Date Point 10y2m2w AV Demeter Road, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Sean Harvey
“Do you think he’s going to ask you again?”
“Not any time soon… we’re still putting it back together, you know?”
Ava was nursing a coffee on the couch opposite the recliner Sean had claimed for himself. It was still hard to see her looking so relaxed and at peace in a relationship with Adam, but that wound was healing for Sean. It was clear that the two of them doted on one another, which definitely helped. If the last month or so had continued to be the same old story of neglect and frustration then he’d have suggested calling it off, and guessed that Ava would have finally seen the light.
But… she’d been vindicated. Once Adam had finally seen the need to actually connect with his girlfriend then by her own admission he’d been perfect, devoting every second they could spend together to them. He took her on dates, they enjoyed the young woods around Folctha together, she was in the best shape of her life thanks to his one-on-one attention… it sounded idyllic.
“I thought things were going well?” Sean asked her.
“It is!” she agreed. “It’s just… you don’t put a relationship back together overnight. Even with the nice apartment and all the time we’re spending together, you know…”
“Right. All that time apart, all the changes.” Sean agreed.
“He’s not changed as much as I was afraid he would.” she conceded, setting her coffee down. “Sure, he’s big as a bus nowadays and he’s got all these skills and training but… he’s still got that goofy laugh, those stupid dorky jokes. Whenever he’s being romantic, it’s like he’s been planning it for three weeks…” She sighed, toying with a stray curl of hair. “I’ve probably changed more, deep down.”
“How so?”
“Just… things, you know? My way of looking at things.” she shrugged. “I don’t know. I just… I think…”
Whatever she was trying to think aloud went un-thought at the distant sound of a door slamming and a rapid rhythmic thudding sound that grew stronger by the second. Ava grinned and stood up as what were unmistakably the footfalls of an extremely heavy man came thumping up the last flight of steps. “He’s home early! That’s great, that means it must have gone-”
Adam didn’t bother with his key. The doorframe and lock both disintegrated as he just swatted the door so hard that even one of the hinges broke, leaving it hanging drunkenly from the top corner. His expression wouldn’t have looked out of place on an angry war deity, and Ava actually shrieked a little and took a shocked couple of steps back.
Sean’s own reaction was no less violently startled—he flinched away from the broken door and wound up having to scramble to his feet to avoid tipping over the chair arm and onto the floor.
Ava had retreated even further across the room as Adam bore down on her, until her back was against the wall and she was penned in against it by the palm he’d smacked down right next to her head. She was wearing any expression that was the very picture of equal parts bewilderment and fright. From where he was standing, Sean couldn’t see Adam’s face, but he could see the rage simmering in every line of those titanic muscles.
For a deadly few seconds, the only sound was the creak of the last tortured hinge swaying back and forth, as Ava’s face went from intimidated shock, to dawning horror.
“Shit.” she squeaked. “You know.”
For all the fury of his entrance, Adam’s voice was dangerously quiet and level. “You were stupid enough to talk to BASEBALL.” he pointed out.
However Ava wanted to respond, it didn’t come out except as a silent mouthing of the start of a word, and some desperate looking around, blinking rapidly as she tried to think of what to say. She cowered and gave an involuntary terrified gasp when Adam bunched a fist and drove it into the wall so hard that the plaster caved in.
“Where do I start?” He growled. “All this time? And who- was it this skinny shit here?”
He rounded on Sean who backed away, raising his hands as if they’d do any good at warding off somebody who out-massed him a couple of times over.
Adam took three smart steps forward and immediately had Sean by the front of his shirt, yanking him around so hard that he heard the seams fray. “YOU?! You wanna own up to this? Did you-?”
There was no refuge save for honesty. Sean did the best job he could of straightening and looking Adam in the eye, swallowed, and nodded. He knew neither if his head was about to go the same way as the wall and the door, nor what he might do to stop it if it was.
