Date Point: 10y3m3w AV
Mrwrki Station, Uncharted System, Deep Space
Kirk
“I don’t like this.“
“You are perfectly safe.”
“Nothing between me and vacuum but forcefields? Fuck that, dude.“
“How can one engage in pro-…” Vedreg paused. “No, wait. This is vulgarity for punctuation and emphasis, isn’t it.”
“Hey, he’s finally getting it. Miracles do happen!“
Rrrtk had so much peripheral vision that they could almost see behind themselves, so it was easy for Kirk to spot Vedreg’s irritated glance in his direction.
Kirk himself was meandering along at the front of their little trio, examining the station. Lewis was in an irreconcilably foul mood and hadn’t appreciated being pulled out of his sulk, nor climbing into a pan-species pressure rig—little more than a lightweight pack on his chest that encased him in a forcefield and kept the proper O2/CO2 balance. The device was absolutely foolproof, designed to shut down only when it detected a breathable atmosphere, but that didn’t stop Lewis from fidgeting and adjusting it nervously as if it might fall off at any second and strand him. Humans really did hate forcefields.
That fact always bemused Kirk. They would trust their lives completely to steel and aluminium which might develop stress fractures and leaks, but forcefields, the product of ultra-dependable solid-state electronic components, left them nervous and sweating.
“What are we even here for, anyway?” Lewis asked, through the life vest’s built-in communicator and translator.
“The last time I was here,” Kirk replied “I was able to use Sanctuary’s nanofactory to repair the power systems and the station’s own nanofactory. I left it with instructions.”
“Instructions to what?” Vedreg asked.
“Fix the station.” Lewis said.
Even Kirk rounded on him. “Lewis… you are right, but how did you know?” he demanded.
Lewis rubbed his chin with his thumb, then aimed that same thumb at part of the wall. “Hull breach. Recently patched and welded. We’ve passed six or seven now and you’ve inspected every one. Plus, what else are you gonna tell a busted-ass station to do with itself? Crochet some nice doilies and bake an apple pie?“
“What are ‘doilies’ and ‘apple pie’, please?” Vedreg asked.
“Doilies are, like… Little fancy decorative cloth things, and apple pie is… you take the fruit of an apple tree and a bunch of sugar and… Dude, it’s not important.”
“I’d still like to know.” Vedreg pleaded.
Lewis hesitated, then shrugged and sighed, giving up. “Okay, so, uh, you need a bunch of ingredients. Flour, sugar, butter…”
Kirk turned away to hide his amusement as he continued to inspect the repairs. They needed to be perfect – the station’s back had broken during its crash-landing, and while Kirk had no plans ever to launch it again, Mrwrki still needed to be airtight and space-worthy.
He listened idly as Lewis explained apple pie to Vedreg, including his reassurances that the ingredients that would have been unpalatable to Guvnurag all had “vegan” and “gluten free” alternatives. For some reason, the whole concept of “baking” seemed to fascinate Vedreg.
“So what’s the verdict?” Lewis asked eventually.
“All of these are acceptable…” Kirk conceded. “I think we must assume that all the others will be also.”
“Good. Sooner we get our asses behind a fucking pressure hull, the happier I’ll be.”
“This way, then.” Kirk indicated a door.
“Lay on, Macduff.“
Kirk nodded and activated it. “You know, that is a misuse.” he pointed out as it tortured itself a quarter open before jamming.
“Nuh, the misuse is ‘lead on, Macduff’ right?” Lewis disagreed, needing no prompting to wiggle himself into the gap, brace his back against one door and his feet against the other, and heave. Whatever obstruction had held it gave, and the door slid smoothly the rest of the way open.
“That would be wrong, yes.” Kirk replied. “But the original use was ‘Lay on Macduff, and damned be him who first cries ‘Hold, enough!” – Macbeth was defying Macduff and declaring that he would fight him, even knowing that it was futile. He was not inviting him to lead the way.”
“Macbeth?” Vedreg rumbled. Guvnurag speech patterns rendered the word more like “Mac-u-bets?”
“Vedreg, old friend, an introduction to Shakespeare will have to wait.” Kirk told him, as they squeezed into the airlock. The Kwmbwrw were mercifully about as large as Kirk’s own species, and the airlock was designed for half a dozen of them. It had just enough room to accommodate Vedreg’s bulk alongside their own.
