Date Point: 4y 9m 2w AV
Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Gyotin
The central hall of the Faith Center had been cleared out—all the furniture, cushions, books, even the carpet had been rolled up and taken away, leaving behind bare floor which had been marked with an eight-pointed star of some kind.
Gyotin and his Brothers had elected to lurk in a corner, out of the way, and watch. Most of the humans seemed to be equally as uninformed as he was to the nature of this ceremony, which he found interesting. There was a lot of milling around and talking in quiet confusion, much of which centered on a small, overweight human female whose age-silvered head fur was long enough to reach her knees, about half of which had been tied back away from her face.
“So, is this their senior Mother or something?” Tagral asked.
Gyotin indicated not. “I don’t recognise her.” he said. “Besides, they don’t have a clan of females like we do.”
“Then who-?”
The question was interrupted by some angry, loud words being spoken on the opposite side of the room, which got louder and angrier as their speaker stormed towards the door, which had just admitted Captain Powell and his team into the room.
“How dare you?” The speaker was an older man, small and balding and looking positively tiny next to the soldiers, who all glanced at each other in dismay at being so accosted. “How dare you come here?! You FAILED her!”
He was the very picture of righteous indignation in any species’ body language, and the shocked expressions of so many of the other Deathworlders suggested that his accusation was not a widely shared one, but what struck Gyotin was the soldiers’ composure. They fidgeted and some of them looked ready to retort, but all it took as a slight turn of Powell’s head to quiet them instantly. Even the silver-haired elder who had been hurrying to soothe out the conflict paused.
It was Powell’s face that rooted Gyotin to the spot, however. On a human’s mobile and subtle features, the total absence of any expression whatsoever communicated volumes.
”…You’re right.” Powell said. His voice was deep, and soft, and emotional. “We did.”
He took a step forward, and the little man backed off. “Think about what that must feel like, and you’ll understand why we’re here.”
There was a general awkward clearing of throats and shuffling of feet as the soldiers took up a respectful position towards one side of the room, standing in a formal posture with their feet apart and their hands behind their backs.
Awkward silence descended again, finally broken by a syncopated drumming from outside the hall that got steadily louder, being joined by the high-pitched voice of some stringed instrument playing a lament. As the musicians crossed the threshold and stood playing on either side of the door, the soldiers snapped their feet together and removed their berets.
It was a small coffin, carried by only four people and laid solemnly on the table in the middle of the room as the music came to a gentle stop.
“Ladies and gentlemen…” the Elder began as the bearers retreated to positions around the room. “…as you may be aware, Sara’s family have requested that we remember her life in accordance with Pagan traditions. There should be nothing in what we are about to do that can cause offense to anyone, but if you would prefer to pay your respects now after your own fashion and then wait outside, we will take a few moments of silence for you to do so. I’m sure that Sara will not mind.”
A few of those present did exactly that, approaching to touch the box, or mutter words. The little man who had accosted the soldiers and a female of similar apparent age—his mate?—knelt stiffly and whispered for a little while, before standing and leaving, both weeping openly.
Once they had gone, the elder stepped forward again. “Thank you. You’ll find the order of the ceremony in the leaflets we handed out, but please do not feel pressured to participate if you don’t wish to. As one of Sara’s friends-” she nodded to Ava “put it so eloquently, we don’t think that Sara would want us to lie on her behalf.”
“And so…let us take a few deep breaths to prepare ourselves. Breathe deeply, and remember the love you have for Sara and the joy she brought you. And so we begin.”
She took a deep breath of her own, and raised her hands. “Let us call for peace, that in Peace the voice of the Spirit may be heard. May there be peace in the East! May there be peace in the South! May there be peace in the West! May there be peace in the North!”
Reading from the booklet, most of the mourners recited with her. “May there be peace throughout all the worlds.”
The Elder turned towards one of the points of the star on the ground. “Spirits of the East, Powers of Air, we call you. Bring us bright memories of our beloved Sara and of the laughter that surrounded her. Blessed be!”
As she turned through each of the cardinal directions, invoking in turn Fire, Water and Earth, Gyotin had to prod Tagral to get him to stop fidgeting, eventually having to deploy a claw to get his Brother to really quiet down and start showing some respect. He would be the first to admit that he himself didn’t understand what compass directions, air, water and so on had to do with anything, but whatever was going on, it seemed to be working for the humans.
Or at least, for most of them. The huge soldier, Legsy, was wiping water off his face every other second, as was almost everybody else in the room. In fact, there were only a pawful of dry eyes in the whole building, and they belonged to the Gaoians—unsurprisingly, for physical reasons—and to Adam and Ava who simply looked…tired? Gyotin had become adept at reading a human’s expressive face by now, and weariness seemed like the closest approximation he could think of for what theirs were showing.
The last dry face was Powell’s. His usually inscrutable mask was now a scowl, an expression of the most deep and deadly anger, directed at something that Gyotin was desperately glad he couldn’t see, and was infinitely more glad wasn’t him.