Rather than knocking his block off, Adam just made a disgusted noise and gave him a contemptuously gentle shove, landing Sean on his backside a few feet away. He turned and stalked back to Ava, who’d moved out of the corner he’d trapped her in and was watching him wide-eyed, hunched over and trembling, with her hands hugging her upper arms.
“You know what BASEBALL said you said?” He demanded. “He said you said you don’t owe me a fucking apology. What the fuck?!”
Ava finally found her voice. “Hear me out.” she pleaded.
This was not, apparently, what Adam had wanted to hear. “HEAR YOU OUT?!” he barked, and she backed away two stumbling steps as he took a pace toward her. “Hear you out?! Sure! Sure I’ll fucking hear you out! You’ve got FIVE seconds to explain yourself, Ava!”
“I-”
“Four.”
“Adam-”
“Three.”
“It was that or break up with you!” she blurted, finally finding something resembling her confidence again. She was still shaking, but there was an ‘I’m-not-going-down-without-a-fight’ edge to it now.
Adam paused in his countdown and just stared at her. For her part, Ava wrung her hands and stared right back, still trembling like a leaf but clearly determined to say her piece.
“You’re all I have of home.” she said. “You and Dad-”
“Don’t you dare call him that!” Adam snarled.
”…I can’t lose you, and I was going to.” she forged ahead. “I reached the end of my- I couldn’t do it any more, I was sending so much your way and getting nothing back and I ran out, and it was… I had to reach out to somebody.”
“And you couldn’t fucking talk to m e?!” Adam demanded.
“I DID!” she shot back. “Every time! Every fucking time, Adam I told you time after time and when did you listen? You didn’t!”
“BULLSHIT!” Adam exploded. Ava’s fire was up and she looked like she was going to keep arguing, but he took another step forward, she backed into the kitchen area, and this time the poor refrigerator took the brunt of his rage, drawing a fearful gasp out of Ava in place of the tirade she’d clearly wanted to unleash. “I listened!” he insisted. “But what did you expect me to do, go AWOL? Is that what you’d want instead? Me in prison and all that time and pain wasted?”
“I-”
Adam prodded her in the chest, hard. She gasped and rubbed at the bruised spot. “I went through hell, and the only thing got me through was thinking you had my back.” he growled. “Broken bones, torn muscles, nearly drowning, pain pain pain, day in, day out for Five. Fucking. Years. And don’t even get me started on some of the nightmares I’ve had because of what I’ve learned!”
He prodded her again. “ALL while having to put up with the exact same loneliness that you couldn’t handle! You think all that time away from you was easy for me? And I’ve had temptation, oh yeah I have! More than a passing little devil, do you know how easy it is for guys like me to get laid?”
“Well-”
“SHUT UP!!” The fridge rocked as it suffered further abuse. “Do you know how often I gave in? Do you know how often I thought about giving in?”
“Then-”
“NOT EVEN FUCKING ONCE!!“
In the aftermath of that roar, Sean could have sworn the loudest sound in the room was his own heartbeat, then Adam’s finger curled back from under Ava’s nose and his head dropped. “Not once. Not even once. Not once.” he mourned. “Not one single goddamn time, Ava. I did all of this for you. To keep you safe, to…”
He trailed off.
Ava was weeping openly now. The fear in her body language was gone—for the first time since Sean had known her, she looked ashamed.
“But…” she put a hand on Adam’s face and he swatted it aside to glare at her again. “Adam, all I ever wanted was you.”
Adam didn’t move for a moment. Then he swayed upright, backed off, and gave her a long, slow, tearful appraisal. “Right.” he grunted. “It’s all about what you want.”
“Adam-”
“Fuck you, Ava. I don’t know what happened to you, but I never fell in love with a selfish backstabbing whore.”
“Adam-!”
He spun, strode to the door, and put the last hinge out of its misery with a petulant backhand. “Get out of my house.” he ordered, and was gone.
Date Point 10y2m2w AV Commune of Females, Wi Kao City, Gao
Regaari
“You are approaching a commune of females, male. Identify yourself.”
