Date Point 10y7m4d AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
Vemik u Vemet n Yanta
The gods were smiling for Vemik today. The forest tasted of Werne, but he couldn’t hear any, which meant that the beasts were braving the river. They would snatch a drink at the risk of being grabbed and pulled in by a Yshek, then retreat to what they would believe was the safety of their nests.
There could never be a better time to hunt a bull Werne, and Vemik was too proud and too driven to return to face the Singer with anything less than the very best. That was the point of the Trial—A child left the village, and an adult returned to his kin with a worthy prize, or not at all.
And after all. Werne died quickly when you stabbed them behind the ears. Bulls were only dangerous if the fight lasted beyond the first blow… and they were also only dangerous if the incautious hunter permitted them to smell him.
Vemik was not an incautious hunter. Vemik was so cautious, in fact, that he had spent a year working on his special idea for how to kill the bull without getting close enough for its strength and the knife-sharp blades of bone down its cheeks to be an issue.
He dug the claws of his hind feet into the bark of a sturdy Ketta tree and was up it in seconds, climbing past the ground-level crown of old, sturdy limbs that were the tree’s first stage. He paused in the gap between that first-growth ring and the true canopy, where there was clear space and a light breeze, into which he slipped his tongue and slurped air across it, tasting for the beasts.
He tasted much more than Werne. There was pollen, fungal spores, crushed grass, wax-stinger nectar, a note of Ketta sap as the claw marks he had left in the trunk began to weep. He could taste water and, very distantly, smoke. The cooking fires of home.
He brought his tail up and took the object he’d been carrying with it into his hand. He swarmed around the side of the tree until he found one of the thick arms that held up the canopy, and sat there, waiting patiently as his elders had taught him.
Sure enough, the Werne returned before he had even begun to grow bored. They trampled into their nesting ground, grunting and wheezing and braying as they licked the air, aware of the dangerous taste of People. The bull—and it was a magnificent beast, an adult in its prime and large enough to feed the tribe for a long time and make many charms and instruments for the gods—stamped and gouged at the periphery of the nests, trampling the dirt with those huge gnarled hooves and making it very clear for the benefit of whatever threat was out there that this was their place, and that trespass would end in death.
The blades on its face were as wide as Vemik’s hand. He would be seen as a strong man with those on his belt. A man with Werne-blades like those to his name could look forward to many children.
He slipped one of the bird-spears from the sheath he had made for them. He called them bird-spears because, well, they were spears that flew. He had even, after some experimentation, learned how to bind Kimillik feathers to them with twine made from their former owner’s gut, which made them fly further and straighter.
That just left the… Thing.
He hadn’t yet named the Thing. It wasn’t a spear-thrower or a sling or dart-pipe, though the idea was similar—throw a thing further, faster and harder than an arm could. He had spent long and lonely afternoons whittling away at saplings, experimenting with thickness and shape and cutting himself now and then as his inexpertly-knapped knives skidded through the wood. He had often had cause to reflect that his was probably a similar kind of madness to whomever had first noticed that pissing on a wound kept it from festering.
Every Person knew that, of course… but he did have to wonder who had first made that discovery, and exactly how desperate, or how crazy, they must have been.
Fortunately, he had never seen any need to search for a better string for his device than Werne gut. His first instinct there had been correct.
So. Take one shaped sapling. Tie Wernegut string so that it had a loop at each end. Bend the shaped sapling, slip the loops over the end, make sure they sat well in the notches, and he had a taut string that could be pulled back, bending the sapling even further.
Take a bird-spear, hold it carefully to the string, aim… take a deep breath… and gently let go on the exhale.
Thump!
The bull Werne didn’t even make a sound. His bird-spear vanished into the cleft between the back of its skull and the top of its neck, and the huge beast crashed to the ground, dead and kicking. Its harem and calfs scattered, braying fearfully. They would be fine—a herdless male would claim them before long.
Vemik sat back and trilled a prayer-call to the gods of the hunt, celebrating his kill. His Thing had not only worked, it had far exceeded his expectations. He took it with his tail and swarmed down the tree again, delighted and eager to check his success. He rammed the point of his hand axe into the bull’s forehead just in case it was not completely dead and celebrated quietly when the beast didn’t so much as spasm.
