Date Point: 9y 3d AV
London, England, Earth
Sean Harvey
First Contact Day had come and gone without much in the way of incidents for Sean. He’d had quite a lonely Christmas and New Year, too—the former had been spent playing EVE Online. The latter was forgotten – he’d woken up in Ava’s bed at her place, with Charlotte and Ben in the other room, a Homerian hangover, no clear memory of anything after about six pm the preceding year, and no Ava.
There was Ava now, though, dusting snow off the shoulders of the expensive blended wool coat that Adam had splashed on for her during his first winter visit as Sean let her in.
She gave him a warm grin. “Hey lover!”
Sean managed the first genuine smile he’d been able to produce in a couple of weeks. “You’d better stop calling me that, you know.” he replied. “We don’t want you to accidentally use it around Adam.”
If the suggestion put a dent in Ava’s mood, she didn’t show it. Instead, to his surprise she kissed him with a smile and brushed past him into the living room. “Well, I’ll keep using it so long as it’s true.” she asserted, lightly.
”…How long is it going to be true for?” Sean asked.
“Oh come on, you’re going to lay the heavy stuff on me right after I get back?” Ava teased. “Come on, how was your new year?!”
“I, uh…woke up in your bed with a splitting headache.”
“Not for the first time!”
“Yeah, but you weren’t there and I wasn’t naked.”
She tutted. “See, I know what you’re doing wrong there. You should have picked somebody up, had a good time.”
“In your bed?”
“Sure!” she nodded, casting herself down on the couch and tugging her scarf out of her collar. “Just change the sheets, you know?”
“Let me guess, you got laid at New Years.”
“Oh yeah.” She nodded, and her eyebrows emphasised the point. “He’s…very physical, you know? He likes to rough-house, and hug, and tickle, and…”
“Fuck your brains out?” Sean asked, in his best dry tone.
“You said it, not me!” She sat forward, concerned. “I’m sorry, are you…okay?”
Sean sighed. “Look. I love you. You know that, I’ve said it before. Seeing you so happy with somebody else is…”
Her expression fell, and so did her gaze, so that she was looking at the carpet.
”…It makes me really happy.” Sean finished.
Ava frowned at him “…That’s not how I expected that sentence to go.” she admitted.
Sean shifted seats and sat next to her. “I think if anybody’s going to get how that feels it’s you, though.” he said. “Being both…really happy for somebody, but also hurting at the same time because you know their happiness is coming at the expense of your own?”
She nodded, eyes downcast again.
He stood to make her a cup of tea, and was nearly to the door when she spoke again. “You know I love you too, right?”
He hadn’t been expecting that at all, and just turned to give her the very reference image of a bewildered stare.
“I mean it!” She added. Having unbuttoned her coat, she left it behind as she stood up and slipped her arms around his waist. “I love you, Sean. I owe you everything, how could I not?”
Sean blinked a bit as that sank in, and then wrapped her up in his own arms and held on, fighting back tears.
Sure enough, Ava had turned on her own waterworks, but this time it was a kind of happy cry, not the misery he was so used to seeing. “I guess I’ve got a thing for selfless guys.” she said.
“I’m not selfless.” Sean disagreed, shaking his head against the side of hers. “I still wish you’d choose me.”
“But you’re going to let it happen?”
“Yeah” Sean didn’t even hesitate on that one. “If it’s what you want.”
She sighed, and kissed him, gently, on the cheek. “Lover, in some ways you’re more of a man than he’ll ever be.”
Sean let her go, not knowing how to respond to that. “Cup of tea?”
She laughed. “Okay fine, be all British.” she teased. “I just want you to know that…I’m sorry. I know this is cruel on you.”
“C’est la vie.” He shook his head, forgiving her. “We’re not calling it off just yet though, are we? There’s still a little while.”
“I think we’re past the point where I need somebody to carry me, now.” Ava said, and his heart sank a little. “So…let’s just enjoy each other, okay? No more drama, no more…heavy stuff. Just love. Can we do that?”
“Nothing would make me happier.”
They kissed again, a deep and affectionate one that was a marked contrast to the unregulated release-valve for pent-up emotions that had been their relationship so far, and left them both smiling.
He felt warm and alive.
“So…” Ava said. “Cup of tea?”
Date Point: 9y 2m 1w AV San Diego National Memorial, San Diego County, Southern California, USA, Earth
Gabriel Arés
The part Gabriel had trouble with was how clean the destruction had been.
A nuke the same size as the antimatter blast that had destroyed his home, his friends and his life would have thrust a spear of radioactive fallout deep into the heart of the USA, maybe even as far as Denver. Certainly, nobody would have been able to visit the Grand Canyon or Las Vegas again for centuries.