He was so busy watching the captain and speculating about what colossally stupid entity it was that had attracted such depth of ire that he completely missed the eulogies, and only returned his attention to the ceremony when the priestess started to speak again.
“O Great Spirit, Mother and Father of us all, we ask for your Blessings on this our ceremony of thanksgiving, and honouring and blessing of Sara. We stand at a Gateway now. A Gateway that each of us must step through at some time in our lives, and which Sara already passed.”
“Her soul is immersed in the shining light of the Unity that is the Mother and Father of us all. The sadness and pain that we feel now is in our knowledge and our experience of the fact that we ourselves cannot yet cross that threshold to be with her until our time has come. We do not weep for our beloved sister, for she is beyond all pain, all fear and all illusion. We weep instead for ourselves in the pain of our separation.”
“And so to ease that pain, let us all now spend some time in silence to remember Sara, to call her up in our minds and to speak to her in the private places of our heart and free ourselves of our burdens, saying to her all those things that we always wanted her to hear.”
This part was familiar to Gyotin. Silence. He filled it by stepping on Tagral’s foot when his Brother started fidgeting again.
The silence was broken some minute or two later by the priestess, who turned to the younger Arés. “Adam?”
Adam smiled weakly, nodded and swallowed, then stepped forward, turned to the coffin and read from the booklet, a little shakily.
“Did you know it was time to fly?” he asked. “I didn’t want to say goodbye. But…but we all know this is not the end…Fare-”
Finally the weariness broke, and he paused, bit on his lower lip and looked down, squeezing his eyes shut. Alone in the middle of the room, he sobbed once before finally managing to rally himself and continue.
“Farewell for now, my dear, dear, friend.”
Date Point: 4y 9m 2w AV
Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Gabriel Arés
“Hey, Dad?”
Gabriel turned and smiled weakly at him. He had been watching the memorial stone being placed, a solid slab of blue slate imported from Earth and engraved.
“Sacred to the memory of a child of Earth,
And to all who shine with her among the stars.“
“Hey.” He croaked.
“I have a question.”
Gabriel’s weak smile remained and he nodded, a little sadly. “Figured you would. You can see it, can’t you? The thread linking her and…all the others.”
“Yeah. And I’m guessing you can’t tell me the details.”
Gabriel nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Just tell me what I need to do.”
“Adam…”
“I need to know, Dad. So tell me what I have to do. How do I earn it?”
Gabriel closed his eyes and nodded, then hugged his son as hard as he could. “Hey, amigo?“
“Yeah?”
“You’re a tougher man than I am. I’m not just proud of you, okay? I respect you.”
Adam softened just a little, and returned the hug. “Y yo también te respeto.” he replied.
Gabriel nodded, then straightened, as much as he could around his faulty leg. “Go talk to Powell.” he said. “That’s how you start earning it.”
Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV
UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space
Lesry
“Ooooh. Now that thing looks like a mover!”
Lesry had to admit that it did. If the black sphere which made up probably eighty percent of the craft’s mass was its power core, then even with an old-fashioned distorted-space Apparent Linear Velocity drive it would have been blindingly fast. Lesry, however, had a few of the high-end firmware upgrades to the implants in his optic nerves that were available only to ranking Directorate scientists, and they were reporting that the ship had one of the Blackbox engines.
Which meant, at a very rough mental calculation, that he may well be looking at the fastest vessel in the galaxy.
The few rather more refined calculations that he bounced off his cerebral coprocessors confirmed that he almost certainly was.
It landed easily enough, settling down to thrum gently on forcefields as it finished its descent level with the same bridge that his own History Paradox was parked upon, extending a gangplank to link the laughably small amount of ship that wasn’t power core to the shore.
“Somebody unusual visiting us.” He said. “Look busy! If I’m impressed I might throw in a small bonus.”
That one never failed to get the hired workers motivated, and they threw themselves into the cataloging and loading as he tucked his thumbs into the belt of his sand-robes and took his time wandering over to the end of the arriving ship’s gangplank.
He wasn’t expecting the human who strode down it with an expression that promised serious pain to anything in his way, nor the two other (rather paler) ones who followed after him shouting what was presumably his name.
Nor was he expecting one of the most famous beings in the galaxy behind them.
“Well! Councillor A’ktnnzzik’tk! You have a talent for making an entrance!” he observed, having to raise his voice to compete with the untranslated barking sounds the humans were making at each other.
A’ktnnzzik’tk produced an old-fashioned translation device from a satchel and held it idly in one of his stronger hands as he finished crossing the bridge. “Not by choice.” he said. “May I take it that I’m addressing the leader of this expedition? Thank you for meeting me in person.”
“Co-leader.” Lesry admitted, both intrigued by A’ktnnzzik’tk’s apparent lack of a translator implant and pleased by his manners. “Had I known one of the more…hmm…notorious politicians was coming, I would have torn my colleague Knadna away from her research as well, and believe me, that’s not a risk that a sane being would take lightly.”
A’ktnnzzik’tk chuckled deep in his lanky throat. “I’m retired now. This is a personal project.” he said.
