Date Point 10y4m2w3d AV
Starship Negotiable Curiosity, Cimbrean system, the Far Reaches
Bedu
What surprised Bedu was how businesslike the humans were despite their considerable discomfort. They were all complaining and groaning now… but the moment the word arrived to stand up and prepare for boarding, they had immediately laid out their equipment neatly in plain sight and had then stood against the wall of the ship’s common area while the ship came to a relative halt and prepared to be boarded.
When the unmistakable sound of the airlock cycling began, they turned, pressed their hands to the wall above their heads, and waited. Bedu was at a loss as to why, but his speculation was soon answered when, once the lock cycled, five more humans in that thick space armor of theirs bustled efficiently onto his ship.
In any other situation he might have used the term ’brandishing’ their weapons, but in fact they were far too clinical and workmanlike for that word to apply. Those guns were being held in the tight, snappy grip of elites who knew exactly how to use them, and who didn’t need to wave them around to draw attention to the possibility of future violence.
There was a short, tense and efficient interlude as each of his captors’ heads was subjected to a scan of some kind. Only once all four had been pronounced ’green, whatever that meant, did they relax. The weapons were put away, the body language changed. Smiles and hugs and alarmingly physical gestures of affection were roundly shared. In that second they went from utterly professional killing machines to the very best of friends, reunited and excited about it.
One of them remained aloof from the cycle of affection. Not that he was standoffish – quite the reverse, he welcomed Rebar, Titan, Snapfire and Starfall with obvious affection, but it was a more… detached affection.
The Corti had no words for ’fatherly’ or ’brotherly’.
Bedu soon found himself under the taciturn care of one of the smaller humans, referred to by the others as ’Highland’. Two others, both of whom were behemothic slabs of muscle laden with an alarming amount of equipment, seemed to be the medical experts, and they rushed to attend to their exhausted comrades. Bedu could understand why – over the course of what they called a “week”, those four men had gone from being imposing forces of physical force, to groaning statues who barely moved except when compelled to by need of nutrition or duty change.
Their predicament was an effective antidote to any notion that humans were invincible. Greatly more durable than anybody else could ever hope to be, yes, but Bedu had spent a week watching them slowly fight a losing battle with their own equipment. They were people to him now. Nice people even: Courteous, clever, conscientious people whom he was forced to watch suffer.
Even for Corti, that was an uncomfortable situation.
The slightly aloof one, whom he took to be the leader, approached him once things had settled down. He was among the smallest of them, but still easily out-massed Bedu several times over.
“Bedu?” he asked.
“Yes.”
The leader nodded. “My name’s ’Stainless’. You’ve been detained for questioning as a witness in a matter pertaining to the freedom and security of the peoples of Earth and Cimbrean, and of all humans.” he announced, formally. “Sorry for the inconvenience.”
“As it happens, I’ve rather enjoyed the inconvenience.” Bedu stood. “Besides, this detention is legal so long as you reimburse me for my time…”
“That wouldn’t be my responsibility.” Stainless informed him. “But everything should be above-board and legal, yes.”
“Excellent…. Are your subordinates going to be well? They seem to have suffered rather badly during the flight.”
Stainless glanced over at his men.
“They’ll be fine,” he said. “Thank you for your concern.”
“So what happens now?” Bedu asked.
There was a lurch, and the ship chimed its usual alert sound for accelerating into a re-entry.
Bedu inclined his head. “The planet Cimbrean, I presume?”
“That’s right.” Stainless nodded. He exchanged a few quiet words with Titan that Bedu didn’t catch, and gave the (presumably) younger man a pat on the shoulder as he staggered and groaned his way forward to help with the re-entry.
Bedu excused himself and took inventory of his belongings, making sure they were all put away and that he had memorised their exact position. He doubted that he would come back to find anything missing, but it would at least be nice to know if they had been moved or searched.
The landing wasn’t as smooth as Mwrmwrwk would have managed, but it was by no means a bad one. In fact, humans being the high-gravity species they were, and capable of handling really quite serious jolts, they probably felt it was perfectly smooth.
Through the wall, Bedu heard Hkzzvk bleat in alarm. Snapfire called something comforting along the lines of “it’s okay buddy, we just landed!” and Hkzzvk’s panicked noises immediately ceased.
