Date Point: 10y4m AV
Finchley, London, England, Earth
Ava Ríos.
Sean’s uncle Simon turned out to be an older and more weathered clone of his nephew. He had the same long, straight nose, the same wavy dark hair, the same long and slender frame. If not for a few wrinkles, the tan and a dusting of white hairs, the two could have stood side by side and been hard to tell apart.
He also had a keen and critical eye, which he was running over Ava’s online portfolio.
“I like this one. You timed it perfectly on his exhalation, it really feels cold…This one, you could have put the subject a little off-center, get more of the tree in there, you see?”
Ava just nodded and paid attention, answered questions when they were asked. It was interesting feedback—she’d had so many people tell her how great her photos were, it was a genuine pleasure to have somebody go through them with a fine comb and pick on the tiny imperfections.
When he reached the end of the album, Simon handed her tablet back to her and nodded, smiling gently. “Sean was right, you’re good.”
“Told you.” Sean commented, from where he was sprawled on the couch playing an old game, something with airships and muzzle-loading rifles.
“So, what does that mean?” Ava pressed.
Simon stroked his chin thoughtfully. “You’ve come along at a good time.” he said. “The guy I usually work with is off sick and will be for the foreseeable future, so I do need a photographer…” he tapped his chin, frowning. “Look… How do you feel about the Middle East?”
“How do you mean?” Ava asked him.
“Would you be, uh, scared to go there?” Simon clarified.
“Not enough to stop me if that’s where the work is.” she shrugged. “I dunno. You’ve got to take care wherever you go, right? Just because you have to take a little more care in some places than others…”
“A lot more care.” Simon corrected her.
“Fine, a lot more.” Ava agreed. “But there’s no such thing as safe anyway.”
“True.” Simon agreed. “So…?”
“So…yeah. I wouldn’t have a problem going there provided I had somebody to show me the ropes.”
“Hmmm…”
Simon fetched a tablet from his bag and signed into Google Maps. Within seconds, he’d summoned a sandy oblong of land sandwiched between Africa and Asia.
“So… this down here is Saudi Arabia.” he said, tapping it.
“Right.” Ava nodded, taking note of the countries around it for good measure.
“Now, the Saudi royal family are still richer than Croesus, but part of the reason for that is that ten years ago they did something very sensible, and sold every oil-based asset they had. Seriously, VI Day happened, and before we’d even really got our heads round aliens on the telly, the Al-Sauds had ditched every penny they had in oil and invested it elsewhere. At the time, people thought they were crazy, they even made a loss on some of those sales.”
He opened a new tab. “Time, however, has proven just how bloody smart a move that was. When alien technology put the final touches on fusion and widespread cheap solar power, a hole appeared in the oil market, and the value per barrel’s been in decline for eight years in a row now.”
Ava nodded her understanding. “But Saudi Arabia itself didn’t do so well.” She noted.
“Exactly.” Simon nodded. ”The country’s economy was still founded in oil. Declining oil industry means declining employment, declining wages, and all the people who made a living selling goods and services to the oil industry and its workers, they all started to lose jobs and money too, their labour pool of foreign workers dried up…Throw in some safety cock-ups around the Hajj badly hurting their tourism industry, and Saudi Arabia’s been in a recession for five years now.”
“Surely we’re never going to be rid of oil entirely?” Sean asked.
“Not plastics.” Ava agreed. “But gasoline? The market for that’s going to be a fraction of what it used to be when it finally settles.”
“And there’s the problem.” Simon continued. “Saudi Arabia just isn’t as rich as it used to be. In fact it’s imploding. They’ve already had to cut spending in all sorts of ways. Artificial reefs and peninsula projects have been abandoned, cities in the desert have shrunk because they just couldn’t afford the water… and military spending has been slashed.”
“Oh boy.” Ava sighed, realising where this was going. “The Caliphate.”
“The so-called Caliphate,” Simon gently corrected her. “In what used to be Syria. Yes. They’ve had their eye on Mecca and Medina for years: the Masjid al-Haram and Al-Masjid an-Nabawi are two of the three most sacred places in Sunni Islam. If the Caliphate were to annexe those cities, it’d be a major propaganda victory for them. Recruitment would boom, and it’s high enough already.”
“Where’s the third?” Sean asked.