“Collecting Deathworlders? Most beings start smaller, with Gricka, or perhaps a pet Vulza.”
“It’s an entertaining hobby. I recommend it.”
Lesry allowed himself the luxury of a stab of amusement. “Well, the most we have here is an unaccountably sturdy Gaoian who wears concealing robes.” he said. “She’s our chef. I do hope she doesn’t turn out to be a human in disguise or something tiresome like that, this expedition will be far less pleasant without her culinary talents.”
A’ktnnzzik’tk blinked at him. “Information so freely volunteered?” he asked. “My thanks.”
“I suspect that you would have found her more or less instantly anyway.” Lesry said, and inclined his head towards ‘Shoo’. “After all, she is brandishing a knife at that dark-skinned human you brought with you…”
Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV
UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space
Xiù
“You stay the hell away from me, Zane!“
He started to babble at him in that same dense Patois and Xiù’s temper eroded even further. “Shut up! Shut up and fuck off!” she screamed.
The blonde woman—and oh God was Xiù happy to see a fellow female—stepped forward and said something a little too quietly for Xiù to catch, but it did the trick. He paused, then stepped backwards, eyes still fixed on her, then spat in the dirt, spun and stalked off between the scattering aliens.
The blonde woman exhaled, then turned to her. “Xiù Chang, I presume.” she said. It was so weird hearing somebody pronounce her name correctly.
Xiù put the knife down. “Uh…hi.” she said. It wasn’t what she’d imagined saying when she finally got back in touch with the human race—the real human race, not Zane—but then again nothing in the last four years or so had gone like she had imagined, so why should greetings?
“You’ve got to be sweltering in that disguise.” said another voice, a male one, from slightly behind her. She grabbed the knife and spun, prompting the man who had snuck up on her to back off, raising his hands defensively. “Woah, woah!” he protested. “Easy!”
Xiù lowered the knife, cautiously. This one was hot. Okay, she’d thought the same thing about Zane when they had first met, but this guy…
She shook it off. Handsome didn’t mean trustworthy. Nor did female, come to think of it, but…
But if she was ever going to get home, she’d have to trust somebody a little, wouldn’t she?
She put the knife down again, and Mr. Handsome nodded and circled around to join Blonde Girl. “Just making sure you didn’t stab him.” he said.
That didn’t exactly endear him to Xiù, but she understood. “Sho wia yu, uwa wa mé Xiù.” she said.
That earned her a pair of blank looks, until she realised that she’d spoken in Gaoian rather than English. “Uh…yes. Yes, my name’s Xiù.” she said. “Sorry, it’s been…since I last…”
“Five years? Not counting that guy?” The blonde said, smiling. “It’s okay, I understand. My name’s Allison. This is Julian.”
Xiù blinked. “I…had a friend called Allison.” she said. “Back on Earth.”
That detail seemed more relevant in her head than it did in the conversation, but she really was out of her depth here.
“Would you like to see her again?” this Allison asked her.
“I…” Xiù looked at the ship they had arrived in, and it finally hit her.
A ship. They had a ship. And these were humans, from Earth. Who had come here in that ship. From Earth.
Suddenly, she couldn’t see a thing through the tears.
They had a ship.
She could go home.
__
Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV
Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Adam Arés
”‘Eeey, Adam!”
Legsy always had a friendly manner about him, which Adam liked. He’d shown plenty of intensity while training the militia, but outside of that role, Legsy was pure earthy charm and humor. It made militia training a charm, and while a lot of the colonists preferred not to use the gym at the same time as the soldiers, Adam found he really didn’t mind being outperformed by them. They served as examples of what he might one day be able to manage himself.
It also meant that he and Legsy practically had the gym to themselves, which was perfect for what he had in mind.
“Hey Legs.”
Adam watched the older man swing his kettlebell around. Legsy trained for endurance, and while Adam had seen people like Mark Tisdale working with more impressive weights, Legsy could apparently go all day, working his way steadily up and down through the set until he was red and reflective with sweat, but never seeming to tire.
Adam himself was still working up to that. He elected to use the cross-trainer instead. Legsy gave him an encouraging grin and nod as the device swirled into action.
“So uh…I’ve got a question.” Adam asked, after what he judged was a decent interval.
“Go for it, pal.”
“What the hell is going on?”
”…How d’you mean?”
“Home, Sara…how come they’re not pressing charges? There’s a pattern there, I can see it.”
Legsy didn’t answer at first, just continued to swing his weight, but his expression had clamped down beautifully.
“Yeah, I reckon you can.” he decided. “I can’t tell you though.”
“No, I know.” Adam agreed. “but Dad said if I want to know what’s going on then I need to talk to Captain Powell.”
Legsy really was an open book—he had so many different blank expressions. This one said that there was something serious going on with Powell at the moment that he, Legsy, was not comfortable discussing.
“I’d give him a few days.” he said at last. “It’s rough on an officer when an op he commanded ends that way, right? He gave me a bit of a row the other day.”
“Did you deserve it?” Adam asked. Legsy laughed, but his heart wasn’t as in it as it usually was.
