Date Point 10y4m3w3d AV
Celzi Alliance Embassy Station, Earth/Luna L3 Point, Sol
Rylee Jackson
“Celzi Diplomatic Station, this is FIREBIRD-ONE escorting diplomatic shuttle, request permission to land.”
Colonel Stewart would be doing the exact same thing over at the Dominion station at Earth/Luna L1. The timing was important – both of the major interstellar powers needed to be carefully removed from Sol, and they needed to be removed in such a way as to not escalate the tensions between them by making it seem like humanity was siding with either one.
The shuttle full of Marines were there in case the Hierarchy had an agent on board who tried something last-ditch like de-orbiting the station or whatever.
”Permission granted FIREBIRD-ONE. Welcome back major Jackson, you and the shuttle are cleared to land together in bay seven.”
She recognized the translated simulation of a voice from her previous visits to the Celzi station. PR being such a big part of Rylee’s job meant regular schmoozing with both sides. That was why she’d been chosen to lead this op: the embassy knew her.
Plus, if the need arose, her WSO Joe Semenza could nuke the station to molten debris. There was something satisfying about having that kind of gratuitous firepower at their fingertips.
They made their entrance with all the style and grace that her professional pride demanded, sliding smoothly into the bay on manual and kissing the deck with nary a bump. Her new sled, a replacement for the one lost on Garden, was called Phoenix and for once Rylee didn’t fully cycle her down – there was a non-zero chance after all that they’d have to make a hasty departure, and Phoenix wouldn’t lose too much of her capacitor’s stored energy from sitting idle on the deck for a few hours.
The Marines, she had to admit, made an even better entrance. The instant their shuttle’s ramp clanged down, two dozen of them in full MOPP marched down it like they were on parade. The two Celzi guards who had entered the hangar to greet her were probably shooting nervous glances at each other, though it was hard to tell with Celzi. They looked like a kind of moss-grey collision between a monkey, a kangaroo and a lizard, and their oddly-shaped skulls with their many eyes gave them fully overlapping three hundred and sixty degree vision. They didn’t need to turn their heads to look at each other.
Rylee left Semenza to look after Phoenix and approached the two aliens, carefully not removing her flight suit, though she did slide up her glare visor so that they could see her face. She probably looked quite an intimidating sight herself, in her astronaut’s “snoopy cap” and in the new flight suit that had been adapted from EV-MASS technology.
“Is… something wrong, major?” one of the aliens asked. She internally kicked herself for not being able to tell Celzi apart on sight. Oh well, time to play it impersonal rather than friendly.
“Call the ambassadors,” she ordered. “Something important has come up that needs their immediate attention.”
She wasn’t left waiting long. Stationwide announcements in a variety of alien languages rang through the decks, and within minutes she was being escorted, along with the marines, to the forum chamber on the station’s topmost deck.
She was met off the elevator by Ambassador Sandeep Verma. Verma’s career had been an interesting one, taking him from his native Gujarat, to the Indian consulate in Canberra, and ultimately into space to be humanity’s ambassador to the Celzi Alliance.
Rylee had worked with him several times. Something about being the FTL test pilot kept her snowed under with invitations to assorted diplomatic parties, hence why one of her AFSCs was Public Affairs. She could definitely sympathize with the ambassador’s crowded and storied career.
That same prestige was what had sent her on this mission. It was important not to snub either side or to show favorites, so while the Dominion got the senior officer in the form of colonel Stewart, the Alliance got the more notorious one in the form of major Jackson. They’d tossed a coin over it.
“Major?” Verma had a smile on, but his body language was wary. Rylee shook his hand. Really she shouldn’t waste time with preamble, but the ambassador didn’t need rushing.
“Can we talk privately?” she asked as she handed him the sealed letter marked ‘EYES ONLY’ for his attention. It was an uninteresting grey and bore the emblem of the Global Representative Assembly – a circle, two short arc sections sharing the same center, a longer one, and finally a short one again.
Verma nodded and pulled a device from his pocket. A privacy forcefield fuzzed and opaqued the air around them. He ripped the seal on the letter and read it.