Regaari was in no mood for games. The message from WARHORSE was far too important to pass to Ayma digitally—this was a conversation, and one that he was itching to have.
“You can’t be serious, Sister Layra, you’ve seen me every third or fourth day for a quarter of a year, it’s me!” He pointed out, making a bee-line for the door.
He nearly walked into her ceremonial fusion spear, which was suddenly charged and spitting hot while aimed levelly at his chest. Behind it, her ears were up and her eyes bright with dutiful challenge.
“Identify. Yourself.” she repeated.
Frustration, outrage and the burning need to deliver his message had badly eroded Regaari’s composure anyway. Having a weapon levelled at him was the final insult that forced him to do something that, under normal circumstances, no sane male would have even considered—he snarled at a female.
“Regaari. To deliver a message to Mother Ayma. Now get out of my way you witless, parasite-infested, officious plodding four-paw!“
Her speartip lowered and her ears rotated backwards out of sheer surprise and, whether out of genuine intimidation or whether she had finally got her head around the urgency of his mission, she stood meekly aside after a moment’s consideration.
Regaari swept past her.
Unlike the Whitecrest enclave, the Commune of Females wasn’t a single architecturally planned building but several, built organically over the centuries as the needs of the females had changed and as available funds and labour had dictated. Not that the females were ever short on either funds or labour thanks to the thousands of attention-hungry males who lived in the city outside their walls.
Still, at some point a senior Mother had declared that the entrance to the commune needed to be something both imposing and beautiful, and so an appropriately grand building, far wider than it was tall, had been constructed. From the outside, its most striking features were its sweeping white stone stairs and the doors at their top—huge Takwood things with borders of angular geometric silver filigree that were only ever opened for important occasions. The actual entrances were the rather more discreet though similarly decorated frosted-glass sliding doors to either side, one of which whispered open for him as he approached, and was ignored as he passed through.
Impressive though it was outside, Regaari had always thought that the inside of the commune’s grand building was by far more beautiful.
The floor was an irregular library of differently coloured slate tiles, left naturally just a little rough on their upper surface, but still smooth enough for completely unimpeded movement. Lighting was provided by hidden lamps which bounced warm yellow light up into the vault of the ceiling. At ankle height in the wall, hidden projectors sent ripples of a faintly greenish hue playing over the slate floor tiles, creating a watery effect which neatly complimented the real flowing water that rose in a fountain behind the Takwood doors before being sent to run and chatter down twin shallow meandering channels that reached out into each wing of the building before vanishing into the walls to emerge outside and feed the ornamental ponds.
Every inch of wall was trellis or bas-relief. Regaari always had to take a moment to admire the hanging plants, attended by delicate little flying drones. They had been carefully chosen so that some were always in flower no matter the season, and right now the grand concourse was kissed with delicate whites and blues.
Mothers and Sisters were walking and chatting, sitting on the benches, reading. There was an air of tension that Regaari could smell, and feel in the fur of the back of his neck. Several of the nearby females glanced at him, saw a Whitecrest male, and promptly and obviously turned away to keep their conversation private. He noticed Sister Myun watching him, and the two shared an affectionate though subtle mutual pricking of ears at one another. She had been pulled from gate guard duty for the duration of her pregnancy though she still loitered in the concourse, as much because she loved it there as because she was (by her own estimation) about the most competent of the commune’s guardian sisters.
Certainly she was the strongest and most highly trained, having spent much of her adolescence blending the Gung Fu that she had learned from Xiù with stances and styles more appropriate for a Gaoian, many of which were now part of Whitecrest’s training regime. Regaari had sparred with her during their courtship, and had never once managed to knock her off her feet – the young female could float and flow like dawn mist when she wanted to.
Regaari glanced around to quickly check whether Ayma was present, then concluded that Myun had just as much right to know.
“You know, Sister Layra reported you arriving.” she said as he approached, laying aside her tablet. “I think you impressed her.”
“That may not have been wise.” Regaari conceded. “But this is important, and she was in my way.”