“Maybe. He was tampin’.” he said, using a Welshism that Adam had deduced meant something like ‘furious’. “I’d give it a few days, butt. Let him simmer down, I’ll get you in to see him when the time’s right. Fair?”
“Thanks, Legs.”
“No worries, pal. Now come on, I know you can go faster than that!”
Adam quickened his pace and settled his mind, enjoying the heat building in his muscles.
He felt like he’d just set his first foot out the door on a journey.
Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV
Starship Sanctuary, Planet Aru, Elder Space
Allison Buehler
“What do you think?”
Xiù had been introduced to a vacant room—on the opposite side of the ship from Zane’s, and next door to Allison’s, and was, from the sound of it, busy taxing the abilities of Sanctuary’s water recycler with a hot shower. Julian and Allison were, by mutual unspoken agreement, hanging out at the junction down the deck where they could make sure Zane didn’t try to get at her, be on hand should she need them, and converse unheard.
“About…what, now?” Julian asked. “About Xiù herself, or about whatever went down between her and Zane?”
“Xiù herself, for now.”
Julian thought about it. “At first glance, I was thinking ‘damaged goods’.” he confessed, and pressed on when Allison made a “hmm” noise and nodded.
“But here’s the thing, though.” he said. “She’s in great shape. She’s kept up her exercise and ate right, and that puts her a cut above most everyone else out here. Physically, she’s perfectly fine, give or take a few scars. Mentally? I dunno, what does five years alone with nobody but raccoon people to talk to do? She was nineteen when she was abducted. Then there’s the…” he checked to make sure nobody was listening, then lowered his voice anyway even though none were. “the Hunters. And the nervejam.”
“Yeah, I read her file.” Allison agreed. “She saved a whole starship! Took on one of the big Hunter ships solo! That’s…shit, that’s big damn hero stuff.” she frowned at him. “But, you’re one to talk. What does six years alone with nobody but trees to talk to do?”
“It fucks with your head.” Julian said, honestly.
“You’ve always seemed…fine to me.”
“We’ve not slept together yet.”
“You mean actual sleep, right?”
“Yeah. Can’t even do it without an axe next to my hand.” Julian told her. “And I wake up at the slightest noise, reaching for it. Do you snore?”
Allison shook her head. “I don’t think so. Why?”
“Lewis does. That’s why I moved away from his room. I kept thinking there was a Murderpig near my camp.”
“Murderpig?”
“This big.” Julian held out a hand at rib height. “This long.” He stretched his arms as wide as they would go. “Teeth like this.” he drew one of his knives “and it hates you. Murderpig.” He put the knife back in its sheath.
“You came up against shit like that?”
“Yeah. Lucky for me, it’s all nose with a Murderpig. Their eyesight’s fucking awful and they snore when they breathe, like a fat guy asleep on the bus. Getting the drop on them’s easy. Good eating on them too. But if there was one near the camp I needed to be up and armed like that.” he snapped his fingers.
“What happened if you didn’t?”
“I never didn’t. If I ever hadn’t, then we’d never have met.”
“Oh. Damn, Julian.”
“Eh, it was only for like four months out of the year. Rest of the time, Nightmare was nice and quiet. I used to- hey, she’s done.”
Xiù had poked her head out of her room, wearing a towel and a blush. “Uh…hey, are my new clothes ready?” She asked. “I just realised how nasty these robes are…”
“I’ll go check.” Julian told her, and trotted down the stairs.
Allison turned to talk with Xiù, and noticed that their recent rescue was watching Julian with catlike fascination as he went, her blush deepening and spreading to her ears. Allison couldn’t blame her—Julian had an amazing ass—but that couldn’t be allowed. “Sorry, girlfriend. I saw him first.” she said, not unkindly.
“Uh…” Xiù blinked, then coughed. “Sorry. You guys are…?”
“We’re….yeah. We are. How are you feeling?”
“Clean!” Xiù said, rebounding. “I mean, my own actual shower. With real shampoo! And conditioner!”
Allison laughed. “Hah! With hair like yours, I can see why you’d miss those.” she said. “Don’t expect miracles with the clothes, though. It’s all practical stuff, not decorative.” She grinned. “Unless you can rock a pair of yoga pants.”
“If it fits properly and breathes, I’ll be happy.” Xiù promised. “And we’ll be going back to Earth soon, right?”
“We don’t need to. All we need to do is get to a station with an FTL relay and schedule an Array send with Scotch Creek.”
“Huh?”
Allison paused. “Okay, so, I’m not exactly Miss Technobabble.” she said. “But…did you ever see this old TV show, Stargate?”
“Sure. My brother Wei brought all the DVDs on eBay.”
“Well, we’ve kinda got one of those downstairs.” Allison said. “but, like, less dramatic. It’s called a Jump Array. Neat piece of kit!”
Xiù gaped at her. “Wait, so…you could send me home right now?” she asked.
“Not right now, no. We need to get to a station with an FTL relay, send a message to Earth via Cimbrean, wait for-”
“Where?”
