Date Point 10y8m AV
HMS Valiant, En Route to Mrwrki Station, Uncharted system, Deep Space.
Lt. Col. Claude Nadeau
“Do you know what the biggest object the human race ever launched into space was?”
Claude and Major Powell had been invited to stand quietly to one side of Valiant’s bridge as she maneuvered through the system forcefield alongside Kirk’s much smaller ship. They were chatting quietly and staying out the way as best they could. Claude, being a relatively slim man, was having no difficulty in that regard. Powell however was both physically huge in his own right and was wearing two-thirds of an EV-MASS, minus only the bulkiest outer layer.
Powell nodded. “Aye. International Space station, right?”
“Nope.”
“No? Could have sworn…?”
“We’re standing in it.”
Powell looked at the bulkhead alongside him, as if he’d literally never seen the ship he was travelling in before this moment. “…Oh, aye. I suppose it would be. Though… what about Ceres base?”
“Built on a dwarf planet. It’s not a free-floating object in its own right.” Claude stroked the ship’s dull grey painted metal fondly. “Of course she’ll be overtaken by USS San Diego, but for now… this is the largest space vehicle ever built by human science.”
“She’s a good ship.”
“Mmhmm. Undoubtedly. But I can’t help but watch that ship your friend Kirk is flying and think that we’re travelling in the interstellar equivalent of a coal-fired steamer.”
Momentum had idled alongside them throughout the three-day journey to their destination with the same general air as a dolphin might have played with a traditional ocean-going destroyer. One was a conqueror of its environment; the other, a native. If Kirk had wanted to, he could have pushed up to a jaw-dropping multiple of lightspeed and left them behind with a contemptuous flick of his tail.
Powell gave him a curious look. “You sound like you’re happy about that.”
“Aren’t you? We’ve achieved so much despite being so far behind. Imagine what we’ll be able to do once we’ve got our hands on that-!” Claude gestured forward, to where the bridge’s navigation display was showing a to-scale model of the system with a moon of one of the gas giants highlighted.
“I have… reservations.”
Once upon a time, a younger Claude Nadeau might have pooh-poohed any such concerns on the woefully inadequate grounds that the man expressing them was no scientist himself. After all, the world was full of the kind of uneducated dinguses who had once tried to have CERN closed down over concerns related to black holes and other such misunderstandings.
Lt. Col. Nadeau was an older and wiser man who carried a tinge of embarrassment about his younger self’s elitism, and in any case Powell had backing that went right to the top. Both Admiral Knight and General Tremblay had weighed in for him in fact, and as politics went their clout didn’t get much cloutier. You listened to men like that.
“Lay them on me,” he said.
Powell scratched at his chin thoughtfully. “Let’s say this thing does everything you want. We get ourselves basically for free a fleet of ships built wi’ tech and systems generations ahead of ours. We go from your coal-fired steamer to a nuclear fookin’ submarine, right?”
“Right…?”
“No offense, sir, but bein’ Army maybe hasn’t equipped you for thinkin’ about just how bloody complex a ship is. Valiant here has… I’unno, fookin’ thousands of little details, any one of which, if it’s based on untested and little-understood xenotechnology, would be a potential liability. Don’t get me wrong, I know the benefits of technological supremacy better’n most…”
“…But whose technology?”
“Aye, there’s the rub. Then there’s all those other concerns about economics an’ ’restrained development’ an’ all that but fook it, really: Better dirt poor than dead.”
“That’s my thinking,” Claude agreed. “But… thank you, Powell. You’re right, we’ll need to be cautious.”
Powell nodded, then raised his eyebrows to watch the system map. Helm had just overlaid a bright blue line between their current location and the orbit of the Mrwrki moon.
There was an external viewscreen—contrary to popular fiction, it was a tiny disregarded thing tucked away in a corner that nobody ever looked at and it showed absolutely nothing of interest, not even when Valiant ramped up to a stately one kilolight and blitzed across fifty AUs in less than thirty seconds.
Claude was the only one watching it during the final second. There was no swirling wibbly spacetime stuff, no blurring nor even any noticeable blueshift of the forward stars. That was a product of a built-in safety feature of the warp drive; without it, warping vaguely sunwards would have exposed the ship to a catastrophic gamma pulse. All that happened, in fact, was that he was treated to twenty-four seconds of absolutely nothing happening, and then a gas giant popped into existence as they came up on it far too quickly for human reflexes to cope.