While the antimatter had created some very strange ionization effects at ground zero, these had faded inside minutes. It had, in its way, been a very clean wound. Buildings had been smashed apart, flattened or just plain vaporised. The crater had filled with sea water, creating a plume of steam that had been visible from space and which had altered the local weather. The wildfires had burned for months.
The whole city had been written off. There were only some sixteen hundred survivors or so, most of whom had moved on and tried to keep on living. They had lost a few—a cancer patient who’d been out of town visiting a specialist in Los Angeles, several suicides, and a young married couple who’d died somewhere up Mount Everest a year after the blast—but most of them were now established in getting on with the business of just being alive, and with new cities now being built on planets other than Earth…
Well, resettling San Diego would have just felt like walking on peoples’ graves.
Nature, naturally, had no such qualms, and in five years the debris field had overgrown with hardy shrubs like Creosote Bush and Manzanita, plus ferns and grasses. A few young trees had even found a home among the rubble, but by and large the ruins of San Diego belonged to wildflowers and delicate flowering bushes, the perfume of which was carried up the hillside by clean sea air.
It was beautiful.
The memorial planning had taken five years, and was intended to involve every one of the survivors, or somebody on their behalf. The idea was simple—an eternal flame had been set up, an elegant silver teardrop with holes around its equator that, when lit, should send flames flowing up and around the metal to lick off the top. It was mounted atop a five foot pole on a hillside overlooking the downtown crater.
The participants had all been asked to find a flat stone from wherever they had gone on to live, preferably as heavy as they could comfortably lift, and send it to the artist for preparation.
Adam’s slab of Cimbrean green slate, with its lone alien fossil, had caused quite a stir. He’d taken some of his precious leave time in order to deliver it, on the grounds that the artist might not believe that anybody could comfortably lift it, and Gabriel would have paid good money to see the look on the guy’s face when his boy walked in cradling an enormous chunk of alien geology in his arms.
That Cimbrean fossil now took pride of place. The artist had carved a groove to fit half the flame’s supporting pole and Adam’s contribution now sat at the heart of the tribute, peeking out of the top with the little spidery, whiskery thing that had once died in those ancient layers of extraterrestrial silt just peeking out of the top.
Everybody’s stone was visible, though. Even the very smallest one, a tiny palm-sized thing contributed by a little boy who had been just three months old at the time of the blast, visiting his grandparents in New Hampshire.
It was amazing hearing what some of them had got up to over five years. Moving off-world and joining the military seemed to be almost tame next to some of the stuff a few of the others had got up to. A beat cop that Gabriel had never met but shared SDPD history with had gone into the FBI and had talked down a hostage situation in Mississipi. There was a man from Linda Vista who’d become a monk, and a doctor from Alvarado for whom this was the first time setting foot on American soil since the tragedy.
For Gabe’s part, standing up for a long while was finally becoming less of a challenge. Five years of exercise and physiotherapy hadn’t repaired the nerve damage in his leg, but the muscles were stronger and steadier, his arms had strengthened to cope with resting his weight on his stick, and he no longer shook when standing upright for any length of time. It still hurt a bit, and always would, but he was spared the indignity of needing to sit down when so many others were standing respectfully.
There wasn’t a ceremony, exactly. They just circled the memorial, touching it, examining it, finding their stone and then, watched by the news cameras, the little boy stepped forward with a lit taper on the end of a pole, and touched it to the teardrop at the top.
It lit, flared, flickered, stabilized, and they watched the heat brown the metal.
Then, in ones, twos and threes, they turned away and left behind, having finally said goodbye.
John “BASEBALL” Burgess
“Okay, it’s a fucking sauna in here.”
WARHORSE had always struggled with the heat. He was just so big nowadays, and so dense, that he actively struggled if the temperature crept above seventy or so. Hell, ALL of the Operators were like that, but Adam had it worst.
A busy restaurant in LA during a heatwave was really not his environment at all.
“If you need to step outside to cool down a minute, it’s okay Grillsteak.” Ava told him.
John nodded his agreement, out of equal parts concern for his friend’s comfort, and seeing an opportunity to have a private word with Ava.
He’d been suspicious from the moment her forgiveness email came in after the move to Folctha. Even sitting down the deck of a C5, he’d been able to hear her shouting, and it had been FAR from the first such instance. It seemed like every letter or contact between Adam and his girl had gone tense or angry at some point, even when she’d sent him an envelope full of pictures of herself in pin-up poses wearing some of his old T-shirts—an event that Adam had been forced to endure much whooping, whistling and good-natured teasing about.