“Cimbrean. Humanity’s first colony world. You didn’t hear about it?”
Xiù made a strange ducking motion with her head, then blinked and carefully shrugged while shaking her head, as if remembering the gesture. “I…didn’t really pay attention to the news.” she confessed. “It just got me down. There’s not much about humans in the news, and it’s never good when there is.”
“Yeah?”
“It was always about how we would bring the Hunters down on them and get them all killed.” she elaborated. “But how does this Cimbrean place protect itself?”
Allison grinned. “You know that big forcefield protecting Earth?”
“Protecting it?”
“Yeah! It sure as hell isn’t containing us, but it’s stopping the bad guys from getting in. Anyway, Julian stole one.”
Xiù blinked. “That Julian?” she asked, pointing after him.
“Yep. Actually, he stole two.”
“Wow. So, uh, where’s the other one?”
“Kirk won’t say.”
Xiù sighed. “So we need to send a message to Earth.”
“Via Cimbrean. And then we have to wait for them to get back to us and say ‘Sure, send on this date at this time using this code’ and then…bam! You’ll be back in Canada.”
“Just like that?”
“Unless you decide to stay, yeah.” Allison told her.
“Why would I want to stay out here?”
“Why would you want to go back?” Allison retorted.
“Wh-? It’s home!” Xiù said.
Allison nodded, a little sadly. “That’s fine. And if that’s what matters to you…Sorry, I shouldn’t have even mentioned it, it’d just be nice to have another girl on board.”
“I guess…” Xiù said. “but…I had my dreams. I was going to be an actress. I still could be, if I go home now.”
Allison kept to herself the fact that Xiù was going to need a lot of post-production and makeup to cover all the scars she seemed to have picked up during her time away from home. There were a lot of them. The ragged tears down her forearm were the largest and most disfiguring, but the one that kept drawing Allison’s attention was a little raised inch-long mark on Xiù’s neck, dangerously close to her carotid artery.
She was spared the discomfort of the conversation tailing off by Julian’s return, as he handed across the clothes the nanofactory had printed to Xiù’s measurements—four simple black sports t-shirts, two equally simple navy blue fatigues, four changes of undecorated but comfortable underwear, a dark grey fleece sweater , four pairs of thick socks and a pair of hiking boots.
“Here you go.” he said, handing them over. “Not exactly red carpet stuff, but it’s warm and comfortable and you can clean them real easy. Just rinse ‘em and hang ‘em up. Lewis can show you how to program the nanofac later if you want a bit of variety.”
Xiù took them gratefully. “Thanks.”
“So you want to be an actress?” Allison called through her door after she had shut it.
“Yeah! That’s why I took up Gung Fu, I wanted to be in martial arts movies!” Xiù called back.
“Not drama or anything?”
This was met with a bitter “Hah!” from behind the door. “Have you ever heard of a Chinese version of Downton Abbey?” she asked.
“Not in America.” Allison confessed.
“Exactly. Hey, these are a good fit!”
“Lewis figured out how to lift your measurements from the biofilter field.” Julian said. “Bespoke tailored printed clothing. Neat, ain’t it?”
“Do they have stuff like this back on Earth now?” Xiù asked
“Not yet. I mean, four years and change isn’t that long anyway, and this is alien technology.”
Xiù opened the door so she could finish talking to them unimpeded as she pulled on her boots. “Yeah, but…we’ve got spaceships and a colony and stuff now.” she said.
“I think a lot of what comes out of Scotch Creek is just copying and pasting.” Julian confessed. “We’ve been bit in the ass a few times by now, especially with the first-generation translator implants and what happened to San Diego.”
Xiù stood up from tying her laces, frowning. “Why?” She asked. “What happened to San Diego?”
”…Ah.”
Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV
Starship Sanctuary, Planet Aru, Elder Space
Lewis
“Hey, Amir?”
“Yes?”
“Whaddya think went down with Xiù and Zane, anyhow?”
Amir sighed and set aside his checklist. Self-maintaining and robust though Sanctuary’s systems were, he felt safer for manually checking them while landed.
“Why the fascination?” he asked. “It seems cut and dried to me.”
“You think?”
“I knew men like Zane back in Birmingham.” Amir said. “All ego, very intense. Charming, if they liked you, but if you irritated them…”
“You did?”
“Sure.” Amir replied. “My cousin was married to such a man.”
Lewis nodded sagely. “Good looking dude turned on the charm, huh? Got her wrapped around his finger before he turned it off again?”
“Sort of. Arranged marriages didn’t go away just because my grandparents left Pakistan, you know. They just brought them to England.”
“Wait, shit, your cousin had to marry some dude?” Lewis protested. “That’s not cool!”
“She didn’t have to.” Amir corrected him. “That would be forced marriage. But the marriage was arranged between his parents and my uncle and she…” He coughed. “Well, she didn’t think too hard about it.”
“Were you cool with that?”
“Oh, it happened after my abduction. I had the pleasure of meeting the husband after getting back. I didn’t like him. And Maleeha was a different person to what I remembered, very subdued. I’m sure she even flinched a little bit when he raised his voice.”