There was a flurry of called orders, confirmations, status reports and the general air of a job well done.
“Orbit achieved, captain!” somebody called. Nolan nodded gravely and looked back down the bridge’s length to give Nadeau and Powell a nod that said ’over to you’.
Powell led the way. He seemed quite at ease and comfortable in the cramped confines of the ship despite his size, and navigated it with an agile aplomb that Nadeau failed to match.
Whereas the flight decks on Myrmidon and Caledonia had been cavernous things big enough to fit several shuttles inside, Valiant’s wasn’t even inside the ship: instead, the Dominion-made shuttles piggy-backed on the ship’s dorsum and were flown on remote control to mate their ramp with the bay on the ship’s port side when needed. Not an ideal solution, but one that both worked for the Dominion shuttles and also allowed for some flexibility in whatever more permanent human-built solution they came up with.
Nadeau resolved to put that one right at the top of the list. They could do so much more with a craft of the same size, if it didn’t have to be hollow enough to accommodate a pair of Guvnurag.
On the other hand, that particular constraint was welcome right now. Otherwise, any shuttle ride alongside five SOR operators would have been desperately uncomfortable. Powell’s technicians helped him don the bulky outermost component stage of his armor and the final checks were done with in some efficient seconds. The last component he locked on was his faceplate.
Nadeau suppressed the urge to grin as the major’s Heads-Up Display activated. Using orange for a HUD designed to be used in darkness and space was simple physiological good sense based on the biology of the human eye, but it added a baleful and intimidating component to the suit that rounded off its sheer bulk and physicality.
Of course, the effect was probably sadly lost on most nonhumans most of whom, aside from the Guvnurag and Celzi, had dichromatic vision like a dog’s. Oh well.
Powell ran through a last check of his own, then presented the edges of his mask for inspection by his technician, who completed the checks by sticking duct tape over the seals. Claude doubted if that would help, but the gesture had the air of ritual, and who was he to question the ways of combat arms and their support teams?
He boarded the shuttle instead. It had been given an after-market modification in the form of a steel bulkhead that divided the passenger section neatly along the one-third, two-thirds line, complete with a pressure hatch. The idea being that the SOR in their suits rode in the hatchward third while anybody else who happened to be on board was safe from decompression behind a double layer not only of steel, but also of forcefields.
Most of Nadeau’s team were already on board. As researchers, technicians and scientists, being armed wasn’t usually part of their job description but they were still Army. Nobody was seriously expecting treachery from Kirk, but sensible caution dictated that if they were walking into a trap, they’d want to be armed, despite the presence of the SOR.
He accepted his own weapon from Sergeant Lee as he sat down. Lee Jun-Seok was a power systems genius and nearly as much of an expert on ElectroStatic Forcefields as Nadeau himself. Certainly he knew more about the intricacies of channeling EM radiation through them, and neither man had ever seriously pictured themselves sitting on a shuttle armed with submachine guns in their careers.
“Too bad there’s no windows on this tub.” Lee commented easily.
“We’re in orbit,” Nadeau told him. “Now we’re just waiting on the SOR.”
“Holding us up are they?” Lee asked with a widening smile.
“Mm-hmm. They can’t leave home without their duct tape and a kiss eh?”
There were smiles and laughter from around the compartment.
“What’s with the duct tape, anyway?” Sergeant Campbell asked. She was a materials specialist and one of a handful of people on the team not originally from Scotch Creek. “If they do that every time then they’ll have to use spirits to get rid of the residue, and that’d damage the actual seal…”
“Best not to question it, Camp,” Lee advised. “Watching their lips move as they try to think of an answer would just be depressing.”
Nadeau sat back and let the banter do its work. The SOR weren’t long in getting on board with a series of heavy thumps and clangs. Powell stuck his head through the pressure hatch. “Ready in here?” he asked.
Nadeau nodded. “Whenever you are, major.”
“Aye.”
The hatch closed, and there was stifled giggling in the moments before the ramp came up and they disengaged from Valiant with a lurch that had Lee grabbing for his sick bag.