The lock cycled without incident—Lewis’ brute-force fix to the outer door seemed to have permanently resolved the problem as it closed easily and without complaint, and fresh air gusted in. When the inner door opened, there was no sudden rush of depressurization—the interior was airtight.
“Excellent.” Kirk announced, ducking under the door frame and into the great ring hallway that ran around the station’s interior.
“So… what’s here?” Lewis was next, squeezing delicately out from where Vedreg’s furry mass had been pinning him to the wall. “What do we have?”
“A functioning nanofactory and an entire moonlet’s-worth of raw material.” Kirk told him. “With those two things plus time, what we have is… anything.”
“Food? Water?”
“Both in plentiful supply.” Kirk assured him. “This station was intended for extreme deep space observation. It’s equipped to be manned by a full Grand House – about six hundred Kwmbwrw – for a year between resupplies.
“And, uh… where are those six hundred Kwmbwrw?” Lewis asked.
Kirk imitated a shrug for his benefit. “They were not aboard when I found the place.” he replied.
“The escape pods?”
“Launched, presumably. I did not check.”
Lewis looked up at the ceiling and muttered something that the translator decided was not for their benefit. Louder, he addressed the station’s control software. “Station, as a proportionate number per hundred, how many of this facility’s escape pods and life rafts have been launched, in total?”
The station’s response boomed through the silent halls: “Zero.”
“None?” Vedreg asked. Curiosity, confusion and mild alarm pulsed all over his body. “But this place is derelict!”
“Derelict space station, disappeared, turned up crashed thousands of lightyears from where it’s supposed to be, crew missing, no escape pods launched?” Lewis asked. “Kirk, dude, I’ve seen this movie. I want no part of it.”
“I did a thorough sweep when I first came here.” Kirk asserted, firmly. “I checked everything. There is nothing here except us.”
“Fuck sake…” Lewis muttered. “…Okay. Whatever. But if we find their skinned carcasses hanging from the ceiling somewhere, we are leaving. Okay?”
“Deal.” Kirk agreed, before Vedreg could comment. Their shambling Guvnurag companion had given Lewis a deeply alarmed look.
“So what do you have planned, anyway?” Lewis asked, peering down a hallway as if expecting some kind of horrible flensing monster to be lurking there. The fact that the lighting was clear and bright and the deck was plainly clear of stalking beasts didn’t seem to satisfy him one bit.
“That” Kirk mused “Is a very good question…”
“You don’t have a plan?”
“I have a fully powered space station, a nanofactory, and more raw material than we could use in a lifetime even if we spent the first quarter of that time building more nanofactorys.” Kirk told him. “The rest is just… detail.”
“Detail?!“
“Yes. Detail. What we build. How many. What they are for. What we do with them and who we give them to.”
“That’s not ‘detail’ that’s, like, eighty-eight percent of the plan!”
“Well, that eighty-eight percent is yours, then.”
Lewis stopped examining the corners in search of hideous mutants and frowned at Kirk. “Come again?”
Kirk managed a complicated quad-limbed version of a shrug. “I am not a deathworlder.” he said, simply. “And just in this last hour or so, you have demonstrated time and again that you think a few steps ahead of Vedreg and me.”
He folded all four of his arms. “In my experience, it pays to defer to superior knowledge and skill.”
“You’re… giving me a whole factory to play with.” Lewis stated, clearly not quite able to believe it.
“One” Kirk nodded “That can build basically anything synthetic, including more nanofactorys, and machines which can grow anything organic.”
“To fight the Hierarchy.”
“And the Hunters. Yes. All it needs is your imagination and input.”
“Oh.”
Lewis stared around at the station. He clapped his hands together once, rubbed his palms and licked his lips.
”…Right.”
Date Point: 10y3m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches.
Adam Arés
“Ngggh…ow.”
A rare wince and groan forced its way out of Baseball as Adam lowered him gently onto his bunk. Walking wasn’t something John could manage at the moment, owing to the severe muscular tears in both his legs, and quite likely some hairline fractures…everywhere, really. Adam winced in return. After all, he was intimately familiar with the uniquely painful and intense training that he and Base shared, and they both considered it a point of pride to bear their suffering in quiet. It was part of their bond, sharing pain and gain that the other operators couldn’t possibly understand. So to hear John complain even a little…
“Fuck.”