Rebar, Titan, Snapfire and Starfall disembarked first, though Starfall was leaning heavily on the largest of his comrades, and Snapfire had to be carried, slung across the shoulders of the second-largest, whose careful footfalls still made the deck plating groan and protest. Bedu watched with mingled awe and disbelief – Snapfire had struck him as being so heavy that even medium stevedore drones would have struggled with his mass. While the feat certainly didn’t look effortless for his comrade, neither did it look like it was pushing his limits.
Bedu and Hkzzvk were carefully shepherded down the ramp by Stainless, Highland and one of the large ones, whose moniker Bedu had not learned. They were met at the bottom by a consignment of humans not wearing armored pressure suits, but instead clad in looser and clearly more comfortable working garments. These were still armed – a ludicrous consideration given that either one of them was comfortably strong enough to dismember anybody who wasn’t human – but the weapons were small, and holstered.
“This way please.” one of them said, waving his hand toward a nearby vehicle. Closer still, the four aching SOR men were being aided onto a transport whose rear step was almost brushing the ground.
Bedu looked around. Cimbrean was a pleasant planet, but there was something… strange about it, that he just couldn’t quite identify. Maybe it was the humans themselves – their every movement seemed faintly awkward, as if they weren’t quite walking naturally. Of course, they wouldn’t be, would they? Cimbrean’s gravity was rather higher than Bedu’s native norm, but must be much lower than Earth’s.
Or maybe it was the auditory landscape. Corti ears were large and sensitive, well adapted to the comparatively low atmospheric density of Origin. In Cimbrean’s denser air, every noise was a little louder and a little deeper and they carried distant hints of shouting, construction work, traffic, and alien laughter. Only that last one was an unfamiliar sound of course, but the cadences and sheer business…
Hkzzvk provided the answer. He trudged down the ramp, shying away from the humans and glancing nervously around as if looking for somewhere to run, but as he always did whenever they landed, he paused and took a deep breath.
He promptly buried his nose in his hands, croaking aggrievedly to himself.
“Hkzzvk?” Bedu asked.
“This planet reeks.” Hkzzvk explained.
Corti had very little to speak of in the way of a sense of smell, so Bedu deferred to his crewman’s superioriority in matters olfactory. “In what way?”
Hkzzvk raised his head and his nostrils flared. “It smells of predators.” he decided. “and … urgh, I don’t know what most of these smells are, but I don’t like them.”
That would be it. Weak as Corti nasal acuity was, the pheromones and scents on the air would still be present on a subconscious level, informing his mood. He nodded, satisfied that the mystery was solved.
“Well,” he said. “All the more reason to be done with this interview and get on our way.”
“What about our employers?” Hkzzvk asked.
Corti didn’t smile often, but when they did it was usually because they had scored some small moment of empowerment. Bedu allowed himself an unabashed expression of triumph, and borrowed a human word of unmatched communicative potential.
“’Fuck’ our employers,” he said.
Date Point 10y4m2w3d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), planet Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Martina Kovač
Anybody who knew the “Lads” knew they weren’t superhuman. Absolutely pushing back the limits of what ’human’ could mean, yes, but it was difficult to be in awe of somebody when you regularly saw how much pain, inconvenience and indignity they suffered through.
Arés had put his finger on it – Martina was a bio-mechanical expert who had more academic training than most civilian surgeons and a broad role covering absolutely everything about the life-support functionality of every EV-MASS they had, including the ones waiting in reserve for qualified Operators who could wear them. It fell to her to dig through feedback and medical reports diagnosing the most minor of concerns with the suit and liaising with the Lads themselves on their own fitness and suit-readiness. It fell to her to sign off on every life support pack’s fitness for use, and it fell to her to keep the suit techs properly briefed on any concerns that needed addressing.
She loved to boast to her friends and family that she was in charge of a whole team of spacesuit experts, but the unglamorous reality was that many of the suits’ most important systems were below the waist and so, as Arés had pointed out, it fell to her on a monthly basis to intimately measure all of the Lads, and that was only the most minor of the several vital responsibilities she had that all involved the pelvic anatomy.