After that initial jolt, however, the ride was smooth and easy, and they chatted and relaxed through the forty minute descent, keeping an eye on the screen in their compartment. It was immediately obvious when they passed through the station’s pressure-retaining forcefield: suddenly there was sound from outside, and the sounds from inside became just a little less loud and ringing, as they suddenly had somewhere to go rather than echoing around the inside of the shuttle.
Everyone went quiet and listened as the shuttle settled with another jolt, the ramp went down, and the SOR disembarked hard and fast.
Nadeau listened in on the tacnet with interest. To judge from what he heard, the longest part of taking the station by far was ensuring that there were no unwelcome surprises waiting in the landing bay’s control software.
Eventually, one of the Operators—Blaczynski minus his helmet and breathing mask—opened their pressure hatch. “All ashore that’s goin’ ashore,” he reported. “Welcome aboard Mrwrki Station.”
They grabbed their gear and disembarked, to find Kirk waiting for them on the deck alongside an especially huge Guvnurag. For many of the team, these were the first ETs they had ever seen in person, and several of them stopped to appreciate the moment. Claude had seen the Gaoians when they had visited Earth, but they were… different. Gaoians after all were about the same size as humans.
Guvnurag were much, much bigger. This one, who could only be Vedregnenug, was as tall as a truck cab at the shoulder and just about as wide and long. He was covered in shaggy drifts of milk-chocolate brown fur flecked here and there with white, save for two bare stripes down his flank and a smaller patch on his forehead that were glowing a soft green. Huge eyes with W-shaped pupils blinked down at the human scientists as they disembarked, and he shifted his weight to lift one enormous hand to his chest in what was probably a gesture of welcome.
He was such a remarkable sight that the human alongside him went almost unnoticed at first. Lewis Beverote didn’t really suit the long-hair-and-robes guru look, but maybe that was because he was obviously delighted to see them, and was talking enthusiastically with one of the Operators. He saw the scientists disembark and raised his arms.
“Oh my god, FRIENDS!!” he declared. Nadeau heard Campbell laugh slightly. “Please tell me you brought bacon!”
A slightly yellower shade of green rippled on Vedreg’s body for a second, but the huge ET didn’t comment. Of course, Guvnurag were herbivores, weren’t they?
“As a matter of fact we did,” Nadeau stepped forward and shook his hand. “Lieutenant Colonel Claude Nadeau. You must be Lewis.”
“Dude.” Lewis gave him an entirely unexpected though mercifully brief hug. “I’ve been without human contact for like nine months now. I ain’t settling for no weak-ass handshake, especially not when fuckin’ Santa Claus shows up!”
“Nine months? Yurgh.”
“Yah. Not fun. And, like, one dude is not enough to run this shit show, you know?”
The operator he’d been talking to—Vandenberg—spoke up. “Bro. One of our little projects? We cured our own bacon, just as an experiment…it’s fuckin’ good, man.”
“Dude, you’re givin’ me the munchies…”
Vedreg quietly stepped away from the conversation and Nadeau followed him, drifting over to where Kirk and Powell were in conversation. Lee and Campbell stayed behin. “Sorry about that,” he offered.
Vedreg rumbled at length, and his translator took a second to catch up. “Your species are carnivores. I don’t begrudge you that,” he said, as a flash of blue pulsed across him. “But it does make me uncomfortable. I am looking forward to seeing how the authentic Earth ingredients you brought with you compare to what I have.”
Nadeau nodded. “Right, that was in the briefing. You bake?”
“It gives me something to do while I think.”
They joined the conversation between Kirk and Powell.
“-Aye, yeah. Very different to how you last saw it,” Powell was saying. He greeted Claude with a nod. “Between Folctha, New Belfast and the farming villages out along the coast, we’re up to about sixty thousand now, and that’s not counting the alien quarter.”
“Rapid growth!” Kirk commented.
“Corporate money,” Powell explained. “Between Byron, Keystone, and that agricultural offshoot from Hephaestus LLC, there’s a fook of a lot o’ wealth being invested in Cimbrean right now. An’ why not? There’s literally billions of square kilometers of land up for grabs. You should see it. Once you’re past the research outpost at New Penzance, it’s corn fields, potatoes, maize and orchards as far as the eye can see all the way out to the logging operation at New Belfast, and it’s all livestock out the other way past Sellers Lake. Proper cowboys, too, even if they’re using fookin’ quad bikes rather’n horses.”
