Date Point 10y2m2w1d AV Byron Group head offices, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Kevin Jenkins
“My God, what happened?”
Kevin could see why the question was being whispered. Moses Byron, who was always the picture of smiling confidence and vitality, looked stressed. Pale, even. Rather than striding into the room in his usual blustering style, he more… shuffled. Thoughtfully.
“Did somebody die?”
“Shh.”
Byron took a moment to survey the crew of BGEV-8, assorted board members and department heads, and cleared his throat. “Been a development.” he croaked, and cleared his throat again. “This, uh… this planning session is cancelled. I’ll let you know personally when we reschedule. For now, uh…”
He coughed. “Rachael. Recall GEV-9 and GEV-10. Tell them under no circumstances are they to use their jump drives—they’ve got to come back the old-fashioned way.”
“Mister Byron, that’ll take them months-!” somebody protested.
Moses held up his hand. “I know. I ain’t changing my mind. Oh, and, uh… Trevor, some fine folks will be along later today to take a good look at your department. Give them full access. To everything, and I mean everything, including Project Ophanim.”
Nobody said a word—they just exchanged bewildered and slightly scared expressions. Finally, Byron spoke again, looking at Kevin. “Everybody whose name isn’t Kevin Jenkins, go find something to do. I don’t care what it is, go home early if you want. Go on.”
People practically fled.
“Based on the little… ‘chat’ I just had with the halls of power in this great nation of ours…” Byron began, once the last door was closed “It seems I need to hire me a no-man. Somebody who, if I’ve got fifty people kissing my ass and telling me we’re golden, if I look at you and you shake your head, we bury that idea and never speak of it again. Sound like something you can do?”
“Does this thing come with a salary?” Kevin asked. He judged it correctly—Byron laughed.
“Hah! And an office.” he said. “Though if half the things I hear about your cooking are true, I might include attending to the comestibles on your list of duties.”
“I could be persuaded to take a job like that.”
“Good… good” Byron cleared his throat again. “…We dodged a bullet. By this much.” he confided, holding up two narrowly spaced fingers for illustration.
“Dodged at least two by my count.” Kevin agreed.
“Yeah… I’ll see you in the office tomorrow. You got a place to stay?”
“HR already got my hotel room sorted out.” Kevin told him. “Guess I’d better see them about somewhere more permanent, huh?”
“You do that.” Byron agreed. He shook Kevin’s hand and wandered out of the room, clearly still deep in thought.
Kevin’s mission pay had already been sorted out, and thanks to the miracle of modern digital banking, calling and paying for a taxi were effectively the same thing.
He’d planned on leaving Earth forever. He distinctly remembered how the word had felt as he spoke it. Forever. Not for five years, not until something better came along. Forever. Get himself out of his estranged daughter’s life and never look back.
It was the first time he’d even thought of her in years, and he ambled through the hotel lobby and into the elevator in a pensive mood, only shaking himself back into the here and now as the doors opened with a chime.
He was about to swipe his phone to open the door lock when a thought occurred to him. Experimentally, he knocked on his own hotel room door.
“Come in.”
The door wasn’t locked, and Special Agent Williams was sitting in the large comfortable chair by the window, putting down a tablet. “Well done.” she added. “You have good instincts.”
“Save it.” Kevin muttered, and sat on his bed. “Look, Williams-”
“Ah.” she raised a finger. “Small note on tradecraft for you. ‘Williams’ is a cover name. Professionally and to you, I go by Darcy. Special Agent Darcy, if you want to be formal.”
“Darcy, huh? That a fake name too?”
“If it was, why would I tell you?” She smiled again. “I would have introduced myself as Darcy if you hadn’t dug up Williams to say hello.”
“Pardon me for spoiling your entrance.” Kevin deadpanned. “So what, are you offering me a job as well?”
“I am.” she agreed. “Though I suspect the title won’t be as impressive as whatever it is Byron’s calling your new role.”
“Comestible attendant.”
