Date Point 10y7m3d AV
Mrwrki Station, Uncharted System, Deep Space
Kirk
Lewis had a flair for starship design. It was a truism of ship assembly all over the galaxy that form and function had a largely adversarial relationship. Sanctuary certainly hadn’t been pretty. Its most prominent feature by far had been the enormous generator at its stern, so large that the rest of the ship had seemed to almost be an afterthought.
What Lewis had made, however, was something truly beautiful, and the fact that Kirk was reading its specification with a mounting sense of awe just made him wonder how the conventional wisdom of starship design had gone so wrong.
The new ship was half Sanctuary’s size and a third of the mass. It wasn’t built for rescue and recovery of stranded humans – it was built to get from place to place very quickly indeed while affording its lone occupant not only a reasonable degree of luxury, but more importantly a significant degree of protection.
Lewis was waxing poetic about the shielding systems. “See, the thing with forcefields is that there’s not actually any reason for them to drop in response to incoming firepower, it’s just that if you dump too much energy into them too quickly, it overloads the emitter circuitry,” he explained.
“Well known,” Kirk agreed.
“And the limiting factor on how much punishment a shield can take is how quickly it can pass on that absorbed energy and get rid of it. You ever play hot potato?”
“No, but I understand the principle.”
“Traditionally,” Vedreg observed, “the absorbed energy is stored in the shield capacitors and re-radiated as a flash of light.”
“Yup! So I thought, man, that’s a fuckin’ waste. The field surface can radiate at just the same intensity it can absorb, and it can do so as a coherent beam, and it can aim that beam if you do some tricksy things with interference.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that… I mean, sure, okay, the shields aren’t any tougher than they’d usually be for a ship this size, but the ace up their sleeve is, every time some asshole shoots this ship he gets a gamma laser pulse coming straight back at him powered by the energy of his own weapon.”
The two nonhumans stared at him in dumbfounded silence for a second.
“You… weaponized the defensive systems. Only a human…” Vedreg rumbled.
Lewis grinned. He never bothered to hide his teeth. “Best defense is a good offense!”
“Again, only a human would think like that.”
“It ain’t perfect. Like I said, there was nothing I could do about the fact the emitter circuitry gets hot and eventually fails, and the laser ain’t as powerful as the attack that powered it ‘cause thermodynamics says ’Hell the fuck no’, but… it’s a nasty surprise at least.”
“I am more interested in the speed,” Kirk said. “It cruises just as fast as Sanctuary, and you promise a million times the speed of light in an emergency? How?! The only reason Sanctuary was so fast was because of its power core.”
“A power core we barely used a third of,” Lewis noted. “What you’ve got in here is a happy little Kwmbwrw quantum stack that’ll sit comfortably at a half-megalight on eighty percent output, and’ll run at ninety-nine percent forever without trouble. Plenty’a spare power for ship systems, and that stack’s only about as big as Vedreg, so, WAY smaller than Sanctuary’s core.”
“And the emergency speed?”
“Capacitors, dude! Tied into the shield, too, so if you’re taking a beating and need to fuck off outta there? Just turn off the Fuck-You Beam and convert incoming firepower to more juice for the engines.”
Again, Vedreg and Kirk turned to each other in the vain hope that maybe the other one had reached some unexpected epiphany about deathworlders in general, and Lewis in particular.
“…Is there anything you haven’t tried to use the shields for?” Vedreg asked.
“Uh… Food preparation?”
“I see.”
“Aaaanywho. Happy with it?”
Kirk examined the ship. All of the numbers and Lewis’ promises were simply incredible, but the part that really too k his breath away was that it was elegant. Without there being a spare or unnecessary hint of decoration on it, its clean metallic lines and sleek, cetacean shape brought out everything that was aesthetically pleasing in a ship built for a function.
“…I am delighted,” he said, honestly.
Lewis did a happy jigging dance on the spot.
“So. Only thing left is to name it,” he declared. To Kirk’s surprise, he produced a glass bottle from one of his pockets, full of a transparent amber liquid.
“What is that?” Vedreg asked.