“Short version: Big Hotel is gone,” Rylee informed him. The Ambassadors by necessity were both briefed on DEEP RELIC. “Earth’s secure and the GRA wants the embassies relocated to Cimbrean-five just to be absolutely certain.”
Verma grimaced slightly, but nodded as he read the letter. It was much longer than Rylee’s summary, but probably contained about the same amount of useful information.
“They are not going to like that,” he observed.
“The ID are being kicked out as well,” Rylee explained. “So neither side gets to claim we’re siding with the other.”
“They still will not like it…”
“They can dislike it all they want, one way or the other this station ain’t gonna be here much longer,” Rylee said, dismissively. “They’re being relocated. They can go amicably and relocate to Cimbrean, or they can be expelled…with extreme prejudice.”
Verma met her eye, then nodded and turned the page, read the name and signature that occupied the top two inches of an otherwise empty sheet (a classic and typical waste of paper, in Rylee’s opinion), then handed the letter back to her.
“I shall do my job, then,” he promised.
“Good,” Rylee smiled for him, radiating absolute faith in his abilities. “Let us know if we need to get you off the station. These guys aren’t just pretending to be marines.”
“Not necessary,” Verma smiled. “I hope. Thank you anyway.”
He turned off the privacy field and gestured invitingly for Rylee and the marines to follow him. He swept into the forum with an impressive impromptu air of gravitas, looking thoroughly out of place and vulnerable next to a woman in a lightly-armored spacesuit and a dozen men in MOPP.
Rylee lowered her visor again. The odd thing was that she probably cut the most threatening and alien figure among them. MOPP – Mission Oriented Protective Posture – made the marines faceless and scary, but the technology hadn’t changed much in twenty years meaning that the men wearing it looked huge and encumbered, but also embarrassingly low-tech. It was a good show of strength… but Rylee knew from experience that while aliens were often impressed by seeing humans carry heavy loads, there was something they found even more intimidating about the human body itself – the shape of it, the way they moved. For whatever reason, aliens saw the same thing in a walking human that humans saw in a stalking tiger.
MOPP hid that. Rylee’s flight suit didn’t. It was built by C&M Spacesuit Systems using the technology they’d developed for EV-MASS, making it snug, sleek and technical. A far cry from the bulky thing she’d worn eight years ago in Pandora’s early flights, with its duct tape modifications and velcro patch inside the helmet for scratching her nose.
Rylee secretly geeked out about it all the time. It looked like it had been created by the better class of digital artist, the ones who managed to balance a high-tech aesthetic with actual military function and practicality.
In the circumstances, it was not only a good way to show off that scary deathworlder physiology, but also a statement: ‘Look how far we’ve come, and how quickly.’
It worked. She became the immediate focus of attention when they stepped into the forum itself. Never mind the geodesic dome overhead with its angel’s-eye view of the Earth, never mind the charcoal concrete floor with the polished bronze forked spiral – a stylized representation of the galaxy – embossed in the middle. Never mind the warm lighting and the panelling on the wall made from several kinds of wood imported from the homeworlds of the Celzi, Qinis, Jeghiren and Lathk, nor the imposing and venerable ambassadors from those species sitting at their desks. It was a beautiful chamber – as if the Qinis would settle for an ugly one – and they’d invaded it looking decidedly ugly.
She ran her best fearsome eye over the lot of them, relying on the faceless mirror-black of her flight helmet to do all the communicating she needed. Only the Celzi ambassador failed to emote discomfort, but then again Celzi were notorious for not backing down easily. The whole Alliance was named after them for a reason.
“Ambassador Verma,” the Jeghiren ambassador stood. “You alarm us, with your sudden summons and your…troops.” They – Jeghiren were monogendered, and insisted on impersonal pronouns – waved an arm languidly at the marines. “We request an explanation.”
“The Global Representative Assembly has instructed me to inform you of a new development.” Verma replied, having apparently decided not to bother with circumspection. “You may not be aware of some security threats on Earth that we’ve been fighting, but that situation has now reached the point where we must ask both this embassy and that of the Dominion to relocate to the Cimbrean system.”
