Date Point: 10y6m AV
New Mexico, USA, Earth
Master Sergeant Christian Firth
“Fookin’ Christ it’s hot…”
Firth suppressed a smirk. The Major was right, New Mexico was hot as shit, much hotter than his native Kentucky. It was good to see him sweating. Powell and Murray both came from Great Britain and strolled around Cimbrean – a planet that was downright cold by Firth’s standards – as if it was balmy and comfortable.
Already, Murray was going red and had jammed a field hat down around his ears to try and keep that delicate Scottish skin from scorching. Major Powell’s quiet complaint was a sign that he was really struggling – he hadn’t even commented on the heat in Alabama back when they’d been undergoing their astronaut training – and while Firth had to admit he preferred the air-conditioning in the truck to the thermal hammer-blow that had hit them the second the doors opened, he was damn well going to show up the Brits this time.
At least it was a dry heat. Not to mention perfect Aloha Shirt weather – he’d found a truly vile one with some kind of fantasy artwork where an unreasonably slim man with spiky hair and a suit of impractical armor was brandishing a stupid wavy sword twice his size. Murray had mimed dry-heaving on seeing it, which meant it was perfect.
He was never going to beat Rebar for hot-weather comfort, though. Rebar was from Arizona. Rebar looked like he was out for a stroll in the park.
They all took a moment to stretch out after the long drive. Huge though the truck was, SOR men were huger, and Firth had been behind the driver’s seat. It felt odd letting the officer drive, but that was just one of the old man’s quirks – he preferred to take the wheel himself if he could.
They’d pulled up outside what was basically a large tin shed, a few miles west of a town whose next door neighbors were the middle of nowhere. It was a good shed, though – new, strong metal, well built, and a new and brightly painted sign on the roof that read ‘Black Ogre Munitions.’
Rebar read their motto aloud. “’Because We Can’, huh? I think I like these guys already.”
“‘S quite the resumé,” Powell commented, rolling his sleeves down to try and ward off sunburn. “Apparently these gents got caught up in Syria back in the day. You heard about Al-Mashqouq an’ that business wi’ the Jordanians?”
Firth hadn’t. Vandenberg clearly had – his eyebrows cranked upwards and a half-smile twisted the corner of his mouth. “That was them? Shit, I may have to get me an autograph.”
Before Firth could ask, the front door opened and a sturdy man limped out wearing a prosthetic leg, a polo shirt with the company logo on the breast and a USMC veteran hat.
“Gunnery Sergeant Howard, I presume,” Powell said, meeting him with a handshake.
“Yes sir,” Howard grinned, and did the rounds, welcoming them all. Firth didn’t even notice his two missing fingers until they were shaking hands. “And I think you’ll like what I’ve got to show you.”
“Anything to get out of this bloody heat,” Powell replied, in characteristic gruff humor. Howard caught on easily enough and beckoned them inside with a smile.
The air conditioning was a welcome relief after the noonday blast furnace outside, and Murray sighed happily as he turned his sweat-soaked back towards the vent. Poor Highland hadn’t even looked so uncomfortable back in Egypt. It wasn’t actually cool in the workshop, as there was an assortment of machines that were busy warming the place up as a byproduct of actually doing their jobs, under the supervision of a handful of other men of varying age who all straightened up to welcome their guests. There was another round of introductions and handshakes.
Rebar was already running his eye over the workshop. To Firth, it had an odd mismatch going on – around the walls and in the corners were the kind of scuffed and well-used metal tools, benches, cabinets and equipment that might have been built fifty or sixty years ago. Next to those distinctly second-hand looking items, the three sleek bits of inscrutable modern tech in the middle of the ‘shop looked badly out of place, almost like some kind of Corti spaceship had landed in the middle of a WW2 reenactment.
Introductions complete, Howard led them through out of the noise and comparative warmth of the workshop into an even cooler office space, and scanned his palm print on a heavy door that led into what turned out to be the armory.
