The business of lashing down Sanctuary was a serious one. Huge though she was, and alien-tech thrusters that required no reaction mass notwithstanding, the realities of power-to-weight ratio still existed, and Sanctuary was designed to pull fierce acceleration even at sublight, relying on her giant core’s power output to keep the crew happy and healthy at 20G or more.
The result of that was that she was light for her size. In the high winds expected to come sweeping down the valley over the next few days, she would slide or even be picked up and thrown unless securely anchored.
Kirk, Lewis and Amir were on one side of the ship. Julian, Xiù and Allison on the other, firing cables across her hull using a modified kinetic-pulse weapon. One person to retrieve and hold the cable’s end, one person to crank it taut, the third to operate a compressed-gas gun which fired an anchoring peg into the bedrock, which Kirk had informed them would typically have been operated by a team of four armed with a lifter and a heavy stabilising frame.
Julian just carried it, leaning on it heavily to hold back the recoil. Each time it fired, the heavy ‘Chunk!’ sound it produced pulsed right through their bodies and produced a donut of airborne dust.
Xiù broke the silence after the third anchor was in and they’d found their rhythm. “So… Julian, do you mind if I ask you a question?”
“Shoot.”
“I’ve never heard a surname like Etsicitty before…”
Julian laughed softly. “Not a lot of people have. It’s Navajo.”
“You’re Navajo?”
“Grampa is.” Julian shrugged it off. “I’m not.”
‘Chunk!‘
Allison hefted their line launcher, checked that her feet weren’t caught in a loop of cable, steadied herself and fired. The line described a graceful arc over Sanctuary’s back.
“How does that work?” she asked.
“Well Grampa went to prison for resisting the draft. When he got out he went to an anti-war protest where he met my Gramma and they settled in Clearwater county, Minnesota.”
There was a tug on the line, which meant that the other end was attached, so Xiù started to crank on it.
Julian grinned. “Think my Dad was a bit of an accident.” he confided. “And, y’know, interracial couple in the seventies, white girl and a ‘redskin’…” He waved a hand, dismissing the bigotry of yesteryear. “Dunno if things were a bit more relaxed by the time I came along, or if it was just, y’know, ‘Well, at least he’s HALF white…’”
There was a call on the radio. “Heads up!” and the line from the other side came over, bouncing in the dirt a few meters away. Allison retrieved it just as Julian set the gun and fired the next anchor into the rock.
‘Chunk!‘
“Grampa wanted me to learn his people’s ways but…” Julian shrugged, massaging the shock of the recoil out of his hands. “They’re his people, I guess. I’m not really Navajo myself, I don’t feel that…” he waved his hands. “I dunno.”
“Kinship?” Xiù suggested.
“Yeah, that’s it. The bond’s just not there for me.” They’d gone along to some kind of a nation… thing at one point, and what had struck Julian hard was that he’d felt like a white guy and had been largely treated as one. That had disappointed Gramp Etsi, but it had at least persuaded him to just let Julian be Julian.
“Doesn’t that make you feel sad?” Xiù asked.
“Why should it?” Julian asked. “Maybe I never went down to New Mexico with the old man to learn the ways of my ancestors or whatever but we still had a great time. He taught me hunting, camping, fishing… yeah. I enjoyed it, so I became a park ranger. I used to spend five days a week out in the North Country, keeping tabs on the wildlife. Deer, birds, fish, bears, you name it.” He shrugged, watching Xiù wind the crank. “Guess the Corti thought I was impressive because they snatched me up gear and all and stuck me on planet Nightmare.”
“And your Grandfather?” Xiù asked him.
“Still going.” Julian smiled fondly. “Same old Grampa, with his dungarees and his robusto premium cigars… pretty damn strong for an old man, too.”
Xiù decided that the line was taut enough and plucked it, producing a bass note. “Is that all of them?”
“That’s all of them. Just need to head topside and make sure they’re on top of the steel plates so they don’t cut into the pressure skin and heat dissipators. Care to join me?”
Xiù nodded, apparently pleased to be invited.
“I’m heading inside.” Allison said. “Kirk wanted the airlock seals tested and he can’t open the hatch himself.”
Julian snorted. “Fucking class five species…” he teased, and grabbed her round the waist for a quick, romantic kiss.
When it was done, Xiù was awkwardly looking at anything other than him or Allison..
“So, how do we get up top?” she asked as Allison slipped away and jogged off in the direction of the larboard airlock. Julian just turned and folded his arms, smiling faintly as he stood below the rungs recessed into the side of the ship until she noticed them.
”…Oh.”
It was an easy climb in Aru’s modest gravity, but Julian had never exactly been thrilled by heights. Sanctuary was classified as a modestly-sized luxury yacht, but that still translated to being forty meters above the ground at the top, buffeted by the eddies that were bouncing back and forth between the two sandstorms like a puppy unable to choose between two tennis balls.