The Lathk ambassador was the first to speak. Lathk defied easy description, being a bipedal biological eccentricity whose tiny beady black eyes gave them almost no vision to speak of, and who had neither a sense of smell nor much apparently in the way of a sense of taste. Their primary sense by a country mile was hearing, and in place of a head they had two gargantuan ears mounted high and forward on their shoulders.
Those ears and their spindly birdlike limbs always gave Rylee the impression that they would go tumbling away in a strong breeze, and she had to chew down the racist impulse to think they looked absurd. They were actually an important partner in the Alliance, providing for most of the agriculture and a steady supply of warm bodies. Even if the war had been in a low ebb for the last ten years (thanks in no small part to human intervention) the Alliance were still rattling every saber they had, and that meant signing up young beings – among them plenty of Lathk – to serve on whatever new front line might open up if a lasting peace wasn’t eventually worked out.
“You are picking a side?” she asked.
Ambassador Verma’s job over the last four years had included exerting whatever gentle pressure humanity could muster to keep the war from boiling over again. The Celzi leadership might have been reckoned as master strategists, but Rylee was pretty sure that any second lieutenant with Sun Tzu and Robert A. Heinlein on their bookshelf already had a more comprehensive strategic education than the most seasoned Celzi general officer. The war so far had been catastrophically bloody and industrial.
But of course the Dominion was too proud to let the “rebels” win by granting them whatever territory they’d already carved out, and the Alliance was too proud to settle for what they had.
“No.” Verma’s assertion was instant and firm. “We remain committed to the neutrality and independence of our species.”
“Then what are these troops for?” The Celzi ambassador asked.
“And why are they wearing protective gear?” The Qinis ambassador added, taking the bait.
That was Rylee’s cue. “Our equipment is a precautionary measure. We hope it proves unnecessary…” she hinted, smoothly. ETs were notoriously gullible when on the back foot, and while outright lies were present in the diplomatic toolbox, in the years since Rylee herself had summoned these two space stations into orbit around Earth, the most effective tool by far that humanity’s diplomats had fallen back on time and again was crypticism. Deathworld reputation did the rest.
The ambassadors all glanced at one another (again, insofar as she could tell. She wasn’t even sure Celzi could turn their head) and after a few seconds the Jeghiren spoke again. “What is the exact nature of this security concern?” they asked.
“We’re not at liberty to disclose that information for now,” Verma replied. “Please. There will be plenty of time later to discuss exactly why this is being done but for now it’s safest for the embassies to relocate to Cimbrean.”
“We shall need to discuss-” the Celzi began, and Verma cut him off.
“Ambassadors, please do not mistake this for a request,” he said, firmly. “This relocation is a condition of continuing to have a relationship with the human race.”
Rylee consciously didn’t fidget during the long moment of deliberation that followed. There was a low, but non-zero chance that if there was a Hierarchy demon among the ambassadors, and if they had any last-ditch contingencies to try, this would be the moment. WERBS was lurking in the wings, ready to obliterate the station the moment it lit a jump beacon.
Knowing that by far the most destructive thing that humanity had ever built was aimed at the soles of Rylee’s feet was a test of composure to almost rival the infamous rubber chicken. Another benefit to the inscrutable visor – the ETs couldn’t see her sweat.
“…Very well,” the Celzi grunted at last. He leaned over and spoke softly into a microphone on his desk. Rylee breathed a sigh of relief and touched the push-to-talk button on the side of her helmet.
“ILIUM, this is HELEN. PARIS has agreed to relocate.” she announced, softly.
”Copy that, HELEN. AGAMEMNON is also relocating.”
“Awesome.” Rylee breathed a sigh of relief. “I’ll prepare a slaved jump.”
”Understood. We’ll send a runnner to Cimbrean for codes. ILIUM out.”
She turned to Verma. “Okay, the jump’s all set up. I need to get back to Phoenix to play cab driver.”
“Go ahead,” Verma invited. “Thank you, major. I think your presence helped tremendously.”
“Don’t thank me until we’re safely around Cimbrean Five,” Rylee replied. She certainly wouldn’t be happy until the station was outside of the Cimbrean system field where no possible Hierarchy action could threaten humanity through it, and where it no longer needed to have an FTL superweapon aimed at it.
