Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV
UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space
Allison Buehler
If there was one thing Lewis was terrible at, it was taking a hint once he was fixated on a train of thought. “Seriously though, what do you think? ’d he rape her or something?”
“She doesn’t want to say and that’s the end of it.” Allison told him.
It was cold in the desert at night. She’d known that, but still hadn’t quite registered that the temperature would be in freefall within minutes of sunset. She was almost mentally counting down until the first fog started to appear on her breath.
It didn’t help that the deserted city had an eerie, unsettling quality to it. If the place had been truly abandoned—plants growing all over everything, walls falling down, that kind of thing—then it wouldn’t have been so bad, but the place was still slightly alive, thanks to the automated maintenance and civil engineering systems that the OmoAru had laced through the ancient conurbation at the height of their power. Everything was still clean, still standing. Just…empty. It was almost like walking through her own home city of Phoenix, except that the road signs were alien, the proportions wrong, and the silence…
It was cloying. It stuck to everything. The desert breeze and the hiss of sand only seemed to amplify the silence, rather than dispel it, and when occasional little animals or robots moved around in the dark, it set every ancient monkey danger instinct in her body off.
She’d always hated the dark.
“You gotta speculate though, right?” Lewis persisted.
Allison stopped and grabbed his arm, hard, prompting a wince and a noise of complaint. “Lewis: Shut. Up.”
She let go and listened, ignoring Lewis as he rubbed his arm and made irritated subvocalizations.
There was definitely noise and a glow coming from a nearby building
“Zane? That you?” She called, grateful for a chance to have something other than Lewis’ insensitive speculation to break the silence.
It wasn’t Zane. Instead, an OmoAru shuffled out into the street, raising a glowing white stick.
Aliens came in all shapes and varieties, and the temptation was always there to compare them to mixtures of human species back on Earth. Blue giraffes, white zebra-giraffes, raccoon persons and so on. It was always an unfair and inaccurate comparison—they were their own species, the products of evolution that had nothing to do with Earth—but comparisons with leopard geckos and big-eared bats sprang to mind anyway when considering an OmoAru.
This one was about twice Allison’s height and shrouded in robes against both the sand and the cold night air. Its skin—dry, tough and scaly—was the colour of the desert, mottled here and there with patterns of a surprising turquoise and ochre hue that became thicker and more vivid around the base of its huge furry ears. The tufted end of its tail ticked back and forth behind its back, folding over into a question mark.
“UmUa WenUatu WoUem WioYuwu?” It asked.
“Bah wheep grahnah wheep nini bong, dude.” Lewis replied amicably, and offered the alien a Vulcan salute for good measure. Allison rolled her eyes and put a hand over her mouth to cover her smile.
“WumuaAmo SuOumu?“
“Sure dude. Whatever…Guess there’s no point in asking if you saw a big black dude who talks even weirder than you go past, huh?”
“Huh?“
“Huh. Guess ‘huh’ is a universal, huh?”
“Huh.” The alien disappeared into the building again.
“Lewis, you’ve got a talent for communication there.” Allison quipped.
The sentence was barely out of her mouth when the OmoAru returned and handed Lewis a little dull grey metal ball about the size of an apple.
“Huh?”
“Huh!” The tail lashed and its ears perked up. Allison got the distinct impression that a human would have been nodding vigorously and smiling.
”…Oh! Huh! Well thank you very much, my man.”
“WemUei!” the alien agreed.
“Ming mang mong, dude.” Lewis told it.
Allison watched the alien return, apparently happily, to its domicile “…the fuck?”
“Hell if I know.” Lewis said, pocketing the gift. “Nice guy, though.”
“What do you think that thing is?”
“You heard the dude. It’s a huh.”
“Lewis…”
“Well how the fuck am I supposed to know? Could be the dude’s car keys, could be his porn stash, could be his grandma’s ashes.”
Allison sighed. “Okay, okay…”
She raised her torch and looked down the street, expecting and receiving no sign of any living thing beyond the pool of light where the giver of the Huh was living.
“No sign of anything where we’re at, Kirk.” she said, activating the contact microphone by pressing lightly on it where it was stuck to her throat.
“I was just about to let you know: we found them.” Kirk replied.
“You did?”
“Both of them, yes. Vedreg believes that he may have uncovered a breakthrough in the mystery of elder species decline.“
“He has?”
Vedreg’s simulated voice—the translators always rendered him with a gentle Received Pronunciation accent for some reason—came on the line. “Oh yes. Do you see the large, lit building at the apex of the oxbow lake?”
Allison looked around. It was hard to miss in the dark. “Sure. You’re there?”
“Indeed. If you could collect the others and bring them here, they may wish to see this…“
“Julian?”
“I heard. Xiù’s lurking in her cabin, so I’ll meet you ther- ah, shit.“
Allison frowned. “Problem?”