Xiù seemed to be just as uncomfortable with the winds and altitude as he was. Moderate gravity or not, a fall from that height would kill, and when she held out a hand for him to help her balance he grabbed it without thinking.
Her hand was surprisingly hard and roughened from work. Different to Allison’s. Allison had plenty of grip strength, but her hands were softer, colder and her fingers were more slender. Xiù’s hand was warm, and unconsciously solid. Feminine, but sturdy.
He tried not to notice.
“So, uh… what about your mother’s side of the family?” she asked, raising her voice to be heard over the air currents, clearly wanting to bolster her own confidence or distract herself with conversation.
“Gran-gran was Ojibwe. She never talked much about my grandfather, ‘cuz he was, uh, never part of Mom’s life. All I know about him is he was Dutch…”
“How are your parents now?”
“Dad died of cancer when I was, like, six and Mom…left. Grampa and Gramma raised me.”
“Oh… I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” Julian kicked a cable and gave a satisfied grunt when it didn’t move.
“Do you know where your mom is now?”
“Yeah. After Dad died she kinda helped his brother through it and…well, I’ve got two sisters in Holland I never met.” Julian shrugged. “She’s okay. But by the time she was ready to look after anyone again I was thirteen or so. Seemed easier just to stay with Grampa and Gramma.”
Xiù checked the cable nearest to her. “This one looks okay, I think…” she guessed. He nodded, trusting her judgement.
“What about your folks?” He asked her. “Five years is a long time, think they’ll have changed much?”
“I’d…” she hesitated, then gave him an embarrassed smile and a shrug, flicking wind-wild hair out of her face “…don’t know. I hope not.”
Julian nodded sympathy, but smiled. “I hope not too.” he said. “But… word of advice? You should probably brace yourself. Did you read your messages yet?”
She shook her head no. “Only one of them.”
“Cool. Well, you’ll have plenty of time while the sandstorm passes over.”
There was a lull in the wind and Xiù cautiously let go of his hand to straighten and look at the scenery. It was, admittedly, spectacular – the river was a malachite road, its forks and junctions winding down from distant brown mesas beneath a turquoise sky.
“Incredible.” she said, taking a step towards it. “We could almost be somewhere on Earth, couldn’t we?”
Julian nodded, though he wasn’t really listening: he was too busy admiring a completely different view. On autopilot, his mouth agreed with her. “We could, yeah.”
“Like… Monument Valley?”
She turned around and Julian realized where he’d been looking. So did she.
“Uh…” Mentally punishing himself, he took in the correct view this time while Xiù hastily turned her face back towards the landscape. Her ears were bright pink. “No, not like… Monument Valley’s more red, and there’s lots of green. This is more like… Argentina, maybe. More yellow and brown.” he said.
He checked the last cable. “And…” he cleared his throat. “…Uh, we’re as anchored as we’re ever gonna get, I reckon. May as well head indoors.”
Xiù just nodded without turning around.
Floundering for conversation, Julian hit on the first thing that came to mind. “It’s…my turn to cook tonight. You okay with a good steak?”
Xiù turned and gawped at him, blush forgotten. “Actual steak?” she asked. “Like… beef?”
“Yep, and I can’t cook anything else worth a damn, but my steaks? Oh, I can cook a steak alright.” Julian found his confidence again and grinned. “I can cook a damn good steak.”
“Wow.” Xiù said. “Uh… medium rare, please?”
“That’s how I take my steak too.” Julian agreed. “Anything else is-”
”-An insult to the cow.” Xiù finished for him.
They beamed at each other for a few seconds before the same thought struck both of them at once and they lapsed into simultaneous, mutual awkwardness.
“We should, uh-” she began.
”-get off this roof.” He finished.
“Yeah. Before the storm arrives.”
“Right. Don’t want to get blown off… uh… I mean-”
“No, uh… Well. No. Um…after you?”
Julian was right. His steak was amazing. But the real pleasure for hadn’t been in eating it, but in watching him make it.
It wasn’t an eye-candy moment. It was a human moment. Julian seemed to turn off some of his defenses in the kitchen, claiming it as his own, putting some music on and spinning around it in a slow but efficient bustle. He didn’t clean up after himself as he went, just dumped everything in the sink. It was a messy and male approach to food preparation but…
But no Gaoian would have ever listened to Breaking Benjamin, or nodded in time to the music, or sang along just loud enough for her to hear that he was singing along in a surprisingly good singing voice, punctuated by the sizzle of skillet and the clatter of plates and seasonings as he worked on his masterpiece.
“♪♪…Holding on too tight…breathe the breath of life… so I can leave this…♫“
“Look but don’t touch, girlfriend.”
Xiù jumped. Allison smiled at her. “He’s taken, remember?” She asked.
Xiù remembered to shake her head rather than shimmy it like Ayma. “That’s not it.” she said, which was a bit of a lie, but not much of one so it didn’t count.