She turned and marched out, with two of the marines in tow, and put in the call to Semenza to fire the sled up. She leaned against the elevator wall as they headed back down to the hangar deck, and reflected that going from interspecies celebrity to messenger girl to threatening muscle to glorified truck driver in one afternoon was a pretty good summary of her career.
She stretched and sighed. “You boys been in space before?”
One of the marines chuckled under his hood. “No ma’am.”
“Not exactly glamorous, is it?”
“I dunno,” the other one piped up. “Maybe it’s just wore off for you, ma’am. I was nerding out the whole time we were in there talking to them ETs.”
Rylee had to laugh and nod agreement to that, smiling inside her helmet. “Maybe,” she agreed. “Maybe it has.”
Date Point 10y4m3w3d AV
Eppley Airfield, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Kevin Jenkins
“But you’re an exec! Aren’t you a bit senior to be standing at the airport with a sign?”
Kevin shrugged, a pointless gesture in a phone call, but still a natural and unthinking one. “These kids are important,” he replied smoothly. “And no offense Walter, but I’m the only other Abductee in the whole Byron Group. They’re gonna need to hear what I’ve got to say.”
Walter Billings scoffed. That was why Kevin liked the man – he didn’t guard his manners among The Team.
The Team was a loose idea, and it consisted of everybody involved behind the scenes in bringing Byron Group Exploration Vessel 11 from conception to space. Walter and his lifelong colleague and best friend Jennifer McAllister, Clara Brown née Ericson and her father Michael. The implacable Mr. Williams (whose given name of Raymond was one of Kevin’s most cherished secrets – the man himself hated it), Moses Byron, and of course Kevin himself.
”Didn’t Xiù Chang break your nose? Williams wasn’t happy to hear that. He’s still grousing about ‘loose cannon behaviour’, you know.”
“She’ll be great. She was just having a hard time adjusting to Terran life again and I pressed the wrong buttons,” Kevin replied. “Trust me, Walter. I know these kids, I know what they’ve been through, and I wanna put a human face on what’s going to happen to them. And if I can maybe give them some advice that’ll help them get through what Keating and those other stone-faced assholes have planned…”
”Protecting the bet you put on them, eh?”
“You bet on them too, Walter.”
”…You’re right. Advise away. Just tell me you’re going to be back in the office sometime today, because I urgently need to discuss the waste processor design with you.”
Kevin chuckled. “Well shit, how can I refuse an offer like that?” he asked. “I’ll be right in after I drop them off at the Box.”
”I’ll see you then. Bring popcorn.”
It was Kevin’s turn to scoff, and Billings ended the call laughing.
Kevin adjusted his collar – there wasn’t a force on the planet Earth or any other world besides that would persuade him to wear a tie – and leaned on the railing again, well aware that alongside the other people loitering against it with cards in their hands, he probably stood out in being by far the most well-dressed. There was just something about a properly tailored expensive suit that left the slightly faded chauffeurs’ uniforms and short-sleeve shirts or polos to either side of him looking like they belonged in the background.
As it happened, Chang, Buehler and Etsicitty had apparently listened to the Group’s request to not bring more than a few small personal effects, and hadn’t burdened themselves with anything more than their carry-on luggage. They were the first ones to come out of Arrivals, each one carrying a smallish bag and the clothes on their backs, and all dressed comfortably for travel. Kevin got their attention with a wave, pointed with a movement of his head, and met them at the end of the rank with a round of handshakes.
“Figured I’d collect you in person,” he said. “All sorted out up in Minnesota?”
“We packed it all up and fixed everything. The place should be okay without us for a couple years.” Julian replied.
“Good. Heck of a commitment you’re making.”
“It’s what we want,” Xiù told him. When Kevin looked questioningly at her, she shrugged. “You were right.”
“…Sorry.”
“Didn’t you two already apologize to each other?” Allison asked. She jerked her head towards the airport’s doors. “Come on, if we’re making a big commitment, let’s commit.”
Julian and Xiù both chuckled, hoisted their bags and followed her, chorusing “Yes ma’am” like it was a private in-joke of theirs, which it probably was.