Either Darcy’s professional façade genuinely did slip for a moment, or else she was by a league the most flawless liar Kevin had ever met. “Hah!” she giggled, and raised a hand to cover her mouth. “Oh, that’s good. I like that.”
“So what would my job be?” Kevin asked her, deciding he probably had got through to the real woman under the Company act, whoever she was, and allowing himself a satisfied smile.
“Oh, exactly the same as you’re doing for Moses Byron – veto any ideas of his that strike you as unwise. You’ll need… well.”
She hefted a light black satchel from beside her chair and handed it to him. Inside was a brand new Samsung tablet still in its box, and some kind of a black device to attach to it.
“What’s the box do?” Kevin asked.
“Encryption, decryption, secure communications…” Darcy shrugged. “Don’t plug it into any device other than that tablet.”
“What’ll it do, explode?”
“No, it just won’t work. But it would still technically be a felony.”
“Communication with what?” Kevin pressed.
“A secure server.” Darcy said. “Full of briefings and reports and documents that you’ll need to read, though I suspect that a lot of what’s in there won’t come as that much of a surprise to you.”
Kevin nodded. “Just two more questions…”
Darcy sat back and delicately crossed her legs. “Shoot.”
“One: Why me? I ain’t exactly the model of ambitious patriotism, you know.”
“Ten years ago, you drove up to the front gates of SCERF carrying the kind of intelligence we were absolutely starving for.” Darcy told him. “You’ve clearly got something that does the job of ambition, even if it’s just that you’d rather not get nuked from orbit. Certainly, you’re smart enough to know that as a real possibility and you’ve taken active steps—potentially at risk to your own liberty and person—to combat it.” She inclined her head. “Now would you say that somebody like that wasn’t worth our time?”
Kevin frowned and didn’t answer.
“What’s your second question?” Darcy prompted him, eventually.
”…Does this thing come with a salary?”
Date Point 10y2m2w1d AV HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Planet Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
John Burgess
“Woah… hey, I thought you were gone for the day, man?”
Adam just shrugged and hung his light bag by the door. “I took a day. Got to sort out some things. Get my head right. But… you know me, I gotta be doing shit to think right, you hear me?”
“I hear ya.” John agreed. “I was gonna lift…”
“Nuh-uh. We’re wrestling. Now.”
Fifty seconds later, the mat was grinding painfully against John’s face and his arm felt like it was one Newton of force at most from dislocating.
“So.” Adam shifted his posture just a little bit while John’s feet scrabbled ineffectually for purchase. “Let’s talk about how you kept my cheating ex’s secret for her, ‘brother’.”
Date Point 10y2m2w5d AV Folctha, Planet Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Ava Rìos
“Ready?”
”…No.”
“They’re calling.”
“I know, I just…”
Ava took one last look. It would have been nice to think of Folctha as her home, but… it wasn’t. Not any more. Not really. It was all white buildings and parks and streets, now. There were cars, there was the beginning of a rail network to connect to the outlying farms and villages. There was a thriving street or two full of shops. There was a supermarket. There were paved roads, advertisements, the neon green cross of a pharmacy. It was a town, now. It wasn’t the Folctha she’d lived in.
She could remember little wooden chalets tucked between the native trees. She could remember being happy in a place that might have been here, but wasn’t here. She could remember…
But that’s all it was. Memory.
”…I’m ready.”
Charlotte and Ben waved sadly to her from beyond the glass. She’d already said goodbye to Gabe, and Adam… she wasn’t surprised he hadn’t come. Jess had work. Hayley had left Cimbrean years ago.
She presented her passport, stepped through the security arch, shuffled into place on the Jump Array’s deck alongside Sean, and fidgeted as the last few people did likewise. The gate was closed, there was a short countdown, and…
And she was on Earth.