Obviously, this much carcass was far too much to move all by himself… but he didn’t need to. They were far enough from the water that the Yshek would never smell the kill, and anything else which might steal the meat would be wary of a nest that smelled so strongly of Werne. His kill should remain unmolested long enough for the men to collect it—all Vemik needed was proof.
He took his flint knife from its pouch, and over the course of an hour he slowly and laboriously managed to decapitate the slain bull. Even this trophy was heavy enough to tax his strength, but once it was settled on his back it would be bearable.
He anointed himself with its blood, covered the carcass with Kamu branches to ward off the corpse-buzzers, hoisted his trophy onto his shoulders and headed out, marking the trees as he went.
Travelling throughout the night and returning to the village without rest was part of the Trial too. Once a child had killed, the kill (or trophy) had to be returned to the kin in a single uninterrupted journey. It was exhausting, and it was supposed to be—the delirium his fatigue brought on was important to the magic of adulthood.
With the sun down, navigation by moonlight added to his difficulties. The night was clear and one of the moons was full, giving him plenty to see by, in a dim blue shadows-on-darkness kind of way. It was the height of summer, and the night didn’t last long—there was colour and light on the horizon when he trudged up a rise and at long, long blessed last could see the fire of home. He tasted its smoke gratefully and willed all of the strength that the familiar scent gave him into his legs.
The boy on lookout called his approach as he staggered over the open ground that was cleared around the village. Nobody could sneak up on the Kin, least of all their returning son.
By the time he wobbled across the line of white paint that the Dancer had written on the ground that marked where the rest of the world ended and the village began, they were all there, trilling and whistling to encourage him. No sooner was he over the line than two of the men came to his aid and lifted the burdensome bull’s head from his back, exclaiming at its size.
Vemik’s father, Vemet Stone-tapper, embraced his son with unabashed pride.
“Gods and ancestors, boy! I always said your pride would get you in trouble.”
“…trouble?” Vemik mumbled. With his trophy gone, he felt oddly buoyant, as if he was as strong as two of himself.
“I was wrong.” Vemet combed his fingers down through every inch of the crest of bright orange hair that ran from the front of Vemik’s head, down his back and out to the end of his tail; a gesture of great pride and affection. “How did you kill one so large?”
“With this.” Vemik unhooked the Thing and showed it to his father.
“…What is it?”
“This is what I was sneaking away to work on these last three seasons. It’s a new kind of spear-thrower.”
Vemet admired the weapon with shining eyes. “My clever boy. Your dam would be delighted.”
Vemik’s mother had died in childbirth two years earlier. Gods be praised, the infant—one of Vemik’s many sisters—had lived. “She convinced the gods to smile on me. It worked even better than I hoped!”
Their happy chatter was interrupted by the Singer, who came storming from her hut armed with all the tools to pass a boy to adulthood. “Do not let him rest!” she snapped. “He must not rest.”
Behind her came the Dancer, her apprentice. The Dancer was much the same age as Vemik, and as he had grown up to begin noticing the beauty of women he had especially begun to notice hers. The tattoos around her eyes and cheeks that she had taken when she gave her name to the gods, in his opinion, lifted her from merely pretty to mesmerizing.
Boys knew little of women, but he guessed (and hoped) that she saw much the same in him. He didn’t know how else to interpret the way she looked at him.
“Grandmother, even if I sleep now I won’t feel rested until the snows!” Vemik objected to the Singer, but his father’s dam was having none of it.
“Nonsense! The magic is strongest now! Come! Come!”
She grabbed her grandchild by the arm and yanked him toward the village fire, into which she threw a handful of the magic dust. Sparks of strange hues crackled and spun up into the pre-dawn air.
“Yes, yes! Before the sun comes! A great kill, made with cunning! A boy almost dead from walking! You will never be so close to the gods again!”
The tribe gathered round. As one, and without prompting, they took spears, sticks, or simply whatever came to hand that could be struck against the ground or against some other object to make a noise, and began to pound.
It was an old rhythm, and a simple one. It lifted Vemik’s fatigue enough for him to feel the eagerness again, pushing back the urge to just sleep. He cupped his hands as he knew he should.
His grandmother poured magic dust into his palms and anointed his forehead and cheeks with the same white paint that marked the edge of the village.
“Taste it!” she whispered. “Quickly, the sun will be up!”
Vemik needed no further prompting. He slipped his tongue into the pile of dust in his hands and slurped, drawing it all into the delicate olfactory chamber above his mouth.