“What’s so important that you’d snap at a commune guard like?” Myun asked. “I mean, Layra probably wants to mate with you now, but if it had been anybody else you-”
“The humans found Shoo.” Regaari interrupted her, ignoring that nugget of intel for the time being.
Myun surged to her feet. “Shoo’s safe?!”
“They picked her up from an escape pod this morning.” Much as he’d have preferred to keep the original, Regaari had to admit that having a prosthetic paw with a built in gesture-based control interface for his data was unbelievably convenient. He summoned WARHORSE’s message and sent it to Myun’s device, which she snatched up and interrogated eagerly.
She impressed and pleased Regaari by reaching up to the communicator clipped to her ear and pinching it before he had even thought to ask her. “Security Central, Mother Ayma has a priority message waiting on the grand concourse. Call for her please. Priority message for Mother Ayma, grand concourse.”
She listened to the response, then growled a little. Her contract with Regaari had earned Myun some prestige—a fact which spoke volumes of Regaari’s own reputation—but she was still very much the junior on the security forces, and somebody somewhere was keen to keep her reminded of that fact. Nothing ever went as swiftly and smoothly as she would have liked. “It’s a personal message, Central, but very important and private. Please call for her. Thank you.”
She sighed and unclipped the communicator, muttering a loaned human curse once it was safely turned off. “Bitch.”
Regaari chittered quietly. “Anyway, I don’t know more than is in the message there. Though, if WARHORSE thinks she had a rough time of it… I’m a little worried.”
“Is there any way to find out more?” Myun asked.
“It’s a lot easier to get a message from the SOR than to the SOR…” Regaari mused. Both of them pricked their ears up as they heard the commune-wide announcement for Ayma.
“Ayma has Yulna’s ear.” Myun pointed out, borrowing yet another human phrase. She did that a lot, peppering her language with deathworlder colloquialisms. Regaari had almost begun developing the same habit, but had carefully avoided it—he had the political consequences to think about. Myun on the other hand seemed to have accepted that her enthusiasm for all things human was equal parts profitable and isolating. Either that or she was too headstrong to care.
“True, but Yulna is not Mother-Supreme yet.” Regaari pointed out. “She may not have as much influence as you think.”
“She’s going to win, and the humans know it.” Myun retorted. She’d been a stubborn cub, and was now a stubborn and slightly naive adult. The fact that Regaari agreed with her assessment was unimportant.
“What’s that expression? About those birds you shouldn’t count?”
”…before they hatch. Chickens.” Myun finished for him, deflating. “You’re right. But… it’s Shoo.”
They both jumped a little at Ayma’s voice. “Shoo? What about Shoo?”
Regaari stood and they exchanged the nose-rub of old friends. “They found her. She’s alive.”
Ayma made a squeaking noise of delight and relief and sank onto the bench beside Myun, ears swivelling like robots in an assembly line as she tried to settle on a reaction. “Where is she?! Can we see her?”
“I don’t know yet.” Regaari told her. “I only just got the message. She’s back on Earth. It sounds like she got into more trouble.”
Ayma nodded. “That would be Shoo.” she agreed, then stood up again. “So we’re going to Earth.”
Both Regaari and Myun’s ears flattened. “You’re… you can’t be serious.” Myun squeaked.
“I have waited nearly ten years to finally see her again and… ‘kick her ass’ for running away.” Ayma proclaimed. “I am not letting a little thing like a class twelve deathworld get in my way.”
She turned to Regaari. “Besides, didn’t you say that the humans wanted to give you some kind of an award?”
“Well… yes, but nobody ever mentioned actually going to Earth.” Regaari replied. “The pollens in the air on that planet would kill us!”
“We can wear breathing masks.”
“The gravity-”
“Excursion suits. I’ve had a long time to think about this, Regaari: I’m going. I would like you to come with me.”
“Don’t you have a cub to look after?” Regaari asked.
“I also have a Sister who needs my help.” Ayma retorted. “Of the two, Shoo will need me more: the cub is nearly weaned.”