“Jerusalem.” Simon told him. “But the Israelis are a much tougher nut than the Saudis, and the Palestinians are… never mind. Point is, they don’t have a shot at Jerusalem any time soon. But they might have a shot at Mecca and Medina if not for…”
He zoomed the map out a bit. “…Pakistan. Like I said, Saudi Arabia’s collapsing, and because nobody in the region wants that they’ve been channeling aid and supplies to the Saudis for years, much to Iran and Russia’s alarm. In Pakistan’s case, a large part of that aid has been military – just like the Saudis and the so-called Caliphate, Pakistan are Sunni too, and they’re keen not to see the holy cities fall into Caliphate hands. So, they’ve been loaning all sorts of things: Training, special forces, a warship or two… and of course their air force can reach anywhere in the region just fine.”
“Okay…?” Sean asked, examining the map. Simon smiled grimly, and closed the app to open a folder full of pictures instead – two ships at harbour, dimly visible through extreme range and heat haze.
“This is the MV Nasarpur, and berthed next to it is the PNS Zulfiquar, one of the Pakistan Navy’s frigates. Nasarpur’s a merchant vessel, a light freighter. About two months ago she left Karachi bound for Jeddah Seaport. When she got there though, she was immediately locked down by the Pakistani military. She didn’t load or offload anything, and three days later she sailed straight back to Karachi, without explanation.”
“Any idea why?” Sean asked.
“Oh, rumours were flying thick and fast.” Simon told him. “None of them were very credible… Not even the kind of rags who run headlines like ‘The Corti abducted my cat!’ or whatever were touching them. That is, right up until some friends of mine were fed a tip that an Israeli checkpoint intercepted a nuke covered in Pakistan flags.”
“A nuke?!” Sean exclaimed.
Ava was similarly dismayed. “You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was.” Simon shook his head.
“Okay…” Ava re-opened the map and considered it some more. “Where’s Iran in all this?”
“Good question. One of the two questions we are going to be answering, in fact.”
“Oh, bloody lovely.” Sean groused. “You plan on leading us into a powder keg where cities could maybe blow up?”
“Story of my life…” Ava commented, sotto voce. Neither man heard her. “What’s the other question?”
Simon sat down, resting his elbows on his knees. “That nuke showing up in the West Bank makes absolutely no sense at all.” he said. “Nobody benefits from that. If they’d successfully smuggled it over the border and then detonated it… then what? Like I said, Jerusalem – and specifically the Al-Aqsa Mosque – is the third holiest site in Islam. Destroying it would be only marginally less blasphemous than destroying the Kaaba, or the Mosque of the Prophet.”
“Set it off elsewhere in Israel” he continued “and they’d just bring down the angry hammer of the West. Either way, there’s no incentive, so that nuke being where it was is just… bizarre. In fact I’m having trouble figuring out what the nukes are going to be useful for anywhere. Unless whoever took them truly are crazy enough to believe that they could detonate them and actually survive or even defeat the retaliation.”
“Unless just setting them off is the whole objective.” Sean pointed out. “And the whole point is martyrdom.”
“Or unless blasphemy is the whole point.” Ava added. “Some anti-Muslim organisation wanting to destroy the holy sites?”
“True.” Simon nodded. “But in both cases… y’know, even martyrdom is done in support of an objective, and I feel like if body count alone was the idea, they would have gone off already. It’s a big and insecure part of the planet and they’ve had plenty of time to drive those bombs to pretty much anywhere in Afro-Eurasia. If the plan was just to cause mayhem or to enrage the Muslim population, they’d have gone off already. I think.”
Sean raised a hand. “Am I alone in being a tad concerned about going up against people who stole some nukes and who may be willing to use them?” he asked.
“Don’t let me stop you if you want to back out.” Simon told him. “Goodness knows, it’d be a welcome relief from Jacqui spamming me all the time telling me to talk you out of it.” he added, referring to his sister, Sean’s mother.
”…Ava?” Sean asked.
She thought about it. She knew what her answer was, but it would be nice to articulate why.
“Simon… What do you think about what happened to San Diego?” She asked.
Simon sat back and considered her. “How d’you mean?”
“Like… what’s your theory on what happened?”
Simon pondered his reply carefully before giving it. “I think… look, all the credible science commentators have all agreed that it was some kind of antimatter-based weapon. Five kilograms, they reckon.” He said.
“Five kilograms of antimatter would cost about three hundred thousand trillion dollars.” Ava told them.