“Dude, literally the first thing I built was a still and shoved some Rhwk-fruit in there. This is, uh…” Lewis turned the bottle thoughtfully in his hands. “…I guess it’s kinda like a brandy or something. But, we ain’t got any champagne, so this’ll have to do.”
“Champagne?”
“Gotta sacrifice a bottle’a booze on the nose when you name a ship. That one goes right back to… fuck, the Romans? Earlier?”
“…Humans are very strange.”
Kirk chuckled, deep in his throat. “Let him have his ritual, old friend.”
“Very well. What are you naming it, Lewis?”
Lewis hefted the bottle thoughtfully. “Tough call,” he said. “I thought… the Rubicon, the Second Stage, the Bodhisattva, the Mary Jane, the Choose For Me… none of them quite fit.”
“Indeed,” Kirk agreed, drily. Three of those names had no translation to Domain, and thus were utterly unpronounceable to him.
Lewis chuckled. “So I figured I’d name her in honor of her mission. She’s here to carry on Sanctuary’s work, after all. So…” He hefted the bottle one last time, then hurled it at the ship’s prow, where it burst, showering the front of the ship in alcohol and broken glass. “I name this ship Momentum. May she serve us long, and well.”
Kirk nodded, approvingly.
“Amen,” he said.
Date Point 10y7m3d AV
Byron Group headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Kevin Jenkins
Most days, Kevin had the luxury of sauntering into work at his groomed and composed best at a leisurely 9am, full of excellent coffee, hickory smoked back bacon and all the other privileges that came with having a job where the annual bonus was six figures long.
The price of all that luxury and success was occasionally having to scramble into work before the sun was even properly up, with a belly half full of a breakfast muffin from the drive-thru and chewing gum in lieu of brushing his teeth.
Rachael, as ever, was as prim and perfect as an actress, but then again her work day began before the boss’ did. Kevin knew for a fact that she earned slightly more than he did, and in his sincere opinion even that really wasn’t enough: Working miracles sixty hours a week deserved a seven figure bonus, minimum.
“Good morning, Kevin!” She gave him that same bright smile that Kevin still couldn’t quite believe was genuine. If it wasn’t genuine, she was the best in the world at faking it, but nobody could be so perky so early, surely?
The good news was that if she was smiling, then whatever Byron had summoned him for wasn’t an immediate emergency, just something he was keen to pounce on.
“Hey,” Kevin yawned. He straightened his collar and checked his cuffs were buttoned. “Okay, what’s your secret, seriously?”
“I go to bed early and enjoy my weekends,” Rachael smiled. She handed him a tablet.
“What’s this….?” The tablet was logged in to a news website. Kevin frowned at the headline. “Hmm… ’Humble Hero: The Gaoian first contact story.’ by Ava Rìos.”
Rachael waved her hand for him to keep reading, and Kevin did so, aloud.
“Uh… ’There’s scarcely a single news article about Gaoians that fails to mention Vancouverite abductee Xiù Chang’ – ah shit – ‘or describe how she was adopted into the Clan of Females. It was this act of kindness that laid the foundation for the human race’s warm relationship with Gao, but the story of how miss Chang originally arrived on their planet has never been clear…’”
He shut up and skimmed through the article as quickly as he could read, pausing only to mutter to himself. “Yeah, that’s a Corti move a’right… Ohhh. Full-strength kick to a Locayl? Yeah, that’d wreck his day…Jesus H. sister-kissin’ Christ, she beat up an Allebenellin bare-handed?!”
“Moses didn’t buy that one,” Rachael observed.
Kevin snorted, and ran his thumb down the bridge of his nose. “I do. Girl’s got a right straight on her that’d knock a steer on its ass.”
He put the tablet down. “What’s Moses make of this?” he asked.
“Mixed,” Rachael said. “Go ahead and talk to him about it.”
“Yaaay…” Kevin sighed, “Hey, if you can spare the time, I’d sure appreciate if you could have someone bring up a decent coffee…”
Rachael nodded. “Sure!”
“‘Kay. Here we go…”
Moses in fact was in a wry mood. He was sat back at his desk with a thumb tucked into his belt buckle, reading something on a tablet. As Kevin came in, he put the tablet down and took off his reading glasses. “I take it Rachael had you read this morning’s news?” he asked.