“She’s Clan, Regaari.” Myun pointed out. “What would you do if she was a Whitecrest?”
Regaari hesitated, then ducked his head slowly. “I’d already be calling for a shuttle.”
The females ducked their own heads, then Myun sighed. “I wish I could come with you.” she said.
“You’re pregnant.” Ayma pointed out.
“I know, that’s why I said ‘I wish I could’.” Myun agreed. “But take a message from me?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll… take a Whitecrest ship to Cimbrean and arrange things.” Regaari said. “That should take long enough for your cub to be weaned.”
“Good.” Ayma scratched at her ear, thoughtfully. “I’ll… go tell Yulna she needs to do without me for a while.”
“Ayma… she’s been in stasis for five human years.” Regaari said. “And it was an escape pod. She may be a bit fragile.”
Ayma just chittered.
“When was Shoo ever not fragile?”
Date Point 10y2m2w AV Vancouver General Hospital, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Earth.
Colonel Ted Bartlett
“She’s tough.”
The family were waiting outside, pacing and chewing their fingernails and desperate to be let in. Not that it would do them any good. Miss Chang was sedated, and would remain so for several days. She had been jumped straight to Scotch Creek from Caledonia’s onboard jump array and had been airlifted from there to Vancouver General, still inside a stasis pod. She had arrived on an operating table that was perfectly prepared for her and that fact had undoubtedly saved her life.
The fact that she had even made it that far spoke volumes of her tenacity.
Her doctor was in no mood to entertain military scientists, however. “She undoubtedly is.” She agreed. “But I would very much appreciate knowing why I’ve got an Army colonel in my ITU, please.”
Ted nodded. “Doctor Spilny, I need to swear you to secrecy on a few things. This is going to be important to her care, but it’s also important for… well.” he handed over a tablet with a non-disclosure agreement on it. The doctor skimmed it—it wasn’t long—and then scrawled her signature and pressed her thumb to the biometric pad for good measure.
“Miss Chang is one of the few people we know of to survive nervejam trauma.” Ted told her, after he’d countersigned. “Are you familiar with nervejam at all?”
“I heard it’s some kind of alien weapon that can induce fatal seizures…” Spilny conceded.
“It’s… a lot nastier than that.” Ted revealed, solemnly. “I’ll spare you the jargon, but it works by creating a field that disrupts some specific types of quantum activity that’s part of the brain’s normal function. Or, rather, forces it to behave a certain-” he trailed off. “The point is that while the effect may wear off instantly, the damage it does is permanent.”
“Her brain is… scarred?”
Ted nodded, grimly. “Intimately. On a cellular chemistry level. Or… most likely, anyway. The testimony of her friends would suggest as much.”
Mr. Etsicitty and Ms. Buehler had weathered the vacuum of space rather better than Ms. Chang, and were both recovering elsewhere in the building. Etsicitty’s foot was attracting prosthetic and rehabilitation specialists from all over North America, who were sharing detailed footage and images of it with their colleagues overseas. By all accounts the interface between flesh and synthetic material was ingeniously self-sterilising, and might well revolutionize the field of human prosthetics. Bartlett, as a lifelong enthusiast for science, was keeping a weather-eye on that development, but it was outside of his field.
To be frank, so was the case of Ms. Chang, but nobody else was even half as qualified as Ted was, so…
Doctor Spilny frowned at her patient, deep in thought. “Prognosis?”
“I’m not qualified to give one. Obviously, actually testing the long term effects of Nervejam would be… unethical.”
“Lab rats?”
“You can’t… really scale up the behaviour of rats to the behaviour of humans…” Ted squirmed. “But what we suspect is that any existing psychological tendencies or predispositions are likely to be exacerbated. The other thing we noticed was a spike in learning retention and neuroplasticity for some time after exposure, which then tapered off to below previous levels, leaving the subjects, uh, strongly influenced by whatever they were doing immediately after the trauma.”