Put bluntly she had to think a lot about how much the guys pissed and shit, both in terms of frequency and in terms of volume. Those inelegant metrics were thoroughly effective at grounding her estimation of them all. It was a bit like knowing the directory of Spiderman’s porn folder, or which was Wonder Woman’s preferred brand of tampon.
At least her back was almost completely pain-free by now, thanks to some aggressive therapeutic massage and Crue-D treatment. Warhorse had declared that he wasn’t going to be able to stop the burn from leaving some permanent scarring, but when she’d examined it over her shoulder in the mirror, she’d decided that while the white mottling and dimpling down her right flank and buttock wasn’t pretty, it was still much better than she’d feared.
This was good, because today wasn’t a day for limping around. At least, not for her. When Vandenberg, Blaczynski, Sikes and Akiyama were delivered to the suit shop, they were practically stretchered in, and every single one of them was gaunt and pale with fatigue and cramping muscles.
For a change, pumping in the ice-cold water that was vital to persuading their midsuit layers to relax and shrink so that they could be removed produced no complaint. Getting the suits off was much more difficult than usual because the guys couldn’t pull as hard as they normally would, but off they came in the end. In fact in Titan’s case, they only freed him by getting Burgess to help with heaving on him – Arés was too busy lifting Sikes out of his suit and getting an IV into him.
Just in case Martina was still harboring any lingering doubts about how rough the Lads really had it, the stench was unbelievable. Bozo, who had been left sitting obediently in the corner waiting to be introduced to his new friends, promptly sneezed, shook himself and got the hell out of there with his tail between his legs. Martina envied him.
Fortunately, she didn’t have to deal with actually cleaning the suits – that was for the techs – but body biochemistry was absolutely her concern, so she told her nose to shut the fuck up and gathered what she needed from the the suits’ sewage processors, briskly took the needed blood samples, and excused herself to the safe atmosphere of the lab.
From there, while the samples were spun, had lasers shone through them and all the other assorted work that the testing machines did, she was able to liaise with the Protectors and keep them apprised of her results in real-time. Between them they quickly decided that the best thing for their buddies was to get them scrubbed up and bedded down on cots right there in the suit shop, with drips in for hydration and glucose, a maximum dose each of Crue-D, and a license to sleep for as long as they needed under supervision.
She was grateful to find, once all the results were in and she’d evaluated them, that in her absence the suit shop had returned to its more usual nasal background noise which, although it did include a strong note of body odor, at least balanced that note with lubricant, hot rubber, industrial cleaning agents and solder.
Warhorse had taken first shift in supervising his exhausted buddies, who were all fast asleep on cots along the dividing wall between the shop and the locker room. Out of their suits, they were an obvious mess – all four were sporting pinch marks, blood blisters, bruises, rash and the other trademark skin discolorations that came with wearing EV-MASS for any length of time.
They had a form for recording those – a stylized human body from several angles with a simple emblem system – crosses, hashing, plus signs and stars – for recording the location and size of different kinds of marks. He’d saved her a job there and begun filling them in himself, and they took a moment to double-check to her satisfaction that he hadn’t missed anything as best they could without actually moving or waking the sleepers.
“How’re their results?” he asked, once she’d satisfied herself and pocketed them.
“Nothing scary, but God. I wouldn’t want to have metabolite levels that high.” Martina said. “Sikes especially must be in agony.”
‘Horse gave his buddies an unhappy look over and nodded.
Both of them caught movement in the corner of their eye, and stood when it turned out to be major Powell crossing the shop with a serious expression, not that he usually wore any other kind.
“Siddown, siddown.” he called, waving them down. “I’m just checkin’ on them.”
“They’ll be fine sir. Arés and I were just discussing their bloodwork.” Martina told him.
Powell nodded. “Any thoughts on their recovery time?”
Horse looked to Martina. “Two weeks, two and a half?” he asked.
“That’s maybe being optimistic…” Martina suggested. “The rehab diet alone-”
“Right, yeah.” Arés nodded.
“Just a ballpark will do me for now.” Powell said.
“Three weeks, sir,” Martina told him.
Powell’s jaw worked thoughtfully as he assimilated that news. “Cally in drydock, four of the Lads convalescing, I’ve got Jackson wanting to train you and Baseball up for PR work…” he grumbled, gesturing to Arés, “General Tremblay’s gonna have to find somebody else for the embassy job.”