“Jesus.” Sean muttered. “That’s… how much is that?”
“A fuck of a lot.” Simon told him, unhelpfully.
“All the combined goods and services of the planet Earth would add up to that in about seven years or so.” Ava told him. “So… yeah. There is NO WAY that bomb was human activity. It was aliens, I guarantee you. And – oh look, within a few years of it happening, there’s a huge increase in defense spending, we start building spaceships and my boy-…” she paused, pulled an annoyed face and started over “…my ex-boyfriend winds up as the poster boy for a new generation of spaceborne serviceman.”
Simon nodded. “And then a Pakistani freighter carrying presumably nukes loses that cargo on the open ocean, only for one of them to show up a month or two later exactly where it makes the least sense.” he said.
“Right. It’s like if somebody who didn’t really understand the politics and religion and the whole… the whole everything that’s going on in the middle east was looking to try and shake up a real clusterfuck of a war in the region.” Ava told him.
“To what end?” Sean asked.
“Iunno.” Ava shrugged. “But what happens if they succeed? What if the whole Middle East did descend into World War Three? Would the allies be able to just ignore that and keep throwing resources up into space?”
“Not bloody likely…” Simon mused. “Where did you come up with a theory like that, anyway?”
“It’s… there’s kind of a pattern.” Ava told him. “Adam and I… our first date was to a roller derby. He spotted somebody in the crowd he recognised from a murder investigation, and… there was somebody lurking outside with an assault rifle, and… Y’know, it was almost a mass shooting.”
“You never mentioned this!” Sean gaped at her.
“It’s how Dad got his injury. He was… the gunman got him in the back. But then years later, when we lost Sara… that guy moved the exact same way. Adam saw that instantly. And he was doing something in the Byron launchpad at Folctha…”
She gritted her teeth and sighed, frowning. “It’s… I can almost put my thumb on it. It’s like a word on the tip of my tongue. I can feel that those two men really were connected, to each other and to San Diego, and to all this spending and the SOR… and to this.” she tapped the picture of Nasarpur and Zulfiquar. “To that freighter and the nukes. It’s all part of the same thing, I know it is. This piece of the puzzle just fits.”
They considered the image again.
“Bloody hell, duck.” Sean said eventually, shivering. “If you were trying to talk me into coming with, you’ve done a shitty job.”
“And given me a lot to think about.” Simon added. “Where do we even begin investigating something like that? And if you’re right… there’s no way that the intelligence services aren’t involved.”
“What’s the alternative?” Ava asked. “I heard there’s an Icelandic choir gonna go do a concert tour around Dominion space. You want to go cover that instead?”
“That’d be the sensible thing to do.” Simon suggested.
“Fuck sensible.” Ava grumbled. “Whatever this thing is, it killed my parents and ruined my life, and I’m not alone. I wanna fight back. So hell yeah, I’m in.”
Simon gave her a long, slow stare, then turned to Sean. “I like her.” he declared.
“Said you would.” Sean agreed.
Simon stood up. “Let me… let me plan this.” he said. “I’m not quite sure where an investigation like this might start. And no offense, Ava, but you being American is going to complicate matters if we just head straight for Saudi Arabia or wherever and start poking around. For the time being, fill out those forms I gave you and submit them. We can at least get your credentials sorted so that whatever we decide to do, we’re ready to do it. Okay?”
Ava and Sean nodded, and he stood. “Get some bags packed and ready to go, keep them by the front door or somewhere. I’ll be in touch.”
Sean let him out.
“Are we crazy?” he asked, on returning. “I mean, are we seriously going to kick off our careers in journalism by going to the Middle East and chasing nukes?”
“I think Simon’s either crazy or desperate to take us along.” Ava replied unconcernedly, stretching out on the couch.
“Doesn’t that bother you?”
“I gave my last fuck months ago.”
“That’s not what I wanted to hear!”
Ava tucked her hands behind her head. “Sean, don’t you get it? Didn’t you put the pieces together? Didn’t you listen to a thing I just said?”
Sean frowned at her and circled around to drop in the armchair. “Clearly I didn’t.” he muttered.
Ava sighed and sat up. “Someone or something wants us dead.” she said. “You MUST have seen the Vancouver attack footage. And everybody knows about the, the quarantine field and come on! You think two million dead Californians happened by accident? Adam and I could have been in that, it kind of rams the point home!”
“You really think-?”