Resting on the large steel table in the middle of the room was the item they’d come to review. Howard picked it up, checked it, and then stood with it slung comfortably in his arm as he introduced them.
“No preamble,” he promised, “This baby here’s our flagship item, the Black Ogre Munitions Gauss Rifle One, type D. She’s envisioned as a bespoke and highly modifiable platform for small elite units who need to get the most bang for their buck on ammo weight.”
Considering the damage to his dominant hand he did a quick and easy job of disassembling the weapon until it was down to just the barrel group, a pile of various accessories, and the receiver.
“As you can see, we’ve gone with a bullpup configuration. Nice thing about a gauss rifle, because the trigger system’s completely electronic we’ve got a nice crisp trigger pull and because she fires these .45 caliber caseless ferrous slugs, there’s no brass to eject so it’s just as good if you’re a righty or a lefty. No brass of course also means a much reduced likelihood of a malfunction.”
“Firing power is provided by these energy hypercells.” He lifted one from the table – it was about as big as Firth’s thumb. “This little guy right here’s worth about a gallon of gasoline, which depending on which barrel coils you’re using should get you anywhere between about two thousand and five thousand shots- yes?”
Vandenberg had put his hand up. “That’s an awful lot of energy density, Gunny. I have safety concerns about stability there – last thing we want is one of our guys blowing up ‘cause his power cell got damaged.”
“Well…okay, that’s valid.” Howard scratched at his nose, looking possibly a bit crestfallen and defensive. “We were concerned about the weight with larger cells…”
The Lads chuckled mirthlessly. “Bro,” said Rebar, as he rolled up his sleeve and flexed his enormous forearm, “We’re not even the biggest guys on the team. The Beef Brothers make Firth here look small.” Firth grinned and stood up a little straighter. He was so overwhelmingly big he didn’t need to do anything to make the point besides simply stand in place and loom. The BOM team boggled at the sight, visibly revising some of their estimates upwards by a few multiples.
“Mass ain’t a concern for any of us, even Powell.” He confirmed, and nodded respectfully at his officer who smiled his faint approving smile.
”Bulk,” Murray pointed out.
“Right, yeah” Rebar nodded. “It’s bulk that matters – we’re way past caring too much about weight. What we need is something sleek that can take a hell of a jolt without, oh…”
“Blowing up, breaching the hull of whatever ship or station we’re aboard, explosively decompressing the whole thing and killing everybody?” Firth suggested.
“That.”
Howard glanced at two of his colleagues. “We could reinforce the cell’s housing…” he suggested. He demonstrated where the cell usually lived in a receiver under the barrel. “If we gave it plenty of protection in there, it shouldn’t add much to the weapon’s size. Use a lower energy cell, maybe? But you’d need to carry more. Hmm…”
The Major cleared his throat “Lads, let’s keep focused on the platform. We can customize and revise later.”
“Right.” Howard, nodded, and continued his demonstration.
Together they enthused over the base receiver and its standardized feed for the projectiles, which also housed the controlling electronics that were common to all variants, along with a military-grade Bluetooth radio, a respectably powerful integrated computer and its copious and well-protected flash storage. The barrel, coil, and power assembly were entirely replaceable, isolating the power electronics from the more sensitive bits of the weapon. Like most modern combat platforms with close-quarters fighting in mind, the stock, grips, shrouds, rails, and all other accessories were also fully modular and replaceable.
“Lastly, there’s a built-in low-speed databus on these rails that works with contact pins along the bottom of an accessory. That lets you mount either standard Picatinny scopes, sights, and so forth, or whatever ‘smart’ device is developed in the future. The rails use a modified RS-485 serial bus; simple, robust, low-power, and a modest but very reliable signaling rate. We, uh, don’t know what you may want to do with it, but the firmware in the receiver can be fully upgraded.”
“Akiyama was tellin’ me about these just the other day,” Rebar enthused. “Since it’s serial, we’re totally free to do whatever we want. The wire protocol isn’t even defined.”