Spilny frowned at her patient again, watching her chest rise and fall with a click-hiss-wheeze as the ventilator did the work on her behalf.
Ted gave her a minute to think, which he used to produce a copy of the research paper from his briefcase. “The paper should explain more. We don’t really have any advice on what you can do for her, but any observations you can make or data you can gather might help us help her and other future victims.”
Spilny nodded, and accepted it. “I’ll be sure to do that.”
“There’s one last thing…”
“Which is?”
Ted produced a handheld implant scanner from his briefcase. It was little more than a grey cuboid, not dissimilar to the tricorders he’d watched on Star Trek growing up. “May I just lean in there and perform a scan?”
“It’s not invasive, is it?”
“Ultrasound.”
Spilny just gestured to the bed invitingly. Ted leaned in past the assorted tubes, lines and leads, and pressed the scanner gently but firmly against Ms. Chang’s forehead.
Three seconds later, the LED on its back lit up green, and he breathed a sigh of relief. While the SOR and the medical staff on Caledonia had both already checked her for alien hardware, Ted’s own device was the most recent and sophisticated model that wouldn’t be fooled by nonmetallic implants, as had happened in the tragic case of Sara Tisdale’s murderer.
“Thank you, doctor.” He straightened up, pocketing the scanner.
“Thank you, colonel.”
Ted let himself out. He didn’t make eye contact with the family hovering outside, just nodded politely, touched his fingers to his brow, and made himself scarce, wishing he could do more.
Date Point 10y2m2w AV HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
John Burgess
It was Good Movie Night. Sometimes, the guys wanted a good movie to counterbalance all the awful ones they like to watch, and it was a good way to round off a mission day. The dorm was clean, they were all showered, and now there were a few hours of quiet time to lounge around in ranger shorts and watch something.
Hence they were watching ‘The Pink Panther’. The old one, with Peter Sellers. That had been the plan at least, right up until somebody had asked where WARHORSE had got to and John had tried to explain.
“And you didn’t think to tell him sooner?” TITAN was asking, plainly angry.
“Man, when did I even have the chance?” The movie was on pause and the usual comfortable puppy-pile on the couch had broken up into a standing argument.
Sikes opened his mouth to comment, and John nodded in anticipation of what he was going to say. “Okay, okay, yeah, lots of times, but come on man, timing! We were all on edge, we were all… then just as I was about to tell him he went and proposed to her, and then before he had a chance to get over that we had the mission, and…”
“And you should of told him!” TITAN asserted.
“You’re supposed to be our fucking brother man, and you’re lying to Horse of all people about his girl fucking around?” Sikes agreed.
Firth weighed in. “You two are like the bromance of this outfit, how the fuck are you gonna stand by and let Horse get Jodied?”
“He-”
“We’re supposed to trust you with our lives.” Blaczynski added.
That stung. It downright hurt, in fact. “You know you can.” John protested, quietly.
“Do we? ‘Cause if you can help Horse’s girl suck some other asshole’s skinny fuckin’ dick-”
“Say what?” John rounded on TITAN. “I didn’t fuckin’ help her!”
“You let her keep on doing it, dintcha?” Blaczynski retorted.
”‘Cause the alternative was ripping Horse’s heart out of his fucking chest at exactly the wrong moment, man!” John illustrated the mental image with a gesticulation. “We wouldn’t HAVE him if I’d done it before now. You think he’d have made it through without at least, like, the idea of her? And I’m not sure I’d have made it through without him!”
“You think it was a choice between this, or no Protectors at all?” REBAR checked.
John sighed and nodded. “Could be.” he agreed. “Even Horse has his limits, man.”
The three Defenders exchange quick glances, communicating silently.
“Tell me he was at least pissed at you.” Firth demanded.
“He was fucking furious, bro.”
“Surprised he didn’t tie your ass in a pretzel.” TITAN said. “Fuck, he’s gonna have a face like Armageddon landing when he gets back…”
“Yup.” John agreed.