“Yeah, my foot broke again.“
Allison sighed. Julian insisted that the prosthetic was perfect for his needs in terms of moving around and stepping silently, but it achieved that by being a near-exact replica of the human foot made using carbon-fibre “bones”, and its “flesh” was a synthetic muscle tissue that Julian called “myopolymer”.
It worked just fine, when it worked. Unfortunately, the same alien materials science that made Kirk’s prosthetic by far his strongest limb didn’t quite match the performance standards of a healthy human body in terms of both weight and strength. Julian’s decision to go for accurate movement and mass rather than high performance, so as to minimize his rehabilitation training time, meant that he periodically suffered the equivalent of tendon ruptures and stress fractures. “D’you need us to help you back?” she asked.
“Nah, it’s a field repair. Price I pay, I guess.” The advantage to a prosthetic foot, of course, was that he could perform the equivalent of surgery on it himself with glue.
“See you soon, then.”
“Sure.“
Lewis spent most of the walk examining his “Huh”, poking it and turning it over and over in his hands. Allison was pretty sure he surreptitiously licked it at one point, all with no apparent effect. It was an improvement on his speculating about Xiù.
Kirk, Vedreg, Zane and Amir were waiting for them in the street. Both the humans were hunched over and shivering from standing around in the plummeting temperature with nothing to do to keep themselves warm, and Kirk was fidgeting in the cold, but Vedreg’s species had evolved to spend a week every year standing around in the driving rain of the World-Storm: He seemed perfectly comfortable, producing great monsoon clouds with every exhalation.
“Ah, there you are!” he exclaimed upon laying eyes on Allison and Lewis. “Come and see!”
Allison looked upwards. “It’s…a building.” she said. Though it was an admittedly impressive one, taller and more sprawling than any other around it, and looking quite clean, well-maintained and lit compared to its neighbors.
“It’s a hospital.” Vedreg corrected her.
“And we’re going to find the secret to species decline in there, are we?”
Vedreg turned and spread his arms to indicate the city and its surrounding sprawl of infill as a whole. “A hospital this large has catchment for the entire river valley.” he said. “It should be absolutely thriving with activity, should it not? Despite the much reduced population, some hundred thousand souls still live inside this hospital’s coverage.”
Allison nodded yes, then remembered that without translators she had better do Vedreg the courtesy of speaking aloud. “Sure.” she said.
“And yet…no ambulances are landing.” Vedreg indicated the dormant landing pads. “The ground vehicle parking area is all but completely empty. No pedestrians are coming or going. The Injury and Emergency department is silent. Clearly, the OmoAru who live around here don’t care in the slightest about their own health. And yet the building remains open, the power is still on, and the reception drone is ready to receive and help.”
“Automated?” Lewis asked.
“The staff parking.” Kirk chimed in “Is not vacant. Somebody is still at work inside.”
“Who?”
Kirk’s imitation of a human shrug was getting better with practice, but his extra limbs still made the gesture look strange. “Unfortunately, I don’t read OmoAru.”
“Huh.” Allison mused.
Lewis laughed. “Don’t start that shit again.” he warned.
His admonition earned a wry huff from Allison, and baffled expressions from everyone else, so he explained, producing the “Huh” to show off, passing it around. Vedreg and Kirk promptly fell to debating its meaning and significance, while Zane just inspected the little object, turning it over in his hands.
Allison sidled over to Amir, who had been silent so far, staring up at the hospital. “Thoughts?” she asked.
“Fifty quid says the cybernetics ward turns out to be open and the Hierarchy’s behind it all.” Amir challenged her. “Wiping out whole species when they start to become a threat seems like their style, doesn’t it?”
“And with an advanced species whose heads are going to be full of implants like the OmoAru…” Allison mused, following his line of reasoning. “…No bet. Have you-?”
Something very painful happened to the back of her head.
Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV
Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth
Captain Owen Powell
“Hello, captain. Major Tony Ford, it’s nice to meet you.”
“Major.” Powell looked around the office as he shook the psychiatrist’s hand, finding it uncomfortably familiar to the other ones he had visited for counseling in his career. The couch was different, though. Long, low and square. A sofa, rather than a psychiatrist’s couch. He appreciated that. “Guess I sit there, do I?”
Major Ford smiled slightly and shook his head. “If you want. Or over there, on the floor, walk around…you can even sit at my desk and I’ll sit on the couch if you like. There’s coffee and tea if you want them.”
“I’ll…take the couch, thanks. And, uh…yeah, a cup of tea would go down about right.”
Ford nodded. “A Yorkshire man like yourself I’m thinking…strong and sweet?” he asked, smiling.
Powell produced a very, very little tired laugh through his nose. “Aye, you’ve got me bang to rights there.” he said.
Ford made the drinks quietly, giving Powell time to settle in and get the measure of the room a bit more. On second glance there were personal touches everywhere, not least of which was a dog basket in the corner, in which a dark little terrier was sat, watching him with wide-eyed interest. Her tail flopped over uncertainly in response to the attention.