“Never a dull moment.” Martina observed. They all knew the subtle tics and tells that were Powell’s expressions, and she saw a silent laugh pull momentarily at the corner of his mouth.
“Aye, at least I’m not fookin’ bored.” he agreed. “Okay. You two bash together a recovery schedule and I’ll let the Navy worry about getting us a replacement ride while ours is in the shop.”
“Yes sir.”
Powell left them in peace.
Martina started calculating the rehab schedule in her head, and Arés was plainly doing something similar, albeit on his fingers. She tried and failed to stifle her amusement: He was so huge and prodigiously muscled that counting on his fingers made him look adorably cro-magnon, even though she knew that he was furiously calculating some quite sophisticated medical realities.
He didn’t fail to notice, and went slightly red. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“What?!”
She laughed, and pantomimed counting on her fingers while pulling the dumbest, most neanderthal face she could. He snorted, directed an affectionate middle finger at her, and went back to his mental arithmetic with a smile.
Martina pulled her notebook from her pocket and happily did the same. Apparently the therapy hadn’t killed off their chemistry after all…
Date Point 10y4m2w6d AV
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, Earth.
Allison Buehler
“Come on, honey, you’ve got this! First roll!”
Xiù was plainly having the time of her life. A loud woman with a broad Louisiana accent was cheering her on, and she wasn’t the only one – the four other players at the table were all calling words of encouragement. Xiù meanwhile was smiling nervously as she picked up the dice.
Allison laughed as she and Julian watched her imitate what others had done and blow on the dice in her hand, then cast them vigorously down the table. There were cheers, everybody collected some chips and Xiù pumped her fist, danced an excited circle on the spot, and eagerly accepted the dice to throw them again, drinking in the words of praise and encouragement from the eclectic mix of people at the table.
“Do you follow what’s going on?” Julian asked.
“She just rolled an eleven.” Allison explained.
“That’s good?”
Allison smiled. “Everybody’s ten dollars richer thanks to her.”
“Hah. That’s our girl!”
They watched Xiù share a joke with the lady from Louisiana – it was hard to hear what she said over the sound of people calling for a repeat performance – and bounced the dice off the far wall of the table. This met with a more subdued response, but still a generally positive one, and several chips were added to the table.
It was all clearly a bit arcane for Julian. His attention wandered as the croupier maneuvered her stick around and returned the dice for another throw, which was met with a more muted response.
“So I’ve been thinking.” Allison told him.
“‘Bout what?”
“‘Bout you and her.”
Julian turned to face her. “You’re still okay, right?”
“I’m fine! Are you? You’ve not really… y’know, moved things forward.”
“We have our moments…” Julian said. “It’s just tricky.”
“Moments like what?”
“Like… little moments. Where, if I was having the moment with you…” he leaned over suddenly and kissed her. “…like that, you know?”
Touched, Allison smiled. “So what’s tricky about that?”
“Well, you said we have to ask permission first and… I mean, I don’t know how to do that without it kind of… I want things to be natural.” Julian explained. “You know…”
“Spontaneous.”
“Yeah. It’s like… if we have to ask permission-”
“I get you.” Allison nodded. She sat back and watched Xiù throw her dice – whatever she rolled, it produced a neutral response from her fellow players. She took a swig of her beer to cover a rush of mixed emotions.
Julian saw right through her. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“I’m…. kinda…” Allison sighed and started over. “I want to just agree that it’s a stupid rule.” she confessed. “I feel like I shouldn’t be so insecure, you know?”
“Hey, it’s okay-” he began, reaching out and taking her hand.
Allison squeezed his fingers. “No it’s not,” she interrupted. “This whole thing with her was my idea after all. A rule like that is just… it sends mixed signals. I’m not putting my money where my mouth is, y’know?”
“It is okay.” Julian insisted. “We’re all in this together. Xiù and me, we don’t want to hurt you, and if you need time to adjust to things then that’s fine!”
There was a cheer from the table. Grinning from ear to ear, Xiù curtseyed for her fellow players. She saw Allison and Julian watching her and gave them a huge beaming smile and a wave.
“Y’know, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy Vegas,” Julian confessed, returning the wave. “I’ve been here before and it’s too… it’s just not my thing. But I love how much she’s enjoying herself.”