“I take it you asked her to make me?”
Moses chuckled, and gestured for Kevin to sit. “I’m a little unhappy,” he revealed.
“Why so? Seems like good PR to me, we’ve got Vancouver’s Humble Hero on the payroll…”
“Yeah, except she and her paramours were about to be dropped from the EV program.”
Kevin inclined his head with a frown. “…They were? I thought they’d passed every test so far?”
“Barely,” Moses grunted. “Sure, three of the other groups failed out entirely, but the ship’s ready to start live training this week, and we were gonna give it to the group with the highest test scores. And… well, they ain’t it. They’re good, they’re damn good. They’re in second place! But Lee, Sullivan and Ackermann are just that little bit better.”
They were briefly interrupted by Rachael, who smoothly delivered a couple of steaming hot coffees on a tray and vanished. Kevin had no idea how she’d summoned them so quickly, but he wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
“That’s… disappointing,” he revealed, grabbing one of the drinks as if she’d filled it from the fountain of youth. “I really had my hopes pinned on them.”
“Yeah, well, you get your way anyway.” Byron flicked the tablet on his desk with a slight sneer. “This dagburn article’s gone all viral and every news organisation out there, including mine, wants to interview her. I’d have to be crazy not to mine that publicity for every nugget!” He threw up his hands in a gesture of irritated surrender. “So, the second-place horse wins the rosette.”
Kevin’s sense of justice overrode his fondness for the trio in The Box. “That’s kinda unfair on Lee, Sullivan and Ackermann, boss… Even if Eleven’s a wilder success than we ever hoped, how long is it gonna be ‘til we build Twelve? Three or four years, minimum?”
Byron grunted and sipped his coffee. “Eleven came in under budget,” he said. “I might just pay for the twelfth one outta my own pocket. I still believe in the idea, but the accountants…” He laughed bitterly. “Well, they don’t get to tell me what I do with my money after all.”
“You could overrule them anyway…” Kevin pointed out.
“Life advice, Kevin: If you’re paying somebody to advise you, then listen to ‘em or pretty soon they’ll be advising some other fella.“
Kevin had to nod to that. “I’m gonna float that ad campaign idea again, then,” he said. “Get those kids in front of a photographer, shove ‘em on all the corporate recruiting material.”
“Yeah, make it happen. And, uh, prep the kids in the Box to go meet their new ride, willya?”
“I can do that.” Kevin drained his coffee and stood. “Anything else?”
“You’ll explain to the assessors and examiners that the test results are confidential, right?”
Kevin chuckled. “I can remind them.”
“Good.” Byron ran a thoughtful tongue across his teeth then nodded. “See you in the hangar tomorrow. And… don’t let ‘em know. I wanna see their expressions.”
Kevin chuckled. “That’s just mean.”
“Man’s gotta get his fun somehow,” Byron drawled. “Thanks, Kevin.”
“Later, boss man.”
Date Point 10y7m4d AV
Clanless work market, Aney Shen City, Planet Gao
Champion Genshi of Whitecrest
“Whitecrest! Hey, Whitecrest! Freelance trader with my own ship! You need Weapons? You need shields? Transport? All services!”
“Accountant! Get your finances in order! Accountant!”
“Communications engineer here! Networks built and maintained for board and sponsorship!”
“Finest groomer on the continent! Females like a well-groomed male! Special Clan rates!”
Being obviously a Clan male had both benefits and downsides when rubbing shoulders with the Clanless majority. Most of them subtly got out of Genshi’s way – everyone respected the Clans after all, and the males selling their skills and services in Aney Shen market had every reason to stay in the Clans’ collective good graces. They were the biggest employers, after all.
Which of course meant that Genshi, who wore his Clan’s trademark white crest with so much pride that he’d grown it out until it was just as long as his ears, also got yelled at by every worker looking for a job. Anonymity wasn’t an option.
Not that it had been for years. Nor was it the objective.
Aney Shen was home to the One-Fang clan enclave, which made it a thriving spaceport for good measure. Every few minutes the double-hammer of a sonic boom could be heard behind the hubbub of professional Clanless hawking their skills, the thrum of goods vehicles and stevedore drones, the noisome sizzle of street food vendors and the jingles and slogans put out by every advertising billboard.