“It’s rapidly becoming a gentler Earth,” Nadeau commented.
“Well.” Powell wobbled his head. “It’ll be hundreds of years before the Earthlings really start to dominate, but what can you do? I remember the day we heard about the Skidmark—uh, the Terran Microbial Action Zone,” he corrected himself. “Folk were mardy as sin over that, but nowt we can do to stop it. They’re saying that a few species already look like they might just survive though. Cimbrean Tea seems to be doing pretty well.”
“Selection pressure at work,” Nadeau suggested. “The species that were already populous and successful would have the best chance of adapting to the new circumstances.”
“Aye.”
A peal of laughter made them look over at the other group. Lewis was pantomiming some kind of strange and stiff robotic movements, then pretended to push something over. Kirk snorted. “That is the most animated I have seen him in months. He has been rather badly depressed recently.”
“Well, I’ve got some news that should pick you both up,” Powell said.
“Oh?”
“Your friends Buehler, Chang and Etsicitty. They’re alive and well.”
A huge pink flush that was presumably delight or relief flooded Vedreg’s chromatophores. “Wonderful news!”
Kirk tilted his head upwards and shut his eyes, a gesture that was very human in his strange, long-necked way. “Yes,” he agreed.
“Wait, not the three who are going to Mars?” Nadeau asked.
“The very same,” Powell nodded.
“Mars?” Kirk asked.
“Aye. Don’t ask me why but the three of ‘em are working for Byron nowadays, training up to fly some kind of exploration ship.”
Kirk stared at him. “That’s… perfect!”
Powell tried to questioningly echo the word, but Kirk had already turned. “LEWIS!!”
Lewis lowered his hands from whatever it was he’d been gesticulating, made his apologies and trotted over. Behind him the conversation continued with some laughter and nods.
“‘Sup?”
“They’re alive!”
“Who-?” Lewis’ brain caught up. “Xiù? Julian and Allison? They made it?”
“The Lads pulled ‘em out of a life raft about six months ago.” Powell said.
“They spent some time in hospital, but they’re safe and sound,” Claude added.
“Yes!!” Despite the mass difference, Powell had to take a step back as Lewis power-hugged him. “You are like the best good news fairy!”
Powell cleared his throat, and gently levered the smaller man off him. “You’re welcome.” Across the bay, Nadeau saw Blaczynski and Vandenberg struggling to maintain neutral expressions. He could hardly blame them.
“It gets better,” Kirk told him. “It seems this Byron Group had much the same idea you did, and are sending them on an exploration mission… presumably to find habitable deathworlds?” he asked, turning to Powell and Nadeau.
“That’s the shape of it,” Powell agreed.
“And when they find them-!” Lewis enthused, racing ahead of the conversation, “We can target the coltainers!”
“Ah, yes.” Claude stepped in. “I think this might be a good moment to discuss these Von Neumann probes of yours…”
Date Point 10y8m AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
Vemik Sky-thinker
“Do you taste that?”
“Taste what?”
“It’s that same strange smoke again…”
Four days after their encounter with the strange wingless bird at the river, the village was on edge. Nobody had even bothered to mock them for bringing back root-birds. So many root-birds after all at least demonstrated skill and cunning, and the three hunters had been so plainly shaken and worried by what they had seen that nobody thought to tease them.
Especially not when the Singer had spoken quietly to each of them alone in her tent and declared that they were telling the truth. Vemik had asked the Dancer later on what spells her teacher had cast to know such a thing and she had, with a smile, revealed a little secret of the magic of women: that the best magic required no spells at all.
“If you had been lying,” she said “the others would not have known what details you made up to cover the lie.”
“…And she would have seen that our stories were not the same.” Vemik finished.
The Dancer had given him her prettiest smile and taken some fur from the tuft at the end of his tail as an assurance of secrecy. “You’re a rare one, Sky-Thinker,” she had said. “You’re nearly as clever as a woman.”