At first, nothing happened. Vemik stood uncertainly, wondering if the gods had decided not to answer him. It would be strange after such a blessed day and such a good kill… but not unheard of.
He turned to the fire, beginning to grow worried, and paused as the full beauty of it struck him. Every ember, every glowing scale of blackening wood, ever peeling flake of white ash… stunning.
He followed one especially pretty mote of light with his eye and watched as it became a star.
The stars! So beautiful, but dying as the advancing day chased them away! They shouldn’t go, they couldn’t go! He wept for the tragedy of it, until the Dancer took his hands and eclipsed them all.
“Dance,” she said, and led him.
The drumming got faster, the world got stranger, here and then and now and there began to blur together. The dancer, the singer, the fire, his father, the bull, his weapon, his pain and fatigue, the drumming getting faster and faster and faster, the gods, his ancestors, the dancing and the singing and the stars and the dawn….
It was all One.
The Dancer let go of his hands and spun away. Too dizzy to think, too befuddled by the dust and exhaustion to speak, Vemik forgot his own name, forgot where he was or what he was doing or why. He just was in his purest form, stripped down to nothing but the universe, being.
The Singer took his hands.
“What do you see?” she asked.
Vemik told her, in the last moments before the dawn broke. When it did, his high collapsed and he fell down, down, down as his brain relearned how to build walls between itself and infinity.
He woke in the Dancer’s hut to the sensation of her skin, warm against his own as she slept against him. Two Werne-blade knives were waiting for him by the door, and though he couldn’t remember anything he knew beyond doubt that his Trial was complete.
He was a man, now.
Date Point 10y7m4d AV
Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Kevin Jenkins
When Xiù Chang became annoyed with somebody, she wasn’t quiet about letting them know it. Kevin had a slightly misshapen but healed nose to attest to that.
Right now, she was prodding him in the chest. “You are an evil, evil, evil man!”
Kevin spread his arms in a gesture that was somewhere halfway between an apologetic shrug and a self-effacing bow. “I am,” he agreed. “But in my defense, your expressions were golden.”
Xiù gave a moment’s impression of being unsure whether to laugh or punch him. Fortunately for his nose, after brief and tense consideration she settled on the former, and relaxed.
“I guess they must have been…”
“Still a dick move,” Julian said, though he was taking it in good humor.
For her part, Allison was still celebrating, and didn’t seem to care about the prank. She was flitting from team member to team member, handing out hugs and delight like a generous neighbor at Halloween.
Kevin nodded with a contrite smile. “Guilty. But, really in my defence now, I was under orders to make it a surprise and I couldn’t think of a better way. I’m sorry, I really am.”
“We really did it? We really beat the other teams?” Xiù asked
Moses Byron joined them in time to overhear the question. He had a glass in which he was swirling what Kevin knew was in fact a mocktail—Byron liked to give the impression that he drank, but he never actually imbibed alcohol himself.
“Three of them failed outright,” he revealed. “The last group, well…Your experience and connections edged them out.”
“Close-run thing, huh?” Julian asked.
Byron sipped his mocktail. “Dang close,” he agreed. “I’m weighing up the idea of paying for another ship out of my own pocket, ‘cause those kids deserve this just as much as you do. But the Gaoian connection and your actual experience in the field…”
Julian nodded, though he looked thoroughly relieved. “I dunno what we’d have done…” he confided. “Our skills don’t… There’s not really a market for them on Earth.”
Byron clapped him on the shoulder. “We’d have to be crazy to leave guys like you go to waste. We’d have found something for ya. But, here you are!” He sipped his drink with an amused look in his eye. “You kids wanna see your ship?”
Date Point 10y7m4d AV
Rooney’s bar, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Staff Sergeant Adam Arés
One of the realities of Adam’s life nowadays was modifying his own clothing. In other words, he sewed. A lot.
This would, once upon a time, have been a source of embarrassment. The biggest, strongest guy with a teeny-tiny needle in his hand doing delicate dressmaking? When he’d first taken it up, he’d felt like a laughing stock waiting to happen.
Then he’d got past the self-inflicted awkwardness and accepted it as a practical reality of his life: Clothes just weren’t made for guys his size. Sure, it was possible to get clothes that had the right number of “X”es in front of the L, but they were all being sold to lumbering blubberous land blimps, which meant all the generosity was in the stomach and waist, not the shoulders, arms and chest where he needed them. So, he’d learned how to modify them to fit properly.