Adam wouldn’t have been Adam if he hadn’t felt slightly guilty. Now that all the anger was out of his system and he was thinking clearly, he had to admit, his friend hadn’t really deserved such a methodical reminder of who was the better wrestler. “I guess I overdid it…You okay, bro?”
Base opened an eye. “…Are you?”
Adam gently palmed the back of his battle-brother’s head and massaged. “I’m really sorry, bro.” John’s hand came up and embraced his brother’s head as well, though even that elicited another wince. Adam had done a thorough job of working him over.
They touched foreheads and nuzzled. “No no, I had it comin’…” Base grunted. Then, with a sad, almost needy look, “Forgive me?”
“Dude,” Horse chuckled quietly, “You were right, y’know. Of course I forgive you.” They held for a long moment, letting the peace and affection between them return.
The moment passed. John nodded against him, then let go and rested his head back, grimacing at yet another stab of pain. “Love you, man.”
“Love you too, bro,” Adam grinned. “Go on, rest up, let the Crude do its thing.”
He padded quietly out of the room. John was asleep almost before Adam had closed the door. He chuckled to himself; instant sleep was a skill the whole SOR had in common, but John and Adam had learned it from the very beginning of their careers. He shook his head and headed to the showers for a long, cool soak.
By the time he dripped and towelled his way back into the common room wearing only his ranger shorts, the rest of the guys were on the couch enjoying another Bad Movie Night in the form of “The Phantom Menace”.
“Room for one more on there?” Adam asked them, still toweling his head dry. The hot-then-cold shower had done much to clear his head, and now he wanted to relax and meditate with his brothers, as it were. They shifted up and climbed over each other to make room and he squeezed in, wriggling his arm around Titan’s shoulders to fit until he was finally comfortably part of the pile, where he sighed happily and watched in silence.
“Y’know, I heard the kid who played Anakin quit acting.” Firth said, after a while. “Apparently this film ruined his career.”
“Shit happens.” Adam shrugged. “You gotta move on.”
“So you’re single now, huh?” Blaczynski asked. He flinched as Rebar swatted the back of his head. “Ow!”
“Yup.” Adam shrugged again and repeated himself. “Shit happens.” He tried not to let the comment bother him, and snuggled into Titan a bit more.
They endured the movie a bit longer, before curiosity finally gnawed its way through Titan’s restraint. “That’s all you got to say on it? ‘Shit happens’? Wasn’t she, like… your high school sweetheart? You two’ve been together as long as I’ve known you.”
Adam sighed and turned where he was sitting slightly. “What you want me to say?” he asked. “I don’t even have it all sorted out in my head right now. Okay? Maybe I’ll talk about it some, maybe I’ll figure shit out and move on, whatever. Right now…yeah. Best I got to say is ‘shit happens’.”
“Least you sorted fuckin’ Baseball out… OWW!!” This time it was Adam’s turn to give Blaczynski a blow upside the head, and this one wasn’t the half-hearted brotherly cuff that Blaczynski managed to attract at least twice a day: it was an open-palmed clout so hard that everyone flinched.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Adam growled. The mood changed instantly – nobody needed more than that to spot that a line had been crossed, and they all went tense.
There was an awkward silence as Adam stared Blaczynski down. It wasn’t much of a contest.
“Horse, uh, did you miss the part where Base helped your girl fuck another fella?” Sikes pointed out tentatively.
Adam snarled and stood up, unceremoniously dumping half the operators on the floor, and seared the lot of them with a dark glare. “Oh, noooo, I spent the last two hours breaking him because he ate the last of the Eggos!” He narrowed his eyes, “What business is it of yours anyway? You wanna go a round on the mat with me too? Think you’d last more than a few seconds? ‘Cuz Base paid the fuckin price already. Him and me? We’re cool. And yeah: He kept that fuckin’ secret, and it was the right goddamned thing to do!”
“Woah, woah. Easy brother.” Blaczynski held up a hand reassuringly – the other was still nursing the back of his head. “We’re just-”
“You’re mad on my behalf. Cool. I get it. Thank you.” Adam snapped. “But he’s sorry, I’m sorry, we’re both over it, and he was right – I wouldn’t be here if he’d told me when he first learned. So lay the fuck offa him or you’ll answer to me, got it? All of you.”
