Date Point 10y8m3w AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth
President Arthur Sartori
One of the first things President Sartori had done upon entering the Oval Office was to have a discreet holographic projector installed on the desk. One of the good ones that in the future might even allow him to have a conversation with somebody as if they were physically present in the room with him.
So far it hadn’t really been used for anything more than TV, but it was showing its value today with so many of America’s most influential invited to watch the Mars landing alongside him. Among them was the man of the hour himself, Moses Byron.
Sartori had requested his presence on the grounds that nothing could possibly be lost by reminding the enterprising billionaire exactly where he stood in the pecking order of power.
They traded pleasantries, shook hands and smiled for the camera.
“Quite a moment,” Sartori observed, as soon as they had a moment without a lens pointed at them.
“It’s been a tough road,” Byron said. “A lot of hard lessons learned.”
“Hmm. Don’t go forgetting any of them.”
Threat duly delivered, he clapped Byron on the shoulder and gestured for him to take a seat on the couch next to him.
Misfit was a surprisingly pretty ship considering that she paid no homage at all to aerodynamics or any notion of sleekness. Maybe it was the livery of silver, charcoal and red, or perhaps it was just pride in the ingenuity that had gone into her, but she cut a splendid figure in the artist’s impressions.
Too bad that there wasn’t a second ship out there to record her from the outside. The best seat in the house was the camera mounted above and behind Xiù Chang, showing the back of her helmet as she began the descent phase over the western end of the Valles Marineris, which the commentator helpfully informed them was a region known as the Noctis Labyrinthus.
Moses certainly seemed pleased with the result. “That girl’s just an incredible human being,” he enthused. “You familiar with her story, Mr. President?”
Sartori nodded that he was. In fact in just a few short months Miss Chang had planted the seeds for a burgeoning alliance with the Gao, an alliance that was already bearing fruit in ways that Moses Byron didn’t suspect. Several organisations had been waiting to approach her once she’d enjoyed a decent interval of peace back on Earth.
Byron, characteristically boorish, had pounced first. “The other two are pretty special as well,” he was saying. “We sure lucked out with them. Not many people have that kind of dedication and drive.”
The live stream had several angles on the descent. There was a camera in the crew quarters looking out of their cupola window, and also one in each of the crew workstations. Etsicitty seemed unflustered and calm as he worked with three different touch-screens which the text ticker said were controlling the ship’s many sensors, feeding telemetry to the pilot to help her calculate and control their descent, avoid hazards and select a landing zone. Every so often, he and Chang exchanged a few words as they narrowed down their options.
Buehler was the opposite—she was a worker bee, twisting and turning efficiently this way and that inside her engineering station as she balanced power loads and kept a close eye on dozens of different systems at once. Sartori, being something of a firearms enthusiast himself, noted with interest that the right thigh of her excursion suit was equipped with a holster, though it was empty for now.
“I’d like to meet them,” he declared.
“We can…probably arrange that.” Byron frowned in furious calculation. “I guess we can postpone the mission launch by a day…”
“Too bad my schedule’s not so flexible,” Sartori told him. “But let me know when they get back, hmm?”
“I’ll do that.”
They sat and made small-talk for the next eight minutes as the ship’s descent played out. Everything looked quite smooth and uneventful, really. Not that Sartori wanted anything to go wrong, but the reality was steady and really quite uninteresting. In fact he was so deep in discussion with his wife Bella that he almost missed the actual landing. In exactly the same deceptive way that the ground snuck up on an airliner, Mars was just there, rushing along below Misfit without it being clear when they had gone from high altitude to low.
Chang had nimble hands, and they went to work flying over the controls to arrest their forward momentum and hold them motionless in the air for a heartbeat, before she eased down and Misfit kissed onto Martian soil with nary a jolt. In fact it took Sartori a second to realize that the historic landing had even happened.
It certainly fooled Buehler. ”Tell me when we’re down…”
”We’re down.”
”Wow. You sure?”
Chang giggled ”I’m sure. SUBLIME DED idle, EACS to idle, power down ESFALS….Power down flight systems.”