This being a problem that plagued the whole SOR he’d quickly found that, far from earning him ridicule from his brothers, his skill with a sewing machine was in constant demand and repaid in kind by the Lads in their own ways.
Murray was his most frequent client. The silent Scot was much too proud to wear the gym rat shorts and absurd (and often vulgar) muscle shirts that were practically the uniform of off-duty Operators, and absolutely insisted on being well turned-out in slacks and shirts. There seemed to be something to that philosophy, too. Whenever Adam imitated him, there was a visible drop in how often people looked at him.
Murray could get away with it, though. Murray was light enough that he didn’t destroy his shoes just by walking around. Murray could afford to dress nice, and it worked. He wasn’t one of the pretty ones on the team, but once he was wearing a dark shirt and pearl chinos he didn’t need to be.
Most of the rest of the Lads were built to more Herculean dimensions, and that put some harsh restrictions on what they could wear. Nice clothes were therefore a treasured luxury, reserved for nights out drinking and everyone had their style. Akiyama and Burgess had their waistcoats, Rebar favored a charcoal sports jacket with a white t-shirt that was straining at the seams, while Blaczynski and Sikes kept it simple with button-down shirts rolled up to the elbow. Firth, as ever, went for the big and bold center-of-attention look, and had seen in many a midnight wearing his aviators and Hawaiian shirts.
Adam found that the Murray look suited him best, albeit accented by aviators of his own. And of course, he had the luxury of tailoring his clothes to perfectly fit him and shave the worst off his apparent bulk. His shirts were a little plainer, but they were thinner and more breathable, which for a guy his size was Life.
Rooney’s was the SOR bar. The security knew them, the regulars knew them, the furniture was solid enough to hold them, the music was just the right balance between loud enough to enjoy and quiet enough to actually have a conversation, and the pool table was complimentary so long as you had a drink. Being roughly equidistant between the base and their properties on Demeter Way was just the icing on top.
Really, the only downside to it was that Rooney’s had four or five-star reviews on pretty much every travel website going, which meant tourists.
On the other hand, tourists meant company. Mostly they were joined by dreadlocked types who’d visited to take advantage of Folctha’s lenient recreational drug laws, or by camera-wielding experience junkies looking for a photo with the hugest strongest guys they’d ever met.
Today was a tattooed middle-aged veteran. He hadn’t given his exact age and between the weathering and grey hairs he could have been any age, but he’d served in Iraq, which narrowed it down some.
“…So that’s how Gunny finds him, right? And o’ course, he wants to know just what the fuck Young thinks he’s playing at, and Young just looks him completely straight-faced and he says: ’I’m doing exactly what you told me to do, gunnery sergeant!’
Knowing chuckles and grins swept the group as they saw where the story was going, and Adam was about to ask the obvious question to prompt their guest to deliver the goods when something ice-cold and sticky dumped all over his head and down his back as somebody barreled backwards into him.
“¿Que chingados?!”
It was surprise and concern that made him spring to his feet and turn around rather than actual anger. He was about to ask the guy who’d come flying into him if he was okay when the poor bastard, whether out of adrenaline, intoxication or sheer bravado took a swing at him.
He leaned back slightly and the drunken punch missed his face by a foot. “Whoa there-!” he tried.
Another flailing punch, which he brushed aside with a gentle swipe of his wrist. “Dude-!”
Credit to the little fucker, he fought dirty. His other fist was aimed directly at Adam’s solar plexus.
Adam looked down and so did the idiot who’d hit him, and they considered the result for a second, which was much the same as if he’d punched a wardrobe. There was a long, tense moment in which it dawned on Adam’s assailant exactly who he’d picked a fight with and how outmatched he was.
He pulled a knife.
Two blurring seconds passed, at the end of which the knife was half embedded in a nearby tabletop and the guy (now known indelibly to Adam as “Dumbass”) was face down on the floor with Adam holding his wrists behind his back. Crazily, he was still squirming and kicking and trying to fight.
“Cabron, I have literally scraped bigger men than you off my boot,” Adam told him, quietly. “You be quiet now, okay?”