Allison nodded. For courage, she finished her beer. “Baby… I don’t know if I’m ready to scrap the whole permission thing yet, but the next time you have one of those ’moments’, I want you to promise me you’ll go for it, okay?”
“Al-”
“I mean it, mister. You kiss that girl the first chance you get. That’s an order.”
Julian stared at her for a second, but he knew when she was serious. He didn’t joke about with a ’yes ma’am’ this time: He nodded. “…I promise.”
“Good…” Allison scooted round and cuddled up to his arm. “I love you.”
He kissed her forehead. “I love you too, dummy.”
Xiù’s run of good luck came to an end with a groan and a short round of applause from everyone else at the table. She said her goodbyes, collected her chips and sprang over to Allison and Julian’s table looking thoroughly pleased with herself.
“How’d you do?” Julian asked her. Xiù had gone to the table with a strict budget of ten ten-dollar bets.
“I’m up twenty dollars!” she waggled a stack of twelve chips, thoroughly pleased with herself.
“Nice!”
“What about you guys, are you okay?”
“This is the best time I’ve ever had in Vegas.” Julian told her.
Allison laughed. “Same!” she announced, having never been to Vegas before. “It’s fun watching you play.”
Xiù grinned at them. “Okay, so Charlene – that’s the lady in the denim vest – she told me about this stage show she thinks we should go see, and Hank – that’s the guy with the belt buckle – he was telling me about this gourmet burger restaurant on the Boulevard and…”
She took Julian’s hand and pulled him in the direction of the street, babbling excitedly. Grinning to herself, Allison gathered their belongings and followed.
Date Point 10y4m2w6d AV
Planet Perfection, The Core Worlds.
Vakno, “The Contact”.
The early years of Vakno’s career had involved teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Not through any lack of skill, or a run of bad luck, but because she had early on calculated that whatever her odds of success in the infobrokering business might be, the most probable failure case was assassination.
It was, after all, how she had disposed of her own early rivals.
To that end, she had spent nearly all of her profits during those early years on personal protection. From bodyguard drones and the very best personal combat rigs, to the full splendor that was her office. Those spartan walls and that austere desk hid within them a package of assorted defensive technologies both physical and electronic that made Vakno about the most securely protected living thing in the known galaxy.
Nowadays, keeping it at the very bleeding edge required only a fraction of her assets. Her own sensor network had tracked the Hunter swarm long before Perfection’s defence grid. She had already evicted (and kindly warned) her client by the time they were entering orbit. When they had launched dozens of objects onto a high velocity re-entry course, she had been given plenty of warning to activate the very strongest shields she had, and retreat into the most secure sanctum below.
When one of those weapons – a kinetic impactor of some kind, a simple metal pole twenty times her height and bigger around than she could have wrapped her arms – had smashed into the city deck above her, its destructive power had ripped out the surrounding layers, crushing homes, businesses and lives, and gutting the supports of a major corporate skyscraper, which had not remained vertical for long.
Vakno herself had barely felt a tremor throughout the short bombardment. Shortly thereafter, her perimeter defences had sensed Hunters picking through the devastation, but not like any Hunter she had ever seen before. These were larger, even more nauseating in form than their ordinary kin and layered in dense fibrous musculature that reminded her uncomfortably of the few humans she had dealt with in her career.
Three of them had died straying too close to the bunker’s perimeter, and they had apparently decided not to waste their time cracking her shell when there was much softer meat to be had.
They had ravaged the city for nearly a day before Vakno’s sensors finally detected the return of the humans and several high-energy flashes in orbit, characteristic of lithium-deuteride fusion.
Rather than fight the hated deathworlders, the Hunters had departed with their holds full of slaves and their bellies full of meat.
So many slaves. So much meat. Even Vakno, dispassionate as she was, couldn’t help but feel the weight of panic and alarm against the walls of her rational self-control, pressuring her into reconsidering just how valuable humans really were.
When she saw what the Hunters had done to the crippled system defence fleet, however, she had to sit and meditate long and hard before finally recovering the rational control necessary to look at things from the human perspective.
And the question presented itself – How had the Hunters known?
