Date Point 10y4m3w1d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Planet Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Admiral Sir Patrick Knight
Knight hadn’t been involved personally in the interview of their alien detainees of course – that job had naturally fallen to Intelligence, according to whom Bedu had been an absolutely model interviewee – polite, concise, intelligent enough to recognise that resistance would gain him nothing, and with no particular reason to do so anyway.
The summary of his interview made for interesting reading.
Bedu’s business model it seemed was inconveniently discreet, to the point where even Bedu himself didn’t know who his clients were unless they wanted him to. The client who had set him on the trail of Kirk and the missing starship Sanctuary had done so anonymously, but with considerable existing knowledge of where to start looking.
The search had started at the planet Aru, and this in itself was an education. Knight was something of a history buff, and alien history in particular was a field that had begun to fascinate him. There was so impossibly much of it and the Dominion’s historical archives – which humanity notionally had access to by dint of being an associate Dominion member, even if they were far too large to actually be transmitted to any storage medium on Earth – had much too haphazard a filing system for anything to be known with any real certainty before the Corti had come along and imposed strict data standards on the whole mess.
Aru, however…Aru was previously unknown to him, and was now in admiral Knight’s opinion a fascinating jewel of historical interest that his amateur antiquarian’s instincts would have dearly loved to get in front of the figurative loupe.
Why Kirk had gone to Aru was known, thanks to the statements given by the two survivors of his crew – Etsicitty and Buehler – and the young miss Chang whom they had collected from the planet. Why he had lingered after recovering her had been a little fuzzier, but Bedu had shed some light on that mystery.
The historic decline and fall of every sapient spacefaring power in the galaxy was well documented. Indeed, it was one of the topics of fascinated discussion that entranced amateur xenohistorians on the Internet (not that there were yet such things as professional xenohistorians), in the parlance of whom the phenomenon had been named the “Great Filter”, a term borrowed from one Robin Hanson who had coined it in an attempt to solve the so-called Fermi Paradox.
The Fermi Paradox was a now-extinct problem that had distracted people who were inclined to worry about such things with the question of where all the aliens were and why they weren’t popping in for a cup of tea and a chat. Given that said question’s relevance had faded somewhat in recent years, the Fermi Paradox was now only of interest to historically-minded students of science and enthusiasts of the burgeoning field of xenoarchaeology.
Aru, being the home planet of a species who were already in the late stages of their terminal decline and apparently disinterested in doing anything to stop it, was naturally a decent starting point for anybody who wished to understand the nature of the Great Filter and maybe do something about it.
Kirk had lingered there after collecting his most recent rescue, and then when Bedu had been sent to investigate Sanctuary’s disappearance, the Negotiable Curiosity had not needed to search very long and hard to find a debris field thirty light years away.
Bedu’s ship, its owner had proudly explained, was equipped with particle detectors sensitive enough to trace the FTL movement of objects as small as an escape pod up to ten years after the fact, assuming the trail wasn’t confused by the passage of other ships. Space, however, was so… well, spacious, that really that was a problem that only manifested along major spacelanes and near stations.
Sanctuary, while not a large ship, had been built with such a convention-stretching power output that its trail was the easiest Bedu had ever been called on to follow, and it had led him right to the heart of a tumbling cloud of wreckage.
Again, the next part matched with what Etsicitty, Buehler and Chang had reported – something with the power output of a dreadnought had intercepted them, and both ships had been destroyed when Sanctuary’s mortally wounded pilot, Amir Bahmani, had rammed the hostile while the rest of the crew abandoned ship.
Bedu had initially followed the escape pod carrying the three humans. Retracing his steps and picking up the trail of the other, faster, lifeboat had eventually led him to a system known only by its stellar coordinates – Knight glossed over the string of numbers involved, which described the star’s type, age, distance as a proportion of the galactic radius from Sagittarius A* and its deviation in radians from the straight line connecting that object to the heart of the Andromeda galaxy.