One by one, he made eye contact with all of them. Vandenberg and Murray held it and nodded their approval and agreement – Akiyama, Sikes, Firth and Blaczynski all blinked, nodded and looked away sheepishly.
Adam nodded and relaxed, and tiredness – a deep, spiritual fatigue that he’d been holding back all day – hit him like a rock slide. He sighed, suddenly realising just how much he needed some alone time. “Fuck. Sorry. Y’all…enjoy the movie, guys. Imma go to bed now.”
”…‘Night.”
“‘Night.”
Adam thumped his way back to his room, grumbling quietly to himself. There were photos on his desk when he got there, real ink-on-paper prints. They were an anachronistic relic, but still reckoned by purists to be the best way to immortalize a memory, and Adam was inclined to agree. Ava had taken this set years ago, posing raunchily for him in one of his old T-shirts and nothing else…and eventually not even that.
He sat on his steel-beam bed and studied them carefully, one by one. The bed creaked loudly by way of greeting, a familiar and weirdly comforting sound in his personal world that entirely failed to shake him out of his fugue. The photos were profoundly and painfully erotic.
He considered ripping them up.
Instead, very carefully, he took a wooden box out of his locker that his dad had given him for his birthday, slipped the photos into the very bottom of it, and buried the box at the bottom of his “storage” duffle bag, wondering and doubting if he would ever look at them again. He neatly packed the bag away, tugged his shorts off, and rolled onto his complaining bunk, determined not to let the prickling at the corner of his eyes become anything more.
He stared at the ceiling instead, and of all the photos he’d stuck up there – from Basic, from PJ training, from Folctha and from everywhere else he’d been and all the people he’d met – his eyes alighted on one from school. He was in the middle, young and wiry and shaggy-haired, flanked on either side by Sara and Ava with his arms round their waists. All grinning at the camera.
He rolled on his side and, at length, fell asleep on a soaking wet pillow.
Date Point: 10y3m3w5d AV
Vancouver General Hospital, British Columbia, Canada, Earth
Allison Buehler
Every so often, Allison amazed herself with just how much she could read in some fairly subtle gestures and expressions. She no sooner had to walk into Xiù’s room than she spotted the quiet desperation on Mrs. Chang’s face as she rattled away without pause to her long-lost daughter, nor the mostly-concealed discomfort and desire to be elsewhere on Wei’s.
Xiù’s expression was not in any way subtle. Quite the reverse, when she glanced up to see Allison leaning against the door frame, the look Allison received said ‘I love my family and I’m so glad to see them again but please save me from them.’
Allison couldn’t blame her. Ever since Xiù had woken up, she’d been the target of relentless attention from her doctors and nurses, and then an undammed torrent of familial affection, which had to be weird. Having a brother who was, in terms of date of birth, a few years her junior and yet was slightly older in terms of actual time experienced…
Allison couldn’t picture it. She was having a hard enough time adjusting to the changes in pop culture. The music on the radio, the references to technology and websites that hadn’t been around the last time she’d visited Earth, movies and TV series and actors, politicians. She hadn’t ever even heard of the President.
All of that was small beer next to Xiù’s reunion with parents who were well into their sixties, and as for Julian…
Julian had taken the news of his grandfather’s passing very hard. Very hard indeed.
She cleared her throat, gently interrupting the unrelenting babble of Mandarin that poor Xiù had been enduring. Like mothers everywhere, Mrs. Chang seemed to be determined to share the minute-to-minute details of every single day that her absent child had missed.
“Hey…” she smiled at them, trying not to show how much it bothered her that her voice was still rough and flegmy. “I’m really sorry, but could we borrow Xiù for a little while?”
Mrs. Chang turned to get her daughter’s opinion only to find that Xiù was already wrangling the blankets out of the way. For their part, Mr. Chang gave Allison an understanding smile and nod, and Wei seemed to be grateful for a break from the awkwardness. It had to be equally weird to find that your older sister was now younger.
Xiù was being adorably stubborn, too. The wheelchair by her bed was contemptuously ignored, even though the mere act of standing up got her breathing heavily. If the hand she laid on Allison’s shoulder was leaned on a little more heavily than it might have been if it was purely a gesture of welcome… well, Allison wasn’t about to comment.