“Oh, that’s Peggy.” Ford said. “Don’t worry, she’s as good as gold, won’t even leave the basket without permission.” he added fondly, smiling at her as he handed over the tea.
“I’m not going to wind up talking to the dog, am I?” Powell asked.
“Not if you don’t want to. But she’s half of the partnership, and there if you need her.”
”…Aye, let her out.”
“C’mon Pegs! Say hi.” Ford ordered. The dog bounced happily across the room and sat in front of Powell, giving his hand a little lick as he scratched her ear.
“Were you always a psych, Major?” he asked, noticing a few other personal effects around the office, one of which was unmistakably a large piece of shrapnel.
“No, I cross-trained.” Ford said, settling back down at his desk. “I was escorting EOD teams on my first two tours.”
“Nice one.” Powell said, genuinely impressed. “But why the move?”
“We lost a man. They never did figure out exactly why that carbomb went off, they thought the robot had made it safe but…well, everyone took it hard. I coped best by helping the others, and from there I decided to switch career paths.”
Powell nodded.
“What about you, did you sign up intending to go into the SBS from the beginning?”
“Aye, I did.”
“What attracted you to it?”
Powell sipped his tea. “My old man’s sister was an A and E nurse at Sheffield Teaching Hospital. She had these stories about when they sent the SAS lads along there for medical training in the ‘70s.”
Ford listened, drawing him to continue. “Okay, so…this is all second hand, but apparently one of them was really fond of his motorbike, and one day after shift he went out there and found it’d been stolen.”
“Oh dear.”
“Aye. Apparently he turned up on it next day and all he’d say on the subject was ‘he won’t do that again’.” Powell chuckled, then paused and scratched Peggy’s ears some more. “…When I were little, I used to think that was well cool. Fookin’ unprofessional is what I’d call it nowadays.”
“Is that what attracted you to the Service? Stories like that?”
“At first, aye. I wanted to be hard, you know? Be a tough bastard. That’s what got me in the Cadets. Then I saw all me mates getting in trouble with the law, all their parents losing their jobs, and I could see this career ahead of me if I stuck at it. It was only really later that I started to believe in the message, right? Keeping our country safe, making the world a better place…”
Peggy gave him a lick as he looked down at her and scratched at her ear again. “…Shall we get started?” he asked.
“If you like.” Ford said. “What happened?”
“What happened?” Powell exhaled. “A kid died. You’re…briefed, right?”
“About the Hierarchy? Yes.”
“Right, well…emergency mission. Hierarchy in the colony, doing summat dodgy down the starport construction site, one of the kids had snuck in there to try and take a picture. We mobilized, were there in less than two minutes. Swept the site. We nearly had the bastard when he shot her.”
Peggy made a little noise and shuffled a touch closer to him, warm against his leg. He couldn’t resist the urge to pet her some more.
“Ten fookin’ seconds.” he said. “Less than. Seven, maybe. If we’d been there ten seconds earlier…”
“Could you have done anything differently?”
“No.” Powell shook his head. “I’ve gone over it. We did everything bloody perfect. I can’t bear to tell ‘em this, but my lads pulled out the best day’s work they ever done, there’s not a single fookin’ learning point in the entire bloody operation. Perfect.“
He sighed. “And we still got there ten seconds too late.”
“I’m interested…why can’t you tell them?”
“Well what’s that going to achieve?” Powell asked. “Sometimes there’s not enough silver fookin’ lining in the world.”
“And that’s hard to accept?”
“No, that part I can accept. Failure’s always an option, no matter how well you do. That’s not what hurts.”
“Hurts?”
“Ah, I’m injured.” Powell replied. “Sure as if I’d been shot in the gut. One of my men had to chew me the fook out to make me come in here.”
“Do you think he was right to?”
“Abso-fookin’-lutely.” Powell asserted. “I’ve been beating myself up, losing sleep, takin’ it out on the lads. I’ve been a bad commander the last few days, and that’s got to fookin’ stop.”
“You sound angry at yourself.”
“Yeah, I am. I thought I was just angry at the Hierarchy, but…no, fook that, I am angry at them. And at myself. And at…”
He fidgeted, then patted the dog when she whined at him.
Ford gave him a minute, then suggested, softly. “Anger can be constructive.”
“Yeah.” Powell said. “I know that. Me and anger are old friends, we get on just fine, mostly. And I reckon that’s what’s giving me trouble, is that it’s not constructive to be angry with the person I’m most mad at.”
“Who?”
Powell picked the dog up. “The girl.” he told her, very softly. “I’m angry at the victim.”
Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV
UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space
Allison Buehler
“Uwsm!”
Blurs. Noise. A warm hand on her cheek.
“A-sn!”
Julian.
“Allison!”
Now, how did speech go again? Oh yes.
“Aaargh…”
“Oh, shit, you’re awake! You had me scared there.”