Vemik, as ever, turned his thoughts to the sky when he was at work as he was now. He was mentoring one of the boys in keeping watch. It wasn’t a fun job, but it was an important one—slathering one’s orange crest with mud to hide its brilliant hue and then skulking in a treetop east of the village with a shouting-stone on a length of cord was both boring and unpleasant, and brushing the mud out afterwards could take a whole morning, but if the eastern tribe did decide to raid…
There was no reason why they should—this year had been a superb season. The Werne had bred well, the rains had come often, the fruits were heavy and the eating good. Nobody under the great open sky should be starving. Now was a time of peace, when daughters were traded and hunting parties met respectfully and parted ways by mutual agreement.
But there was always the possibility that their women had read some portent or another that demanded blood. There was always the possibility that they had been raided and would mistakenly blame Vemik’s tribe. The only thing certain in life was that, eventually, there would be another raid and so the sentries endured the itchy drying mud in their fur and kept watch.
Vemik looked to the east, raising a hand against the sun and licking the air. It was definitely the same smoke he had tasted a few days prior, and after a few seconds of searching, he made out a faint grey column staining the eastern horizon.
“…That’s their village!” he mused.
The boy by his side—one of Vemik’s nephews, Yatak u Yafek n Metti—peered hopelessly in the direction he was looking. The boy was a blur-eye and no use as a hunter at all as anything beyond arm’s length was just a blob to him, but he had skilled hands for stone-shaping, sharp ears and an acute sense of taste, and a sentry relied more on those senses anyway.
“What is that?” he asked, tongue lashing as he sampled more of the strange smoke on the breeze. “It tastes evil.”
“I don’t know,” Vemik agreed. “It isn’t wood or charcoal, it isn’t flesh, fat or bone… But it comes from over our neighbors to the east.”
He stood up to his full height and tasted the smoke one last time, then decided to call for the others. He took the shouting-stone from his belt and spun it in a slow circle from his hand until it was hooting quietly to itself, just loud enough for him to hear.
With three sharp strong swipes, he made it shout three times, waited a moment then did it again, and again. Three groups of three shouts—a call for advice, not an alarm.
He was just getting to the point of contemplating whether to repeat the call in case it had gone unheard when his father Vemet, his brother Yafek and Yan the Given Man joined them, also covered in mud and armed with spears, axes and slings.
Yan was their Given Man, a brother of the eastern tribe who had led the Easterner’s daughters to them years ago and was welcomed into the tribe as one of their own. His counterpart in the east was one of Vemik’s second cousins, Jaral, who had escorted their own daughters during the trade.
The daughter trade, according to the wisdom of women, was important to keep babies strong and it helped keep relationships between the tribes friendly and respectful for the most part. Only a foolhardy man antagonized his village’s women by killing their brothers, and only an evil or insane man would fight his own brother. Traded Men kept the peace, that was their role, and Yan took his duty very seriously indeed. Vemik trusted him almost more than he trusted some of his own cousins, and Vemet had once been heard to unthinkingly call him ‘brother’.
“That same smoke,” Vemik said, pointing with his spear.
“More of your unkillable birds?” Yafek teased. Yan smacked him sharply on the arm.
“Those are my brothers over there,” he pointed out, staring out at the distant smoke with a tense, scared look in his eye. He tasted the air and flicked an ear cautiously.
“We should investigate,” Vemik said.
“I agree. My daughters are over there,” Vemet growled.
Yan thought about it, then handed Vemik his peace totem. The carved wooden rod with its jovial-faced fat god effigy was brightly painted, and had a twin in the far village. Thus, whoever carried it was known by the other village to be coming in the name of their Given Man.
“You’re the lightest and cleverest of us, Sky-thinker,” he said. “You go.”
“Alone? Me?” Doing it just the once for his test of manhood had been terrifying enough.
“You’re a man now, son,” Vemet agreed. He gripped the back of Vemik’s neck and pressed their foreheads together fondly. “And a good one, too. Turn that sharp mind of yours to scouting and you’ll be back safe, I know it.”
Vemik nodded. “…Ask the Dancer to cast a spell for me?” he requested.
“That’s a fine young woman you’re wooing, Sky-thinker,” Yan observed. “I’m sure she’ll want you back safe: It’ll be a good spell.”
“You have everything you need?” Vemet asked.
Vemik checked his belts. He had rope, his bird-spear thrower, ten bird-spears, his axe and flint core, his twin Werne knives, and everything he needed to start fires. Everything that a man should carry and then some. “…Yes,” he decided.