It would be a long time indeed before Perfection recovered to the point where Vakno would be back to business as usual, and like all Corti she had a burning need to be productive. Her sense of self-esteem would not permit her to take a vacation during the inevitable lull in her business.
Not when there was so gnawing a question left unanswered. The raid was too precise in its timing, too flawless in execution and too large in scale to have happened on the spur of the moment.
This wasn’t fortune: Somebody had fed Perfection to the Hunters. Somebody had almost fed Vakno to the Hunters. And Vakno had had people killed for much less than that.
She started digging.
Date Point 10y4m3w1d AV
Yosemite National Park, California, USA, Earth.
Julian Etsicitty
All of the tourism pictures showed Yosemite on clear blue-skied days when the waters were still and mirror-polished, flanked by a stentorian, forest-bearded honour guard of mountains.
Julian thought it looked even more beautiful in the rain.
It wasn’t serious rain – really, it was more a kind of acrophobic cloud that processed down from the mountains and dragged a diaphanous silver wedding train of light drizzle behind it, which fogged out the bombastic landscape that so entranced the documentary makers and tourists, and instead forced the eye to notice the smaller, the closer and the more immediate things.
Allison, naturally, was lurking in their tiny tent – built for two and delightfully cozy for three – under the tarp shelter Julian had rigged up for them and she was refusing to stray out into the rain. She seemed happy enough to wrap up warm with an ebook and a thermal flask full of Ovaltine and watch him work, and once he was done she’d insisted that Julian should go commune with nature and not worry about her.
Xiù was a complete contrast. She’d slapped on her outback hat and gone exploring the second Julian had declared their little day-camp complete, apparently oblivious to the chill and the moisture. She’d acknowledge his warning to be careful and not stray too far, and had set out eastwards toward the sound of the river, armed only with the backpack of essentials he’d prepared for them all just in case.
Julian took his time in following her. She wasn’t hard to follow – the fitness regime she’d followed religiously during her years in exile meant, especially thanks to the weighted clothing she’d worn to try and simulate the Earth’s gravity, that Xiù was a little powerhouse, remarkably strong and heavy for her apparent size, and despite her agility and poise she’d never learned the art of stepping softly. To an experienced tracker – and Julian was a master tracker – her footsteps were nearly as clear and obvious in the wet ground as if they’d been painted there in blaze orange.
What she didn’t do was make much noise. Julian was the other way round – he stepped lightly and tried to leave no clear sign of his passing, but he did sing to himself, humming and whistling through the bits where he couldn’t remember the lyrics. It was maybe a little ridiculous, but if there was anything nearby that would prefer to avoid him, he should give it plenty of notice rather than startling it. Besides, he was so used to doing it by now that it would have felt strange to him not to sing as he walked.
♪♫”Heyyy, darling… I hope you’re good toni-i-ght… hmm hmmm hmm-mm hmm…Tell me something sweet…”♪♫
He ambled along in Xiù’s wake, inspecting all of the things she’d paused to look at, and several other interesting things that she’d apparently missed. The sedate pace allowed him to satisfy himself that he’d picked the right spot for them to dally the day away – there was no sign of any potentially dangerous wildlife in the area, which was his biggest concern, but also no sign that the river ever got high enough to threaten them or their stuff.
He lost her trail when he reached the river, and the ground became nothing but stones and rock, but that hardly mattered, because she hadn’t gone any further.
Julian hadn’t ever got onto the subject of spirituality or religion with Xiù. He had no idea what she believed in, but he knew that she meditated every day when she could, usually first thing in the morning before he and Allison were up. The day they’d left Minnesota, she’d woken up extra early and had been seated comfortably on the log by the fire pit, facing the dawn sun when Julian had risen.
Now, she was seated in the lotus position on a rock by the river. She’d taken her hat off and let her hair down, and had her face turned slightly to the sky with a subtle liberated smile playing around her lips, enjoying the play of cool moisture over her face.
She opened her eyes, and gave him a relaxed smile and a wave. “Singing to yourself?” she asked.
“Always a good idea in the woods.” Julian shrugged off his pack and sat down next to her. “I’m pretty sure there aren’t any bears around, but…”
Her face fell. “…Oh. Wow. Bears?”
“Always possible, but I don’t think so. Nothing here they’d want.”
She gulped and looked around. “Maybe I shouldn’t have run off alone. Sorry!”