“Yup! We wanted to keep this as open as possible. Given, uh, how much the stats and pics didn’t do you fellas justice…” He looked them over again, still maybe not quite believing his eyes, “It’s clear we need to re-think parts of this.”
“‘Horse and ‘Base would prolly prefer DU rounds and the biggest fuckin’ coils you could manage,” commented Firth. “Me too, maybe.”
“DU poses its own risks.”
“Yup, but if we’re doing our jobs they shouldn’t really be shootin’ anything ‘cept on recovery, or whatever.”
“Aye,” nodded Powell. “Fewer rounds, but hit with those as hard as possible. But those are details we should address in the design critique. Before that, I’d like to see how these weapons fire.”
“Can do, sir.” Gunny smiled happily.
Much to Murray’s disgust, the range was outside, back in the relentless heat. The Major bore it with better humor this time, probably because he had a rifle to play with.
Howard didn’t waste their time – he gave them a quick familiarization and then stood back to watch the fireworks while dropping in remarks about the weapon’s muzzle energy, rate of fire and accuracy.
Firth drew the short straw and had to go last, but just watching the others shoot gave him a decent idea what to expect. When he finally got his hands on it, he lined up on his fresh new paper target – thoughtfully, BOM had given them Hunter-shaped targets – and happily drilled it right between its three central eyes. Something about nailing those monstrous fucks right between their fuckin’ eyes just felt right…
The recoil took a few shots to get used to, but that was just because the profile was very different to a conventional firearm. Rather than an explosive kick in the shoulder, the GR1-D shoved instead. There was still plenty of force involved, but it didn’t peak as high and was delivered over a slightly longer interval.
The impressive part was the helical magazine. From what Howard was saying, the caseless ammo took up only a third of the volume of conventional 5.56mm, and BOM had set themselves – and met – the challenge of making use of that phenomenon by fitting three times as many rounds into something no larger than a STANAG magazine. He didn’t go into detail about how it worked, but there was something deeply wood-inducing about the words “ninety round mag.”
“Thoughts?” Gunny looked smug as fuck, like he’d just nailed the hottest girl at the prom. And after all…
“I think I’m in love,” drawled Firth. “Hell, I think I love this more than Walsh’s sister.”
“High praise,” Murray smirked.
“That magazine’s reliability will need to be proven. I wanna take it apart and see how it manages to feed and fit ninety rounds stacked up. And we’ll need to iterate on this platform design pretty hard to get what we need,” cautioned Vandenberg, “Especially, I think, with suit integration. We’ve got these nice HUDs and it seems criminal not to use them.”
“On-weapon video?” Murray’s suggestion was so obvious nobody on the team even needed an explanation.
“Oh, fuck!” Firth laughed at the possibilities, “Imagine! Just stick your boomstick over a wall, or whatever, and look around corners! Plink Haji without even exposing yourself!”
“Yup. Serial ain’t terribly fast, but it’s reliable, and hell, with a good video codec, maybe multiple Bluetooth—”
“Weeds,” Powell commented. It was an American term, but a useful one that he’d picked up, which cautioned against getting tangled up in unnecessary details.
Vandenberg grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, sir. Also, I reckon I’d be happy to pump even more muzzle energy out of this bad boy. You said two thousand shots per cell, minimum, so we’ve got room to play around there.”
“What about recoil…?” Gunny glanced yet again at the prodigiously muscled men he was addressing and corrected himself. Vandenberg’s forearm wouldn’t have fit in the cup of Howard’s prosthetic leg. “Never mind.”
“All told, I think we’re optimistic,” Powell declared, after catching his men’s eyes and receiving a nod from all of them. “If we take it as a given that we’re going to want those energy cells to be fookin’ bombproof, about how long d’you reckon you’d need to make that change?”
Howard glanced at his colleagues. “I’d call that… ‘bout a month?” There were some nods. “Yeah. As for the mag testing, you’re welcome to take a couple home with you.”
“And the suit HUD integration’s more down to C&M than to these fellas,” Vandenberg commented.