Together, they made slow and breathless progress down the hospital corridor. The human respiratory system had never evolved to handle hard vacuum, and the damage they had suffered during their brief exposure had beat them round the head and mugged them. Young and fit though they both were, even gentle exertion was proving to be a hardship.
They paused for breath on a bench about twenty yards down from Xiù’s room where Xiù managed to fit a smile in between coarse breaths. “Thank you.”
“You okay?” Allison took her hand.
“Aside from… feeling like… I got run over… by a tank?” Xiù panted, and tried to take a deep breath which degenerated into a coughing fit. Allison ran her free hand up and down Xiù’s spine until it stopped. “God… I don’t know.”
“Too much to take in?”
”…Yeah. How’s… Julian?”
“That’s why I came to get you. He’s pretty beaten up over his Grampa. I thought he’d feel better to see you.”
“I guess.. we both lost family…” Xiù agreed, and hauled herself upright. Allison didn’t really feel ready to move just yet, but she forced herself to her feet anyway. The rehabilitation physio specialist had been adamant that she’d recover fairly quickly if she didn’t shy away from exercise, even if that exercise was a long way short of what she was accustomed to achieving.
The second set of benches was another twenty yards down, with only ten more to go to Julian’s room. Xiù sank onto it, perspiring.
“Okay… Why the hell… can’t space… be like in the movies?” she asked. “Star Lord… didn’t have to… put up with this shit.”
Allison giggled, and that triggered her turn to cough until her throat burned. It was Xiù’s turn to give her a comforting backrub, making a concerned noise that was a little more Gaoian than human. Allison didn’t comment.
“Ugh…”
“Allison…?”
“Yeah?”
“Is this… weird? That… I just got back… to my family… and I’m already… wishing they’d leave me alone?”
“I doubt it.” Allison shrugged. “God knows, I can’t wait to get off this planet ASAP.”
Xiù almost looked betrayed. “You’re… you wanna leave?”
“I was happy up there, babe.” Allison told her. “I was doing something. I was… you know, I felt like I was achieving stuff. I’m never going to be anybody on Earth.”
Xiù shook her head vociferously. “You don’t know that!”
The exclamation prompted another cough, but only the one this time.
“No, babe. I do. I know what I want, and I wanna be a spacegirl.” Allison said. “I wanna go out there and help find people, keep doing what Kirk was doing, maybe find worlds for people to live on, maybe find… who knows? What’s down here for me that somebody else hasn’t already done a million times?”
“A home?” Xiù asked.
“Home is wherever you’re happy.” Allison retorted. “And now that I’ve been to other places…? I don’t think that Earth can ever be my home.”
Xiù looked so crestfallen that Allison just had to rest a reassuring hand on her upper back. “Not what you wanted to hear?”
“I don’t know…” Xiù shrugged. “Is it stupid that I just… I kind of wrote you and Julian into my idea of what getting home was going to be like?”
Allison, genuinely touched, managed a giggle that didn’t turn into a wheeze. “Oh… I love you.”
Xiù gave her a stunned and confused blink, redness spread across her cheeks and nose, and Allison realised that this may have been an incautious thing to say to somebody who’d been starved of positive human interactions for several years.
She gave Xiù a hug. “Girl…I had more fun with you in one week than I had with some of my ‘best friends’ in two years. And I know you’re going to need help: I’m not just gonna abandon you, I promise.” She clarified. “I’m here for you.”
“O-oh…” Xiù’s blush faded again. “But you’re still leaving.”
“It’s not like I’ve got a spaceship in my other jacket, babe.” Allison pointed out. “I’m here for the foreseeable. It’s just… I know what I want to do with my life. In the short-term, I’ll help you. In the long term…” she glanced upwards significantly.
Xiù nodded, and wriggled into the hug a bit. “I’m sorry.” she said.
“What for?”
“For being… clingy.”
Allison gave her a backrub through her bathrobe. “Are you kidding? You’re not clingy.”
“I feel like I am.”
“You spent… how long, all by yourself?” Allison asked her. “Maybe you’re just too used to that. It’s fine, babe, I promise.”
“You’re sure?”
Allison smiled at the top of Xiù’s head. “I’m sure. Helps me feel useful.”