And then suddenly…all was forgiven? And there hadn’t been a single angry word since? Not so much as a bitter comment or a terse email?
John was certain he knew what that meant. Been there, done that, with two or three different girls in his life.
The problem was, he had no proof, which was why he’d been planning to talk to her very carefully and gently without going as far as an actual confrontation. Deep inside, he was a long way shy of impressed with her, even if he wasn’t quite ready to commit to angry just yet.
But, he had no proof.
Adam nodded, and gratefully excused himself to get some cool air, leaving Ava sipping at her Mojito opposite John.
“So…” he said, the moment his friend had awkwardly shouldered his way past the astonished diners and out of earshot. “Things are going way better with you two.”
She nodded happily around her drinking straw but didn’t comment.
That hadn’t gone as he’d planned it.
“I’m glad. Y’know, he was…off his game there for a while, after the move to Folctha.”
“Yeah.” she agreed. “I wasn’t exactly fair on him.”
That hadn’t gone as planned either.
Fuck it. Direct approach it was.
“Look…Ava, call me paranoid, but when things go from that bad to that good overnight, it makes me suspicious.”
“Are you a naturally suspicious person?” She asked, helping herself to a bread stick.
“If something seems too good to be true…” John replied, keeping eye contact.
She stopped chewing, and frowned at him as she swallowed. “What are you driving at, BASEBALL? Don’t dance around, put it out there.”
”…Have you found somebody else?”
She did something wholly unexpected and giggled. “Are you out of your-? Where would I find somebody to replace Adam?”
“Well…speaking from experience here, but maybe anybody who’s there might have been better for you, for a bit. Just to tide you over. Am I near the mark there?”
The couple of rapid blinks she managed and her slightly too neutral expression told him that he was. “Yeah? Speaking from experience, are you?”
“Yeah.”
“So you’ve cheated on your girls.” She stated.
“Once or twice.” he agreed.
“Why?”
“Young, dumb and horny. What’s your excuse?”
“I haven’t done anything to excuse.” She replied.
John saw right through that one—it may have had the words of a denial, but he knew an evasion when he heard it. “What, you think it’s okay?”
“Yeah, actually. I do.”
Things went off-script for John for the third time. “Uh…”
“Look, you said it yourself, he was off his game without me.” Ava told him. “Well, he’s still got me. And yeah, okay? It’s because I found somebody to ‘tide me the fuck over’. You want to talk about what’s okay? Is it okay to yank somebody around by their heart for four years? Is it okay for you to shove your nose in and suggest that my whole life should be about Adam?”
She leaned forward, and the only other person that John had ever seen wear a steel glare like that was Major Powell. “Especially when you’ve done it yourself? Fuck you! I don’t owe you or Adam a goddamn apology.”
A nearby diner cleared his throat and looked away, and she lowered her voice again. “Maybe you should stop thinking of me as ‘Adam’s girl’ or ‘the thing that keeps him going’.” she added, allowing the word ‘thing’ to freeze solid with contempt as she said it. “I’m Ava. I’m not his, I’m mine. And if I do whatever it takes to back him up and help him, it’s because I want to! You understand?”
“And I’m not just some meathead grunt.” John shot back. “I’m his brother, okay? I’m looking out for him. I’m not gonna let anybody hurt him.”
“You and me both.” she retorted, then sat back and picked up her Mojito. “We done?”
John paused, then nodded slowly and extended a hand over the table. “…it’d hurt him if we weren’t friends.” he pointed out.
“Yeah, it would.” she sipped her drink, not returning the gesture. “You proposing a truce?”
“Are we cool?”
“We’re not cool, no.” She replied, but leaned forward and shook his hand. “But you said it, I’m not gonna let anybody hurt him.”
Good enough.
By the time Adam returned with a waiter bearing a pedestal fan, he was delighted to find them getting along like old friends.
Date Point: 9y 2m 2w AV
HMS Sharman, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
James “Legsy” Jones
“Fair play, boys, I’m impressed…but for the love of fuck, why and how?”
“Come on, Legs. Both our Protectors are away, we wanted to surprise them.” Stevenson told him.
“With this?!”
“Hell yeah! They put those fuckin’ stupid Feet of theirs on everything, it’s our turn to leave our mark!”
“So the four of you painted a castle on our water tower.” Legsy put a hand to his brow to shade his eyes and get a better look at it.
“Only fair.” Sikes drawled. “They put little feet on everything, we put a frickin’ huge castle on ONE thing.”
“Quality over quantity.” Vandenberg nodded.
“That the motto of your love life, Rebar?” Price asked, and accepted a high-five from Murray.