“No. I fucking know, Sean. I saw a man shoot a fourteen-year-old girl because she was in the way. That’s what we’re up against. I don’t know who, or what, or why, but I know that SOMETHING with more antimatter than we could produce if we turned all of the Earth’s civilizations to making it and pumped it out for a lifetime… Something with that wants us dead. And it’s somehow got some humans on its side too.”
She gestured to the window. “And what are the options? Do nothing? Get drunk? Fuck a lot and try to enjoy ourselves before they succeed because we didn’t try and stop them? The Hell with that! I- I can’t!”
She was amazed to discover that she was crying.
Sean, very gently, shifted from chair to couch and put a hand on her upper arm. “You sure you’re not still feeling guilty over Adam?” he asked.
“Of course I still feel guilty over Adam!” Ava tore away from him and surged to her feet, angry now. “How does that change anything? Who gives a fuck? It doesn’t matter what my reasons are for doing it, it’s still the right thing to do.”
“We could get killed.”
“Oh, wake up!! We WILL get killed some day. Cancer, or a car crash, or an antimatter bomb from space or… who the fuck knows?! Death doesn’t scare me, Sean. If it scares you, you’re welcome not to come along.”
He laughed gently. “I did say ’we’ could get killed, didn’t I?”
Ava stilled. “…Okay, what’s your reason?” she asked, turning to face him.
Sean shrugged. “A bad one.” he conceded, picking at something invisible on his jeans and not looking at her. “But, y’know. Better to do the right thing for a bad reason, right?”
”…Yeah.”
Ava considered challenging him for a better answer, but settled for shrugging and trudging out of the room and up the stairs into her bedroom to prepare a bag as Simon had suggested. Every fiber of her wanted to be sullen, angry and bitter pretty much all the time, and she was damned if she’d indulge that impulse, even if Sean couldn’t resist his impulse to drop a veiled and passive ‘I love you’ on her whenever he could, which was really starting to be a pain in the…
She paused, took a deep breath, and started over.
She had to do that a lot as she packed, just as she’d had to do every day for weeks now. Every single resource she could find about travel in the Middle East stressed modesty. Modesty! As if the God who’d created the human body had intended for it to be an object of revulsion and fear. As if men were so weak that women had to suffer the burden of controlling their impulses for them-!
Pause. Deep breath. Start over.
It was getting better, day by day. Every time she caught herself flying into a rage, every time she closed her eyes, inhaled and let go, it made the next time a little easier.
She took her time and focused as hard as she could on packing the bag as small and efficient as possible. Tight jeans were out, but that was okay, she had some loose slacks. These formed the outer layer, inside which were rolled her flannel shirts, loose tops and everything she had that would combine to cover her from wrist to chin to ankle without scandalizing the oh-so-delicate male sensibilities-
Pause, deep breath, start over…
Underwear, socks, sanitary pads, some makeup essentials, a pretty square scarf that should hopefully pass muster as a hijab if she needed it. She spent a few minutes practicing putting it on, threw it into the corner in disgust after she managed to jab herself in the back of the head with a pin – pause, deep breath, start over – retrieved it and, after a few minutes, became satisfied that she was putting it on correctly without having to refer to the WikiHow guide.
Experimentally, she wore it alongside the clothing she’d picked out. It wasn’t baggy and formless, at least. In fact…
“Modest and still hot.” she congratulated herself, then realised that in testing her outfit she’d managed to completely undo all her progress on packing the bag.
She paused. She took a deep breath, and she started over.
Date Point 10y4m AV
HMS Sharman, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Regaari
“Chasing after Shoo was more than just a personal mission for me, it became a lucrative contract for the Clan.”
Admiral Sir Patrick Knight had been summoned, and Regaari was now being politely interrogated in a meeting room somewhere in HMS Sharman’s structure. Ayma, apparently, was to be ‘debriefed’ separately.
Somehow, Regaari had expected the admiral to be a near-clone of major Powell—sturdy, strong, and rough. Knight in fact was tall and slender and the translator rendered him with a refined, intellectual accent similar to that of Clan Highmountain. “How so?” he asked
“The females are… extremely devoted to their ideal of Clan loyalty. More so than any male is to his clan, and that is quite a feat.” Regaari explained. “Their devotion to one another apparently transcends species. They’re in something of an uproar right now over the wisdom of bringing a human—Shoo—into the Clan, but the one thing that none of them will even think of suggesting would be ejecting her from the Clan of Females. She’s a Sister, and will be a Sister for as long as she lives.”