The Earth end of the Byron Group’s commercial jump array was Hamburg airport, and Ava could sense being on a different planet even if the architecture hadn’t suddenly and confusingly changed without so much as a flicker. Folctha’s municipal gravity generator might have exactly duplicated Earth gravity, but it couldn’t duplicate the heavy richness of the air. It was like coming down from mountaintop to sea level. It was warmer, denser, more oxygenated and more humid. Earth was a hot planet by galactic standards, and doomed to get hotter despite the rapid one-eighty in carbon dioxide production over the last eight years. She could taste and smell that fact in every breath.
“So. Hamburg.” She hoisted her bag. Beside her, Sean snapped the drag-handle up from his and kicked it over into his hand.
“Yep.”
“Are we flying back to London?”
“That’s cheapest.” Sean agreed.
“How cheap?”
“Fifty quid each.”
“Good…” They passed through another security arch. “I can afford that.”
“I won’t hear of it.” Sean told her. “You’re going to need that money.”
“But-”
“You’re going to need a job. That means buses and the tube and maybe a taxi or two. So keep your money and use it. You can pay me back once you’re earning.”
“You can afford that?” She asked.
“I’ve been writing articles for a bunch of different news sites and blogs, working part-time at ‘Spoons.” Sean shrugged. “I can afford it, just. I was probably going to wind up looking for a lodger anyway. Rent in London being what it is I’d have made a fuck of a lot, too, but… I mean, money’s less important than helping you get on your feet.”
Touched, Ava managed a smile for him.
“Besides,” Sean added “I’ve got something coming up. My uncle Simon gets back from Angola next week. If he follows through on what he was talking about in his emails, maybe you and me, we could land on our feet.”
“What’s he doing in Angola?”
“Covering the election for Reuters.”
“I’ve still got that offer from Byron Group…” Ava noted, glancing at the corporate advertising for the jump array—Earth and Cimbrean, photographed from orbit and connected by a line that cycled through all the classic, vivid fibre-optic colours with the tagline ‘One small step…’
“Moses Byron talks a good game.” Sean agreed. “Hell, it seems like he walks his talk too. I’m just not… I don’t know, do you trust anybody who got that big that quickly?”
Ava shrugged. “People like his whole ‘ethics and integrity’ brand. Even if it’s just an act for the camera, he’s playing that part to the hilt.”
“Is that the same thing as actually being ethical though?”
“Sean…” Ava sighed. “Don’t ask me about morals and stuff right now. I don’t feel qualified.”
He inclined his head slightly, assessing her mood, then nodded and laid his hand gently on her upper back for just a second. “Okay.”
Neither of them said a word to the other for nearly an hour after that, by which point they had boarded their plane, taken off and reached cruising altitude. He’d been looking out of the window for most of that time.
”…Are we okay?” he asked.
Ava had been using the plane’s wifi to check her website. She put the tablet down when he spoke, and gave the question some thought. “We’re… You’re my very best friend, Sean. Is that enough? I don’t think I’ve got more than that to give.”
He nodded, and gave her a hug. “I’m sorry, Ava.”
”…You didn’t do anything.”
“No, I did. I got selfish, and…” Sean shrugged. “I pushed.”
“You didn’t hurt me, Sean.” Ava reassured him. “I hurt myself.”
“And I helped.”
“Yeah, well… you can stop helping me hurt myself by letting me take the blame for this, okay?” She told him. “This whole thing has been a lesson, and I want to learn it, not, not foist off the responsibility on somebody else.” It was her turn to give him a reassuring squeeze. “You learn your lesson, and I’ll learn mine. Okay?”
Sean nodded despondently, aware that lesson he was going to have to learn was the one he wished he didn’t have to. “…Okay.”
He looked out the window again. “…That makes sense.”
Date Point 10y2m2w6d AV Uncharted System, Deep Space
Vedregnegnug
”-show up. There we go. It seems we escaped.”
Vedreg allowed a mingled pulse of relief and released anxiety to highlight his body. A human would have shuddered. “I detest stasis.” he declared. “Death or life on the moment of a button press. Thank you for sparing us any anticipation.”