”…hurts…”
“Hey, look at me, okay?”
Allison forced herself to focus on his eyes. He shone a light into her face and stared intently at them for a second, checking the dilation of her pupils, before finally nodding. “Okay. You’re okay…I hope.”
”…happened?” She tried to move, then collapsed as nausea washed over her.
“You tell me. I got here, you and the guys are all unconscious. Kirk and Zane are missing and Vedreg…”
He indicated a breathing mountain of dark fur that was crumpled at the foot of the hospital stairs with shoots of dark red moving up and down it. “I think Zane was just planning to knock him out as well, but…I think he’s really hurt. I can’t get him to say anything.”
Allison squinted at him. While she knew every word in what he had just said made sense, and so did the arrangements too, for some reason she just couldn’t quite…
It clicked. “Shit! Vedreg…” She stood again, squelching the nausea this time.
“Woah, hey, maybe you shouldn’t…”
“Maybe I should.” She grunted, teetering on her feet as she staggered towards Vedreg. “The hell did he hit me with?”
“Looks like…a steel ball of some kind.” Julian held it up.
“Oh. The…Huh. The Huh.”
“What?”
“Forget it. How…how are the guys?”
“Alive, but barely responding. You’ve all got serious concussions, I don’t know…”
“Nothing we can…” the word she was looking for was a fuzz that just wouldn’t resolve, so she aborted the sentence and concentrated on remaining upright just long enough for her legs to gratefully give out and dump her by their Guvnurag comrade’s head.
“Vedreg?”
It was hard to tell, but she thought he moved slightly.
“Vedreg I…guess you don’t handle pain like we do, but I need to know if you’re conscious. Just do anything, okay?”
One of Vedreg’s huge bloodshot blue eyes rolled open from behind three layers of nictitating eyelids and looked right at her for just long enough to confirm he was still among the land of the living, then screwed shut again in agony.
Allison knew how he felt. “Come on, I can’t stop the pain if I don’t know where you hurt.” she said, grateful to have something to focus on. It was helping her work through the concussion.
”…chest…” the big alien coughed, eventually, moving his hand where it was cradling his flank. There was an obvious dent there.
“Shit, no wonder you’re like this…”
She was carrying two medical kits. The smaller one, the green bag on her belt, was made by and for humans, any one of the painkillers and treatments it contained might kill Vedreg outright. The other—a metal box about the size of her forearm— was intended for use on aliens, and came with the major advantage of being pseudo intelligent, capable of diagnosing, prescribing and prognosing injuries and ailments in all known interstellar species. Humans, sadly, weren’t in its database yet, and probably never would be. Allison knew from past experience that most ET drugs simply didn’t work on Deathworlders.
“Guvnurag patient, fractured ribs.” she informed it, and held the device’s black end—a low-powered, short-range medical scanner—over the break.
She held her breath as it took the measure of the damage, and exhaled happily when it reported that the injury, while undoubtedly agonising, was not life-threatening, and ordered her to apply its injection end to three spots around the wound.
It hissed alarmingly as she did so, but Vedreg seemed to appreciate whatever it did, as he relaxed and made a noise very like “Aaah…“
“Painkillers?”
“A local anaesthetic and a regenerative, most likely.” Vedreg replied, returned to his usual communicative self. “Thank you, Allison. I fear had he punched me much harder then I would no longer be with you.”
“You rest. Look after Amir and Lewis.” She told him. “We’ve got…uurgh…”
She had stood up, and had to steady herself on Julian.
“Allison, you need bed rest.” he told her.
“Fuck that, we’ve got to get back to the ship.”
”…of course. Xiù.” Julian said.
“Right. He’s obsessed, I knew it. He saw his chance and took it.”
“You should be flattered.” Vedreg commented. “He rendered you unconscious first.”
“And I doubt he’d have done it at all if Julian’s foot hadn’t broken.” Allison retorted. “Come on, let’s get after him.”
She was damned if she was going to let a few spinny buildings and the way her own limbs felt blurry stop her from getting payback.
Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV
Scotch Creek Extraterrestrial Research Facility, British Columbia, Canada, Earth
Captain Owen Powell
“I first…We were…”
Powell exhaled, and started over. “We spent a month on Cimbrean getting set up, just me and the lads, getting things ready for the civilian colonists. Day they arrived, I remember she…the girl fookin’ rampaged down the ramp the second it was down. She was racing her brother to be the first civilian colonist to set foot on a new world. She won. Right proud of it, too.”
“You have a soft spot for children, don’t you?” Ford asked.
“Never met a soldier who doesn’t.” Powell retorted. Peggy seemed to have fallen asleep on his lap. “You were at Camp Bastion, right?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, you’ve got to remember the kids around the camp, right? The locals? They become mascots, don’t they? I always remember how jaded some of them were, though. They got it, aye?”
“It?”
Powell grimaced and scratched the back of his head. “It’s…this is going to be a bit hard to explain.”