Julian chuckled. “It’s okay! If I’d thought there was any serious danger I’d have stopped you. Trust me.”
“I do!” Xiù squeezed some water out of her hair, then laughed nervously. “But… Wow. We really do live on a deathworld, don’t we?”
“Oh yeah.” Julian nodded. “Kinda smacks you full in the head sometimes, doesn’t it?”
She nodded. “Still… it’s beautiful.”
“I’ve always wanted to come here.” Julian agreed. “Almost gave up on getting the chance, really.”
“Allison’s missing it though…”
“Don’t worry, she’s perfectly happy.” Julian promised.
Xiù nodded and looked around again at the iconic landscape. The light rain was almost nothing now – enough to moisten the skin and slowly soak into their clothing, but it was doing nothing to impede the view. In fact the shreds of cloud garlanding the peaks only enhanced it.
“Are you warm enough?” Julian asked her.
“I’m fine,” she assured him. “This is nice!”
“We’re both used to chilly temperatures, huh?”
She nodded. “Gao and spaceships… and I guess this is nothing next to a Nightmare winter?”
“Downright warm. And don’t forget Canada”
She waved a hand dismissively. “Vancouver’s not that cold.”
Julian nodded, shut his eyes and let the white noise of nature permeate him. He was used to the wilderness, and had long learned the trick of really turning on his ears. Modern human life meant that people rarely got the chance to understand just how acute their senses truly were. It wasn’t that their ears got numb or anything, just that daily life involved being surrounded by so much noise that filtering out everything except for a narrow band of “important” sounds was an ingrained survival skill.
Un-learning that skill and noticing everything, that was a real trick. The same went for the nose. Given time to adjust, the human nose could pick up the musk of a mouse in nearby bushes, or the avian funk of a nest full of chicks in the trees above. The ear could tell flycatchers from warblers and hear stones knocking along the river bed, if only the listener knew how to listen.
He certainly heard Xiù’s contented sigh and the way she settled herself a little more comfortably and slowed her breathing,
They enjoyed the comfortable silence together, basking in the scent of conifers and petrichor, and Julian only opened his eyes when an unexpected beam of sunlight on his face turned the quiet blackness behind his eyelids red.
He raised his hand to squint against it. The weather was rolling in waves down the valley, and the rain would be back soon enough, but just for a few moments the view was clear, open and unimpeded.
“Ai ya…” Xiù breathed.
“Yeah.”
He put his arm round her waist. He half expected her to stiffen or catch her breath, but she did the opposite – she sighed happily and leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder.
Rather than saying anything, Julian made a kind of wordless, gently interrogative sound. She nodded against his shoulder and replied in kind – not a word, but a kind of of happy chirrup or purr.
He kissed her on the top of the head. With a querying “Mm?” she turned her head slightly, got another kiss – this one on the forehead – and when she raised her face to look at him Julian took his chance and kissed her properly.
Xiù issued a passionate squeak, and purely on instinct she put a hand on the back of his head and straightened up to get a better angle, while her other hand splayed on his chest then gripped his shirt. Julian ran his own hand slowly up her back while his free hand took its place on her waist.
It was Xiù who eventually ended it. When they parted, she gasped and rested her forehead against his, while words quietly bubbled out of her as if she wasn’t entirely in control of them. “Oh my god I needed that I’ve wanted you to do that for-” she stiffened. “Wait. You asked Allison, right?”
Julian smiled, trying to overrule his galloping pulse and project composed happiness. “I did,” he reassured her.
Xiù sighed happily, and this time it was her turn to kiss him.
They stayed wrapped up in each other by the river for a good long while, talking quietly, kissing frequently, giggling together and bonding. It finally had to come to an end though when a fat raindrop slapped disgustingly into Julian’s ear, and he looked at the sky.
“Okay, that’s no drizzle,” he decided, indicating an ash-grey battalion of clouds that were marching down from the peaks with rancorous intent.
Xiù exhaled resignedly and donned her hat, pulling it down snugly around her ears. “Cuddling up in the tent with Allison sounds good as well…” she suggested.
“You read my mind.”
They helped each other put on their backpacks, took a last look at the valley in the knowledge that they’d probably never come there again, and put it behind them hand-in-hand.