”Smooth! Okay, power profile to field idling and… done. Mission control, Misfit has landed.”
Some muted cheers and applause swept the room.
“Congratulations,” Sartori shook Byron’s hand and ignored the chatter of cameras. He watched on the screen as Chang took what was clearly a deep steadying breath and ran through her after-flight checks. Etsicitty was already hauling sample boxes and crates out of storage and unpacking some tools, while the women made sure their ship was happy and comfortably settled down.
It wasn’t long before the three of them met in the middle of the ship. They shared a quick three-way hug and some words of encouragement too quiet for the cameras to hear before loading the first set of sample equipment onto the dumbwaiter.
Sartori nodded appreciatively. Whether the three were a good team by nature or by training, they clearly had a great relationship and cooperation, and fell into an easy rhythm that got the work done in seconds.
Chang took a deep breath. ”Okay Omaha, I guess we’re ready to head outside.”
”Copy that, Xiù. Good luck.”
The view switched to an outside camera just as they were running through checking their suit seals and systems, and conversation in the room quieted slightly before falling almost completely silent as the airlock cycled and their egress ladder extended out and down. It sounded strange through the camera’s microphone and thin Martian atmosphere, as did the surprisingly loud clank of Chang’s boot lowering onto the first step of the ladder.
“So far so good, excursion suit feels nice and comfortable. Air temperature is… minus forty-seven degrees. Nice clear day, hardly any wind…”
She reached the bottom step, paused to look up at Etsicitty who gave her a thumbs up, and jumped the last eighteen inches to the Martian surface.
The impact raised a puff of dust that blew away on the breeze. She looked down at her feet for a second and there was a clear soft sigh on the line as if the magnitude of the moment had finally settled on her, and everyone in the room shut up to hear what she would say.
Her delivery was perfect. She nodded with the air of a woman assessing a job well done, then raised her head and spoke lightly and with confidence.
“’From Mars to the stars, this is only the second small step.”
Sartori sat back and clapped three times before raising a congratulatory fist as similar applause erupted around him. “Nailed it.”
She really had. Byron was beaming with pride as she stepped back and let first Etsicitty, then Buehler drop off the ladder behind her. The view switched to Chang’s helmet camera as she looked around and took in the view.
Sartori had expected Mars to be desolate, and it obviously was: there wasn’t a shred of plant life to be seen, much less any fauna, but what it DID have was scenery. Chang had landed them a hundred meters from the cliff edge of one of the famous Valles Marineris, and the three of them quickly assessed that their suits were functioning perfectly and struck out toward the cliff, looking around as they went. There was no flag-planting or anything like that—Moses Byron clearly felt that having his corporate group’s emblem emblazoned proudly on the side of the ship was sufficient—but they did pause to take a photo of the real first footprints on Mars.
Unlike the ones on the Moon, these would be gone probably even before they got back to the ship. There was definitely a wind up which carried a hiss of sand over them and was already nibbling at their edges.
“So what’s on their itinerary up there?” he asked Byron, but kept a wary eye on something that was happening at the door. A year in the job had given him a nose for when he was about to get some kind of important breaking news, and right now it was itching.
“Gathering rock and soil samples, mostly, and lots of photos. The big work’s out of the way, we’ve proven they can land on a-”
Sartori raised a hand to shut him up as one of his aides approached him to whisper in his ear. “Sorry to interrupt, Mister President, but… it looks like the alien war just sparked off again. We’ve got General Sawyer and Colonel Stewart on the line.”
“Right…” Sartori stood up and twitched his suit jacket into place. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll have to cut this short, something important has come up. Thank you all for being here.”
The room cleared with commendable swiftness, and surprising grace on Byron’s part. He shook Sartori’s hand and was escorted out, leaving the President alone with his aides, advisors, and the feed from Mars.
He took a second to appreciate the breathtaking view from the clifftop that the three explorers were now standing on and looking out over, then nodded to his Aide to change the feed.