Allison tilted her head. “What, then?”
“Just… Humans.”
“Hmm?”
“You, him, Lewis, Amir. The music, the kitchen, the food…Humans. Earth.”
Allison made an understanding noise and put an arm round her shoulder. “Making you homesick?”
“Actually… No. It makes me feel like… Like when I dreamed of home.”
She smiled at Allison and wiped away a tear. “This is what it felt like.”
In the kitchen, Julian’s playlist had changed tracks and took a dizzying detour into Johnny Cash. “♫…Well he must thought that it was quite a joke, and it got a lot o’ laughs from a lot o’ folks. Seems I had to fight my whole life through…♪“
Allison directed a sly smirk at Julian as he picked up the volume a bit. “He’s got an eclectic taste in music, doesn’t he?”
“Very varied.” Xiù agreed, covering her smile.
“Come on, help a girl set the table?”
A minute later, Xiù dropped the knives from giggling at the enthusiastic bellow of “MY NAME IS SUE! HOW DO YOU DO?!” that drifted out of the kitchen.
In the dark and quiet of the night cycle, Sanctuary creaked like a clipper at sea as her shields deflected the pelting sand outside. From without, the view would almost certainly have been spectacular. Forcefields tended to react colorfully with airborne particulates, spitting and sparking as the charge built and grounded itself, glowing all the colours of the rainbow and others besides.
Inside, the only hint of the raging outside forces was the occasional whine as the power systems intelligently redirected the power reserves and increased the reactor output to match them, and the odd structural creak as the shield emitters mounted on Sanctuary’s outer skin transmitted part of the huge forces they were emitting into the ship’s structural components.
In theory, those forcefields were more than up to the task of keeping Kirk’s ship securely in contact with the ground, but the humans always seemed to feel more comfortable with steel than with photons even though, technically, a forcefield was built to duplicate exactly the kind of electrostatic forces that gave steel cables or bulkheads their strength.
Still. Redundancy didn’t hurt and if it set the paranoid Deathworlders’ minds at ease…
Rrrrtktktkp’ch really didn’t need much sleep next to most species. While humans took a solid six to eight hours a night, and the Guvnurag needed a whole day every three or four days, Rrrrtk got by on quick, regular power naps. In fact, the Domain’s standard unit of time known as the Rik was derived from the average duration of the Rrrrtk sleep phase, though nowadays given a standard definition based on… something to do with hydrogen, if Kirk remembered correctly.
Not being able to summon random little facts like that at will was one of the few things he was finding he missed about having cerebral implants. He certainly hadn’t noticed any decline in his logical faculties or powers of recall since their removal. Not for the big stuff. Maybe mental mathematics was taking a while longer, and he wasn’t able to recall trivia, but the important activity seemed mostly unhindered.
The problem was that the disparity between his sleeping habits and those of his crew left long stretches of the night where the only available company was Vedreg. Kirk and Vedreg may have been old friends, but theirs was a relationship built on mutual esteem and shared goals, rather than actually having much in common as people.
Tonight, however, he had something to do, and was glad to be left alone to do it. The less his friends and crewmates knew about some of his plans, the better.
By Rrrrtk standards, the engineering access conduit which ringed the “poles” of Sanctuary’s reactor was a crawlspace, tight and claustrophobic. Vedreg would simply not have been able to fit into it. Humans, Gaoians and Corti, on the other hand, could have strolled down it, though they would have needed a stepladder to access some of the systems that lined the hemispherical conduit’s ceiling.
Kirk stooped underneath an environmental duct, stepped fastidiously over a neat bundle of high-capacity data cables, squeezed between two computer racks, and finally found what he was after at the apex of the conduit, immediately in front of the first of his ship’s seven huge sublight thrusters. It was mounted in a little pedestal which doubled as a superconducting power bus of peerless capacity, designed to shunt as much power as the huge reactor could generate straight into the seemingly innocuous little oblong of sealed technology that was Sanctuary’s Corti Black-Box Drive.
Without knowing how to open one, tampering with a Black-Box drive was a recipe for it blowing up in the would-be opener’s face, and not in a small way, either: The Corti had an unsubtle approach to copyright protection.
Kirk, however, now knew how to open it.
Fabricating the necessary tool had been trivial in fact. All it did was deliver a permutation of extremely precise electrical currents to thirty-two of the drive’s three thousand microscopic terminals.
That set of possible combinations was already absurdly vast all by itself, but when one factored in the need to deliver excruciatingly precise electrical currents to that correct combination, and the fact that the combination and required currents were changed periodically as a safeguard against simple dissemination of the information, then a value emerged that made the total quantity of subatomic particles in the whole of the visible universe seem utterly trivial.
Correctly guessing the combination was effectively impossible – If an enterprising scientist were to fire a neutrino in an entirely random direction and then guess at which specific atom it would eventually hit, then a successful prediction would still be tens of thousands of orders of magnitude more likely than a correct guess at the black box combination.