“Aye. Guess we’ll be seeing you in a couple of months, then.” Powell shook Howard’s hand “Best o’ luck with the modifications,”
“Like we’ll need luck,” Gunny grinned. Powell chuckled, and they walked round the building to get back to their truck.
Murray sighed his relief as the aircon blasted cold air in his face, and ruffled his hair.
“Please tell me our next stop isn’y as hot as this place,” he pleaded.
“Well our next stop is Alabama to check on the gentlemen coming up the Highway,” Powell grumbled, “So it’s not exactly gonna be fookin’ Siberia.”
Murray groaned, causing Firth and Vandenberg to exchange grins. The two Brits took considerable pride in their stoicism, and seeing either of them be anything other than perfectly taciturn was a rare treat. Both at once?
“What’s the matter bro?” Rebar joked. “It’s Huntsville, the north of Alabama. Hell, it’ll be just like bonny Glasgow, you’ll see.”
“Oh aye, I’ll get a munchy box and some Irn Bru and sit down to watch Celtic give Rangers a pasting,” Murray snorted.
“See? Just like home.” Firth grinned as Murray rolled his eyes and wisely held his peace. The Major had a glimmer of amusement in his eyes as he finished programming the truck’s GPS. It felt WRONG being in a truck that big that didn’t roar when it started, but that was modern vehicles for you. Its electric drive was just as good as any diesel engine even if it was too quiet.
They exchanged final gestures of farewell with Howard and pulled out.
“We’re buying that rifle,” Powell said, the moment there was no possibility of the retired gunnery sergeant hearing them.
“I ever tell you how much I love you, sir?” Firth asked him.
Powell snorted. “Far too bloody often.”
A little round of mirth lapped the vehicle. “So what’re the cherries like?” Vandenberg asked.
“Likely lads. We’re getting another officer at long bloody last – he’s Canadian – plus a Kiwi engineer, an Irish lad who fancies himself the next Warhorse, and yet another bloody Air Force type.”
Firth beamed as Vandenberg groaned beside him. “Anyone I know?”
“SOWT. Name of Mason.”
“Umar Mason?”
“Ah, you do know ‘im, then.”
“Second-quietest motherfucker I ever met.”
“Do you know literally everybody in the Air Force?” Vandenberg demanded
“Special operations is a small community, bro, you know this. You could fit every single operator in the entire airforce in our gravball court an’ it wouldn’t be much crowded.”
Rebar grunted. “Dude, Army’s way bigger. Why ain’t we got more Army?”
“Too busy here on Earth,” Murray observed, grimly. It wasn’t a joke. They were all acutely aware that they were toward the sharp end of a very expensive wedge of military spending, a lot of which had been repurposed from elsewhere – humanity’s survival in the face of interstellar extinction-level threats was being bought at the cost of growing instability at home. The new guy in the White House had inherited a record national debt, taken one look at the briefing that Allied Extrasolar Command had prepared for him, and promptly rubber-stamped his approval for that debt to keep growing.
Meanwhile, in pretty much every sun-lashed corner the Earth had to offer, conventional forces were slowly having to take up more and more of the slack as the high-tech assets that had hovered protectively over their shoulders throughout the previous decades were being stretched thinner and thinner across an ever broader and deeper clusterfuck that was now stretching all the way from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Andaman Sea, with no clear end in sight.
Maybe now that the Hierarchy was no longer fanning those flames, there might finally be a turn-around.
Firth viewed it as his duty to break up awkward silences, and the one that descended in response to Murray’s observation was a ringer. “…I wanna meet this Irish dude,” he declared. “Anyone who thinks he’s beatin’ ‘Horse before I do’s gotta have big brass ones, or be crazy.”
“Implying you’re sane,” Rebar quipped.
Firth tugged his trademark aviator shades from his chest pocket, and put them on with a huge grin. “Dude, I’mma beat him. It’s my fuckin’ destiny.”
“If you say so. Smart money’s on Arés, right Murray?”
Murray, in typically verbose style, rocked once with a contained half-laugh and nodded.
“Heh. You’ll see, I’mma catch his stumpy ass and take that money.”