The star in question was a red giant, well past its main sequence and venerably burning through its helium. No temperate planets, one gas giant nearly twice the size of Jupiter, a handful of barren rocks and an acidic hellpit that made Venus look like no more unpleasant than a kitchen full of recently-chopped onions in comparison.
It would have been a completely unremarkable system if not for the forcefield enclosing it – identical to the ones that even now protected Cimbrean and Earth – and the crashed Kwmbwrw research station lodged in one of that gas giant’s moons, which was in the wrong place to the tune of thirty thousand lightyears and change.
From an intelligence perspective, however, by far the most important thing that Bedu was able to tell them was that at no point in its voyage from Sanctuary’s wreckage to this question mark of a system had Kirk’s lifeboat been intercepted.
While Bedu himself was Orange – augmented, possibly a target of interest for Hierarchy use, but not yet actually suspected of having been possessed by a Hierarchy demon – his story was corroborated by the Negotiable Curiosity’s sensor records, which in turn showed no signs of tampering.
Taken all together it was good news, and the report concluded with a recommendation that Kirk’s own status be downgraded from Orange to Yellow. He couldn’t be called Green until an implant scanner had pinged the inside of his skull, but Intel were at least happy enough to move him a step in that direction.
All in all, the report put Sir Patrick in a good mood. He wrote a quick mail for the attention of general Tremblay, rubbed his eyes, and then turned his attention to the report in his pile that he knew was going to deflate that good mood slightly.
With a sigh, he started to pore over the most recent analysis of operation NOVA HOUND.
Date Point 10y4m3w2d AV
San Francisco, California, USA, Earth
Xiù Chang
“…Wow.”
“Yeah.”
“Whaddya think?”
Xiù had a hard time choosing the right word, in any language. ’Colorful’ and ‘Flamboyant’ came to mind, but so was Chinese New Year, and nothing else that presented itself quite made the grade either.
“It’s very… gay.” She decided. That was the nice thing about English. One word could carry such a huge weight of alternative meanings and context, without going into the simply crazy subtleties of intonation that played such an important role in Mandarin. Both languages were hideously complex when compared to Gaori, which was refreshingly direct. Gaori wasn’t unsubtle by any means, but it lacked the impenetrable nuance that allowed her to pun like that, carefully deploying three different meanings at once in the span of a rather simple monosyllable.
She could only imagine what the actual Gay Pride parade next month would look like. It’d presumably make this look conservative and sedate.
She’d gone quite rusty in both her human languages thanks to several years of not using them, and since getting back to Earth she’d almost exclusively spoken English, much to her mother’s frustration. Still, she was finally getting things straight in her head and didn’t so often find herself slipping automatically back into the alien tongue whenever she wasn’t concentrating.
Together, she and Allison watched a young man dance past wearing a pair of gold lamé briefs, bright orange feathers, lipstick, and the kind of muscles that belonged on ancient Greek pottery.
“Show me what you’re workin’ with, baby!” Allison cat-called. Somehow the dancer heard her over the drumming and trumpets. He aimed a buttock at them and smacked it with a grin before dancing along with the rest of his troupe.
Allison gave a delighted laugh, and beamed at the way Xiù was giggling with her.
“Your turn!” she declared, and hoisted Xiù toward the railing. Xiù tried not to imagine what her mother would think, picked another male dancer and cupped her hands.
“Yáo pìguuu!”
Presumably the dancer didn’t speak a word of Mandarin, but he seemed to get the gist of it and posed for her, fl exing magnificently. Xiù applauded while Allison blew him a kiss.
They retreated from the railing as a more stately group in ornate – and huge – red ballgowns began to sail regally by, and Allison took Xiù’s hand to lead her through the crowd. She was in her element, Xiù decided, being surrounded by noise and vibrancy and color. Xiù loved to “get loud” as an occasional treat – as she was doing right now – but Julian had shrunk into himself and had taken the first excuse he reasonably could to retreat to the relative quiet and calm of a coffee shop.
Allison seemed to want to sample everything and she tested even Xiù’s reserves as she led the way from street vendor to street performer, to live musician and back to the barricade to watch more of the parade, then on into the crowd.