“And this benefited Whitecrest… how?” Knight inquired.
“I am an—apparently—prestigious officer of Clan Whitecrest, and I led an exhaustive investigation, chasing Shoo across known space.” Regaari explained. “Now, this was advantageous to Whitecrest first because it was a valuable intelligence-gathering venture in its own right. We tripled the reach of of our surveillance network in searching for her. That alone would have been reason enough to do it, but the mating contracts…”
“You did it all for the nookie?” Powell asked. His expressions were always harder to read than most humans, but there was just enough there for Regaari to guess at a joke of some kind. Joking or not, however, the observation was completely on target.
“For as long as the search continued,” Regaari told him “we had the respect and attention of practically every female on Gao. For males, that is a rare and hugely coveted position to be in—it means that for once WE get to choose our mating partners, rather than the other way around. We advanced our breeding program by generations during this operation.”
“Breeding program?”
“Selectively enhancing the Whitecrest line by mating with females carrying gene-stock from other clans. The Stonebacks, the Highmountains, the One-fangs… breeding for strength, intelligence, reflexes… Every clan has just such a program in effect, planning our own genetic futures.”
The humans shared an uneasy glance for some reason. “Is… something the matter?” Regaari asked them.
“Call it a cultural foible.” Knight conceded. “Eugenics has been an historically, uhm…tricky subject on Earth. Where does Kirk come into this?”
“When I was travelling with Shoo and Ayma, we found ourselves with a dilemma.” Regaari said, sitting back. Designed as the seats were for human proportions, his feet were dangling ridiculously but he didn’t care. “She wouldn’t go back to Gao, you see. She was convinced that she would bring down the Swarm of Swarms just by being there. Who knows, maybe she was right? On the evidence of Capitol Station, we wouldn’t have been able to fight them…and the commune she lived at and all the city around it would have been inundated with slavering predators. I think that thought scared her more than the possibility of being eaten herself.”
Knight and Powell both nodded. Regaari recognised that nod—it was the one that indicated agreement without wanting to interrupt.
“Returning her to Earth was also not within our power. No channels of communication, no help from the Dominion… we didn’t even know where Earth was.” he paused. “In fact, I still don’t.”
“The distal end of the Border Stars.” Knight told him. “A cluster we call the Local Group”.
Regaari tried to recall what he could of the Dominion’s galactic map. The galaxy was an incomprehensibly huge place, and the broad-strokes creation of a notional feature such as a band of uninhabitable systems which marked the no-man’s land between the Dominion and the Alliance inevitably included tens of thousands of stars. It was all far too big for any living being’s brain to accommodate.
“A long way from Gao and from what the Dominion thinks of as civilization, then.” he concluded. “And with the Dominion actively obscuring that information and stymieing efforts to contact your species… well, we were forced to stay on the move. Shoo disguised herself as a Sister and we took care to travel parts of the Dominion far from Gao, where she would be less likely to be discovered. It was there that we started to hear rumours.”
“About Kirk.” Powell checked.
“About Councillor Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk.” Regaari had long mastered the trick of letting his cybernetics transmit the name to the translator rather than trying to pronounce it. “We would find stations where they were still talking about their vagrant Deathworlder and the fact that one of the galaxy’s most notorious political figures had just swept in, collected them and departed. We had just started looking for him when… well, there was an incident. It persuaded Shoo to leave us and go it alone.”
“What happened then?”
“Ayma was furious with her.” Regaari remembered fondly. “I think she’d forgotten that Shoo is a human, with human instincts. She saw her as a Sister, and expected her to behave like one.”
“In what way?” Knight asked.
“Forgive the broad generalization here, but… the Clan of Females stand together and they can be both savage and a bit stupid about it. Threaten one of them, and they will unite to make your life a misery, even if actually doing so is beyond their power. Humans, I think, will do that too…up to a point. And I think that point is the one where an individual decides to sacrifice themselves for the good of the rest.”
“That’s very broad strokes.” Powell commented.
“Borne out by individual examples that I have personally witnessed, Major. Sergeant Leo Price, for instance.”
Knight and Powell looked at one another again. It was amazing how much humans communicated between themselves just by taking a half-second glance at each others’ faces. Regaari had no idea what the unspoken conversation had entailed, but Powell cleared his throat.