“Good.”
That one word definitively ended any stalling conversation—it was time for Vemik to prove his bravery. Wresting back his mounting dread, he exchanged gestures of solidarity and brotherhood with all of them, even Yan, then scuttled down the tree to ground level. He cast one backwards glance at home, checked that the peace totem was secure in one of his pouches, then shook himself and headed east.
Date Point 10y8m AV
The Box, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Xiù Chang
Xiù had never been much of a video gamer, but she’d hung out with her brother often enough, browsing social media on her phone while he was playing… some game or another involving spaceships. She’d forgotten the name. Elite, or something. That had been one of them.
Her simulator was a pared-down version of those games, but on a grand scale. Wei would have chewed off both his feet to play with it.
It wasn’t a game, though: The physics were painstakingly accurate. She’d had the opportunity to show Rylee during their tour of the real ship that afternoon, and had received two things in return: an impressed assessment that the Group needed to start selling that simulation tech to the military, and several pointers which she was now putting into practice.
The real ’click’ moment from Rylee’s tuition had been when she pointed out that there was in fact no such thing as de-celeration, only ac-celeration along different vectors. It was such a simple way of saying things that Xiù had immediately felt rather stupid and talentless for failing to see it that way earlier, despite Rylee’s—and her instructors’—assurances that she was anything but.
The truth was, minor embarrassments notwithstanding, she was beginning to feel like a professional pilot. She had beaten every single one of the “expert” challenges the simulation techs had prepared for her, and those few pointers were making all the difference: She was now on the verge of securing the last elusive gold medal time.
Plus-Y thrust three-quarters…three, two, one… null Y, plus-X full and plus-Z one-half… two… one… quarter roll and kill the plus-Z thrust, correct drift with minus-Z… one… pitch up one-eighty and correct the X-axis drift and plus-Y full again… ten, nine, eight…
Beep… beep.. Beep. beep beep beepbeepbeebeebeeeeee..
ESFALS to full power, plus-Z thrust for just one second aaand-!
Thunk.
She threw her head back and pumped both her fists as the simulation gave her a gold medal—accurate landing on an asteroid mining operation in less than forty seconds, at a safe speed and within two meters of dead center on the pad. Perfect.
The scenarios were far more involved, hazardous and high-speed than anything she’d face in the real world of course. Hopefully. But that was the point: If she could pull off stunts like that, then the much more mundane maneuvers she would actually be performing should come easily and naturally.
Plus, it always paid to plan for the emergencies. If she wanted that platinum medal, she was going to have to pull of that exact same stunt with the simulator throwing some kind of technical crisis at her for good measure.
She was about to go for it, when there was a knock on her door. She hit the “dismount” button that pulled her chair back from the controls and spun it one-eighty as the internal airlock to her station turned itself round. The idea was that if something should fracture the glass pilot’s bubble—Xiù’s nerves about that scenario had largely evaporated on seeing just how sturdy the real thing was—then the rest of the ship should be spared decompression.
Allison was waiting outside with her hands in her pockets and red eyes. She gave Xiù a contrite little smile as the chair tipped her out. Something was clearly badly wrong.
“…Sorry.”
“Hey!” Xiù gave her a hug. “Are you okay?”
Allison returned it with interest. “I, uh… No.”
“Al?”
Allison shook her head, took Xiù’s hand and led her into the hab room. Julian was sitting at the table with a grim expression and a letter envelope on the table in front of him.
“Did something happen?” Xiù asked.
Allison picked up the envelope and handed it to her. “Read it.”
“Wow this is formal. Allison Charity Isobelle Buehler, care of Moses Byron Group interstellar, Omaha…”
“The other side, baby.”
“Oh, right.”
Xiù turned it over and blinked at the return stamp—an address in Salt Lake City. “J.M. Buehler…”
“Jacob Michael. That’s my father’s…” Allison ran a hand through her hair. “Jesus, after all these years, he’s still using the same fucking business stamp.”
Julian gave her a squeeze, stood up and made coffees without commenting.
“I thought we weren’t getting mail?” Xiù asked.
“We’re not,” Julian said. “Except from immediate family.”
Xiù reflected on the text messages and emails she got from her brother and parents and nodded. “Why use your full name, though?” she asked.