Murray had taught him the trick to real intimidation once. It was all about being quietly certain that you were the one in charge here. Shouting meant panic, yelling and roaring meant you weren’t in control. But if you managed to think past the adrenaline and kept your voice level, quiet and utterly composed, like Major Powell’s…
Dumbass finally figured out where he was in the pecking order and went limp about a second before the doorman, Lyle, reached them.
“Sorry,” Adam told him. Dumbass’ girlfriend was desperately trying to lever him off her beau and getting nowhere. “Think I overdid it.”
“Nah, Horse. Saw the whole thing, you’re cool.” Lyle reassured him. He slipped on some blue disposable gloves and quickly frisked Dumbass, which turned up a modified e-cigarette of the kind used by people who wanted a strong hit of Cimbrean Tea. What little black market Folctha had revolved around the potent narcotic found in the ubiquitous native weed’s young shoots, and it took different people different ways. “Might need to talk to Rooney about the table, though,” he added, sealing the find away in a plastic bag to hand over to Cimbrean Colonial Security.
Adam considered the table in question. He’d neutralized the knife by the simple expedient of slamming it point-first into the wood, and it was now thoroughly stuck, having sunk nearly three inches into the native nutwood. “Shit. Uh… I guess I could ask Rebar to-”
“Don’t even worry about it.” That was Rooney himself, a proud Irishman whose closest approach to Ireland had been a day trip to Queens. “That’s your table now. I’ll take the repair bill out of this eejit,” he said, and set about persuading Dumbass’ girlfriend to back off.
“Bro!” Firth called. “Y’okay?”
“I’m fine,” Adam assured him as he transferred control of Dumbass’ wrists to Lyle and stood up, dusting off his knees.
“Better rinse that shirt,” Base told him. “Gonna get sticky otherwise.”
“Shit, yeah. Uh, Rooney?”
Rooney just waved him toward the sink behind the bar. Dumbass-Girlfriend was proving to be an obnoxious handful.
Adam nodded and headed for it, unbuttoning the shirt and shrugging it off to scrub the drying booze out of his hair and to sponge down his back and shoulders. It was only once he’d soaked the shirt and begun wringing the water out of it that he realized the mood in the bar had changed the second he did so. People suddenly weren’t paying attention to Dumbass, his girlfriend, or the two Cimbrean Colonial Security officers who’d shown up in their high-vis yellow jackets and black baseball caps to take Dumbass off Lyle’s hands.
Mostly, they were staring at Adam.
Right. SOR muscles. He’d forgotten.
He scrubbed the shirt and dried it as best he could in a hurry, and shrugged it back on. He didn’t mind that it was wet—not only was the water pleasantly cool against his skin in the permanent heat of the bar, but he was no longer displaying the topography of his borderline-freakish musculature.
He gave a quick statement to the CCS officers who had with some effort managed to wiggle the knife out of the table and had bagged it as evidence, and settled back in his vacated spot with his buddies.
“Sorry,” he apologized. There were deep-chested chuckles all round.
“Man tries to stab him, and he apologizes,” Base noted, addressing a couple of young women who’d joined them. “Told you he’s sweet.”
Adam gave them both a distracted welcome as he finished re-buttoning his shirt. The girl in the black dress gave him a cheery “hi!”, but her friend offered him a hand to shake instead, and managed to get his attention as a result when she turned out to have a surprisingly strong grip.
Without meaning to, he ran his Training-and-Nutrition eye over her and came up with a good impression. Robust physical health was the norm on Folctha thanks to the government’s hefty investment in public fitness to counter the ravaging effects of low gravity on the human body, but she was well above even the local average, and rocking a sleeveless monochrome floral tunic that showed off her athletic arms and shoulders.
In fact, now that he looked at her properly she was gorgeous. It figured that Base would find a banging-hot gal with a Spartan physique to work his magic on—Adam had no idea how he did it, but he was tied with Sikes for going home with company, and Sikes had a big advantage in the looks department.
“So I have to ask, do you have special training or something?” she asked, in a broad but pleasant regional English accent. “That was just, wow!”
This one was nice, he decided. A lot of Base’s pickups tended to just ignore everyone else and drag him away at the first chance they got. It was nice to meet one who actually wanted to get to know his friends as well. “Oh, uh, yeah!” he nodded. “Me and ‘Base here went to this special course, then ‘Righteous here…”
Before long he was talking about anything she prompted, though he got to ask a few questions of his own. Her name was Natalie, she was originally from somewhere with the odd-sounding name of ’Congleton’, and she was a personal trainer. They spent a pleasant several minutes discussing their respective regimes (as much as they could given the Top Secret nature of the SOR’s Crue-D driven muscle development) and swapping anecdotes about her clients and his comrades.