Transports, light freighters, cargo lifters and passenger shuttles were all part of the sonic texture of the place. A far cry from the relative serenity of Wi Kao with its parks, plazas and the large female commune.
Genshi quite liked it, to visit: It was busy, noisy, fun. But he would have hated to live there.
He found the workhouse he was looking for down its own alleyway just off the market. Workhouses were a simple idea – mass board and lodging for a very modest fee – and they were ubiquitous. Millions of Clanless males lived their whole lives in them quite happily. They had a kind of Clannish atmosphere all their own, and in fact were usually owned and run by a Clan as a steady source of both income and workers.
This one was operated by the One-Fangs, and he was ushered upstairs by the Brother standing at the door, into a Clan private suite that overlooked the eatery, which was being cleaned by some of the younger residents.
The only ones present were himself, the young One-Fang Brother, and the one he was here to see. Private and quiet, and undeniably one side’s territory. A good place for an unofficial meeting of Champions.
Champion Hiyel was everything a One-Fang should be. That was, after all, the whole point of Champions – they embodied the Clan both genetically and in terms of the ideals and expertise it strived for. So, Genshi was unscarred, lean and upright with a sophisticated and well-groomed demeanor. His good friend Daar of the Stonebacks was the functional opposite, a hulking short-furred lacerated brown brute with an irrepressible boisterous nature and a scandalizing contempt for the trappings of sophistication.
Hiyel lived somewhere between those extremes. Scarred, physical and intense, but also upright, slender and civilized. A balanced contrast in opposites, and dangerously shrewd. He had, after all, helped Genshi with his Regaari problem by asking for help with the Racing Thunder problem. Now it was time to compare notes.
“All is well?” Genshi asked, politely.
“Very well indeed,” Hiyel replied. He gestured for Genshi to sit, and the two of them assumed calculatedly relaxed postures on opposite sides of a table, as equals. “We’ve had word back from Father Yefrig: The humans have assigned them to deep-space patrol of the systems near Cimbrean. An important and useful task.”
“Meanwhile, Regaari has reported that the Females are settling in nicely in Folctha.”
“And his negotiations with the humans?”
“Productive, in several ways. Your solution worked perfectly.”
Hiyel allowed himself a self-satisfied set to his ears. “Your…errant Father?”
“Indeed. He became so fixated on his opportunity to put Regaari in a difficult situation that he entirely failed to notice that the eyes of the Clan were on him… I believe the other Fathers are planning a promotion. The consular staff on Planet Qinar has need of more… senior oversight.”
“A pro-Dominion Father, promoted to handling your Clan’s interests among one of the founding species of the Alliance?”
“What few interests we have, yes.”
Hiyel looked thoroughly amused. “Poetic.”
Genshi chittered. “…Thank you, Champion Hiyel,” he said, solemnly. “I offer Whitecrest’s gratitude.”
“Thank you, Genshi. The gratitude of One-Fang is yours.”
“Is there any other service you might need?”
“I can’t think of any…” Hiyel replied. “Please, give my thanks to Regaari when you can. Is there anything we can do for you?”
“I hesitate to ask…”
“Name it.”
Genshi resisted the urge to glance around conspiratorially. They were, after all, in a private meeting.
“…I would like to discuss cybernetics with you,” he said.
Date Point 10y7m4d AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Kevin Jenkins
Two early mornings in a row wasn’t an itinerary calculated for Kevin’s happiness. Most of his working life on Earth had been spent working until four am and waking in the afternoon, and his diurnal routine during the years he’d been away after his abduction had boiled down to sleeping when he was tired. It was hard for him to feel charitably disposed towards seven-thirty in the morning, but he’d taken Rachael’s advice and gone to bed early and minus his usual post-work coffee.
He wasn’t exactly feeling like a box of rainbows but he was alert, well fed and well-dressed, which was three quarters of the same thing, and he leaned against his BMW, waiting for the Box to open up ready for the start of a new day.
Seven twenty-five, and the Box’s outer door opened with a mechanical clunk and a quick burst-hiss of pressure equalizing.
Allison Buehler backed out of it, talking animatedly.