No wonder it had supposedly never been opened by an unauthorized user.
With the right key, however, the two sides shot outwards on rails with a snap! and the top hinged open.
Kirk reflected wryly that if life in the galaxy had taught him anything by now, it was that working technology simply never had shiny special-effects deep inside them. The occasion demanded a bottled singularity pulsing ominously inside a glass cylinder, or some other such wondrous artefact. Instead, he was looking at a circuit board much like any other. It was foolish to be disappointed.
Nevertheless, it felt like something of an anticlimax.
The modifications he read off a standard tablet computer were the work of minutes. Connect, load, copy-paste, run. Close the box, remove the key.
Back in the comfort of his quarters, he settled onto the bed, folding his legs underneath him, and bade the room load a text chat interface and connect via the newly established protocol under his name.
++Syst§m N♦tif>c■t?♦n: Us§r ???? h■s j♦in§d th§ <error: undefined exception>++
++Welcome User ????++
++0025++: This is getting ridiculous. That’s the second one this cycle.
++0007++: Working on it.
++0034++: Without apparent progress.
++0007++: By all means you are welcome to volunteer for debugging software that has existed longer than you have. For now, I’ll just kick this spurious “user” again.
++System Notif■■■■■■■ <Error>
<Error>
<Redirecting: Subnet Mask ????????? Port ?????>
++System Notification: Welcome to the Cabal.++
++????++: By “working on it” I hope you mean that you draw closer to a solution that will allow our meatspace guests to connect directly to the Cabal. Every time one of them logs into the primary relay is a potential security failure.
++????++: So long as “Seven” remains in charge of it…
++????++: I know for a fact that Fifty is working on the problem themselves.
++????++: Shouldn’t we be welcoming our guest?
++????++: You’re right. Please forgive us, ah… “Jim”.
Kirk snorted, amused.
++SELF++: Think nothing of it. I don’t wish to be a liability.
++????++: In which case the fewer the occasions on which you connect to this channel the better, at least until we can complete the task of securing it.
++SELF++: That seems reasonable. Please, brief me.
He sat back, and let the explanations roll in.
School is exactly as Xiù remembers it. But… isn’t she a little old to be back at school?
No, of course not. She’s sixteen. She must be sixteen because if she’s not sixteen, then she wouldn’t be in school. QED.
There aren’t many people around, though. They must all be in class. She’d better hurry.
Xiù’s locker is… number ninety-nine. She remembers that fact quite proudly. Top row, second from the right, in the long corridor near the changing rooms. She doesn’t remember walking to it, but there it is. She opens it, and grabs her bag.
It bites her.
Sharp teeth, so many teeth, too many. She flails and beats the Hunter around the head with her free hand, trying to escape. It emerges from the locker like a foul magic trick, like a blasphemous birth, but she manages to get her hand free and run.
Why is she running? Stupid question, this is a Hunter! It wants to EAT her!
But…she’s killed dozens of Hunters, hasn’t she?
Still she runs, though. Running, running, running, feet pounding the tiles, her hair streaming out behind her.
Except, she isn’t scared. This isn’t a chase, this is just her morning jog. She isn’t at school any more, she’s running along the waterfront in Stanley Park, enjoying the cool breeze.
There is a sculpture of a man sitting on the rock out in the water. He looks familiar, somehow. He winks at her and tosses her a tiny object, which she catches.
It’s a metal ball, about the size of an apple. Somehow, looking at it, she knows that the world is going to end, but that she can stop it from happening if she just-
She realised that she was dreaming, and woke up.
‘Morning’ was a concept that Corti, Gaoians and Humans held in common, and which had become enshrined – thanks to the Corti – in interstellar timekeeping. It had created a fortunate rhythm to the day that Xiù had been able to exploit, and she had grown into an early-to-bed, early-to-rise routine that was totally at odds with the nocturnal Vancouver nightlife of five years ago, and more in line with something her mother would have approved of. She was up well before everyone else.
Amir, it seemed, was an early riser too. He was just getting up from his prayer mat as she emerged from the gym into the common area.
“Five times a day, huh?” she asked.
He paused in tidying the prayer mat away. “Is that a problem?” he asked, proving that getting up early didn’t automatically make you a morning person.
“No! Just… making conversation.”
Amir softened and nodded, pinching his nose. “Sorry.” he apologised. “I’m too used to Lewis bickering with me over it, and he’s up early today for some reason.”
“Bickering?”
Amir nodded. “He keeps trying to deconvert me. It’s… obnoxious.”
“Oh.”
He puffed a little laugh out of his nose. “Let me guess. You think this is strange?” he gestured to the prayer mat.
“I… don’t want to argue with you, we only just met.” Xiù protested.
“Seriously, though.”
She hesitated. “I’d… kinda forgotten that prayer is even a thing.” she admitted.