Kevin jogged a few steps to catch up with her. “Ain’t gonna be easy,” he warned. “You’re not the only team on the list. You’re the favorites, but you’ve got competition.”
“Have the others been out there before?” Allison asked.
“That’s why you’re the favorites, they haven’t. But they’re no slouches. Veterans, docto rs, top qualifications… they all have the right stuff.”
“What’s your point, Jenkins?”
Kevin stepped in front of her and stopped them all by raising his hands. “My point is that the only person in the whole Byron Group who actually cares about you guys getting this gig is me. No false manipulative bullshit this time, okay, I know what it’s like. It took me fuckin’ years to finally find a place for myself.”
Allison just gave him a get-to-the-point stare while behind her, Xiù and Julian exchanged a glance.
“Look-” he continued “The other would-be crews competing against you? They’re fine. If they don’t get the job, it’ll be like whatever to them, right? They’re not Abductees, they don’t fuckin’…they’ll still fit. Right? Now have any of you given serious thought to what’s gonna happen or how you’re gonna do if you don’t earn this?”
They hadn’t. He could read it in all three of their faces, but he waited for them all to look at each other, come to the same conclusion, and return their attention to him. “Then for the love of Elvis please, please listen to me, and listen good ‘cause I’ve only got the one chance to tell you this stuff.”
They relaxed, nodded, and listened.
Date Point 10y4m3w3d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Gabriel Arés
Gabriel loved his job, but it came with a price of having precious little in the way of spare time. Cimbrean Colonial Security was a tight ship, full of some of the most dedicated, highly-trained and passionate police officers he’d ever had the pleasure of working with, who were policing what was largely an educated, professional and successful population.
On the policing front, usually the worst he had to deal with were Gaoians. Gaoian males fought constantly. In their culture, for two males to clash and walk away with permanent disfiguring scars was not only commonplace, it was practically necessary. It was a rare male who could catch the eyes of Folctha’s small population of Sisters without some impressive duelling scars.
By human standards, of course, the fights were aggravated assault shading to outright attempted murder in some of the nastier cases. Nobody knew better than CCS that Gaoians were emphatically not cute and fluffy space-raccoons. They were an alien species with alien morality, and sometimes that alien morality got blood on the walls.
Then there was liaising with the military. Cimbrean was in many ways arguably better-protected than Earth thanks to its status as the permanent home of the SOR and of the allied space fleet. Sure, that space fleet was exclusively British for the time being, but with the USS San Diego and its sisters in the works that was due to change, and Gabriel knew from discussions with Admiral Knight that they were trying hard to get their hands on a Dominion-built orbital shipyard to give the ships a permanent anchorage.
Then there was the SOR. Gabriel really didn’t know how he felt about the SOR. Having a cadre of unnervingly big and strong almost-supersoldiers stomping around the town putting every gym rat on both Cimbrean and Earth to shame and between them accounting for an impressive percentage of Folctha’s family-planning spending…
Well. That was almost as disconcerting as the fact that his only son was one of them.
The Air Force had been one thing. Watching Adam spend his sixteenth year growing from wiry teen to a fit youth had been proud. Watching that fit youth become a dense, powerful airman had lifted Gabriel’s soul. Watching that dense and powerful airman gain in endurance and strength as he went through Pararescue training had impressed on him just how strong the boy really was.
Or so he’d thought. The SOR had redefined those limits, converting a merely exceptionally fit and strong young man into a titan, something straight out of Greek legend, or perhaps the more comic-book kind of barbarian hero.
That hadn’t lifted Gabriel’s soul at all. Quite the opposite – it had impressed on him just how broken the boy really was.
Not that he could blame him.
It was with a sense of trepidation, therefore, that he’d agreed to a movie night with Adam and John at Adam’s penthouse apartment on Demeter Road. If there was one thing he’d definitely say for the USAF, it was financially generous to the men who sacrificed for it – every man in the SOR had come to Cimbrean with a pocket full of homesteading money and, thanks to the regimented and tightly controlled nature of their lifestyles which necessitated that the Regiment pay for almost everything, precious little in the way of living expenses.