“What can I say, your sister’s the best.”
“Oh, you fucking didn’t-!”
Rebar tried to scoot away and hide behind Titan as Price made a friendly grab for him, but Aggressors were, by training and vocation, so much faster and nimbler on their feet than Defenders. There was pretty soon a good-natured brotherly scuffle in the dirt, with Price grinding his fist painfully against Rebar’s head and both men laughing.
“Okay, you lot are way too full of beans.” Legsy commented, bringing the rough play to an immediate halt. “Tell you what. If you’re all so eager to prove that you can climb as well as our PJs do, there’s a load of windows on the main office building that’ve never been washed. I reckon the Major’ll be fuckin’ impressed if they’re all nice and sparkling clean at the end of the day, and he might give Admiral Knight the nod for letting that castle you put on his water tower stay there…”
“Aww, Legs!” Titan complained.
“What? I’m just making a suggestion.” Legs folded his arms and grinned. “Because otherwise you’re going to have to go back up there anyway and strip that nice castle you worked so hard to paint right off it again, aren’t you?”
The Defenders exchanged glances. “We’ll…go get the climbing gear.” Vandenberg said.
“Fuck aye.” Legsy nodded. “Have fun.”
He let them get on with it, and made a mental note to get the drone footage that Sikes had definitely taken, even if he’d deny it at first. It’d put the Major in a good mood to watch it, he knew.
“And won’t Adam an’ BASEBALL have a surprise when they get back…” he asked of nobody, turning back to admire the impromptu mural once again. Considering it had been done in the dead of night by four men in climbing gear fifty feet in the air, it was remarkably good. They must have been sneaking up there for days pencilling in the outline.
Adam and BASEBALL, meanwhile, would be back from leave in two days.
He gave it three days before there were Feet somewhere on that castle.
Date Point: 9y 2m 2w 2d AV London, England, Earth
Sean Harvey
“Hey.”
“Hey. I saw you on the news. That’s quite a memorial they built.”
“Yeah.”
Sean smiled as Ava hung her coat up and kissed him, then frowned at the door. “No Charlotte or Ben?”
“Tonight’s…not really appropriate for them.”
Her tone of voice finally got through to him, and Sean sighed. “You’re calling it off, aren’t you?”
“You always knew I was going to sometime soon.”
“Always kind of hoped you wouldn’t.” he replied, but his heart wasn’t in it. He’d known there was no changing her mind.
”…Come to bed.” She offered.
“I thought you were calling it off?”
“I am.” she agreed. “So let’s make the last time special.”
”…Alright. Grab your coat.”
“Huh?”
“I want more than just ‘come to bed’, duck. It’s a nice day out – let’s use it.”
Bemused, Ava put her coat back on and he took her hand.
It wasn’t a lavish date—at the best of times, Sean barely had enough money coming in to keep on top of his bills, council tax and student fees, meaning that any romantic notions of paying for expensive romantic moments like horse-drawn carriage rides in the park or whatever were out.
Mostly, they walked, held hands, talked and just enjoyed one another’s company. Sean’s fitness had improved hugely over the years, from daily walks with her. Previously he would have been sore and tired after a mile—now, a three hour gentle stroll down Archway Road and through Holloway to the City and onto Garden Bridge didn’t trouble him at all.
Sunset was staining the day’s few high clouds a brilliant pink and purple by the time they stood together, looking out over grey waters and Soho, surrounded by the scent and hissing of plants in the breeze.
“You’re right.” Ava commented, after they’d been silent a minute or so. “This is…right.”
Sean put his arm round her waist. “It’s going to be hard, you know.”
“What?”
“Being just your friend.”
She looked down at her feet, blinking, then hugged him. “Please try.” she pleaded. “I’d hate to lose you.”
“You’re not losing me duck.” he promised, stroking her hair. “I just said it’d be hard, not that I couldn’t do it.”
She let go again, wiping her cheeks dry. “You’re a lot tougher than you look, you know that?”
“You seem to bring out that quality in people.”
She didn’t answer, just sighed and nuzzled up against him until the sun went down.
They caught the tube back, still not saying anything. They just held hands on the walk back to Sean’s house. Only once they were inside and the door was locked did Ava break the comfortable silence.
“Come to bed.”
Sean took her hand, and for the last time she led him up the stairs.
Date Point: 9y 5m AV Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Jessica Olmstead
“THREE! TWO! ONE!”
Cheers erupted as gravity settled on everybody like a comfortable warm coat.
Jess and Gabe both shared a sigh of relief. There was just something about low gravity that the human body never quite adapted to. No matter how familiar it became, no matter how good you got at adjusting your preconceptions on how big such a small difference really was, there was just something in the bones and muscles that hankered for good old nine-point-eight meters per second per second.