“Don’t worry about explaining it to me. I think I know what you mean, but for your own sake just…think out loud.”
“I think the other two teenagers around Folctha get it as well. Adam and Ava. S- The girl’s…Her friends. They’d come from San Diego, they were out of town when the bomb went off. Lost fookin’ everything. Their homes, friends, schools, family…and they got it, they understood what S-she didn’t.”
“Which is?”
Powell exhaled. “Okay, right. So…” he thought for a second. “People say ‘life is unfair’, right?”
“Yes…”
“Bullshit. Complete fookin’ rot. Totally backwards. Life is fair. Terribly, terribly fookin’ fair. Life doesn’t give a shit if you’re a forty-year-old soldier or a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl, it’ll kill you like that-” he snapped his fingers for emphasis. “-and not even give a shit. The stars keep burnin’, the worlds keep turnin’, but that’s it. That was your fookin’ lot. It’s fair because it treats everybody exactly the same, that way.”
Ford remained silent and kept eye contact, letting him say more.
“I get that.” Powell continued. “Adam and Ava get that. The kids in Afghanistan and Iraq got that. This gi-” He paused, then frowned at himself and gathered the strength to say her name. “Sara…didn’t.”
“And you’re angry at her for that?”
“No! Not…” Peggy made a protesting noise as Powell set her aside and stood up to pace the room, hunting for the right way to start a sentence. “She was the…I mean…You’d…”
“Describe her.”
That stopped him. “What?”
“Who was she? What did she look like? How did she behave?”
Powell looked back at the couch, and smiled faintly when the dog gave him an uncertain tail-wag.
“I don’t…no, wait, I’ve got it. You ever go round a council estate, Major?”
“Occasionally…”
“They’ve always got those same kids on ‘em, don’t they? Like there’s a fookin’ machine somewhere, stamping out exact copies. The scrawny skinhead boy who thinks he’s hard, the pretty girls who’ll be pushin’ prams and chain-smoking before they can drive. You know the ones. I should know what that kind of kid is like, I used to be one.”
“I think I follow you.”
“Imagine…the complete opposite.” Powell said. “Somebody who fookin’ broke that machine. Somebody who’d never in their life wind up mooching around by the Co-op trying to talk strangers into buying them fags and vodka. Somebody…Different. Better.”
“And Sara was such a person?”
“All three of them, her and the two others. They’re…She was…Alive. Living in the moment. Real people. They know who they are, which I sure as fook didn’t at that age.”
“And who was Sara?”
Peggy licked his hand as Powell picked her up and sat down again. “Like something out of a bloody Enid Blyton book.” he said. “You know, the plucky children investigating fookin’ mysteries, thwartin’ gangs of gun-runners and what have you?”
“I’ve never read them.” Ford confessed.
“Not worth it, mate. Naive fookin’ horse shit, every word of the fookin’ things.”
“You said that you’re angry at her though. Why?”
“That’s just it, I don’t fookin’ know!” Powell seethed. “I wasn’t mad at that kid in Kenya, or at those Yezidi girls in the Persian Gulf, so why should I be angry with Sara? She’s the fookin’ victim here!”
“Well, turn the question around. If you can’t figure out why you are angry with Sara, perhaps it will help to think about why you were not angry with the others.”
That seemed reasonable.
“Well…you know about what happened, right? In those other two cases?”
Ford nodded that he did. “I’ve read the notes, but it’s probably best if you recount them in your own words.”
Powell sighed. “Karatina market, Kenya. There was a little boy. Like, five or six? His parents had given him…” he laughed a little at the memory. “I remember it was this really cheap fookin’ knock-off plastic ‘Ben 10’ backpack…and the fookin’ thing was full of C4 and ball bearings…”
He patted the dog’s side. She had her chin on his lap and was looking up, listening. “His Mum and Dad were sitting in the car with one of those old Nokias. We saved the kid that time, and a lot of other people too, but he didn’t see that. All he saw was the nasty white men who’d come and killed his Daddy. Never fookin’ mind that we’d shot the evil bastard to stop him from calling the bomb and blowing up his own little boy, we were the bad guys.”
“You don’t blame him for that, though?”
”‘Course I don’t. He was a little’n, didn’t fookin’ understand what was happening. Never crossed the poor little bugger’s mind that his parents might murder him like that. It got to me, but…y’know, that’s dealt with. I can deal with being the bad guy if he’s alive and doin’ summat with his life. Who knows, maybe after all these years he’s figured out what happened and forgiven me.”
“And the Persian Gulf?”
“Different story. That one were a freighter involved in slave trafficking, they’d got a handful of Yezidi girls in a shipping container, going to some buyer in Thailand. There was a cockup at the Thai end, the buyer spooked and the freighter chucked the container overboard. Worthless cargo, now. All the drone operator could do was fookin’ watch.”
“You were angry then?” Ford asked.