“So you returned to Gao.” he said.
“By way of Perfection.” Regaari duck-nodded. “Ayma didn’t know why, but I… made use of a resource.”
“The Contact.” Knight guessed.
“Now how do you know about her?” Regaari demanded.
“Via Kirk.”
“Ah. Of course. I should have known he would use her services as well… Well, for a fair price, she sold me information concerning Kirk and his ship. Contact information as well, which turned out to be obsolete. Or at least, he never got in touch via those channels. I have no idea why not.”
“In any case” he continued “when the Whitecrest clan set about trying to find Shoo, we were able to trace her to a station in the Signal Stars. FTS-1090 ‘Endless Possibility’. The trail went dead there.”
“Why?”
“The station’s traffic records were corrupted. Every ship that stopped there over nearly half a Gaoian year, their origin, destination, flight plans… all lost. All we had to go on was civilian rumour and gossip.”
“And what did those have to say?”
“They were abuzz. A Gaoian female had fought with a human male and fled the station. Some time later, that human had left with some other humans in the company of a Rrrtk.”
“Fought?” Knight asked.
”’Wiped the floor with him’ as you say.” Regaari commented, clearly pleased for his friend’s prowess. “The station’s population weren’t sure whether to be sceptical of the stories of human strength, or whether to start thinking Gaoians are deathworlders too. The idea of a disguise never crossed their minds… though to be fair, it was a good disguise.”
“That matches with Kirk’s final report…” Powell observed.
“That it does,” Knight agreed “but those logs being corrupted is new information, and not Kirk’s MO at all… Enemy action?”
Powell grunted and nodded. “Trying to cover their tracks.”
“Which means that Kirk, his crew and Miss Chang stumbled across something important.”
“At the kinds of speeds Sanctuary could get to, that something important could be anywhere, sir.”
“True, but the escape pod is much slower… hmm.”
“Enemy action?” Regaari asked, “What enemy?”
He knew a poker-face when he saw one, and both Knight and Powell had impenetrable ones. “Doesn’t matter.” Powell grunted.
“We do have plenty of enemies, after all.” Knight agreed, a touch more diplomatically. “And this all happened five years ago.”
Regaari considered calling bullshit—it was a phrase he’d learned early on from Shoo’s movies, and loved—but decided against it. It would only antagonize them, and be unlikely to work.
“Not that I’m authorised to make a formal offer…” he started. “But the Clans might well be interested in closer ties with humanity over the coming years. Knowing who your enemies are might shape that decision, or prepare us for coming up against them…”
Again, there was a borderline-telepathic silent conversation between Knight and Powell that took little more than enough time for both men to glance at one another. “Well said,” Knight agreed. “I’ll… need to take advice from my colleagues and superiors on that, however.”
“By all means.” Regaari agreed. “Now… on to the matter of Ayma and I visiting Earth…”
Date Point: 10y4m AV
Mrwrki Station, Uncharted System, Deep Space
Kirk
In the weeks since they had first arrived at Mrwrki, Lewis’ initial experiments with the nanofactory had largely revolved around creating a series of construction drones, which had in turn assembled for him an apartment, rebuilding part of the station’s structure so that the nanofactory and its control centre was basically his living room.
The apartment itself was little more than a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and a large working area, the latter comprised of a commodious comfortable chair, more volumetric screens and work surfaces and what looked to Kirk’s eyes like a hundred data pads strewn over the floor, piled on the surfaces, tucked into the corners of the chair, and generally littering the place like ticker-tape in the aftermath of an especially pompous parade.
Lewis was trying to keep himself to a healthy routine, to the point where Kirk was under strict orders from him to enter the apartment with a shock prod and zap him if he didn’t stick to the rules he’d set himself.
Quite why Lewis would need to be reminded to go to sleep, to bathe, to eat and to change his clothing was a bit of a mystery, but as Kirk understood it, a human in the grip of an obsession could neglect his basic needs, and Lewis had self-diagnosed a strong propensity for exactly that kind of obsession.
At least, that was how Kirk had described it to Vedreg. Lewis’ exact words had been “Dude, I’ll fall asleep on a slice of mouldy pizza inside a week if you don’t remind me to clean up and look after myself. Been there, done that.”