Xiù pulled back and gave her a questioning look. “Useful?”
“I feel like you need me.” Allison told her. “That’s… do you?”
Xiù considered the question. “I… I don’t want to.” she said. “But…”
She looked down the corridor: Wei Chang had just stepped out of her room. He gave his sister a pathetic little smile and lumbered in the direction of the vending machines. “Nobody else understands.” she finished. “I feel like I’ve landed on an alien planet. All these… these deathworlders.”
“The gravity’s wrong, isn’t it?” Allison mused.
“No. It’s too right. And the air feels too rich, and too warm, and I can taste so much on it.” Xiù sighed. “They tell me my immune system’s been made weaker ‘cause it’s not been challenged often enough…”
A nurse checked in with them on his way down the hall. “Are you two okay?” he asked.
“We’re fine, thanks.” Allison reassured him. Beside her, Xiù answered with a Gaoian-style ducking movement rather than a human nod. The nurse gave her a strange look and went about his duties.
”…Dammit.” Xiù thumped her palm to the side of her head.
“Relax, it’s no big deal.” Allison told her.
“To you it’s not.” Xiù shook her head. “Everyone else gives me strange looks…”
“Fuck ‘em.” Allison suggested. “So you’ve picked up a foreign accent in your travels. If they can’t handle that, it’s their problem. Not yours.”
Xiù glanced down to where her fingernails were flicking absentmindedly against each other, and wriggled her fingers to stop them. “I guess…”
”…You okay?”
Xiù rubbed at the scars on her arm. “I’m home. That’s all that matters. I’m home.” It sounded more like a mantra than conviction.
“Are you?”
For the first time ever, Xiù gave her an irritated glance. It was gone in a second, replaced by upset, shame and uncertainty. “I am.” she insisted.
Allison decided not to interrupt whatever she was thinking about, and was rewarded when, after about twenty seconds of cogitation, Xiù took a deep breath and gestured helplessly at the whole hospital.
“I’m home…and all Mom wants to talk about is who married who and when the baby’s due and… I used to spend my whole day worrying about accidentally killing people. Like, if I tripped and fell and reached out to catch myself or something and pulled their arm off… or worse, if I got found out and the Hunters came for me.”
She sighed and looked up and down the corridor. She frowned at a magazine on the table next to their bench and picked it up. At a glance it was obvious its title was something along the lines of ‘Charm!’ and that the front cover was nothing but long-range photos of oblivious women in bikinis being referred to by their first names. “Sometimes, here in this hospital?” she began. “It smells like that Hunter ship did. Just sometimes, it’ll catch me off guard and…”
Allison reached out and tidied some hair out of her face. Xiù studied the magazine as she did so, her frown deepening.
“Is this what I came back to?” she asked. “Weddings, and how fat some celebrity is that I never even heard of? Doesn’t anybody care that we’re at war? That there’s a whole species of monsters out there that wants us all dead? That eat people?”
“This is what you left.” Allison told her, avoiding the subject of Hunters and the Hierarchy for now. “And… hell, if you hadn’t been taken, that might be you on that magazine.”
”…That’s what I wanted to be.” Xiù nodded. “And… maybe I’d feel like I was doing something, too. Helping people get through their day, entertaining them. That seems important. But…” She dropped the magazine back on the table. “There’s no way that’s happening now, is there?”
“What makes you say that?”
Xiù simply gestured to the scars on her arm and throat, to the white lines where pulsegun fire had split her lip and eyebrow aboard the Hunter ship as well as breaking her nose, and to the weathered quality of her skin.
“Xiù, you’re beautiful.” Allison reassured her.
This earned a shy smile, and Xiù maneuvered some hair out of her face. “Maybe.” She agreed. “But am I Hollywood? And even if I was… Allison, I can’t even go a whole day of pretending to be human. What kind of an actor can’t even properly pretend to be her own species?”
She looked down at her feet, sighed, and then coughed. “…I was thinking so much of getting back here, I never thought about what being here would actually be like. What am I going to do here? Now that I’m here… who am I going to be?”
Allison gave her a squeeze. “You’ll have plenty of time.” she promised. “Did the Abductee Repatriation Program get in touch yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Chase ‘em.” Allison ordered her. “They’re supposed to give you some money, support and counselling, careers advice…”
This earned bitter noise. “Right. Careers. I’ve got a heck of a resume. Vagrant chef and Gaoian impersonator. Interests: Gung Fu and movies. Special talents: so fluent in three languages that I sometimes get mixed up and speak the wrong one.”