“Unless Irish gets there first.”
“We’ll see, bro. We’ll see.”
Date Point 10y6m AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Allison Buehler
Allison was ambivalent about the early afternoon PT session she was looking at.
Really, she’d have preferred to keep working on her electrical engineering. All of her existing knowledge and experience with fixing and maintaining stuff consisted of knowing what size of thingy fit in what kind of receiver and how to take it out again when it needed replacing.
Being BGEV-11’s mechanic was going to require a reserve of academic knowledge to complement the hands-on stuff, and while Allison congratulated herself that hers was a damn good brain, the fact was that her education had largely been provided by the school of hard knocks. Somewhere along the line a mild prejudice against formal education had ingrained itself into her soul, and she was finally having to try and scrub it out.
In fact her head felt like it was stuffed with electric spiders, and she was feeling drained and sleepy just from spending the whole morning thinking hard, trying to memorize rules and laws and constants and applied mathematics, most of which she was learning from scratch. It was exhausting… but on the other hand, the moment of revelation when she’d finally clicked onto what logarithms were and what they did had been incredible. She’d gone home after that session with a huge smile.
She could feel that she was on the verge of a similar breakthrough today, if only this damn PT lesson hadn’t come along to interrupt her. This was to be their first with an actual instructor – apparently there had been a bit of a hiring mixup – and Allison was faintly skeptical. She, Xiù and Julian had all thrived in space for years without falling into the trap of low-G muscle atrophy. They knew how to stay in shape.
Whatever. There was no point in getting changed – the three of them lived in their “uniform” of black track pants and a white sports shirt anyway, and apparently the previous BGEV missions had all worn that same combination aboard the actual ship. Sportswear, it turned out, was eminently practical clothing for a starship’s crew.
Julian had suggested it was also probably a team-building thing, to make them feel like a unit. Allison couldn’t find much ground to argue – they were all using the same soap and shampoo, they were eating the same food, they had pretty much identical routines… They already smelled alike, so dressing alike was probably just another way of forging the bond.
While that should have seemed slightly manipulative and creepy, Allison had to be honest with herself that she actually enjoyed it.
She pushed the thought aside and headed for the Hab mockup.
While the Box itself was a mock-up of the interior of their ship (never mind that they hadn’t yet technically won the right to fly it, all three of them now emphatically thought of BGEV-11 as their ship) the training facility around it contained mock-ups of the interior of the Box. It had come as a surprise to them that even the hab room had been duplicated, though a few details were off now that they’d had time to settle in and personalize the real Hab a bit. When Julian was putting the clean laundry away, for instance, he folded the towels in thirds rather than in halves, and Xiù was strangely particular about where each knife lived inside the knife block.
The differences between the mockup and their real living space was subtle, but noticeable and reassuring – it suggested that they genuinely did have some privacy together.
Julian and Xiù were already there and limbering up when she arrived, and it made for an entertaining sight. Julian had earned his fitness through hard work and labor, and Allison had to admit he’d probably benefit from tuition – he really didn’t know how to limber up properly. Xiù on the other hand had spent her teenage years practicing ballet, gymnastics and Gung Fu, and her idea of stretching out was, by anyone else’s standards, almost contortionism. One foot on the floor, the other on the wall above head height, eyes shut and face pinched with discomfort as she leaned forward to touch her forehead to her shin.
She gave Allison a strained sideways smile by way of welcome, and Allison sat down with Julian to help him actually stretch properly.
They were still warming up when the door opened and Doctor Clara Brown backed into the room with her arms full of documents and talking animatedly with her colleague on matters of grave scientific magnitude.
“-just saying, why do they even bother? They’re human-sized talking turtles, it’s not like they can just take the masks off and blend into the crowd if they- oh, hey guys!”
“Hey Clara,” Allison called.
“Hi! So, guys, this is my husband Dane, your fitness coach.”
Dane was a slim, friendly-looking guy who met them all with a round of handshakes and – a fact that immediately endeared him to Allison – no sign of weighing them up or evaluating them yet. It was so nice to meet somebody who first and foremost seemed guilelessly happy to meet them.