“Fookin’ raging.” Powell nodded. His expression darkened. “We boarded the ship, had all these bastards sat in a circle, and they were jawing and joking and asking for cigarettes—they thought we were Americans—and all acting like they didn’t know what had been in that container. Like they hadn’t heard the banging and screaming from inside. Like they weren’t slave-trading fookin’ scum who’d just murdered five little girls. I wanted to bundle every man of ‘em into a crate and tip ‘em over the side myself. But that wasn’t the hard part.”
He paused. “No, the hard part were that the container burst. Pressure difference, right? So all the bodies came back up. We had to fish ‘em out, these skinny little blue-eyed girls, and there were tiger sharks following the ship. They eat whatever falls overboard.”
His fists clenched. “Aye. I was angry there, but, at the right people, you know? Only reason we didn’t shoot those cunts in the kneecaps and throw ‘em to the sharks was pure bloody professionalism, and I still think it’d have been no less than they fookin’ deserved.”
“What do you think the difference is between those cases and this one?”
Powell thought about it for some time, petting Peggy as he did so. “I think…I think I’m angry at her because she got herself into it.” he said at last. “Like, this brave, beautiful, stupid fookin’ girl had to go in and help when the cavalry was already on the way. Like, if she’d just been smart about it, she…I…”
He swallowed, then started to shake. “I never looked in a child’s eyes while she was dying before.” he croaked. “She said her last word to me. She was scared. She…When I closed her eyes, her- she’d been crying, she was so afraid, and the tears made my glove wet…”
He stared at his hand. “I couldn’t bear to take it off for hours…”
He sat, staring at his fingers for a few moments until the dog, very gently, inserted her nose under his palm and hauled herself into his lap, wagging sympathetically. He laughed a little, grabbed her and hugged, sobbing into the fur.
Ford let him get it out of his system. Finally, the captain made a weak “woo-ugh” noise and sat up, wiping his face dry.
“Fookin’….I never cry.” he said.
“You needed to.” Ford observed.
”…You know, I think you’re right.” Powell agreed. “I’ve just not done that since I were a kid. Sorry.” He wiped his face again.
“Don’t be. In fact, I’d have been worried if you hadn’t.” Ford reassured him. “…Are you really angry at her, do you think? Now that you’ve had time to think out loud?”
”…No. I don’t think so, not really. Not any more. She’s like that poor boy in Kenya, isn’t she? She didn’t know any better, it never crossed her mind that maybe her parents had led her wrong.”
“Her parents?”
“Aye. These Dippy-Hippie tree-hugging free love pagan parents of hers. Her dad’s got these tattoos—’an it harm none, do as thou wilt’.” He gestured along his forearms to show where the two halves of the phrase were inked into Mark Tisdale’s skin. “Sexually open, no boundaries, no rules, no fookin’…sense of consequence. I’ll just bet you they never once told her that no, there’s things that you can’t do. You know? Like, they’ll have told her ‘you can do anything”, trying to empower her and that, and it got her killed.”
“How do you feel towards them, then?” Ford inquired. “You’ve compared Sara to the child in Kenya, but what about the parents?”
“It’s…not the same.” Powell mused. “The bastards in Kenya, they had the phone in their hand. May as well have dug the little guy a trench and put a gun to the back of his head, they were going to murder him just as dead either way. But the Tisdales loved their daughter, so fookin’ much. They’d have never deliberately hurt her, but they coddled her so much that she never learned one of the most useful survival skills in the world.”
“Which is?”
“Knowing when it’s time to stop fookin’ playing.”
He sighed. “What’s saving them is that they didn’t know they were doing it. They’re as fookin’ ignorant as their daughter was.”
“Do you think you can forgive them for that?”
Powell inhaled and exhaled deeply through his nose, but didn’t answer, beyond shaking his head and stroking the dog.
Ford nodded. “Why not?”
“I can forgive a child for not knowing how the world works.” Powell replied, after a moment’s thought. “It’s bloody cruel, but there it is. She didn’t have time, and the first chance she got to learn, it killed her. She could have been smarter, should have been, but…y’know, she was just fourteen. A girl. Part of the cruelty of it is that we want them to be innocent at that age, don’t we? We don’t want to spoil their fun.”
“But adults should know better.” Ford finished the thought for him.
“Fookin’ right.” Powell sniffed and shook his head. “I’m not sadistic, I’m not going to rake ‘em over the coals for it, they’re suffering enough. But…”
He shook his head again, breathing out. “…But I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at either of them without thinking, y’know…’You’re the reason I had to watch your daughter die’.”
“What are you going to do?”
Powell finally made eye contact, and there was a hardness in his gaze now that had been absent throughout the interview, one that looked quite natural and comfortable there. “I’m going to find something important of the Hierarchy’s, and when we’re done with it I’ll use the largest piece that’s still intact for a fookin’ paperweight.”
Major Ford smiled appreciatively. “I think this session has been good for you.” he opined.