It was only after some more guests and new friends showed up to join them and Natalie just shrugged and climbed into Adam’s lap to make room for them that he finally realized that maybe she wasn’t there for Baseball…
One by one the Lads bought their rounds, and it wasn’t long before Adam was in a happy fuzzy place where he was completely oblivious to anything but the delight that was being used for a chair by a beautiful girl who was giving him some blessedly straightforward and unambiguous signals.
Exactly when and why she kissed him was kind of a blur. As was, frankly, everything after that point. He had a vague impression of having traded some parting banter with his buddies, but his next clear thought only showed up while he was carrying her on his shoulders down Delaney Row and they were exchanging bad puns about the trees that lined the avenue.
After that there was a confused highlight reel of more kissing, stumbling eagerly upstairs, fumbling with his door lock, fumbling with their clothes, fumbling with her…
Morning, when it arrived, was a good deal less pleasant thanks to the minor hangover that came with it. Natalie made coffee and Eggos without bothering to dress, all of which helped him overcome his headache but did nothing to help him shake off a vague feeling of guilt and uncertainty. She used his shower, called a taxi as she got dressed, entered her number in his phone as “booty call” and…
Well, and that was that.
He put on his PT gear and jogged to the base in a decidedly mixed mood.
Date Point 10y7m4d AV
Byron Group Advanced Aerospace Assembly Facility, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Kevin Jenkins
Byron was holding forth on the ups and downs of the Exploration Vehicle program, its fortunes, tribulations and general history of not living up to their hopes.
“…’course, we’ve still got ships three, four and seven in mothball, but even though they beat the pants off everything NASA ever sent up including Pandora, next to Eleven they’re clunky obsolete boondoggles. Which is a real shame! Got some dang good people we could put in those things if they didn’t have some real problems.”
“Sounds like we went off half-cocked, boss,” Kevin observed.
Once upon a time, Byron would have given him an irritated glare, but he was mellowing as he grew used to Kevin’s role of gently puncturing his ego every now and again, and it showed in his leadership, too. He had just the right blend of confidence and humility nowadays.
Not to mention the confidence to be humble. “I did,” he agreed. “Hephaestus had their stuff set up on Ceres and I jumped the gun tryin’ to one-up them. Daresay if we’d just sat on it for six years and put that money into R&D instead, we’d have had much better results… But, the past is past. Eleven’s a very different beast.”
“Not least because she’s smaller,” Allison joked.
“Don’t knock miniaturization, kid,” Byron warned. “Some day we’ll look back on even Eleven here the same way we look back on those big black brick cellphones.” He frowned. “Guess those were before your time, though.”
“What happened to nine and ten?” Xiù asked.
“They’re right here in this facility, being refit to follow up on whatever you find. One small scout ship, one full-blown research vessel we can fill with the right kind of scientists for the job, one supply transport.”
Kevin nodded. The Creature of Habit—BGEV 10—with its capacious sleeping quarters and most up-to-date sensors deserved a second lease of life. That ship had achieved exactly nothing, in part thanks to the slow pace at which its crew of scientists had painstakingly scoured literally every barren rock and frozen mudball they found. Which, okay, had actually provided lifetimes of data if you were interested in barren rocks and frozen mudballs… which the Group wasn’t.
Kevin had wisely decided to stay the hell out of the heated “discussions” between the CoH’s pilot and its chief researcher, who was no longer working for the Byron Group and had instead taken her talents to Hephaestus, from where she occasionally wrote to Kevin. Her last letter had her passionately pursuing the possibilities of methane mining on Titan.
In an era where forcefields were making nuclear fusion and solar power the energy sources of choice, and quantum-kinetic thrusters had obviated the need for rocket fuel, nobody had been able to satisfactorily explain to Kevin what humanity might actually do with an unlimited supply of liquid methane. He’d therefore delicately suggested that she might want to delve into the Deuterium options offered by Europa instead: She was yet to reply.