Even with Folctha’s relatively steep taxes, Gabriel suspected that Adam had tens of thousands in spending money and savings that he didn’t know what to do with. And a little thing like inviting his old man to visit on the rare occasion when their days off overlapped wouldn’t be setting him back by much either.
If only the gigantic brat had bothered to remember that Gabriel was nursing a years-old femoral nerve injury that made steps a literal pain in the ass. There was no elevator in the building that Adam co-owned with Wilson Akiyama, just eight flights of stairs and it took Gabe twenty minutes to climb them. He leaned heavily on his cane at the top to recover, reflecting that despite his best efforts at fitness and rehabilitation, his mobility was never coming back.
Finally, he knocked on the door. Adam opened it in seconds, and smothered Gabe in an enormous muscular hug. “Hey! ¿Estás bien? Llegas tarde…”
”“Subía estas escaleras de mierda,” Gabe replied pointedly, nodding back at the obstacle that had held him up.
Adam looked at them, then at his stick, and the penny made a solid wooden thunk as it finally dropped.
“Ah… shit.”
Gabe chuckled and reached up to affectionately ruffle what little hair Adam had kept. “¿Es un caballo de guerra, o un burro de guerra?” he joked.
Adam chuckled and welcomed him inside.
The apartment was definitely a well-off bachelor’s party pad. It was furnished with style and elegance, and was comfortable enough, but didn’t look like it was regularly lived in. Despite the best efforts of the hired cleaners, the place had a permanent after-party olfactory background of booze, BO and sex. No cannabis though: even though it was just as legal as alcohol in Folctha, the SOR were forbidden from touching the stuff..
The Spanish had to come to an end when John leaned round the dividing wall between the lounge and the kitchen. “Hey Mr. Arés!”
“Hello, John. What’s cooking?”
“Jerky! Gonna need another hour, but this is my grampa’s recipe. Best you’ll ever taste, trust me.”
Gabe glanced at Adam, who nodded with a grin. “It is,” he confirmed.
“Bueno! What are we watching?”
“Good question,” Adam said. “Base?”
John had gone still. Slowly, he turned and gave them an embarrassed brittle smile. “A… movie that I, uh, forgot to bring with me!”
“Top marks. Well done, dumbass.” Adam applauded sarcastically.
John cleared his throat and aimed his thumb at the door. “I’ll go get it. It’s on base.”
“That’s three miles away.” Gabriel pointed out.
“Yuh. Be back in half an hour. Peace.” John took off down the stairs, springing down them two at a time.
“He’s going to run the whole way there and back in half an hour?” Gabriel asked.
“No big deal.” Adam shrugged. “So hey! Just you and me for half an hour. Beer?”
“Sounds good.”
Gabe sank gratefully onto the couch, a maneuver that really demonstrated just how much he needed his cane, and sat back, happy to finally have the weight off his bad leg.
It was no ordinary couch. When Adam slammed down into it a few seconds later with a couple of open beers, it barely seemed to register him despite his incredible mass. He kicked his feet up onto the coffee table and gestured at the TV to turn it on, an innovation that had slowly started to replace the old-fashioned remote control.
”-relocation of the embassies has already met with vocal criticism from the Dominion, and while the Royal Navy continues to lend support in the humanitarian crisis on Perfection, Dominion officials are now blaming the attack on human military action in that system, claiming that there was some kind of battle. While the Ministry of Defence, the Pentagon and Scotch Creek all declined to comment, sources at Hephaestus LLC have confirmed that HMS Caledonia is now in drydock at the Ceres shipyard undergoing emergency repairs and in Manchester, England, the family of Petty Officer Thomas Kendrick, who served aboard Caledonia, have released a statement asking for privacy-”
“Not that they’re gonna fuckin’ get it,” Adam grumbled.
“That’s not the media’s job,” Gabe agreed. “You know what happened?”
“Marty told me. The ship caught fire.”
“Marty?”
“Shit, haven’t I told you about Marty?” Adam turned on the couch, shedding grimness and disgust with the media like a light summer coat.
“No…?”
“Oh, man, Marty’s just the fuckin’ best! Makes me look dumb as a bag’a rocks, funny, sexy as all hell-”
Gabriel threw up his hands to interrupt the boy, feeling completely knocked off-balance. “Woah, woah, amigo! …Seriously?”