“So, not cool with it then?”
Amir sighed. “It’s…a good arrangement.” he said. “He’s a dentist, she cooks, cleans, looks after the three children…a traditional marriage. Her parents are very happy.”
“So, you’re not cool with it, then.”
”…She was sixteen.” Amir admitted.
“Ah. Shit, is that even legal?”
“Oh, yes. Perfectly legal.” Amir said. “English law only requires parental consent for sixteen year olds, even if the husband is more like thirty.”
“Damn…”
“I get the same vibe off Zane as I do off my cousin’s husband. ” Amir said. “That same…Pride. Is there anything in his file?”
“Lemme check…” Lewis said, followed seconds later by: “Huh…Hey, Kirk encrypted it.”
“He what?”
“Yeah. Locked this shit down tight, too. No breaking it, no way no how.”
“How do you know it was him?”
Lewis gave him a tired ‘please’ look. “I’m the only other dude on this boat who could, and I didn’t.”
Amir got out of the flight chair and went to look over Lewis’ shoulder. “Why would he encrypt Zane’s file?”
“I’m gonna ask him.” Lewis said. “Worst case, he says he’s not telling us.”
“Go for it.”
Kirk responded to Lewis’ summons a few minutes later. “Something come up?” he asked.
“Sort of.” Amir said. “You encrypted Zane’s file?”
“It seemed like a good idea.” Kirk replied. “I didn’t want people to read it and become prejudiced against him. This is supposed to be welcoming ship.”
“Like, uh, why would we be prejudiced?” Lewis asked.
Kirk made the noise that was his species’ version of a resigned sigh. “The Corti experiments of the last fifty years or so were beginning to focus on human weaknesses.” he revealed. “Genetic disorders, mutations, personality disorders, mental illness…”
“So our Zane’s got a…maybe a personality disorder of some kind?” Amir asked.
“I’m not saying. I don’t want to exacerbate the friction between him and Xiù by prejudicing the rest of you against him.”
“All well and good, but if he’s dangerous…”
“You’re proving my case.” Kirk pointed out. “You all took an instant disliking to him. That’s acceptable, I don’t much like him either. But he still deserves his privacy and unbiased treatment. He’s not actually done anything other than be unpleasant.”
Lewis and Amir shared looks that mutually said ‘He’s got a point’.
“Alright, cool. You’ve got a strong argument there, boss.” Lewis finally admitted.
“Thank you. Where is Zane right now, anyway?”
Lewis ran a search script. “Not aboard. Last seen…like, ten seconds after we landed…”
He tapped again. “Neither’s Vedreg.” he added.
Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV
Folctha Colony, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Ava Rios
The Tisdale house was a mess. Ava couldn’t blame them, in fact she knew exactly how they felt. After the bomb which killed her parents, it had taken weeks before she began to notice things like mess, rumpled clothing and the state of her hair again. The first night she had run a brush through it had been a painful one both physically and emotionally, extracting a tangle that had been well on its way to becoming a dreadlock.
Doctor Hayley Tisdale at least was fortunate enough to have straight hair, which would help there. But she was still a mess when she opened the door, wearing food-stained pajamas and red eyes.
“Ava?”
Ava lifted the box she was holding. “I…Gabriel was able to get Sara’s stuff back from the military…”
Hayley stared at the box like it was simultaneously the most beautiful and the terrifying thing in all creation.
“Oh…”
“Can I come in?”
Hayley nodded quietly and stepped inside.
The clutter about the place was just…stuff. Things that had been left where they were no longer useful: clothes, mugs…a few bowls and plates, but not many. They weren’t eating much. Ava knew how that felt—you just weren’t interested. You’d grab books then discard them, pick things up just to put them down again.
There were a lot of wine glasses around though and the house reeked of alcohol, plus another scent that she hadn’t smelled since high school back in California. She didn’t know how that one felt. Ava didn’t know how they had even managed to get cannabis on Cimbrean, but she wasn’t about to comment. The smell was stale, as if they hadn’t indulged for some time.
Hayley swept aside an arrangement of small crystals and semiprecious stones on the table to make room for the box.
Sara hadn’t had much on her when she died, and her bloodstained clothing had tactfully been omitted. What was left was a tiny assortment of jewelry—Sara had been addicted to rings, and had always worn her birthstone, an Emerald, as a necklace. There were a trio of the same kind of crystals that her mother had just swept aside, her phone, spare batteries and a MicroSD card for her camera, and the camera itself.
Hayley didn’t say a word, she just picked up the camera with trembling hands, turned it on after a second’s investigation to figure out how it worked, and started to scroll through the pictures her daughter had taken.
Ava grabbed a brush and gently started to sort out the worst of Hayley’s hair, watching the screen herself.
It was a catalog of the changing face of Folctha, playing backwards. Brown dirt, tree stumps and grey construction sites gave way to a bloom of life here and there. Sara had been gifted with an eye for finding beauty, and for showing it off to its best advantage, finding the little flowering plants that were still struggling gamely against the Deathworld invasion, or the forester, whose high-vis jacket and yellow hard-hat practically shone against the lifeless stack of felled logs he was leaning against.