The engineers who had installed Folctha’s new gravity generator shook hands or exchanged high-fives, and then got on with the business of tidying up all of the generator’s functional bits into the pedestal of the sculpture that had been selected to house it.
It was just a modified warp engine really, and therefore disarmingly small—Jess could have easily held it in one hand. It could have lived hidden away in any basement or office in Folctha, but public opinion had been that it should be somewhere that they could visit, and so by far the longest delay in installing it had been the wait while a sculpture had gone through the process of being commissioned and built, starting with approaching several different artists, then putting the matter to public opinion via Cimbrean’s burgeoning colonial internet.
The winning design was equal parts sculpture and water feature, an angular slate funnel named “Well” that echoed both the artificial gravity well that it would house, and also a source of water, for which purpose it caught the predictable nightly Cimbrean rains and allowed the very gravity it was generating to draw the rainwater through a filter, dispensing it via drinking fountain.
It now formed the centrepiece of New World Plaza. What had once been just a field amidst the temporary buildings of the early Folctha colony was now a brick-paved area with flower beds and market stalls that sold everything from clothing and blankets, books to hyper-modern gizmos like stasis fridges, solar-powered drone quadcopters and holographic TVs. There was even an e-tattoo artist, plus an assortment of missionaries, street preachers and pamphlet-dispensers.
Folctha, in short, had grown up. There was nothing left of the frontier huddle of little chalets and dirt roads. Nowadays everything was paved, the roads designed so that the utilities that ran beneath them could be serviced without disrupting traffic.
Nowadays, the buildings were three, four, five stories tall and a pale grey that looked white in the height of the day, hung with lights and banners of fibre-optic cloth.
Nowadays, the Faith Centre was just the first of many, the original Folctha Medical Center was now dwarfed by the Sara Tisdale Memorial Hospital, Delaney Row was a wide avenue lined with young silver birch trees and full of government buildings.
Everything was inspired by the alien palace that had once stood at the top of the hill, now rebuilt and permanent home to the Thing. Its looping geometric lines and rounded rooms had come to define Cimbrean architecture. Nobody seemed to mind that it was originally Corti architecture—the opportunity to riff on alien themes had been too good to pass up, and in many ways the coldly mathematical underpinnings of the original owner’s vision had been hugely exceeded and improved upon.
And now, finally, they were under Earth gravity again.
“You okay?” Jess asked Gabe. He squeezed her hand—despite his improving fitness, she never did quite manage to not worry about him. She knew he found it mostly endearing, but she’d rather irritate him sometimes than miss a moment when he genuinely needed help. He was good about admitting to those, when they came along.
“That actually feels better.” he told her quietly.
“Are you sure?”
“Mmhm.” he nodded.
“Chief?”
Cimbrean Colonial Security was Gabe’s success story—a modern, trim and professional police force whose high-vis yellow jackets were a familiar sight patrolling the city in pairs on foot, on bicycles, and in sturdy electric SUVs. Gabe had admitted in private that he would have preferred they be armed but Folctha was, after all, a British colony and the citizens had largely expressed a preference that their police force not be armed during their normal duties, reserving the firepower only for when it was needed.
“Yes, Hugh?”
“Bit of a disturbance down in the Alien Quarter, sir.”
Jess gave his hand a squeeze, kissed his cheek and pointed a thumb towards home with a wry smile. “I’ll see you later, ‘chief’.” she promised.
Gabe gave her a grateful smile and limped alongside Bailey towards the waiting CCS SUV.
Jess took in the dispersing crowd, and then headed for home.
She had to politely navigate a gauntlet of parents wanting to discuss their child with her. Despite the known detrimental effects of low gravity on a child’s growth and development, enough families had stuck it out, making do with trusting the small gravity generator that hummed gently to itself under Jess’ desk and the ones in gyms to make up the difference.
It wasn’t entirely clear if that trust was well-founded. None of the kids seemed to have anything wrong with them, but they were all growing up tall. Whatever the truth, the concerns had been enough to discourage anybody from trying to raise infants and toddlers in Folctha. Ever since the Tisdales had gone back to Earth, every new conception had been grounds for slight communal sorrow, knowing that one of their neighbours was leaving for however many years.
Hopefully, the gravity generator would change that. It would certainly save Jess’s job—if the current generation had finished growing up and no new youth had come along to replace them, the school would have been completely redundant.
Now, though, there was hope that some of those young parents might return, and that Folctha could move on with the business of becoming a real, permanent place for families.
All in all, the future was looking bright.