He scoffed. “Right. The galaxy full of atheists strikes again…”
“Are you always this grouchy in the morning?”
Amir blinked, while Xiù folded her arms and channeled Momma Yulna, waiting for the verbal slap upside his head to do its job.
“Okay.” he said, finally. “You’re right, sorry. Lewis just… never mind, I shouldn’t take it out on you.”
“No.” Xiù agreed, but smiled. “But it’s okay. Galaxy full of atheists?”
“Ah, that’s just Lewis’ new argument.” Amir dismissed it. “‘If nothing else out there believes in God then…’ blah, blah, you get the picture.”
“Doesn’t that make you wonder, though?” Xiù asked.
“Nope. Why should it? Look at all the gifts we have. We’re faster, stronger, smarter, tougher, more creative…” He turned to her. “Seriously, what’s Gaoian pop culture like?”
“Pop culture?”
“Yeah! Do they have… sports teams, rock stars? Reality TV? How about just commercial radio? Is there a Gaoian Banksy, or Coca-Cola? What about their phones? What’s their, uh, their version of iPhone versus Android? Do they have somebody like Arnold Schwarzenegger, or… who’s the Gaoian answer to Imran Khan?”
“I don’t… Who?”
Amir wound down a little. “He’s a… cricketer. A famous one, from Pakistan.” He explained
Xiù thought about it. “They have… most of that.” she said, though admittedly she had never really absorbed much of it. Perhaps the part of Gaoian pop-culture she was most familiar with was an edutainment show for little cubs called ‘Yen Ni Wo!’, which was more-or-less the Gaoian equivalent of Sesame Street, minus the muppets. She’d learned half her Gaoian from watching that show with Myun and the cubs, though apparently it had left her with a childlike way of speaking for some time.
“Well, they’re doing better than most of the aliens then.” Amir remarked. “But I bet it’s not as rich as ours, or as varied.”
“If you say so.” Xiù said neutrally, too offended to argue with him.
“That’s my point though.” Amir continued. “Look at all the gifts we have. All the advantages. All the blessings. To me, it’s obvious.”
Xiù was rescued from having to come up with a response to that by Lewis sticking his head through the hatch, looking frazzled and sleep-deprived. “Hey, Xiù, could you give me a hand?”
“Sure!” she sprang to her feet, gave Amir a little wave and a smile, and joined him. “What’s up?”
“Well, I could do with some more exercise advice, but I was mostly just rescuing you.” Lewis whispered, once certain Amir was out of earshot. “Don’t get him started on that shit, seriously.”
“He was okay.” she said, earnestly. “He’s just…passionate.”
“Trust me, you give him the chance and he’ll go way past passionate and into downright fuckin’ intense. ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’, right?”
Xiù glanced back toward the common area. Amir had sat down and from his expression was plainly pissed off at himself. “Maybe.” she agreed. “And… wow, you quoted that correctly.”
“Hey, I’m not here to be the ship’s mascot!” Lewis smirked. “No false modesty, I’m, like, one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. I know Hamlet. Not really my scene, but I still know it.”
Xiù blushed a little. “Sorry, I didn’t meant to imply…”
“It’s cool. Where I went to school, pretending to be dumb was a survival strategy.” Lewis reassured her. “But yeah, it’s been a touchy subject for him this last week or so. Used to be it never came up. Now he gets all sharp real easy. Dunno if that means he’s getting more devout or if he’s having a crisis but it’s best to just, like, avoid the subject entirely.”
They reached the flight deck, where Lewis’ usual nest was a riot of articles, videos and blogs on Tai Chi.
”…You have Internet?!” Xiù exclaimed.
“We’ve got, like, a backup copy of part of the Internet.” Lewis said. “Godzillabytes of it. Pretty cool, even if it’s a couple months out of date.”
“But you’re researching what we did yesterday?”
“Yeah!” Lewis said, dropping into his chair. “I actually enjoyed myself, which is, like, a major first for me.”
“I’m glad.” Xiù replied.
“I have a good teacher.” Lewis told her, and grinned when she smiled at the compliment. “I got up early to try and join you in the gym, but then…” he waved a hand at one of his screens. “Looks like something came up overnight.”
Xiù looked at what he’d indicated, seeing only incomprehensible numbers and text. “What did?”
“Not sure, TBH,” He said, actually pronouncing the abbreviation letter by letter. He turned to that display and dragged it onto the big screen front and center. “I’ve got all kinds of monitor programs and bots installed in Sanctuary. This one logs power draw on the FTL.” He poked a finger at the screen, which flashed blue where his digit passed through the hologram. “I won’t bore you with, like, the Starfleet technobabble here, but TL;DR? Those numbers are the wrong numbers.”
“Wrong how?”
“Couple hours of sporadic power draw, starting in the middle of the night. Not big draw, but we’re landed and powered down, the FTL shouldn’t be drawing a dang thing.”
“Shouldn’t we… go check it or something?”