“You’ve got skills they can use though, right?”
“Who needs fluency in three languages when we’ve got translators nowadays?” Xiù asked. “I’m too old and out of practice to be an acrobat or a ballerina, I’m too beat up to be an actress…”
“You could still work in Hollywood. Extraterrestrial consultant? Tell the movies how to get it right? Or, the Global Representative Assembly. You’ve got knowledge they could use.”
“Maybe…”
“And you’re a great cook, babe. And- oh! You could bring Gaoian cuisine to Earth!”
“Maybe…”
Allison considered her subdued response, then put a reassuring hand on Xiù’s forearm. “Give it time. You’ll think of something.”
Xiù nodded and reached over with her left hand to squeeze Allison’s hand, then stood up. She swayed as the abrupt motion and her void-damaged lungs combined to make her head spin, and leaned heavily against the wall for a second to recover. “Let’s… go see Julian.”
”…Okay.”
Allison took a little more care in standing up, allowed Xiù to thread an arm through hers, and supported her the rest of the way.
Date Point: 10y4m AV
Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth.
Kevin Jenkins
There was an unfamiliar car outside Kevin’s new house when he got home. A black Toyota sedan – completely nondescript and unremarkable, which immediately gave Kevin a good idea of its driver.
It was a nice house. A two-storey thing in suburbia with delicate brownish panelling, two garages and enough driveway for a couple of monster trucks. The local housing association were proving to be a pain in the ass over the exact strain of grass seed he was allowed to use and how long it had to be and how well-watered, but the neighbors were nice. They had visited with a welcome cake on the day he moved in, but their timing had been awful – they’d shown up while he was wearing a short-sleeve polo shirt that put his tattoo on full display.
It was not an ambiguous tattoo. While the original ink had just been a simple black cross, Kevin had spent quite a lot of money over the years modifying it, starting by covering it with a bisected circle and the word “Rehabilitated”. Later touch-ups, additions and modifications meant that it was now well on its way to being a full sleeve of deliberately antagonistic antitheistic sentiment, a physical lashing-out at something he still felt a smouldering bitterness over.
He was proud of his ink, but it wasn’t the best thing to have on show when meeting new neighbors for the first time and it hadn’t gone down well at all. They’d been the very picture of forced civility, and had excused themselves as soon as they politely could. He’d been expecting church flyers to start showing up in his mailbox ever since, but to their credit that hadn’t happened.
Yet.
Darcy confirmed his suspicions by stepping out of her car as he parked, slipping a phone into her pocket. Kevin hadn’t seen her since she’d effectively hired him, although a more appropriate word might be “commandeered” or “requisitioned”. He was a resource, an asset. “Company property” as some of the documentation had euphemistically had it.
Her greeting was characteristically terse. “Kevin.”
“For future reference, you’re welcome to let yourself in.” Kevin told her.
“I don’t have a key.” She replied.
“Like that’d stop you.” Kevin retorted, with an amused joking sneer.
Darcy nodded, offering a smile that was, in Kevin’s opinion, somewhere towards the wrong end of tired. “People tend to get suspicious when they see a lock being picked in broad daylight, though.”
Kevin glanced across the street. There was the merest hint of a curtain dropping back into place as he did so. “Right.”
He opened the door and kicked his shoes into the corner. “Coffee?”
Darcy raised an eyebrow at the commercial espresso machine on his counter. “You take your coffee seriously.”
“Sure do.” Kevin agreed. “How d’you want it?”
“Cappuccino?”
“Comin’ right up.”
He watched Darcy out of the corner of his eye as he gurgled and hissed his way through preparing her drink. She didn’t quite flop down onto his couch, but she did sit heavily, then rubbed her face and rolled her neck.
Kevin gave her a double shot of espresso.
“Thanks for comin’ back up here on short notice.” he said, handing her the drink as he sat down. “I know your schedule’s gotta be busy…”
“You’re allowed to say I look like shit warmed up.” Darcy retorted, giving him a tired but probably honest smile. “This morning I was in Hawaii.”
“What the hell were you doing in Hawaii?”