Things got greener, more alive, and Sara had continued to pick out whatever was most alive in each scene. A cloud of little iridescent shimmerflies. A creature that lived somewhere halfway between squirrel and lizard, stuffing nuts into a pouch on its back. The curve of Ava’s own naked back, the little hairs and the bumps of her vertebrae luminous with the light of a setting sun that was framed by her coiled lock of wet hair. She hadn’t even noticed Sara take that picture.
There were no pictures of Sara herself, though. She had only ever used the camera to record what happened around her, never turned it on herself.
Finally, Hayley set the device aside with a sigh. “I still…I don’t believe it.” she confessed.
“I know.” Ava replied.
“How do you cope? How do I…? I think the only thing that keeps me going is that I’ve still got Jack to look after.”
Ava’s brush never stopped, but the rest of her did, for a second. “I think…I think you just have to keep the people you’ve lost alive.” she said. “Live for them. Carry on their work.”
“Have you?” Hayley asked. “You lost your parents, do you think you’re keeping them alive?”
“I hope so.” Ava said. “I try to be somebody they’d be proud of. I tried to get better and move forward because…I guess because I knew it’d hurt them to see me in pain.”
“D’you think Sara…?” Hayley aborted the question, half-formed. Ava gave her a little hug.
“She loved you both.” She told Hayley. “She talked about you a lot, about the things you said, about what you taught her.”
“She did?”
“Oh yeah.” Ava laughed slightly. “It was hard to get her to stop.”
That prompted a miserable laugh from Hayley too. “She always was a motor mouth…”
Ava smiled, and put the brush down. With the tangles gone and some of her hair’s shine restored, Hayley was already looking much improved. Hopefully, she’d see that in a mirror and it would help her, just a little. It had for Ava.
Hayley picked up the camera, and then unexpectedly she turned and handed it to Ava. “Keep it.” she said.
“Me? I…”
“Please? It’s…a way to keep her alive.”
Ava took the little black device nervously. “Are you sure?”
Hayley nodded, and then gave Ava a kiss on the forehead. “Honey.” she said. “You’re a wiser girl than I am. Maybe you can…”
She trailed off, then just looked down and shook her head. “Just take it. Please? I think she’d want you to have it. It just feels right. Carry on her work.”
Ava considered the picture on the screen at that moment—Cimbrean sunlight, somehow turning the industrial devastation around Folctha pretty just by being framed a certain way—and doubted that she was up to the job.
But she had been wondering where to take her life, now that movie makeup wasn’t an option. Maybe…
Maybe…
“I’ll…thank you, Hayley.” she said.
She meant it.
Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV
Starship Sanctuar y, Planet Aru, Elder Space
Xiù
Hitting something felt good. Gung Fu was a martial art after all, and while practicing the movements had (she hoped) allowed Xiù to keep her form, you could repeat the bào hu gui shan all day but it couldn’t duplicate the feeling and experience gained from landing actual physical blows. The best way to practice punching was…well, to punch something.
The fact that it was cathartic had nothing to do with it. Really: Nothing.
The Sanctuary’s punchbag was therefore getting the most brutal workout of its existence. While the Gaoians could easily have built one for her, she had never asked for one. It would just have been too embarrassing to break the first few, and too…impolite to flaunt just how much stronger she was than them by doing so to a bag it would have taken three of them to lift.
Now, though, she could feel just how long it had really been since she had last received proper guidance in her form. Her wrists and forearms hurt, and in the first few minutes she threw a few strikes where she misjudged the distance and either punched the air just short of the bag’s surface, or else overextended herself striking a point somewhere inside it. She wasn’t off by much, but she was still off, she could tell.
She only finally ended her workout once she was satisfied that she had restored some of her muscle memory and that her form had healed a bit, by which point she had spent nearly an hour focused on that one task, giving her brain time to process the news about San Diego and the devastation that its destruction had wrought on the entire Pacific coast. Nobody had been directly hurt in Vancouver thank goodness, but the ash from Mt. Rainier’s sympathetic eruption, caught by a prevailing wind from the desert, had dusted across British Columbia and even reached as far as Alaska, causing respiratory distress, clogging air filters and lightly polluting the water across thousands of square miles.
She hoped that it hadn’t set off Wei’s asthma.
Julian and Allison had admitted to both knowing the specifics of what had happened, but had also said that, so long as Xiù intended to leave the ship and return home, they weren’t in any kind of a position to discuss it. It was a mystery, but one that Xiù would happily forego illumination of for the sake of going home.
As for all the dead…
Well, it didn’t register. It wasn’t that it didn’t seem real, they had shown her the footage and news reports, too many and varied to be fake. It was definitely real. But it was also abstract. She didn’t even know what two million living people looked like, let alone two million dead. The mind simply couldn’t get a grasp on ideas that big.