“To prove it’s them, I guess,” Allison ventured. “You two are the only other people in the world who know my middle names… But I dunno, my father was always kinda, uh, pompous like that.”
Xiù offered the letter to her, but she backed away. “I’m not reading that shit.”
“…You’re not?”
Julian transferred the coffees to their table. “Could be an apology…” he prompted.
“It won’t be.”
“But-”
Allison sat down and picked up her drink. “They’ll open a ski resort in Hell first.”
Xiù and Julian looked at one another, then sat on either side of her, comfortingly close. She stared long and hard at her reflection in her coffee for a while then finally sighed. “Go ahead and read it.”
“You’re sure-?” Xiù asked.
“No secrets.”
“…Right.”
Julian leaned over and retrieved a knife from the cutlery drawer, which he handed to Xiù without a word. Seconds later the envelope was open, and XIù smoothed the paper out on the table in front of her.
Jacob Buehler had fastidiously neat handwriting that had clearly looped and curled smoothly off the end of rather a nice fountain pen. Even so, the experience of actually reading something handwritten was so foreign to Xiù after all these years that it took a moment for her to interpret what she was seeing.
“Um… ‘Dear Allison,’” she read, ”‘Your mother and I had given up hope of ever hearing about you again. I’m glad we were so wrong.’ Um… ‘When you abandoned us-’”
“Jesus,” Julian grunted, sipping his coffee. Allison just nodded, staring through the table at something only she could see a long, long way away.
”‘—We prayed for you every day. We hoped that you would see sense and come home. Though you didn’t find the courage to come back, I’m glad that our prayers were answered and y-…’ wǒ de tiān a!“”
“What?” Julian asked. She flapped a hand dismissively and carried on.
”‘…and you’ve somehow managed to achieve something respectable with your life.’” Xiù put the page down. “Wow!”
With a scowl, Julian gently turned the page round and read the last paragraph. “’You now have two younger brothers. They are good boys and don’t get into trouble like you used to. We hope-’”
Allison dumped her coffee over the letter, stood and stormed out of the room.
Julian jumped to his feet as well as the coffee ran over the table and flooded his lap. He swatted it off then gave Xiù a shocked look that asked ’what do we do?’
“You clean up,” she told him. “I’ll…” she waved a finger generally toward the door.
Allison was slumped against the wall in the decontamination chamber with her elbows on her knees and her fingers in her hair. The moment Xiù sat down next to her she was grabbed and held painfully tight, and there was nothing she could do except wrap Allison up in her arms and whisper encouragement softly to her in whatever words, and whatever language, came to mind.
Julian emerged a minute or two later wearing fresh new clothes, sat down on Allison’s other side and wrapped her up as well, and together they did everything they could to make her feel loved.
Eventually, it worked. She took a huge shuddering breath, sniffed and sat a little more upright, pushing her hair back out of her face. “…God dammit…”
“Hey…” Julian soothed the back of her neck. “It’s okay.”
She sniffed and wiped her nose. “Are you okay? I wasn’t thinking straight, did I get coffee on you?”
“It’s fine.”
“Jesus, I’m still sorry. Really. I was just…”
“Hurt?” Xiù suggested.
“…Yeah.” Allison massaged her cheeks, then tipped her head back and leaned against the wall, wiping her eyes. “God, and I thought I’d dealt with that shit years ago.”
“Family have a way of getting under your skin, huh?” Xiù rubbed her back.
Allison opened her mouth to say something, then scowled at herself and shut it again.
“Al?”
“No, nothing.”
“No secrets?”
Allison sighed. “It’s not a secret, it’s just that Miss Mouth here was about to be a bitch before I stopped her.”
“Oh.”
“That really put you in a bad mood, huh?” Julian observed, unhelpfully.
Again, there was that flash of Allison restraining herself. “…Yeah,” she admitted, after it had passed. “I really wanna lash out at something right now.”
“Sparring?” Xiù suggested.
“Great idea, getting beaten up by my girlfriend is totally gonna make me feel…” Allison paused mid-snark, shut her eyes and exhaled, then shook her head. “…No, thank you baby. Just…”
“Massage?” Julian offered.
“…Now we’re talking.”
“Alright, gimme a minute…” Julian kissed her cheek and stood up to go back into the living space.