Julian met him with a handshake, “Gotta admit, I’m looking forward to seeing what you’ve got for us.”
“Nothing big for today. I just want to see where you’re at,” Dane replied, shaking Xiù’s hand. He turned to Allison for the last handshake and smiled. “Should be fun.”
“I’ll leave you guys to get acquainted, then,” Clara said. “Oh, and Julian, my dad wanted me to tell you that we’re definitely going to try and improve your foot’s performance. The Assessors aren’t happy with it.”
“Figures,” Julian sighed. “Thanks Clara.”
Dane inspected the offending prosthetic as Allison touched Julian reassuringly on the arm. Much as the assessment team were usually the bane of his, hers and Xiù’s collective life, in this case they had a good point. The mere fact that Julian kept epoxy glue and needle-nose pliers in his pocket and was doing well if he went four days without having to hunch over his foot and fix it was a good sign that things needed to change.
Otherwise, it was an incredible foot. From a distance, you’d be forgiven for thinking that he was absent-mindedly wearing a lone white sock, or some kind of compression bandage. Up close it was a little stranger to look at – every tissue and bone of the human foot had been exactly duplicated, right up to and including a surrogate circulatory system that osmosed the needed sugars and oxygen out of Julian’s own blood at the ingenious and self-sterilizing junction where his truncated natural leg met the replacement.
He’d had to endure visits from dozens of prosthetic and rehabilitation specialists during their hospital stay in Vancouver.
The only anomalies were that said “tissues” and “bones” were in white and black respectively, and that the foot had no covering of skin, which Kirk had omitted based on his prediction that, Dominion medical materials science being a ways behind the human body as it was, Julian would need to regularly tinker with it. A prediction that had emphatically come true.
“So,” Dane smiled at his wife as she left and then turned back to the three of them. “Let’s put you through your paces.”
True to his word, he didn’t let them relax until all three of them were on the verge of collapse, which Allison was dismayed to find came embarrassingly quickly for her. They swung kettlebells, jogged, pulled up, rowed, curled, butterflied, squatted, crunched, dipped, lunged, pressed, extended and raised until her limbs were agonising rubber noodles and her vision was going blurry. Dane ordered her to sit down and rest, and she collapsed like a puppet with cut strings, breathing a hurricane while her heart hurled itself angrily at the back of her sternum.
When she was finally able to sit up, she did so only to watch miserably as Xiù and Julian both outstripped her by a dramatic margin.
She was far from being the only competitive one among them, though. Xiù and Julian fed off each other, both determined not to come in second place, and just when it looked like one of them was flagging they’d glance at the other and find new reserves. In the end, male biology gave Julian just enough of an edge and Dane finally had to instruct Xiù to stop – she staggered to a bench and crashed onto it, leaning against the wall and gulping for air, shining wet from scalp to sole.
Julian managed to stagger on, with shouted encouragement, for another twenty seconds before Dane at last let him rest.
“Okay. Wow!” he beamed at the three of them as he handed around the sports drinks. “I’m really impressed, guys.”
He caught the dissatisfied look on Allison’s face and clapped her heartily on the shoulder. “You did great,” he promised. “Don’t beat yourself up,”
Allison shook her head. “I thought I was fitter than that…” she groused. Dane smiled.
“Look at it as a pleasant surprise,” he advised. “You’ve got a lot to look forward to! And this should make you feel better; you’ve got the best form. Julian, buddy, we’ve got to get that foot sorted out for you ‘cause right now you’re favoring it and it’s throwing you right off. Xiù, very very good indeed, but you’ve picked up a couple’a bad habits that we’re gonna want to straighten out.
Xiù acknowledged the praise with a nod. She didn’t open her eyes, even as she popped the top on her drink and did her level best to drain it in one go. Julian just inspected his foot ruefully and nodded.