She jogged a few laps around the gym to warm down, then collected her boots and headed upstairs, wondering what kind of food they had on board. The clothing she’d been given was really impressive, made of some high-tech performance textile that had kept her cool and dry and not noticeably aromatic. And it was made by humans, for humans, understanding human needs. Luxury! With luck, the galley would be similarly impressive.
Upstairs, however, the crew were talking quietly and their expressions were worried. When she entered, Allison stopped speaking mid-sentence and gave her a gently apologetic smile that said that while she, Allison, was glad to see her, Xiù had managed to arrive at an inopportune moment.
“Is everything alright?” Xiù asked.
“Sunset was half an hour ago, and we’ve not seen Zane since you came aboard.” Kirk told her. She hadn’t had the opportunity to get to know the tall white being, yet. It wasn’t that he had ignored her, but he seemed to be extremely busy with something or other and had given her only a polite welcome aboard and his assurance that they would become acquainted later on, if she liked.
“Pff, Zane? Leave him behind.” Xiù said. It came out as more of a snap than she had intended, but she had to stop her hand from touching the mark on her throat.
“Even if I were inclined to do so-” Kirk said, making it very plain that he wasn’t, “we just found out that Vedreg isn’t aboard either.”
“Vedreg?”
“You ever met a Guvnugundragonbunny?” Lewis asked.
“Oh! You have a…?” Xiù asked, ignoring Kirk as he tried to correct Lewis. “I didn’t see them…”
“He went straight into the city when we landed. Said that he was testing a theory.” Amir revealed. “You were too busy waving knives at Zane and Julian to notice.”
Xiù blushed. “Julian snuck up on me! And Zane…” she paused.
“Is missing.” Kirk reminded them.
“Well, what do we do?” Julian asked.
“We search for him.” Kirk said. “Julian, you and Amir can sweep the north quadrant. Allison, you and Lewis take the east. Miss Chang—”
“No.” Xiù folded her arms.
Kirk blinked. “I see…” he said. “Not to press the issue, but I understand that you’re rather physically formidable yourself and…”
“No.“
There was silence as everyone glanced back and forth at one another, which Lewis broke by clearing his throat. “Uh…Hey, the hell happened with you two?”.
“That’s between me and Zane.” Xiù told him. “If you need me I’ll come running, but that…” She shook her head. “Just…No.”
Kirk lowered his head, exhaling slowly. “I can see that is the end of it. Very well, Amir, if you could accompany me instead?”
Amir finally stopped giving Xiù a calculating stare and nodded. “Okay.” He agreed, though reluctantly.
Allison stood. “Sooner we get moving…” she said.
“I’ll…be in my room.” Xiù said.
She held it together until the door was closed and locked behind her before the shakes started.
Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV
Classified Facility, Earth
“Steve”
“Shitty luck. You got that right.” somebody said as he entered.
Steve sighed and grabbed a coffee. “It was a fucking understatement.” he replied.
Christof Lehmann—the poor bastard who’d been puppeted into shooting a girl on Cimbrean—had not taken the explanation of his situation well. There had been shouting, there had been crying. Both had been easier to bear than the dreadful, broken silence.
“I think it’s pretty clear he needs to be on the suicide watchlist.” Carl said.
“Pretty clear, yeah. Fella looks like he took a dump and found his liver in the bowl.”
“Give the man some respect, Simmons. News like that’d be rough on anybody.”
“Sorry, Boss.”
Boss nodded. “Guess he’s headed to Alaska then.”
“Oh yes.” Steve said. “That implant the Corti shoved in him may have cured his epilepsy, but it’s too deep and invasive to remove. He’d be a lobotomised vegetable once the surgeons were done, assuming he even lived through the operation.”
“Then there’s his reputation.” Simmons pointed out. “Poor bastard was used to murder a little girl. No way to explain that one to the public without ruining him or blowing the lid on the Hierarchy.”
Boss shifted in his seat. “I’m going to be advising the director that we can’t keep that particular secret much longer.” he drawled. His Georgia accent always got stronger when he was feeling emotional, thought that was the most sign he gave. “There’s too much pressure now. The seizure all the people with translators had, San Diego, now this…the Internet’s already working overtime.”
“Isn’t there some plausible deniability, there?” Balistreri had always fallen comfortably into the role of devil’s advocate. She wasn’t actually an argumentative woman by nature, but she had a knack for spotting the alternatives and presenting them. “If the story leaks then we can just claim too much time spent listening to the Internet conspiracy theorists.”
“Nope. Only a matter of time before Herr Lehmann gets his case taken up by a journalist or a human rights lawyer. The cat’ll be out of the bag before long, you mark my words. But if we let it out ourselves, then the details of Operation Exorcist can remain secret.”
“You’re the boss, Boss.”
“Yep.”
“What happens if the Hierarchy do panic and step up their plans?”
“At least we’ll have taken the initiative.” Carl said. “Rather than playing catchup.”
“Best we can do.” Boss agreed. “Alright folks, get some rest, do your paperwork, whatever, I’ll see y’all when I get back from DC.”