They got matching henna tattoos, sampled Fajita chicken skewers fresh off the grill, danced together to the pounding mix of a street DJ who was blending Samba and Rastatrash into something new and exciting and generally got drunk on the sheer weirdness of it all before finally finding themselves sitting down at a bus stop and sharing a bottle of cold water, having summoned Julian to come find them. It was coming up on two in the afternoon, and the parade was drumming and gyrating its way toward winding down.
“Man.” Allison commented, watching two dozen women wearing enough pink sequins and feathers to maybe completely cover three of them strut past smiling. “I think I’ve seen more ass today than the rest of my life put together.”
“Oh yeah.” Xiù nodded, widening her eyes for emphasis.
“Fun though, right?”
Xiù looked around. People were drifting away, now that the tail end of the parade had passed them. Back to normalcy, and to lives with decidedly less glitter in them. The afternoon breeze still carried the distant sound of drumming through the dense, old grid of buildings, but already the whole thing was starting to feel like a dream. Hundreds, or perhaps thousands of magical people had danced and swayed and played and sung their way along these roads, and behind them were left the permanent fixtures of dusty concrete and faded paint.
It was an oddly familiar sensation.
“Xiù?”
“Sorry, I just… Yeah, it was fun.”
Allison knew her too well. “But…?” she asked.
“Well… look.” Xiù waved a hand around.
Allison did so, frowning as if wondering what she was getting at. “Sure got quiet…” she observed, then seemed to get what Xiù was driving at. “Actually, wow. That’s a heck of a contrast.”
“I was just thinking it feels familiar.” Xiù told her.
“Yeah… is it me or is this place kinda ugly without the parade?”
She was right. The asphalt looked like it hadn’t ever been resurfaced, just patched up as needed. Overhead was a tangle of bare black cabling that didn’t seem to have any clear reasoning or logic to it. It wasn’t that Mission district looked neglected, it just looked… preserved. Like a jar of pickled onions, it might still be working and useful but the crispness and life was no longer entirely there.
“Where’s Julian?” Xiù asked.
Allison checked her phone. They were all using a tracking app they’d found that could help them hone in on each other by sharing how far away their contacts were and in what direction. “He’s… that way.” she pointed. “Quarter of a mile.”
“Let’s go meet him.” Xiù stood up. The sheer mundanity was getting to her. “I don’t think I like it here.”
“‘Kay.” Allison tapped on her app to let Julian know they were going to come to him, then took her hand and they set off walking.
They cut across the corner of the parade route, and another facet to the sudden absence of the big glitzy distraction of the Carnaval made itself known to Xiù – she’d spent the whole day holding hands with Allison.
Most of the time it had been a simple case of not wanting to lose one another in the crowd, but now that they were walking together more slowly, it dawned on her that there was something… different about intertwined fingers and an arm wrapped around her own.
She glanced sideways at Allison, who caught the movement in her peripheral vision, turned her head and caught her eye, smiled bashfully and tidied a strand of blonde hair out of her face while squeezing Xiù’s hand.
That was the thing about Allison. Xiù had originally thought of her as the master of fake-it-’til-you-make-it, but that was unfair. Allison didn’t do fake, she did… determined. Her life doctrine seemed to be keeping her foot down on the accelerator, committing wholly to whatever it was she’d decided to do and aiming an angry middle finger at her own comfort zones if they tried to get in the way.
It should have been intimidating, or obnoxious. In anybody else it probably would have been. In Allison… She may have held her own comfort zones in contempt, but she had never once violated Xiù’s, and Xiù knew she’d be genuinely upset if she found she was making either her or Julian uncomfortable. That made all the difference, and so she was able to lead where Xiù might not ordinarily have followed… like walking down the street in broad daylight, holding hands like girlfriends.