“Yeah! I’ve even thought up a great venue for a first date, and-”
“Wow.” Gabriel blinked at his only son and assembled his thoughts. “…Okay. That’s some big news.”
Adam blinked at him. “What?”
“Man, I just… I mean, I never would have guessed. I mean, I love you anyway amigo, but you really could have broken the news more gently-!”
“…Martina, Dad! Her name’s Martina!”
“OHHH!” Gabe relaxed and laughed at the ceiling, wiping his forehead. He was too relieved to feel embarrassed. “Gracias a Dios!”
Adam’s enormous shoulders rocked as he wheezed out his best Muttley laugh, and he gave Gabe a huge, crushing hug. “Nah, nah, nah… You’ve got nothing to worry about there, I promise.”
“Good, because I had a vision of a world without grandkids and I didn’t like it!” Gabe chuckled.
“Well I mean, we’re not even dating yet…” Adam cleared his throat. “So, you’re gonna have to wait a bit, yeah?”
“Hmmm… Are you sure you’re ready to date her? It’s kind of early, Amigo. What’s it been, three months? Less than?”
Adam turned the TV down as the news turned its attention to the sport. “She’s not like Ava. She’s SOR, she knows the deal.”
“That’s the opposite of encouraging.”
“You think so?”
Gabe nodded to himself, at once glad and slightly disappointed to learn that the side of beef sat next to him was definitely still the same Adam.
“Adam… maybe this Martina would understand the why of it a bit better, sure…but apart from that bit at the end there where she ran out of hope and did something stupid, Ava was as patient with you as any girl could be. Marty might be more understanding, but that’s not a license for you to just do your thing and treat her as something you do in your spare time.”
“I wouldn’t-”
“You already did.” Gabe pointed out. “And you just called off a long-term relationship less than three months ago. You sure you’re not just thinking with that big warhorse verga of yours?”
“Dad!”
“What? I know how you got your nickname, man. Hell, you’ve been saluting the dawn since you were twelve. Good for you, you take after your old man!”
“I really didn’t need to know that…!”
Gabe chuckled. “Hey, it’s just my right leg that doesn’t work properly,” he winked. Judging that the boy was suitably embarrassed, he relented. “But it’s not for thinking with, Amigo. Are you really after another committed relationship right now, or do you just wanna smash?”
Adam looked away. “I… shit, Dad, now you’ve got me second-guessing,” he complained.
“Good! You should second-guess. I second-guess all the time.” Gabriel patted him on his huge and startlingly hard shoulder. “It’s a good way to avoid hurting the people you really care for.”
Adam nodded and said nothing for a minute or so. “I guess… I do want an actual relationship,” he said, “but I dunno. Am I ready for one? You’re right, I fucked up the last one pretty bad. Marty’s special, Dad, I don’t wanna hurt her like I did Ava.”
Gabe nodded sympathetically. “Then my advice is don’t go for it until you’ve got more experience,” he suggested. “Have fun with some other girls you don’t care about so much first. Break a few hearts so you learn how not to break hers. After all, nobody climbed Everest for their first mountain, did they?”
“I guess but… are you sure?”
“If she’s that special to you, you need to know how to do it right. And right now you don’t,” Gabe told him. “No, I’m not sure, and I don’t think it’d be the right advice for everyone…But I think it’s the right advice for you, here and now.”
“I’ll think ‘bout it.” Adam rumbled, awkwardly.
“Good. I don’t want you to just blindly follow advice just because I gave it. You’ve got a damn good brain, Amigo, I wanna see you using it, okay?”
Adam hugged him. “…Love you, Dad.”
“Love you too,” Gabe promised, feeling his upper back creak and pop. “Maybe show your love by getting this crippled old man another beer?”
“Yeah, yeah…” Adam laughed, and launched himself easily to his feet before picking his way toward the fridge in that curiously agile and quiet way of his that belied how heavy he was. “Don’t overplay that disability card though.”
Gabriel chuckled and settled into the couch, looking forward to a long and comfortable evening. “I’m sure my soul will survive a small abuse of power,” he said.