To his credit, Lewis was sticking to his schedule almost without prompting, and he was benefiting from it, too. Aboard Sanctuary, he had stuck to the bare minimum of exercise that Julian and Kirk had conspired to force on him. Now…
It was impossible for a human to seem “scrawny” by the standards of Kirk’s species. Humans – even unfit, skinny humans – were pretty much nothing but muscle and bone, and those muscles and bones were denser, tougher, stronger and proportionately larger. To an Rrrtk’s eyes, even Lewis was dense and sturdy enough to shake the deck plating as he walked, and Lewis was decidedly scrawny by human standards.
His general proportions hadn’t changed much on a regime of tai chi and yoga, but his movements had. Lewis had sort of… flopped about the place before, treating being upright as something he did en route to sitting somewhere else, with shoulders slouched and expression distracted, only to focus when he was sat at a terminal, working on a stimulating challenge. Now, he moved with the same kind of fluid alertness that Allison and Julian had possessed. His back was straighter, his step lighter, his expression here and now. It was like he was always at a terminal these days, always working on a stimulating challenge.
Maybe he was. He was certainly absorbing knowledge with a voracity that defied comprehension, and sometimes he made huge tangential links between two subjects that Kirk would never have thought to connect. What was the association between climate science and politics? What did either of them have to do with nanofactorys? For that matter, how did biology and computer programming enmesh?
Lewis had explained. Kirk prided himself that he was one of the smarter members of a species that had, prior to the arrival of humans and Gaoians, been generally respected as the only sophonts around who could give the Corti a run for their money, but Lewis’s exploration of those connections had been so arcane that he still wasn’t sure he understood it.
Could a local drought really spark a civil war? Let alone a regional conflict that went on to drag in half the factions on an entire planet? How could software evolve? In what possible way were either of those already impenetrable relationships relevant to using the nanofactory to build a weapon against the Hierarchy?
Lewis had finally silenced his questions by instructing him to “Go read the Dirk Gently books, dude.”
Kirk hadn’t been able to find an author by that name, but he had been introduced to Douglas Adams, to the concept of “holistic” and, in researching that, to the whole field of Chaos Theory.
The “fundamental interconnectedness of all things” seemed like a bizarre and nonsense concept at first, but the more Kirk had dug into it, the more he realised that he had been exploiting exactly that principle ever since he’d left ’Outlook on Forever’. Relying on it, even. Everything came back to humans in the end – after all, he’d planned to use them to tear down the rusty and stifling entrenched power of the Dominion from the inside.
He snapped out of his thoughtful mood as he approached Lewis’ door. Kirk had gone without company for a couple of days while Vedreg slept, and yesterday’s attempt to check in with Lewis had ended in the human calling “Busy! Come back tomorrow!” through the door.
This time, the door opened.
Lewis’ outfit had changed dramatically, for some reason. He bathed daily and the first thing to come out of Mrwrki’s nanofactory under his control had been a machine for washing and drying his clothes. Even though the forge could have recycled them and built him new clothes every day if he wanted them, he’d stuck to the same fraying jeans and sand-coloured T-shirt that he had been abducted in, years ago.
These were now gone and replaced with robes of some kind, or something like a kimono or karate gi… it was hard to tell exactly what, given Kirk’s own lack of expertise with the intricacies of human clothing and the fact that Lewis had probably designed the garment from memory. The end result was something loose and comfortable.
Lewis was curled up in his Thinking Chair – the huge comfortable one that Kirk could almost have squeezed himself into – reading something off a tablet.
“Hey man. Come on in.”
“How are you doing?” Kirk asked, accepting his invitation and entering the suite properly. It was remarkably clean, especially considering Lewis’ self-confessed propensity for squalor.
“Trying to get my head around quantum computing.” Lewis murmured, in the soft way he always did when concentrating. “I get the theory, there’s just… subtleties to the way the Corti go about using qubits that’re giving me an idea.”
“Like what?”
“Don’t even ask me to explain, man. I’ve got, like, a shape forming in my head and, like, there’s a bit that I think is gonna fit there, but even if it does, ain’t no way I’m going to be able to explain it without telling you the whole shape.”
“I like the new wardrobe.” Kirk changed the subject. “Very… zen.”
“I was going for Tron: Legacy, man. Flynn had his shit worked out.”
“He did?”
“Yuh-huh. If you’re gonna spend however the fuck long in exile with like, two or three people to talk to, tops… may as well be comfortable and meditate a lot.”