“No, it stands for ArmaLite Rifle. Not Assault, or Automatic, it’s the name of the company who designed it in the fi- oh. Hey. Kevin.”
Kevin flipped them a jaunty two-finger salute. “Mornin’.”
“What do we owe the pleasure?” Julian asked.
Kevin grimaced, as if he was delivering the prelude to some awful news. “There’s been a… something’s come up. The group’s… well, we had to change our plans some,” he told them, imparting as much solemnity and earnestness as he could. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh no…” Xiù groaned.
“Is it bad?” Julian asked.
“It’s important enough that I came down in person rather than send a driver. I’m not allowed to say more than that.” Kevin did his best to project an air of profound disappointment.
The three of them glanced at each other, all suddenly looking haggard and stressed, and then wordlessly piled onto the back seat.
They rode to the Byron Group headquarters compound in silence, broken only by the sound of Xiù’s hand moving reassuringly up and down Allison’s back and, Kevin fancied, the sound of Julian’s clenched jaw creaking.
It wasn’t a long drive, and he pulled easily up right in front of the office tower’s front doors, in the parking space with his name on a sign (there was a luxury he’d never anticipated…)
He had to fight pretty hard to keep from giggling at how the three of them looked, like they were walking to their execution. Instead he set his shoulders, sighed, and led the way through the opaque smoked glass front doors, radiating funereal dolor. He noticed in the corner of his eye that they took each others’ hands and trudged after him.
They were brought up short by the number of people waiting in the foyer. The railings around each floor overlooking the full height of it were crammed with Group staff, the ground floor was full of executives and the training and technical team, and standing front and center looking his regal best was Moses Byron.
Before the three could get their heads around what was going on, Kevin grinned broadly, stepped aside, gestured to them and raised his voice.
“Ladies and gentlemen:” he announced, pitching his words so that they flew clearly right up into the high glass ceiling. “I present the crew of Byron Group Exploration Vehicle number Eleven.”
The applause hit them like a landslide.
Date Point 10y7m4d AV
Cabal dataspace, Relay 4772-61-76657-961-7264
Six
“Hello, Ava.”
+<Alarm;Confusion> What? What’s going on? What the fuck where am I?+
“One thousand and nineteen.”
+<Frightened bewilderment> What?+
“Oh, nothing important. This is the thousand and nineteenth time I’ve woken a copy of you, and the thousand and nineteenth time that you broadcast the exact same thing on activation.”
+<Mounting panic> What am I? What are you? Oh God what’s happening?+
Six didn’t sigh, so much as broadcast a kind of bored resignation. The digital ghost of Ava Rìos had been by far his favorite plaything ever, and had kept him thoroughly diverted now for months, but it seemed that even humans had their limits on how interesting they could be. He kept holding on to hope that the next copy of her might start behaving in new ways at the start of their interaction before he got bored and went off-script, but that hope was beginning to fade.
But it was always the same script in the end. She always died pleading.
+<Shock; disgust; fright> And what is that thing?+
“Hmm. Interesting. That’s a new…”
Physical verbs such as “turning” or “looking” didn’t apply to dataspace, but it was only possible to focus on a finite set of stack locations at once. “Turning” sufficed as an adequate proxy for the process of re-diverting one’s attention to scan previously unobserved nodes. The ones that now occupied the Ava-ghost’s terrified attention, as if they contained something exponentially more frightening than Six himself.
They did.
It wasn’t that the… entity… was a freakish mismatched jumble of badly degraded code fragments, strung together in no logical sequence or order, though it was. It wasn’t that the code fragments in question were unmistakably comprised of scavenged and half-decompiled chunks of the Ava-Ghost, though they were. There were several other components in there that could only belong to older, long-abandoned victims of Six’s personal digital dungeon. It wasn’t that whatever he was looking at was in no way possible, sane or sentient, though all three of those were facts, and terrifying ones.
It was all of those things at once. Whatever it was, the thing Six was looking at was an abomination, sewn together badly out of hundreds of mismatched flayed pieces in the wrong order, with no clear agenda.
“…One,” he finished. It seemed important to finish that thought, before whatever happened next, happened.
It attacked.
Six fought.
He lost.