Powell nodded. “Aye, I think it has.” he agreed. “I feel sharp again. More myself.”
“I would still suggest you come back for at least a couple more sessions.” Ford added. “After that, it’s up to you, but at least two more seems prudent.”
“Aye. At least two more.” Powell agreed, and stood, putting Peggy down but pausing to scratch at her ears one last time. “Don’t want to undo all our progress, do we?” he asked the dog.
“Indeed not.” Ford agreed. “We’re available any time, Captain. You let me know if we’re needed.”
“I will.” Powell shook the major’s hands “Thank you, sir.”
“Good luck.”
“Don’t fookin’ need it, mate.”
Date Point: 4y 9m 3w AV
UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space
“Kirk”
“This isn’t going to work, you know.”
“Hush ya.”
“I’ve read your file. Narcissistic Personality Disorder. A terrible thing. You were receiving a lot of therapy back on Earth to help you cope, weren’t you Zane?”
“I say hush!“
Kirk wriggled a little as Zane’s grip tightened around his upper arm, feeling the bone creak alarmingly in the Deathworlder’s grip. “Not had any since you left Earth of course.” He continued. “But you could do. We can still take you back, you can still get the treatment you need. If you keep behaving this way, though, that may not happen…”
Zane broke his arm. Kirk fought down the rattling creak which was the Rrrrtk equivalent of a scream, while Zane just cursed and shifted his grip to the lower, sturdier arm. “Blood clot, why ya ET bruk so easy?!”
Kirk turned his pain into a slightly hysterical laugh. “Evolution!” he replied. “Different worlds different -” he creaked in pain again “- bones.”
“Hush, ya.”
“Even if you do get us to the ship and we take off, Xiù isn’t fragile like me.”
“Oh, she be. Dawta care, yah know. The I’s me leverage- she too soft let the I come ‘arm.”
They were nearly at the ships. As they entered the area lit by their industrial lights, alien workers turned to watch the sight of a human dragging a Rrrtk three times his height towards them.
“You’re not well! You’re not thinking straight!” Kirk protested. “We’re offering to take you back to—aah!—to Earth. Other women! You don’t need this one! You’re acting out, this is a crisis!”
“HUSH. Ya.“
“You’d better let him go, Zane.”
Allison stepped out from among the packing crates, aiming her sidearm at him. She was clearly in a bad way, squinting against the glare of the floodlights and swaying a little bit, and her aim was not up to its usual rock-steady standard.
Zane twisted around, dragging Kirk into the line of fire. “Ya cyaan shoot, seen? ‘Less ya wan’ hit ya boy.”
“True. Julian?”
“Ah, ah!” Zane chided, raising his hand to wrap around the base of Kirk’s throat. “I know ya creechie tumpa-foot man a’ try dat. I make a move and me break ya boy here, sight?”
“And then what?” Kirk rasped around his hand, as Julian stepped into Zane’s sight-line and hefted his hatchet warily. “You kill me and you’ll lose your advantage. Your plan leaves something to be desired, Zane.”
“The I still be dead.”
“I admit, the prospect doesn’t thrill me, but you’re threatening to make the situation worse for yourself, not better.”
“Hush, ya!”
Kirk waved an arm, beckoning Julian and Allison to fall back. Over the dermal patch microphone on his throat, he explained his reasoning, subvocalising so low that even Zane couldn’t hear him, and the translator certainly couldn’t.
“He’s histrionic. He was so convinced of his superiority that now we’ve punctured it he’s liable to panic.“
“What do we do?” Allison replied, murmuring so that Zane wouldn’t hear.
“If we give him the chance to calm down a bit, we can build him back up. Get him to calm down. Get him to think that doing what we want is his idea.“
“And if we can’t?” Julian asked him. “He seems pretty close to breaking point, boss.”
“If it comes to violence, it comes to violence.” Kirk said.
“Greeaaat…”
“I’ll try to leave him alive.“
They were passing through the middle of the field of equipment and crates surrounding the Corti research craft, when the Corti in question decided to interfere.
“You appreciate of course that there is a third option.” the male—Lesry—observed. He and Knadna were in Zane’s way, and they ignored Kirk’s attempts to signal for them to move.
“Get away.” Zane ordered.
“Rather than resort to violence…” Lesry said, stepping forward, “you could sign on with us. A bit of muscle would be useful, and we have the means to deliver you back to Earth, without your being a prisoner in the ship you arrived on. What say you?”
“I want.” Zane growled. “Xiù.”
“And ask yourself if that scenario seems likely right now, hmm?” Lesry pushed. “Be realistic.”
He stepped forward again. “I’m offering you the chance to part ways peacefully, as a free man. That seems like the most rationa-”
Zane backhanded him. It was a casual, almost gentle motion, but it highlighted the huge disparity between Human strength and Corti mass by flipping Lesry head-over-heels over a crate with a sickening noise like a baseball being thrown at a sack full of cockroaches.