“No point. I’ve got the full diagnostic right here.” he waved at a screen. “Piece of shit alien engineering doesn’t log half of what it should, though. My bots log everything, but the modules themselves? Eh…” He shrugged. “All I know is, there’s nothing actually wrong with it, it was just drawing power at oh-dark-thirty last night when it shouldn’t.”
“Still…”
“Yeah. Maybe. If it keeps happening, I guess. It could be the sandstorm for all I know, though.” He dismissed the program. “I’ll keep an eye on it. I should probably go do that exercise while I’m still fired up for it.”
“Give it a bit. I need to go shower and then I’m making pancakes for breakfast.”
Lewis perked up and imitated Homer Simpson. “Mmmm… Pancakes…”
She giggled. “I’ll give you a lesson afterward, if you want?”
Lewis looked like he’d been given an early birthday present. “Sounds good!” he agreed. “See you at breakfast.”
“See you at breakfast.” she smiled and left him, pleased with herself for navigating a whole conversation in English with human body language and no screwups.
Today was definitely off to a good start.
The sandstorm took nearly a week to clear. They had been, for Lewis, six very pleasant days. There was still the unsolved mystery of the power draw on the FTL, but that had only happened once, and came in a distant second place to spending time with Xiù.
Julian, however, had developed the annoying habit of warning him off. “Bad idea.” he was saying, for the third time that conversation. “Seriously.”
“You said yourself, you’d like her to stay on this ship and help out, dude.” Lewis pointed out.
“I would.” Julian agreed. “But she wants to go home.”
“So, maybe if she’s got somebody here she’ll…”
“What, you want to make her change her mind?” Julian snorted.
“Everyone does that to everyone, bro. That’s what a fucking conversation is.”
Julian paused, tried to formulate a retort, and then aborted the attempt with a shake of his head.. “…Whatever. It’s still a bad idea.”
Lewis choked out an exasperated noise. “Why?” he asked.
“Damaged goods. Xiù’s been without healthy human contact for five years, man.”
“Great! Healthy human contact’s what she needs then, right?”
“Healthy human contact, yes.”
“Asking her out is healthy, dude! Good for the self-esteem!”
“Whose, yours or hers?” Julian asked pointedly.
Lewis folded his arms and frowned at him. “Wh-? Hers! Both! It’s human contact dude, I thought you said she needed that.”
“Yeah, but…” Julian flapped a hand as he hunted for the best way to phrase his thoughts. “Drip-fed. Gradually. You don’t throw a hypothermia patient straight into one of those really hot Russian saunas.”
“Dude, it’s not like being asked on a date is fucking hard mode. She says yes, it’s just gonna be movie night and dinner anyway, that’s about all you CAN do on this ship. She says no, cool. I can handle being turned down.”
“Lewis, I spent six years alone, I know what I’m-”
“Xiù didn’t!” Lewis interrupted him. “She had the Gaoians and the aliens.”
“They don’t count.”
Lewis looked offended. “Aliens don’t count? Kirk of all people doesn’t count, huh?”
Julian stood his ground. “I like Kirk, I respect him. I’ve followed him through a lot. But he’s not human, Lewis. Alien company’s nice, but humans need humans, and it takes a while to adjust when you’ve gone without for that long.”
“She’s adjusted to Allison just fine.”
“Allison’s a woman.”
“Sexist, dude.”
“No, listen.” Julian was getting irritated now. “She spent those years with Gaoians, and… you’ve seen her, a lot of the time she slips back into their language, their expressions and mannerisms. She’s gone native, man. And given what I know of Gaoian society, that’ll have primed her to connect better with women than with men.”
“Guys…”
“Sounds like a fucking good reason to give her some human contact, then.” Lewis protested, his own hackles raising.
“Normal human contact! Slowly!”
“Guys.”
“Being asked out is normal!”
“GUYS!””
Lewis’ arms paused mid-outraged flail, and both of them turned to Amir, who had turned in his chair to break up the argument.
“Lewis: Listen to the man. Julian: stop being jealous about Xiù.” he said.
Julian swayed as if he’d been punched. “…Jealous?” he asked.
”…Okay, that was maybe the wrong choice of-” Amir began, but was interrupted.
“Yeah, jealous. Overprotective. Acting like you think you’ve got a right to choose for her.” Lewis stabbed. “And you look at her pretty much the same way you do Allison, dude.”
Amir pinched his nose “Lewis…”
Julian gaped at him. “I- What!? No I don’t!”
“Leave some women for the rest of us!”
“Leave some-? How fucking medieval are you?” Julian stabbed back.
“Julian…”
“You’re the one who thinks he’s got a shot at a fucking harem, dude!”
Julian’s fist bunched and his tone got dangerous rather than outraged. “You wanna watch-”
“GUYS!”