“So. Allison, we’re going to focus on mass, that should bring the extra endurance with it. I’ll send you guys your meal plans in the morning. Julian, I think we’re going to be working on your form first and foremost, but also your legs and lower body. Xiù, mostly we’re just going to correct those bad habits and then I’ll start teaching you how to do my job. All fair?”
“Fair,” Allison acknowledged. “Guys?”
Julian nodded. “Sounds good to me.”
“Shò wia-,” Xiù stopped and scowled at herself. “Uh…Yes.”
“You okay?” Allison asked. Xiù was slipping into Gaori less often nowadays, but it still happened when she was distracted.
“Just beat.”
Dane chuckled. “You’re all super motivated,” he said. “Keep pushing yourselves like that and we’ll get you mission-fit in no time.”
He gave them a minute longer to recover, then stood up and smacked his hands together eagerly. “So. Second half.”
All three of them groaned, and he grinned. “Hey, hey, it’s important. We’re going to warm down, stretch out, make sure you’re not too sore tomorrow. Come on, up!”
Allison was last to her feet, helped upright by Xiù who got a grateful smile and a one-armed squeeze by way of thanks.
True to his word, the second half of Dane’s session was easier. Not easy – Allison had to grit her teeth and console herself with thoughts of future improvement as again the other two outperformed her – but by the time Dane finally let them go she was at least feeling human, rather than half-dead. In fact, she felt pretty good. Positive, even.
The three of them were given enough time to return to the Box for a shower, a change into clean clothes, and a quick afternoon snack to tide them over until dinner, and then they exchanged kisses and parted ways again for their evening training.
The evening session was practical skills, and today was welding which was a welcome relief. After the brain-fuzzing frustration of the morning session and the minor humiliation of the PT, throwing herself into something she was undeniably learning with speed and aplomb was a delight. Welding wasn’t easy, but it was physical, crafty work where the theory met the practical in a bright point a foot in front of her nose.
At least, until she got overconfident. She returned to the Box at the end of the session nursing a minor burn on her arm and with the end of her ponytail blackened and frizzled, generally feeling like a fuck-up.
Xiù was home before her, and nearly dropped the vegetable steamer when she saw the state of Allison’s hair. “What happened?”
“Long hair and MIG welding don’t mix so good.” Allison ruefully flopped the burnt ponytail over her shoulder and inspected it. She couldn’t even see how high the black bit in the middle went. “Maybe I should just cut it off.”
“Oh, Al!” Xiù complained. “Your hair’s lovely!”
“Bullshit,” Allison smiled fondly and snatched a carrot stick from the steamer, gave her a kiss on the cheek and dragged out the couch to sit on. “I’ve never looked after it properly.”
“And it’s still… well, it was nice…” Xiù corrected herself. She sighed, put her cooking aside for the moment and took up position behind Allison to assess the damage herself. “Oh, it’s burnt right up to here…”
“Baby, it’s just hair.” Allison rolled her eyes.
“Still-”
“Ah, quit fussin’ over it.” Allison popped the carrot stick in her mouth and crunched it. “I’ll just cut it off, it’ll grow back.”
Xiù made an irked noise and began digging through one of the storage cupboards, a lesser-used one near the floor. “No, I’ll cut it.”
“…Wait we seriously have hairdressing stuff in here?” Allison asked.
Xiù came back up with a pair of scissors, a comb, a salon cape and a spray bottle. “Duh! We’re training for two years in space, remember?” She tucked the cape tight around her throat. “How were you planning to cut it?”
“Uh…”
Xiù snorted and draped a towel over her shoulders too. “I should do Julian’s too, when he gets back…”
“He’s out late tonight, remember? Training with the field astronomy equipment.”
“Right, yes…”
Allison grimaced as she got an earful of unpleasantly cold water mist. “So you can speak three languages, you can cook, you can beat the shit out of bad guys, you’re learning to fly a spaceship and now it turns out you’re a hairdresser too,” she listed. “Any other talents I should know about?”