Kirk dropped his lower-right hand, the prosthetic one, off the escape pod’s control panel and gave a pleased nod. “And we have indeed arrived at our destination. Good.” he announced.
Their “destination”, as far as Vedreg could tell, was a system in the middle of nowhere, some five years’ travel time from the final resting place of the starship Sanctuary at the meager ten kilolights that was their escape pod’s top speed.
Without the stasis field, they would have starved to death before completing even a fraction of the journey, and theirs was one of the largest, fastest and best-equipped lifepods in their late ship’s stable. Most of the others had been much smaller, cruder and slower. As it was…
Both of them glanced in the corner, and mutually decided not to discuss the deathworlder in the room. Lewis had come scrambling into their escape pod seconds before Kirk had sealed it, babbling about Sanctuary’s port living area taking a bad hit and separating him from the others. He was now slumped against the wall with his arms on his knees and his forehead resting against them.
The escape pod’s sensors had reported that all other life rafts had launched alongside theirs, moments before Amir had suicidally rammed and destroyed a Hierarchy dreadnought. Despite Lewis pleading and weeping at the console for nearly an hour, however, there had been no response from any of them. He’d finally given up and sunk despondently to the deck, scooted into the corner and gone very still and quiet. Humans were almost as expressive as Guvnuragnaguvendrugun, sometimes. Some of their emotions played out across their whole bodies.
Vedreg could hardly blame him: Subjectively, scant seconds had passed since Lewis had given up on his friends. Pointing out that as far as the rest of the galaxy was concerned they had been dead for five years would have been both unhelpful and tactless. Lewis had every right to grieve.
Rrrtktktkp’ch on the other hand were much more difficult to fathom without a translator. By the standards of pretty much every other sapient life-form, including their evolutionary ‘cousins’ the Vzk’tk, Kirk’s species were renowned for reserved emotions, impenetrable body language and inscrutable expressions…but if the way Kirk paused upon glancing at Lewis and then patted the grieving human awkwardly on the shoulder was any indication, he was feeling the loss just as intensely.
Kirk had always been stoic even by Rrrtk standards, however. He turned back to the controls, and indicated them to Vedreg.
“You see?”
Vedreg scrutinized the sensor readings. “That.” he noted, with a swish of accusatory maroon “Is one of the two system defense forcefields stolen from a secure military facility of my people. The other of which now protects Cimbrean, I believe.”
“Yes.” Kirk did not seem to be at all contrite.
“I do not approve of theft, Krrkktnkk a”ktnnzzik”tk.” Vedreg chastised him.
“Would you have given permission if I had asked for them?”
“No!”
“Then theft was the only option.” Kirk tapped some commands, and spoke something untranslated in his native tongue, a sound like a handful of gravel being tossed down a staircase.
“I beg your pardon?” Vedreg asked him. Kirk just made a satisfied nod, and then carefully enunciated a stream of rattling Domain syllables into the comms console.
The system forcefield deactivated.
No sooner had their pod crossed the threshold of where it had once been, than it popped back up, with barely a Guvnurag’s body-length of clearance sparing the rear end of the escape pod. Kirk clearly wanted to take no chances with anything hostile following them in.
Kirk nodded, and turned the translator back on. “Excellent.”
“Dude.” Lewis raised his head. “That wasn’t even Kirk’s line.”
”…what?” Both of them looked at him.
“He said ‘I have been, and will always be, your friend’.”
”…You speak Domain?” Kirk asked, aghast.
“No, I understand Domain.” Lewis hauled himself upright. “I couldn’t speak Domain if you cut my throat. Where are we?”
“How do you understand Domain?” Kirk demanded.
“Dude, I’ve spent months on the same ship as you. I studied it.”
“But… you shouldn’t be able to understand it!” Kirk protested.
“It’s a language isn’t it?” Lewis shrugged. “Fuck, I can’t pronounce Welsh either, but I could learn that just fine if I wanted. Now where are we and why’s it so goddamn important that you quote Spock at the forcefield?”