Julian and Lewis paused again. The moment of tension rang like a dropped knife, and then Julian’s hand uncoiled and his shoulders dropped as he exhaled. “Sorry, Lewis.” he said. “That was…”
“Yeah, that wasn’t cool of me either, dude. I’m sorry.”
The two men cooled off in silence for an awkward minute until Lewis added. “But you do stare at her, dude.”
Julian glanced back down the bridge access corridor to make sure Allison wasn’t somehow there to overhear him, then nodded, sheepishly. “It’s…She’s got a shared experience with me, you know? We’ve both been alone for a long time. It’s nice to have somebody around here who really knows what that’s like.”
“In fairness, we all look at her. She’s bloody gorgeous,” Amir pointed out.
“Right,” Julian nodded curtly. “And don’t think I don’t notice when you two check out Allison, either.”
“Ah, come on dude,” Lewis said. “There’s a difference between that and bein’ a horndog. You don’t just check her out, you full-blown stare and it’s not fair on your girlfriend.”
“Okay, okay!” Julian put up his hands defensively. “Just…”
“Nobody’s in control of their lust, Lewis,” Amir opined. “Not really.”
“D’you mind not calling it ‘lust’?” Julian asked, irritated. “That makes it sound so…”
“That’s what it is, though. Infatuation, if you prefer. And Lewis is right, it’s not fair on either of them.”
“It’s not exactly fucking fair on me!” Julian objected. “I’m not doing this deliberately!”
“She stares at him too, Lewis.” Amir pointed out.
“Wh-? No she doesn’t!” Lewis objected.
“Oh face it, she does.” Amir asserted. “And why not, he’s a specimen! But she’s spending time with you.”
Julian scowled, but Lewis just looked pleased and smiled, giving him a defiant stare. “Oh… yeah! So she is,” he agreed.
“Guess she’s settling for second best.” Julian growled.
“Wh-?” Lewis’ arrogant grin evaporated. “Fuck you!”
“Get in line!”
“Okay, what is wrong with you two?” Amir stood up and stepped between them. “This isn’t like either of you, what’s going on?”
“Just sorting out the fucking pecking order.” Julian snarled.
“Alright, piss off out of my flight deck and don’t come back until you’ve got your head out of your arse.”
Julian rounded on him, but Amir stood his ground. “Go. Cool off. We’ll sort this out later.” he repeated.
Julian looked like he wanted to argue, but just made an angered sound, spun and vanished, his angry stride all but denting the deck as he went.
“And you!” Amir rounded on Lewis. “You’ve been insufferable these last few days! You’re picking fights with me, with Julian, what’s going on?”
“Maybe I’m just-” Lewis began, and then shook his head. “Agh, never mind. I’ll be in my cabin.”
When they were both gone, Amir sat and wiped off his forehead, willing his heart to stop pounding and forget the flash of violence that had risen in Julian’s expression for just a second.
It had been like staring down a dragon’s throat and seeing a glow.
He hit a button. “Hey, Kirk? There’s been a… a bit of a row up here, we should probably talk about it.”
“Jesus Christ, Etsicitty. That bag cheat on your sister or something?”
Julian laughed a little, bitter laugh and kept pounding on it. “Just working out some frustrations.” he rumbled.
“Mmm, after what we did last night I’m amazed you have any.” Allison purred, then wilted a little when this didn’t seem to amuse him. “Okay, what’s up?”
Julian stopped for a second. “Just… Ugh, I don’t know. Nothing.” He punched the bag so hard that it rattled the ceiling beam.
“Riiight. D’you, uh, want me to leave you alone until, say, you turn eighteen?”
He didn’t stop. “Yep.”
“Wow. Okay…”
She turned and was halfway out of the room when his apology exploded out of him. “I’m sorry!”
She turned back and arched an eyebrow at him. “Yeah?”
He unwound the tape on his hands and let them slither to the floor. “I’m sorry.” he repeated, not looking at her.
She crossed the floor, slid her arms around his hips and angled a kiss up into his face. “Baby, what’s wrong?”
“Got into a shouting match with Lewis.”
“Really? Wow, don’t you usually get on okay with him?”
“Usually, yeah.” He agreed, still not making eye contact.
She put her head on one side, trying to catch his gaze. “So… what was the argument about?”
”…Xiù. He, uh, wants to ask her out.”
Allison considered this. “Okay? I mean, I can’t see that ending in her saying yes, but he’s a grown-ass man, I’m sure he’ll cope, and it might be good for her confidence. Why argue?”
“He might hurt her.”
She made an incredulous noise. “Are we talking about the same girl, here?” She asked. “Because I seem to recall the last man who hurt her, she whupped his ass and threw him out the airlock. So… why argue? She can take care of herself.”
Julian wriggled out of her grip and picked up the hand tape. “I… don’t know.” he said, beginning to wind it back up.
“You don’t? You got into a shouting match with the guy and you don’t know why?”
”…Yeah.”
She blinked at him, then stepped back. “Why are you lying to me, Julian?”