Because they were, she supposed. That was the point, wasn’t it? Allison had made it plain that she didn’t want their relationship to just be that of two good friends who happened to share the same man. And while Xiù might ordinarily have settled for just that…Not even Julian quite got her pulse going like Allison did, and she wasn’t sure why. Possibly it was the lingering shadow of taboo, or maybe it was the way she kept breaking through walls she’d never known she had, only to find clean waters beyond.
Maybe it was the fact that Xiù knew in her bones and from experience that she could literally trust Allison with her life. Whenever she flashed back to that horrible moment on Sanctuary when the hull had ripped apart and the void had tried to drag her away, the memory that always came with it was that it had been Allison who’d reached out and caught her.
It was difficult not to want to follow where somebody who’d literally saved her life was leading.
She squeezed back and leaned a little closer.
“Do you ever feel like an alien?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Allison nodded. “Like I’m not quite human.”
“Or that they’re not quite human.” Xiù waved her free hand surreptitiously, indicating a family who were wending their way home. Two bouncing children high on far too much sugar, a harassed mom and a dad whose huge sarcastic T-shirt was pulled tight over his beer gut.
“That’s it, yeah.” Allison nodded. “That’s exactly it. I just wanna ask them, you know, ’Is this who you wanna be? Are you happy?’ You know?”
“That’s not very nice, Allison.”
“Well I’m not gonna do it!” Allison defended herself. “Just… You know?”
“I know.” Xiù nodded. She was looking at people who had never… never gone hand-to-hand with a sapient worm in a robot suit. Never hidden in a Hunter meat locker. Never come within a whisker of horrible death not once but twice. Never seen their innocent protegé, their sister, dying. They had no idea who Triymin had been, what life was really like. She wondered if they even had dreams any longer, or if those dreams extended beyond a happy family and home.
They didn’t look happy…
Allison squeezed her hand again. “I try not to judge.” she said. “But it’s hard, ain’t it?”
“Why, though?” Xiù asked. “Why is it hard? They’re not doing anything wrong.”
“You’re right. They’re not doing anything.”
“Al… that’s not nice.”
“I know…” Allison sighed.
“Even if I feel the same way, it’s not nice.”
“I know.”
Guilt and uncertainty looked so out of place on Allison that Xiù had no option but to give her hand another reassuring squeeze. “But hey. We’re doing something,” she said.
That raised a smile. “We are, yeah. I just wish more people could.“
“Could get abducted?” Xiù teased.
Allison laughed. “No, dummy,” she exclaimed. “Just… I wish more people could see how much bigger they really are. This-” she waved a hand, indicating the whole preserved city around them “this isn’t who we’re meant to be. I swear, there’s something in the human soul that just longs for adventure.”
“Nearly getting killed?” Xiù suggested.
“No, like-”
“Watching other people get killed?”
“Xiù…”
“Having to wear a disguise for three years in case they try and blow you out the airlock or in case the Hunters come looking for you?”
“Babe-”
Xiù gave her an apologetic look. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But adventures aren’t easy or fun, Al. You know that.”
Allison sighed. “…My abductors were called Trevni and Nufr.” She said. Xiù blinked – Allison hadn’t ever told her about her abduction before. “They were actually okay, for… you know, for kidnappers who saw me as a test subject. I might have been strapped naked to a table, but they weren’t cruel, it was all… it was just business. Right? No malice.”
Xiù nodded carefully “Okay…?”
“I killed them. I didn’t mean to. They just… They picked me up because I had a cold, and they wanted to study it and develop a cure. They knew enough about us to know that we’d pay a lot to cure the common cold. But, they weren’t careful enough and…”
She sniffed. “They weren’t nice people, exactly, but they didn’t deserve what it did to them. The last thing Nufr did was he gave me a Frontline and undid my restraints. I’d have died of thirst strapped to that table if he hadn’t. And the people who finally rescued me would have died of… I dunno, acne or candida or something.”
Her fingers twisted painfully between Xiù’s for a moment. “I know, babe. I know what an adventure really is. I know it means people who don’t deserve it dying in horrible ways, and… maybe us too. I know all that. And I still don’t think I could ever go back to the quiet life. I… I wouldn’t know how to cope.”