“No, that’s about it. But, uh, I did learn French and ASL in school.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Nuh-uh… I mean, I’m really rusty in them, but…hmm…” Xiù made thoughtful noises as she decided on how best to fix Allison’s tonsorial mishap. “Anyway, there was a deaf guy at school. We all learned some ASL to help him out.”
“That was nice of you.”
Xiù damped her hair a bit more, and finally settled on an idea, smiling slightly. “Well, he was really cute, so…” she started cutting.
Allison laughed. “Right, right.”
They sat in silence for a minute as fragments of wet hair dropped past her ears.
Xiù broke the silence as she started combing and trimming the back of her head. “…Um, Al?”
“Yeah?”
“Ever since you’ve told us about, um, your baby…” Allison turned her head slightly, and just about managed to make out Xiù’s apologetic expression in the corner of her eye. “I mean… you’ve always been so tight-lipped about your life…”
Allison smiled. “The baby was the big thing I didn’t wanna talk about… I mean, the rest of it’s nothing crazy. Mom and Dad grounded me until I was eighteen and started home-schooling but they kept giving me an allowance. I played a lot of video games, made some friends online, and the day after my eighteenth birthday I got on a Greyhound to Boston and left.”
“Didn’t they try and stop you?”
Allison just shrugged. “I did okay for myself really. Worked at a coffee shop in the mornings and a garage in the evenings, got an LTC and a pistol, spent my lunchtime down at the range. I was getting by just fine.”
“Why Boston?”
“One of my guildmates lived there. Amanda. It was her garage, and she let me crash on her couch until I could afford to rent my own place…”
“You’ve never mentioned her.” Xiù pointed out.
“She was great! Real big on feminism, social issues and weed. She never did like how much I loved my guns, though.”
“Are you still in touch?”
Allison shook her head. “Lung cancer got her about three months before Trevni and Nufr grabbed me,” she said.
Xiù put the scissors and comb down and gave her a hug from behind, wrapping her arms comfortably across Allison’s chest. “I’m sorry…”
“It’s okay. She was already fighting it when she helped me out, so we had plenty of time to get used to it… Anyway, that’s my story. Like I said, it’s not that interesting. I got all the stupid out of my system when I was fifteen… space was way more interesting.”
“Interesting. Yeah. That’s one word for it,” Xiù commented.
“Yeah, I’m sorry you had such a shitty time of it, but me? I fetched up on a freeport station and had a pretty good time of it, working security. Everyone respected the big bad deathworlder.” Allison grinned savagely at the memory. “‘When Kirk showed up with a ship full of people I knew I couldn’t stay, but I had a pretty good time, really.”
“All done!” Xiù towelled her head briskly and gathered up the cape. Allison ran her fingers through the new ‘do, and grimaced.
“You took off a lot!”
Xiù smiled. “I had to. I think it suits you though,” she suggested. She aimed a nod at the bathroom door, a cue which Allison took with a resigned breath.
“Okay…”
When she checked the mirror she had to admit that Xiù had done an impressive job. She’d been worried she was going to end up looking like an imminent complaint to the manager, but the finished product, after she played around with the parting a little, was a practical low-maintenance thing a bit too long to be called a pixie cut and a bit too short to be classed as a bob.
A real fashionable hairdresser would probably have bit through their comb at the sight of it, but Xiù was right – it suited her by neatly framing her cheekbones and enhancing the overall diamond shape of her face.
“So…?” Xiù asked, hovering nervously.
Allison stopped examining it and gave her a reassuring peck on the lips. “I like it.”
Xiù relaxed and started tidying away the mess. “I wish I could be as laid back about it as you are. That red decon thing…”
“Yeah, shaving it all off would suck, but this is actually pretty cool!”
Xiù giggled. “You could say it’s growing on you?”
Allison grabbed the pillow off the middle bunk and threw it at her. Grinning cheekily, Xiù swiped it aside, only for it to knock the steamer off the kitchen counter and spread peas and carrots all over the room.
There was a long, literally ringing silence as the steamer rolled to a standstill.
“…Woops.”
“…I’ll sweep, you mop?”
“…Deal.”