Kirk stared at him for a bit, then creaked a prolonged Rrrtk throat-clear, and called up the system navigation display as the liferaft boosted up to two lights and headed inwards.
“This system has no official name, and I’m not sharing its co-ordinates, as much as I trust the both of you.” he said. “Officially, it’s unexplored.”
“And unofficially?”
“I explored it.”
Lewis frowned at him. “Dude, when did you have time?”
“It’s more or less directly between Supply Station ‘Haven In The Dark’ and Nightmare, but no spacelane passes through here. At Sanctuary’s kind of speeds, going cross-country meant having to stop to ground the hull charge almost at every system, and this one has an appropriate gas giant.”
“So why are we here?” Vedreg interjected, shading himself to indicate curiosity.
“I… found something.”
“What did you find?”
“I found out what happened to Mrwrki Station.”
Vedreg glowed a cocktail of surprised royal blue and solemn green, but Lewis just gave them both a confused frown. “Dude, not everyone in this boat’s up to speed on galactic everything.” he told them. “What’s Mur-workey Station, and what happened to it?”
“Mrwrki was a Kwmbwrw research outpost on the Lleyvian Frontier.” Kirk explained. “That’s a cluster of stars in extreme… well. ‘up’. That is, perpendicular to the galactic plane, in the direction conventionally-”
“I know what ‘up’ means, dude.” Lewis snapped. “What happened to it?”
“It… vanished.”
“And turned up here?”
“Yes.”
“So, we’re going to dock there.”
Kirk hesitated. “Um… Yes.”
“How do you do that?” Vedreg objected. “How do you jump to accurate conclusions so quickly? All humans do it, it’s… infuriating!”
Lewis frowned at him with his mouth slightly open. “How do you not?” he countered. “I mean, why the fuck else would we be here, to take a selfie?”
“We aren’t deathworlders.” Kirk pointed out.
“But you’ve still got a working fucking thinker!” Lewis exclaimed, nonplussed. “Don’t give me the ancient evolution life-or-death bullshit whatever, I’d expect anyone to see that one coming unless the only thing their brain’s for is holding up their fucking hat!”
The two nonhumans looked at one another, then Kirk, with an air of extreme delicacy, cleared his throat again. “Lewis… are you okay?”
Lewis’ laugh had an incredulous note to it. “Are you se-? Dude, like, are you forgetting the bit where our friends got killed? Because that has harshed my mellow a tiny fucking bit.” He pinched his fingertips together a half-inch apart and peered through the gap to emphasize the point.
“Will shouting at us bring them back?” Kirk asked.
“Wh-? Well, no…”
“Then what good does it do?” Kirk folded all four of his arms.
”…So, what, you’re not even going to give the four of them any more than, like, a minute’s consideration?” Lewis asked.
“Lewis-”
“Goddamn herd xenos, man, FUCK!” the human spun away into the back of the pod, slumped against the wall, rubbed his face and then barked an order at the pod. “Privacy field.”
It snapped on in a fuzz of white noise and mercifully obscured him from view.
Kirk sagged, shook his head back and forth in a long, slow, swaying arc, and then double-checked the navigation.
“Do you have any thoughts on how to help him?” Vedreg asked, not sure what colour he should be and so settled on a kaleidoscope melange of concern, alarm, empathy, fear, and many more.
“There is one simple trick to helping any human, old friend.” Kirk murmured, guiding their lifeboat out of warp.
There was what had once been a space station below them, half-embedded in the surface of a tiny irregular lumpen moon that was much too small to have pulled itself into a sphere under its own gravity. The station was broken open, missing power to half its decks, eviscerated from where it had crashed into the surface of the rocky object, but still largely intact.
“And that is?” Vedreg asked.
“Mrwrki station.”
“I meant, and the simple trick is…?”
Kirk ordered the lifeboat to dock with the station’s one remaining powered bay, and turned to face him.
“You give them the means to fight back.”