Six Hunters in one of their raiding ships are a bloodbath, a whole brood-transport is a massacre. And those are the smaller classifications of Hunter vessel.”
He paced across the room. “The Outlook was not a frontier station.” he said. “It was a bustling freeport, a city. Civilization. I stayed there my entire life because I thought it was safe there. I was scared of leaving and being eaten. I would have preferred to live a lifetime in bored obscurity rather than step out of the door and face the specter of those things.”
”…and then they showed up anyway.” Allison said, guessing where he was going.
“Exactly. A little brood, probably out to prove their daring and resourcefulness. They boarded right into the heart of the customs and immigration handling center, where I worked. A fast raid, in and out before any kind of a response could mobilize.”
He shook his mane and stamped a foot. “And if not for Kevin Jenkins, I would have been a casualty of that attack. Instead, I became one of its heroes. I killed half of them.”
“So…what’s your baggage?” Allison asked.
Kirk didn’t answer for a while. When he finally did, the creaks and crackling of his language were audibly laced with emotion even for human ears.
“I…asked him to join us.” He said. “Jenkins. He was the first person I approached to be part of the Sanctuary crew after we first got some of the guys home.”
“He said no.” Allison guessed.
“He said, ‘I’m right where I want to be, man’.”
Allison nodded, sympathetically. “I think I get it. You hero-worshiped him, and then he turned out to be…not quite what you-”
“He turned out to be an asshole.” Kirk interrupted, putting it bluntly. “I used to just think he was damaged and weary, but the more I think about it, the things he said about your species, the way he spoke about the whole universe as if it owed him something, the way he…seemed to think everything revolved around him. I didn’t know anything about your species before, all I saw in him was the answer to my greatest fear, alive and joking after being pounded half stupid by their pulse guns.”
“I saw…life! hope!” he brayed. “I saw the answer to what I didn’t know was called a ‘prayer’! I saw a dynamic being who stood and fought and won against the thing that had kept me pinned and terrified my entire life. Do you know what that feels like, to see your monsters torn apart by an ordinary weary traveler?”
Allison just sat in silence and let him rattle on.
”…and then….‘I’m right where I want to be.’ as if it’s all about what he wants. As if there’s not a galaxy out here that needs saving from THIS!” In a surprisingly swift motion he turned, looked over his shoulder, and delivered a ferocious equine kick to the hologram which, programmed to respond realistically to damage for combat training purposes, staggered and fell, wheezing through broken ribs. “Room, end simulation.”
The holographic Hunter ceased to exist, as abruptly as a light being turned out.
“Hey, Kirk…” Allison said thoughtfully. “Kick me.”
”…what?”
“Kick me. Come on, you know I can take it.”
Kirk looked at her stupidly for a second, then mimed a human shrug—a complicated gesture given the construction of his shoulders—turned, and, with a glance to make sure she had braced herself kicked her as requested.
Allison made an “oof!” noise, staggered across the room and fell on her ass. “Christ, you kick really hard.”
“A real Hunter would not have stood still long enough.” Kirk dismissed, quietly noting the easy, unconscious way in which she tucked her feet underneath her and stood up.
“Still, you say you killed half of them. You stood and fought as well.”
“Please, do not give me any of that ‘the real strength was in you all along’ crap,” Kirk begged her. “I deduced that part for myself, I do not need a Disney moral lesson.”
“I, uh…right. Okay.”
After a few awkward moments, she repeated her earlier question. “So…what’s your baggage?”
“I…do not know, exactly.” Kirk confessed. “I think…are you religious?”
Allison shrugged. “Complicated question. I believe there’s something bigger than us, but…”
“Well, I think that, for a while, humanity was my god.”
“And you’ve lost faith?”
“No!” Kirk exclaimed “No, not that. It is more that…now you are my friends, my trusted allies. you are people to whom I look for strength, not gods to whom I look for inspiration. I still think your species will change the galaxy for the better, but I do not worship you any more.”
“Yeah, we don’t deserve that.”
“If you say so. I love you, Allison.” Seeing her face going slack in surprise, he hastened to elaborate. “Your species, that is. I would not change to be one of you, but you have no idea how happy it makes me that the human race exists. You excite and scare me—you represent death too, but you represent the…the right kind of death. Being around your kind makes me feel alive rather than terrified.”
Allison didn’t know how to take that. “I guess…thanks?”
Kirk stooped a little, a gesture of acknowledgment. “It is only a half-formed thought. But thank you for hearing it, Allison.”
“Feels good to vent, doesn’t it?”
“Cathartic”
There was a comfortable few minutes of quiet while the two of them thought. Finally, Kirk shook himself, and tapped the wall screen. “Anything to report, Lewis?”
Lewis had settled comfortably into his role as ship’s sensor and communications specialist, a talent he attributed to lots of online gaming. Seeing as neither he nor Amir had ever been given translation implants in the first place, they only rarely left the ship.
“Yeah, we’re, uh…we just shook hands with the Age of Opportunism, man. Just getting our mail…yeah, here we go. Looks like there’s something in the dropbox for you, dude.“
“What is it?”
“Two messages. First one looks like an update from Cimbrean, man. Here ya go.“
The file appeared on Kirk’s screen. “Lewis, I can’t read English.” he said, patiently.
“Ah. Yeah. Sorry, bro.”
Allison was about to spring up and read it when the familiar letters and words of the document shifted and changed into the angular runes of the alien interstellar written alphabet.
“Lewis, I can’t read that either. My translator has been removed, remember?”
“Ah. Fuck. Yeah. Uh…“
Not for the first time, Allison felt a stab of doubt at Lewis’ competence. Though on the rare occasion that he focused…
She sprung up and converted the document back to English. “Okay, let’s…The Hunters have left.”
“What?”
“Yeah. According to Folctha, they just up and left. Says there was a battle over the colony, and now they’ve just…gone.”
Kirk stood very still, processing that information.
“…That’s good news, right?” Lewis asked.
Kirk appeared to reach a conclusion.
“No.” he decided. “No, I do not think it is. What is this other message?”
“It’s from Earth. Marked urgent.”
Allison went noticeably pale as she skimmed it. “holy shit, Kirk.” she declared eventually. “I think we got those implants out just in time…”
Date Point: 4y 8m 2w 2d AV
Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Owen Powell
“Oi, kid!”
The girl turned towards him, looked around, then gestured towards herself with a questioning frown. Powell nodded, and beckoned her over. She was one of the older kids, damn near an adult in fact. Ava something, if memory served. She trotted over, moving easily in the low gravity, which suggested she kept up with her exercise. He approved.
“Do us a favour love, could you run over to the alien enclave an’ tell them we’re holding a Thing tonight that they’ll all want to attend? Ask for Gyotin, he’s the only one speaks English worth a damn.”
“I know Gyotin.” she said. “Most likely he’s round at the faith center.”
“The…” Powell strangled the impulse to casually swear. He never swore around kids. “…What’s a Gaoian doing at the faith center?” he asked instead, caught off-guard by the sudden curiosity. Aliens were notoriously secular.
“I think he’s converting to Buddhism.” Ava said. She gave a complicated teenage shrug which eloquently conveyed the sheer absurdity of the notion. “I’ll go tell him.”
“Cheers.”
“A Buddhist Gaoian.” Ross mused, as Ava jogged away.
“Gyotin of all people, too.” Powell agreed. “You ever get the impression the whole fookin’ universe is a joke?”
Ross glanced at the training field as they walked past it. Legsy was in full flow, putting the army regulars through their paces against a squad of simulated Hunters. Something about those particular ETs made his skin crawl. “Sick joke.” he muttered.