“Yeah well, you fucking deserve it.” Sikes folded his arms.
“C’mon don’t be like that, it’s not like I did it to help her.”
“But you DID help her though.”
“Lads.”
Everyone looked at Murray. Murray was like that—you could completely forget he was there until he opened his mouth, and softly Scottish though his speech might have been, everyone shut up and listened. Never mind that he was the smallest of the SOR’s enlisted men, he commanded attention whenever he chose to.
”…Let’s just watch the movie.”
Everyone paused, then settled a bit. There was a round of nods and murmured agreements, and the guys all sat back down on the couch.
BASEBALL was left standing. “Uh…hey, lemme in there…” he ventured
“Couch is full, John.” Firth told him, not looking at him.
“Dude, I was sitting right there a minute ago-”
“Couch. Is full.”
John directed a pleading look first at REBAR, who was avoiding eye contact, and then at Murray who gave him a complicated facial shrug which said quite clearly that he wasn’t about to rekindle the argument by disagreeing and that John was just going to have to put up with it.
After a moment’s hesitation, John settled for a resigned throat-clear and sitting cross-legged on the hard, cold floor next to the couch, rather than wrapped up with his buddies. It didn’t feel right at all, and not even Sellers’ dignified on-screen antics could fix that.
They watched in silence for a little while, even managing a collective chuckle at the exchange – ‘If I were my father, I’d have you tortured.’ ‘If you were your father, I doubt very much if I would have kissed you.‘
The tension seemed to be just about starting to dissipate—or maybe that was just wishful thinking on John’s part – when there was a distant, muffled roar of some kind and the whole building shook as if a bomb had gone off nearby. Huge, metal-framed and reinforced as it was, they still knocked the couch over in scrambling off it alert for danger.
“What the fuck?” Firth asked.
“Sounded like it came from the gym.” Murray aimed a thumb towards it. “Ah… shit, you don’t think Adam…?”
He was left standing as the rest of them took off at a run.
Waiting for them in the gym was a sight more disturbing than anything John had seen on Capitol Station or in training. Adam’s jerry-can was lying at the bottom of the wall at the far end of the gym from where it was usually kept and had burst open, spilling buckshot all over the floor. The wall itself had a crater in it about halfway up, where the cinder blocks had been smashed in by something very heavy hitting it with huge force.
The 100lb plates were all off their racks and scattered around the gym like schoolyard frisbees. The spring steel barbell at the deadlift station—the one commissioned especially for the Protectors – had bent beyond hope of repair, the one at the squat rack was now roughly the shape of a hockey stick, and Adam was sitting in the middle of the floor, cradling his elbow and sobbing.
BASEBALL was at his side in a flash. “Oh man, brother, I- oof!”
The air rushed straight out of him and he felt a stab of pain in his ribs as he found himself caught in the kind of crushing bear-hug that might have pulped an alien and badly hurt most humans.
There was nothing to do but put his own arms around his best friend’s huge shoulders and hold on, rocking him back and forth.
The guys all left him to it and found stuff to do. Murray, Firth and Blaczynski set about cleaning up the gear, while the Defenders gathered round the damaged wall and held a hushed consultation with one another.
Just as the last of the plates was being racked up, REBAR sidled over and gave John a tap on the shoulder.
“Dude, uh… that was a structural wall he busted.” He whispered. “We kinda need everyone out of here while we make it safe.”
John nodded at him, then gave Adam’s back a hefty pat. “Hey… Horse. Man, we gotta move, okay? Come on, let’s get you something to eat.”
Adam nodded against his chest, and asked, in the most childish tone that John had ever heard him produce, “…Can I have Eggos?”
Everyone had to pause to look at one another, despite the broken wall. Adam Arés – Mister Nutrition himself, the best cook on the team – and Eggos? Those were just two concepts that didn’t go together, but now was not the time to argue.
“Sure brother. Sure. All the Eggos you want, man. Come on. And I’ll sort that elbow out while they’re cooking.”
”…okay.”