Allison and XIù sat together in comfortable silence for a few minutes more, with XIù’s hand drifting reassuringly up and down her back before she abruptly stood up and paced around the prep room, chewing on a fingernail.
Xiù was about to query this when Allison turned around and self-consciously dropped her hands to her sides.
“It’s not just the letter,” she said. “It’s the whole… I just wanted to get out there and do what I know I’m good at. And now the Group’s turning us into these huge celebrities and they dug up all this stuff that I buried for a reason, and now we’re gonna be all over the media having our life histories ripped into…” She sighed. “I just feel so used, you know? And stupid. I really shoulda seen something like this coming.”
She rubbed her eyes again. “The letter from my folks was just the cherry on top, I guess. The last little screw you.”
“Were they always like that?”
Allison shrugged. “Pretty much. They wanted a couple of ’good little boys’ I guess, and what they got was a sulky skinny daughter who used to smoke behind the gym hall and listen to the ’wrong kind of music’, whatever the fuck that is…” She ran a hand through her hair. “…I guess when I ran away I was hoping they’d realize how… that they’d improve, you know? But no, here I am, I’m gonna be, like, the second or third person on freaking Mars, but I’m still momma and papa Buehler’s tearaway little brat. Fuck ‘em!”
“Are you going to reply?”
“I might send them, like, two words,” Allison snorted, but she shook her head. “No. I’m done with them. I don’t have parents. And hell, look at me! Look at us! I’ve done some incredible things already in my life and I’m not even thirty yet, and I did all of it without them. So they can go right to Hell and stay there, both of them.”
Xiù, having no idea what to say, said nothing.
“You’re okay with it though,” Allison observed. If there was a hint of resentment in her voice, Xiù decided to ignore it. “Aren’t you? The…celebrity and everything.”
Xiù nodded cautiously. “Is that…okay?”
“Okay? God, Baby, if you weren’t happy with it I’d feel awful right now. I’d hate to think I dragged you into…”
“Al.” Xiù stood up and put her hands on Allison’s upper arms, rubbing them reassuringly. “You could never ‘drag’ me. I’d follow you anywhere.”
“…You would?”
“You saved my life! And you’ve given me an anchor, a purpose, you’ve taught me how to feel human again…” They kissed, then rested forehead-to-forehead and nose to nose. “You’ve given me everything I never knew I wanted.” Xiù told her. “Of course I’d follow you, into anything.”
Allison sighed. “What if I said I didn’t want this anymore?” she whispered. “What if I just wanted to go back to Minnesota and just be the three of us, as if we were all alone on the whole planet? Would you follow me then?”
Xiù wrapped her arms around her head and held her close. “Please don’t,” she pleaded. “Because I would.”
“But you’d hate it.”
Xiù shook her head. “No, you would. Would you ever really forgive yourself if you let this beat you?”
Allison stood up straight again. “…No,” she acknowledged, looking much more like herself at last. “No I wouldn’t.”
“So…are we going back to Minnesota?”
“Hell no.”
There was a soft chuckle from the doorway. Julian was leaning against it watching them fondly, demonstrating yet again that he was silence incarnate when he wanted to be. “There’s the Allison we love.”
“Yeah,” Xiù agreed. “There she is.”
Allison wasn’t much of a blusher, but it was there sometimes. She smiled at her feet, then cleared her throat, eyes shining. “…I needed that.”
Julian smiled, and tilted his head toward the living space. “Go get cleaned up. Massage is waiting, when you’re ready.”
Allison nodded, kissed them both, and retired to the shower. Once she was gone, Xiù blew out all of her tension and sad feelings and shook her arms limber, before smiling at Julian. “I think she’s feeling better.”
He nodded “I wish I had half your skill at saying the right thing…”
Xiù kissed him too. “You’re fine.”
“Hmm…” he said, skeptically. “…Uh, can you promise me something?”
“What?”
“Could you…write your mom and dad? Tell them how you feel? I think…” Julian sighed and nodded in Allison’s general direction. “I think it’s important that one of us has proper parents…And I know you’ve got a lot of stuff you wanted to tell them.”
He was right, and not half as bad at saying the right thing as he thought. “…Will you help?” Xiù asked. “I don’t know how to say what I want to say.”
“I’d love to.”