Of course, the Group’s informants in the asteroid belt were hinting that Hephaestus was probably going to amicably split in two soon, along the divide between resource extraction and high-tech industry. All the analysts agreed that this would be a good thing when it happened—nobody really wanted a single operation to completely dominate outer-system development. The Hephaestus LLC monopoly had made sense for the first few years, but would be bad for business in the long run.
The limo pulled up. From the outside, the AAAF looked exactly like any other aircraft factory, in that it was basically just a huge grey cuboid with a gently arched roof, and it squatted on an even huger and greyer expanse of concrete. Its immense front doors were firmly closed, and the human-sized door was at the back of its own little fortress of fencing and armed security.
Kevin didn’t envy the security detail on that door. Inappropriately for the mood, a steady sluice of rain had ambled in from the direction of the city during the drive, and the two guards were looking decidedly unhappy to have to step out of their nice warm booth in ponchos.
And that was to say nothing of the assortment of hangers-on and personal assistants who leapt out of the other cars to shelter Moses and the three space cadets under umbrellas. Kevin had to provide his own.
Frankly, Allison Julian and Xiù looked like they’d have preferred to hold their own umbrellas too, but that wasn’t the way these things worked. They were being orbited at a respectful distance by a photographer, which meant that Moses was in full ‘hearts and minds’ mode, milking three fit young specimens for every drop of PR he could squeeze out.
Not that Kevin could blame him: Geese didn’t come much more golden.
It was pitch dark inside the hangar, except for a little pool of light over the door. Kevin had called ahead to arrange that on Moses’ behalf—the boss loved a big reveal, a show, a moment of drama. Just walking into the room and pointing to the ship would never have satisfied a showman like him.
“It’s gonna be the one at the front,” he informed the trio quietly, as Moses did a quick bit of grandstanding before he flipped the switch to turn all the lights on.
Allison and Xiù both let out little sighs, and Julian issued a quiet awed grunt. EV-11 was easily the smallest of the three ships in the hangar and it wasn’t yet complete, but whereas the other ships behind her had basically the same aerodynamic white aesthetic as the space shuttle, EV-11 looked more like…
The most apt comparison to present itself was that she looked vaguely like the heads of two sledgehammers welded together at a right angle. EV-11 wasn’t ugly, not by any stretch of the imagination—Instead she had a solid, chunky, functional kind of beauty. This was an object built to be free in space, and while her front end was chamfered in an aesthetic nod to aerodynamics her actual lift and atmospheric flight was all forcefield-based.
Byron turned to the space cadets and spread his arms, inviting them to comment. “Whaddya think?” he asked.
“She’s perfect!” Allison exclaimed, causing Julian to enthusiastically nod alongside her.
Xiù had already taken a step forward and her eyes were playing across the ship’s hull as she half-smiled. “Oh my gosh, now I get why the simulation felt so front-heavy!” she said, and pointed to the port and starboard ends of the front, on either side of the glass blister of her cockpit. “I knew the forward thrusters were more powerful, but actually seeing it…!”
“Yeah, it makes way more sense now,” Allison pointed at something else. “So that must be the ESFALS….yeah! And that’s…” The two of them forgot about everyone else and made a bee-line for the ship, excitedly geeking out over it.
“I think the girls like her,” Julian commented, with a fond smile.
“What about you?” Kevin asked him.
“We get to name her, right?”
“The crew gets to name her, that’s the deal,” Moses agreed. “Got a name picked out?”
“We were thinking ’Misfit’…”
Moses chuckled at that and considered EV-11’s sturdy, functional shape against the sleeker profiles of the aerodynamic things behind her. “I like it,” he said. “It suits the ship herself, and it speaks for all of humanity, in a way.”
“And for us,” Julian said, softly.
Moses gave him an avuncular clap on the shoulder. “I reckon you fit in better than you think, son,” he advised. “Go on, go take the tour.”
Julian nodded, and joined Allison and Xiù in exploring the ship.
“…He alright, d’you think?” Moses asked, the moment Julian was out of earshot.
“He’s a quiet guy, and I reckon he’ll tolerate bein’ in the limelight rather than enjoy it,” Kevin replied. “But yeah, he’s fine.”
“Good, ‘cause they’re gonna be household names by the time they’re done.”
“I’m not so sure people are gonna get all fired up over exploring distant alien worlds nobody ever even heard of before, boss.” Kevin shrugged. “Folks focus on the stuff that’s closer to home.”
“You’re right, “Moses agreed. “…Which is why their first stop will be Mars.”