He swiped right on the tablet. “It helps, actually. Weirdly.”
“I wouldn’t know. Is this what you were doing yesterday?”
“Yeah, dude. Ass finally went on my jeans. You came along while I was buck-ass, assembling me some new duds.”
Kirk snorted, amused. “Lewis, what possible reason would I have to care?” he asked.
“Yeah, yeah. Just because the whole galaxy are nudists, we’re the weird ones.” Lewis scoffed. “Clothing is practical dude.”
“Practical for what, exactly?”
“Well, fuckin’ pockets for a start.”
Kirk just rocked his weight backward onto his four hindlegs, the comfortable sedentary posture of a Rrrtk not planning to go anywhere for a while. He was wearing a utility belt, two holsters and a pair of saddlebags, none of which would have begun to qualify as ‘clothing’ by a human’s standards, yet which meant that he was already rather better-equipped with pockets than Lewis had ever been in his jeans. Certainly, Lewis’ ’Flynn’ robes didn’t seem to have pockets at all.
He decided not to press the issue. That way lay an argument just as intractable as trying to point out to the Kwmbwrw that they were, biologically speaking, obligate omnivores and that their strictly herbivorous lifestyle led to malnutrition problems that placed a permanent burden on their economy. Certainly, the Kwmbwrw and the Gaoians had been at odds over that point from the instant the Gaoians had made first contact.
“Not to rush you…” he said, delicately. “But I was rather expecting that you would have started to build things and experiment by now.”
“I have.”
”…You have?”
“Sure. I’ve just not built anything useful man. So it’s all gone back in the recycler.”
Kirk angled his head so that he could get Lewis into his very limited range of binocular vision. “Nothing useful at all?”
“Well, I made the washer-dryer, and an oven and some cake tins for Vedreg, and don’t forget all these tablets…” Lewis shrugged, swiping right again. “But like, as for the Big Project? Yeah, I’ve thrown together a few basic ideas, some proofs-of concept. But I can either do the mad scientist thing and fill my space with every last shitty little project that’s never gonna come to anything until I’ve got nowhere to work, or I can keep the place tidy.”
“You do keep saying that you are naturally an untidy person.” Kirk pointed out.
“Dude you have no idea what untidy really is.” Lewis told him, setting the tablet aside. “I’m being fucking careful here because I…”
He stopped, suddenly and visibly emotional, then sprang to his feet. “Room. How far to Sol?”
The room spoke in a clearly synthetic voice. “The approximate straight-line distance from this station to Sol is: Half a galactic radial length.”
“That’s about seven kiloparsecs, Kirk. Twenty-three thousand light years. If we had Sanctuary here and I hopped in her right now and flew her straight home? It’d take me two and a half weeks, and that’s if I magically somehow managed to do it without having to stop to degauss every day.” Lewis cleared his throat and gestured to the map: the straight line route strayed dangerously close to the galactic core, where starships never dared to venture. “If I took the spacelanes… Room, if I had a ship with a cruising speed of five hundred kilolights, how long would it take me to reach Sol via cleared spacelanes?”
“Calculating… approximate travel distance, one point three galactic radial lengths. Approximate journey duration in human units rounding up, not including necessary resupply and degauss stops: Sixty days.”
Kirk watched Lewis’ shoulders sag, before he turned around. “And Cimbrean is even further. Two months, Kirk. If I had the fastest ship in the Milky Way right here, it’d take me two months to get home. On most ships? Like, if I tried to hitch-hike home on freighters and whatever, I could be at it for years.”
He dismissed the galactic projection with a swipe of his arm. “I am a long way from other humans right now. I like you and Vedreg well enough, sure. But…You guys can go without, if you have to. Me? if I’m not very, very careful, I’ma go crazy and I fucking know it. I have GOT to take care of myself: No mess. No clutter. Do my chores, exercise, say my fuckin’ prayers, whatever, and maybe I’ll be able to go a few years without completely losing my shit.”
There was a long moment of silence, and then Lewis climbed back into his Thinking Chair. “So mebbe you’d better let me get on with all this studying I gotta do, ‘cause the sooner I get it done and come up with a solution, the sooner I can get out of this cage you’ve shoved me in. Good talk, buddy. Let’s do this again tomorrow.”
Not quite knowing what to say, Kirk watched him in silence for a minute, and then pushed his weight forward onto all six legs again and made himself scarce.