He took a deep breath and released it as a complex sighing sound, full of noises that could have been attempts at starting a sentence.
“Well? Come on, give me real.”
“I-I was mad with him over… well, over Xiù.”
“Mad why? What are-” suspicion sniped her right in the forehead and her jaw dropped. “Julian, what…? Are you fucking jealous?”
The way he flinched and turned in on himself a bit more confirmed it. “You are? What, you thought you’d buy one get one free? You… you pig!”
“It’s not like that!”
“Oh, what IS it like, then?”
“What it’s like is that I’m down here beating the crap out of that thing–” he pointed at the bag “–because I’m super fucking angry at myself!” He finally made eye contact.
“As well you fucking should be!” she retorted.
“Well…I am!”
“Good!”
“I’m sorry!”
“You’re forgiven!”
The paradox posed by her still-angry tone versus her words shut him up long enough for the echoes caused by the gym’s hollow acoustics to die.
“I, uh… I am?” he asked, cautiously.
Allison coughed out a little breathy laugh and shook her head at the floor. “You are.” she said.
“You’re not mad?”
“Oh, I’m fucking mad alright.” She informed him, jabbing a finger into his chest. “You lied to me, Julian. You tried to shut me out. That part pisses me off. Whatever’s going on in your head about Xiù? I can forgive that.”
“You… can?”
“Sure. See, you got mad at yourself and came down here to work it out and you feel guilty about it. So, yeah. Fine. I forgive you. Heck I don’t blame you; I’m kinda fascinated by her myself, and I’m not usually into girls!” She jabbed him in the chest again. “But don’t ever lie to me like that again.”
”…Yes ma’am.”
A sly smile spread across her face, and she looked him up and down. “…Ma’am, huh?”
”…Uh…” He scratched the back of his head “Well I mean…yeah, that’s what I said.”
“That’s kinda hot.” She mused, teasing him. “I could get used to that.”
He rubbed the bridge of his nose with this thumb, awkwardly, and looked away a little bit. “Well I, uh… I mean, I wasn’t really aiming for ‘hot’ but, um, I-if you want more of that, then… uh…”
She arched an eyebrow at him. “Hmm. Good boy.”
She watched his expression carefully. Noticed the way his breathing changed and the wariness in his eyes.
“Huh. You like being called a good boy, Etsicitty?” she asked.
He swallowed and nodded. “May-maybe a bit.” he confessed.
She ran a finger up him from belt buckle to chin, which seemed to paralyze him. “Hmm. Interesting…” she pondered, then looked up into his face. “Could be you’ve got a bit of a sub streak there. Wanna explore it?” She asked.
He licked his lips nervously. “You think? I mean, I’ve never…”
“Me either,” she confessed. “But the question stands. Wanna explore it?”
”…Yes ma’am.”
She grinned, and rewarded him with a kiss. “Good boy.”
Curiosity and mild alarm were dancing on Vedreg’s body as he considered what they had just heard. “That kind of argument seems out of character.” He commented
“For both of them.” Kirk agreed.
“Just a little.” Amir added, drily. “Julian’s scary when he gets angry, too, and Lewis just kept antagonising him. It was like watching a chicken try and pick a fight with a bear.”
“And all this over Miss Chang? Hmmm…” Vedreg lapsed into contemplation, slow bands of blue light rippling all over his body.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Kirk asked him, after a moment.
“Increased aggression, competition over females…If they were Vgork, I would think they were entering Musth.”
“Lewis has started taking his exercise seriously this last week, too.” Kirk mused. “Interesting theory.”
“Uh… For the Earthling’s benefit, please?”
Both aliens made apologetic gestures to Amir. “Vgork males of high rank periodically enter a state called musth where their testosterone levels soar, and they become violent, aggressive and, um…Amorous.” Vedreg explained.
“Testosterone has a similar effect on humans, even though you don’t have Musth.” Kirk added.
“Okay, well…what about me and the girls? We don’t feel any different.” Amir paused. “At least, I don’t, and I think we’d notice if Xiù and Allison were both acting like Julian and Lewis.”
“So that rules out any environmental factors.” Kirk said. “Meaning this must have been triggered by a specific event.”
“Well, Lewis has always been… he’s always rolled his eyes a bit over my faith, but it started to get worse just after we left Umu-whatever. Where we picked up Xiù.”
“So, it’s an event within the past week. The Huh perhaps? None of the other humans studied it.”
“Yeah, but you studied it too, didn’t you?”
“I’m not human. I’m not sure my body even produces testosterone. But even a week on, I still feel cravings to study that thing again.”
“You are not going to suggest we should get it out and examine it further, are you?” Vedreg asked.
“Don’t tempt me.” Kirk replied. “No, I think a simple trip to the infirmary for them both may be in order. If they are both experiencing a hormone spike, as seems likely, then that’s easily corrected.”
“I’ll call them.”