It was all the distraction Kirk needed. He twisted, turned, darted sideways and his prosthetic arm lashed out, extending its concealed fusion blade.
Kirk went one way. Zane reeled the other. Zane’s left forearm left a crater in the sand where it landed between them, smoking, glowing and bloodless at the cut end.
Rrrrtk had a decent turn of speed over very short distances, but Kirk knew Humans well by now. Zane’s scream may have been of agony, but there was a very large component of adrenaline and rage in there as well, and no short-term turn of speed was any good at all when a pursuit predator was angry at him.
The only recourse open to him was to turn at bay and get ready with his sword, prepared to strike a lethal blow if he could, but that much mass, travelling that fast, would quite probably end very badly for him even if he did.
Facing the Hunters had been bad enough. Facing the murderous fury in Zane’s eyes was worse. Julian and Allison had retreated on his orders, and were now sprinting to catch up, but they were too far away, on the back foot. Zane was going to beat them.
Xiù got to him first.
If Zane’s casual backhand had hinted at the disparity between Deathworlder muscles and Corti bones, then what Xiù unleashed on the enraged Jamaican was an object lesson in just how physically far ahead of the rest of the galaxy humans truly were. Zane had time enough only to register her presence as she rose up in his path before she delivered four blows, any one of which would have exploded through Kirk’s body like heavy pulse-gun fire.
The first exploited his missing arm, driving into his chest, knocking him off-balance and driving the wind out of him. The second was laser-targeted on his jaw, stunning him. As he staggered, the third blow was delivered to his left eye, and the fourth to his right.
Her precision flurry of violence took less than a second.
Zane’s headlong berserk charge turned into him staggering, dropping to his knees in the sand, wheezing, and falling over when he tried to support himself on a hand that was lying several meters away.
He wasn’t out, though. Running on adrenaline and anger, he still tried to haul himself to his feet, swinging wildly with his remaining arm even as his eyes swelled up and blinded him.
Xiù just stepped and flowed, and wherever the flailing limb went, there she wasn’t.
She was angry too, Kirk decided. Furious. But it was a different kind of fury. Zane in a rage was a bellowing beast, roaring and thrashing around like a wounded Vulza.
Xiù on the other hand became a machine. Her face locked down, her eyes locked on, everything about her unified into a cold and methodical instrument of violence that simply took the most efficient path to avoid harm and then, when the opportunity presented itself, she stepped forward and delivered a straight punch to Zane’s skull, just behind the ear.
The delicately balanced tug-of-war that kept bipedal humans upright and moving ceased instantly, and Zane crashed into the dirt, unmoving.
In the stunned moment of stillness that followed, Xiù made hardly any noise, simply allowing her breath to hiss out from between her teeth, and then she straightened, inhaled through her nose as she touched her fist to her palm in a Bau Quan, then exhaled as she let her entire body relax. Only the hardness in her eyes remained, though even that thawed a little when she glanced at Kirk.
“Are you okay?” She asked.
“He broke my arm, but I am alive, thanks to you.” Kirk said, and meant it. “I am…impressed.”
“Understatement central there, boss.” Allison chimed in. “Holy shit, girl!”
“You cut his arm off…” Xiù observed. She didn’t sound happy about it.
“Necessary, I’m afraid.” Kirk replied.
“Yeah, but…oh, God.” A distinct green colour rose in Xiù’s face and she turned away, breathing heavily. Allison rubbed her back, making soothing noises.
“Allison, can you tend to his injury?”
Allison looked up at him, then reluctantly nodded. “…Sure. Julian?”
The pair of them hoisted the unconscious Zane onto their shoulder and dragged him—and Allison herself, Kirk suspected—in the direction of Sanctuary and her medbay.
That left Kirk and Xiù alone. The Corti team were tending to their wounded shipmaster, who seemed to be alive, thankfully.
“Are you alright?” He asked.
“Just…” Xiù slowed her breathing. “…I’m okay. Oh God, they left his arm…” She turned away again and bent over, trying not to vomit.
“Are you sure?” Kirk asked her, as soon as she seemed to have recovered a little.
She laughed a little. “I never thought it’d be like this.” she complained, and wiped at some tears that were threatening to form. “Monsters and fighting and cutting peoples’ arms off.”
She sniffed, and after a few more cleansing breaths she stood up and raised her head, staring at a night sky and stars that only six specimens of the entire human race had ever laid eyes on. “I want to go home.”
“And what do we do with Zane? Does he get to go home as well?”
Xiù blinked at him. “You’re the shipmaster, aren’t you?” she asked.
“I am, and I say as shipmaster that it’s your decision. To hell with my arm, you’re clearly the one he really hurt. Whatever it was that happened between you.”
“Then he…” Xiù began firmly, but paused. “I…” She sighed. “Let me give him one last chance.”
“By all means. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m in rather a lot of pain, and we need to send Julian back for the others…”