Xiù was sighing with her when they saw Julian come round the corner. The uncomfortable shuffle in his step evaporated on seeing them, and he picked up his pace with a wave, which they returned.
“Neither would I,” she conceded.
Date Point 10y4m3w2d AV
War Platform Lifebringer, Perfection System, The Core Worlds
Grand Fleetmaster Tk’vrrtnnk A’Khvnrrtk
The ship class designated as “War Platforms” weren’t warships at all, at least not in the sense of a ship that engaged the enemy directly.
Even though it was layered in armor, shields and point defense batteries, Lifebringer was a staging and command vessel. It was the mothership of a whole fleet of transports, shuttles, dropships and heavy cargo lifters. It was a flying barracks, a mobile airfield, a cavernous cargo bay and a nexus of computer systems.
It was, in short, everything that a fleet needed to go somewhere and do something, and it was verging on being as large as a ship could practically get.. At a full gallop, Tk’v would have needed more than [two minutes] to get from one end to the other even if there had been a single straight corridor fit for that purpose..
The humans, he knew, would be impressed. Fleetmaster Caruthers’ transport was an unmodified Dominion standard shuttle, a flying matte-grey brick that made up for in rugged reliability what it pathetically lacked in grace and aesthetics.
Next to the troop lander and the two heavy cargo lifters currently squatting in Lifebringer’s number one docking bay, it was tiny, and it was still big enough to comfortably carry three young Guvnurag. When the humans stepped out of it, it made them seem comically small.
The heavy vibrations their feet sent ringing through the deck shattered that smallness.
He recognised Caruthers easily enough – the human fleetmaster was plainly the oldest of the delegation that had come over. The two at the back looked to be bodyguards or marines. Tk’v was hardly an expert on clothing – the most he wore being saddlebags, holsters and a decorative pennant on his neck to signal his rank – but those two’s seemed less decorative than the others’.
Caruthers, for his part, looked both austere in his black uniform, and splendid thanks to its conservative flourishes of gold and white.
The deathworlder entourage paused in front of Tk’v’s own welcoming party, and Caruthers took one extra pace forward. “Permission to come aboard,” he stated. Tk’v’s translator interpreted this as a formal request, possibly a traditional or ceremonial courtesy.
“Permission granted,” he replied, judging this to be the most probable response given how terse the request had been. Borrowing from some research he’d done on humans, he extended the stronger of his two right hands, trusting the human not to grip with the crushing force that Tk’v knew he was capable of.
His trust was rewarded. Caruthers’ handshake was firm, but no more than that. “Thank you for having us,” he said.
“Thank you for coming.” Tk’v replied. He indicated his subordinates. “This is Subfleetmaster Rhou, and junior subfleetmaster Nwmrwnw.
“Captain Manning of HMS Myrmidon, and commander Devonald of HMS Valiant. Caruthers replied, then indicated the marines. “Corporal Brewer and Corporal Banks.”
“Well then. If it pleases you to inspect the ship, I thought we might talk.” Tk’v replied amicably.
“Lead on.”
V’tk did so, gesturing for the human to walk by his side. “I had Lifebringer’s dimensions converted into your units.” he said. “She is slightly more than four hundred meters across her widest axis, and masses approximately sixty million kilograms.”
“That must be pushing the limits of what’s physically possible.” Caruthers observed.
“Certainly in anything which needs to accelerate like a warship.” Tk’v agreed. “There are larger ships, but not many and they are all painfully slow. The biggest ever built, I believe, was a pleasure barge that could not only afford to spend [months] transiting between worlds, but actively wanted to, so that their guests would have as much time to spend their money as possible. That ship was more than twice the size of this one.”
The expressive line of dark fur above Caruthers’ right eye arched upwards. “Was?”
“Indeed. It eventually broke apart under the stresses of its own acceleration.”
“Hmm. We have a similar cautionary anecdote from an ocean-going vessel called the Titanic,” Caruthers told him. “The fastest and largest luxury ship of its day. Too fast, in fact – it struck an iceberg and sank in freezing cold waters more than a hundred years ago.”