“You don’t need to know.” she sipped the drink and pulled an almost erotic face. “Ohhh, that’s good coffee.”
“Best in Omaha.” Kevin promised. “So anyway, I had a couple things needed clearing up. If I’m any judge of him Byron’s subdued mood ain’t gonna last forever, and when he starts pushing the limits again I need the weight of facts behind me.”
“Shoot.” Darcy told him. “I’ll tell you what I can.”
“The big one has to do with somethin’ you said when you walked into Byron’s office. About how that ship I was on would of been destroyed if not for its IFF.”
“Yes…?” Darcy sipped her coffee again
“How? I know more-or-less what the Firebirds and the V-class can do, and I don’t reckon they could have jumped in anywhere close enough to destroy it in seconds. Minutes, sure…”
“Mm.” Darcy nodded.
“So either you were exaggerating, in which case that’s kind of a problem because anything could jump in and cloak and we’d be fucked…or you weren’t, in which case we have something that can hit a target at least as far out as the moon within a couple seconds of it arriving.”
Darcy ran a pensive tongue through the milk foam on her upper lip, clearly picking her words with care.
“It’s called WERBS.” she told him, after some thought.
“Weaponized Einstein-Rosen Bridge System. Thought so.” Kevin grinned at her. “Bartlett’s baby grew up then?”
Darcy, for her part, looked more irritated than surprised that he knew. “I have got to impress on Scotch Creek the need for their top scientists to be more cautious even around base staff.” she sighed. “Let me guess, he was discussing it with a colleague over one of your – admittedly excellent – coffees while you were up there?”
“Nope. He just had a bad habit of doodling his equations and stuff on my paper napkins and then forgetting to take them with him when he left.” Kevin shrugged apologetically. “It’s okay, I destroyed them.”
“How?”
“Incinerator. He got half his best work done on my bartop, Darcy.”
“Did you understand the equations?” she asked.
“Do I look like a theoretical physics prodigy?”
“I don’t go by looks, Kevin. Did you understand the equations?”
“No. Couldn’t hardly read them.”
“Okay.” She considered her words again, frowning as she took another sip of her drink. “Yes, WERBS is working. In fact it was about the fourth or fifth technology to come out of SCERF, right after forcefields, warp drive, stasis fields and jump engines. We had a working prototype for WERBS before Pandora was even a blueprint.”
“And it could of hit EV-8 out at the moon?”
“Could have. Yes. In fact it ‘could of’ hit you as far out as Pluto.” Darcy settled back on the couch and drained half her remaining cappuccino. “Satisfied?”
“I’d like to know how it works but I’m guessing that I don’t-”
”-Need to know.” Darcy chorused with him, nodding. “You don’t. Hell, I don’t need to know how it works. I can guess it has something to do with wormholes, but exactly what and how…”
“Makes sense to keep that one buried if it’s our ace in the hole.”
“Exactly.” Darcy finished her drink. “Anything else?”
“Few minutiae. Some clarifications over my standing orders and what exactly the company means by ‘covert action’.”
“Covert action is part of the CIA’s mandate, but completely outside of your area of responsibility right now.” Darcy reminded him. “You won’t be required to do anything covert. Your role is purely to… well, to be a bridge.”
“I know it’s part of the mandate, those introductory documents you sent me made that clear as mud.” Kevin retorted. “Coulda done with being less euphemistic, for my money.”
“Euphemism is useful.”
“Right. Can’t have it in writing that part of my job might include murdering Moses Byron.” Kevin snarked.
Darcy quirked an eyebrow at him. “Where did you get the impression that that’s on the cards?” she asked. “That’s not part of your job description.”
“Please. The Company’s reason for being is the security of the USA, and by extension the whole human race.” Kevin gave her a patient stare. “Your own words, right? Well Byron established pretty well with that emergency recall fiasco that he’s a potential liability there. And now you’ve got ‘company property’ working in his building…”
“We’ve got… an ally.” Darcy corrected him. “Somebody we trust to be just a little bit more sensible than Byron and who we hope will serve as a reminder of just how badly he fucked up. That doesn’t mean you’d be entrusted with that kind of thing. You don’t have the training, even if we worked that way.”
“You’re saying you don’t?”
Darcy just gave him a slight smile. “You don’t need to know.”