“Ice? I was given to understand that yours is a hot planet, fleetmaster.” Tk’v observed. “The stories of Earth I have heard mention that the sun can burn you, and that you can die of the heat.”
“That’s toward the equator. The poles are frozen solid year round.”
“Both, on the same planet?”
“It’s a surprise to us that other worlds are any different.” Caruthers smiled, though he made the courtesy of not showing his teeth. “How were we to know, after all?”
“True. In any case, although Lifebringer can accelerate to meet the minimum demands laid down by Dominion security resolutions for a warship, she is still the slowest in the fleet. Substantially slower than your own ships have demonstrated.”
“Our doctrines seem to be quite different.” Caruthers agreed. “Maybe we should compare notes.”
“Maybe we should.” Tk’v agreed.
The tour wended slowly around the ship, taking in the huge power plant (powered by the newest generation of Directorate-made quantum power stacks), the living quarters (an exercise in awkwardness given the wildly differing proportions and needs of the many species on the crew), the cargo handling bays and their army of drones, and finally he command hub, dominated by a to-scale holographic map of the system labelled in blue, yellow and green.
“How is the situation below?” Caruthers asked, once Tk’v had demonstrated the map’s functionality by zooming in on Perfection itself.
The working crew around them went quite still, and listened. Tk’v knew that many of them were firmly of the opinion that the humans were responsible for all the death and destruction not only on Perfection, but at Capitol Station. Tk’v couldn’t have disagreed more strongly. He had specifically requested this relief effort because, unlike most of his peers, he very much did not view the Hunters as a kind of natural disaster. They were a sapient species, entirely in control of their own actions, and the humans seemed to be the only ones who were squaring off to them.
That made the deathworlders allies, in his book, and Perfection represented an opportunity to make or break that relationship.
“The Hunters launched hundreds of kinetic weapons from orbit,” he said. “Perfection’s defence systems stopped all but thirteen of them.”
“The same kind of kinetic weapons that you dropped on Planet Garden,” Nwmrwnw observed, acidly. Tk’v ground his molars together. He would have given much not to have the junior subfleetmaster present for this.
Caruthers proved equal to the accusation. He looked Nwmrwnw in the eye in that unnervingly level way that humans did, and spoke softly and firmly though with no trace of disrespect. “The Hunters are dangerous,” he agreed. “And sadistic and cunning. They’re deliberately using our tactics and tools because they want to divide and weaken us.”
“Just as you weakened the defense fleet?” Nwmrwnw pressed.
“That will be all, junior subfleetmaster,” Tk’v told him, judging that his Kwmbwrw subordinate had gone too far with that remark. “Return to your duties.”
“…Yes, Grand Fleetmaster.”
The humans cleared their throats and looked awkwardly at one another as Nwmrwnw gestured grudging respect and stalked out of the command hub.
Tk’v raised his voice just enough for the other crew to hear, though he addressed the humans specifically. “I am sorry,” he said. “We have all seen terrible things through this operation, and it is difficult to remain objective.”
Caruthers caught on to what he was doing, and joined in. “I sympathize,” he declared. “And I’d like to thank you personally, Grand Fleetmaster, for setting an example and proving that our relationship doesn’t need to be antagonistic. We certainly don’t want it to be.”
“Nor should we.” Tk’v announced, taking note of which of his officers looked away, and which wore body language and expressions of agreement and resolve. “I have spent my life fighting the Hunters, and for the first time I am seeing signs of weakness from them. As you said, they are trying to divide us, and I do not think they would even care to try unless they were scared of what we could achieve together.”
Caruthers glanced at Manning and Devonald. Inexperienced as Tk’v was in reading human facial expressions, there was something… inspiring in the way they all shared the same intense smile.
“In that case, Grand Fleetmaster…” Caruthers extended his hand, “I look forward to scaring them some more.”
Tk’v shook hands with him for the second time. “Well said.”