Two screens, bearing the faces of one of the Chiefs of Staff and the CO of the 946th, shimmered in to replace the reds and browns of Mars with lots of cool Air Force blue.
“Okay,” he asked, standing in front of them and tucking his thumbs into his belt buckle, “…What do we know?”
Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Valles Marineris, Planet Mars, Sol
Julian Etsicitty
”Be careful, Julian!”
Julian would have given up the rest of his left leg for the opportunity to mop his brow, a maneuver precluded but also made fortunately unnecessary by his helmet, and looked around as he took a moment to restore his calm good mood. Mars had a definite desolate charm to it, but that charm was rapidly fading as he did his best to keep up with the steady supply of interesting features that Xiù kept finding via their Flycatcher UAV, while Allison ranged further afield taking pictures and recording the mission for posterity. They’d been doing science for less than an hour, and were making a damn good case for future human missions. Three humans picking over the two hundred meter radius around their ship were already turning up things that all the rovers might have trundled slowly past without noticing.
Uplifting as that was, Julian could have done without having his ear filled by the nagging voice of his geological overseer on Earth, Professor Magnus Ogden. It would honestly have been nicer if they hadn’t been using close-range superluminal comms to eliminate the twenty minute light delay with Earth. At least then the messages coming his way might have had a filter on them.
“Professor,” he explained again, “That box is a powered stasis container. The samples literally can’t come to harm inside it.”
Again, this observation did nothing to dissuade Professor Ogden that all was well. ”That’s no excuse for throwing it around like a baseball, young man.”
Julian bit back a sharp retort that baseballs were a good deal less massive than stasis crates and went to the happy place where he imagined people on the Internet listening in on the conversation and admiring him for his couth in the face of his abrasive academic overlord.
“Yes, professor.” he agreed, and discreetly turned up the volume in his other headset, the one that Drew Cavendish had kindly agreed to build in for him. A new track had just come on.
”♫♪found out today your life’s not the same. Not quite as perfect as it was yesterday but-♫♪”
“Julian, can you hear music?”
Nobody could begrudge him a little white lie for the sake of his sanity, surely? “…No professor?”
Ogden did not sound convinced. “Hrrm. Come on man, you still have two crates to fill. Chop chop!”
He may as well have shouted ’Mush!’ and cracked a whip. Julian just about managed to avoid sighing. He looked up at Xiù as she returned to the ship with the drone under her arm. She gave him a wry sympathetic smile. “Survey’s done,” she said. Sound propagated just fine through the Martian atmosphere, albeit in a tinny and quiet way and they had to speak loudly to be heard through their helmets. “I’ve got to run the ship checks.”
“That’s fine!” Julian nodded and gave her a thumbs up. She had a way of lifting his spirits even in such a businesslike interaction. “I think we gave the academics enough material for a lifetime.”
He hauled the third empty crate off the dumbwaiter and struck out for his next collection site.
Sample collection was not as simple as just cramming the rocks in there, despite Professor Ogden’s assertion that every cubic centimeter of the container was of incalculable scientific value. Every single sample needed to be carefully wrapped, labelled and tagged with its collection site—Every time he found an appropriate stone he had to unsling his tablet then painstakingly zoom in on the ultra-high-definition aerial footage from the drone. The image was astonishingly detailed. He’d been able to zoom in on the lettering of his own name on his helmet and make out the surface texture of his suit, and with it he could identify and indicate exactly which rock he was collecting, right down to the tiny flecks that could have lined the bottom of a goldfish bowl.
…Now there was an extravagantly decadent thought. Martian aquarium gravel. It belatedly occurred to him to wonder if there was room on the ship for a small fish tank.
A new and blessedly familiar voice filled his ear. ”Hi Julian, Clara Brown here.”
“Hi, doc. What can I do for ya?”
”Professor Ogden’s, uh… decided to go oversee the operation in more of a hands-off capacity.” Clara said. There was a definite wink in her voice at that and Julian couldn’t resist a grin. There were times when he loved the Byron Group.
“Too bad, I was just starting to warm up to him.”
”I could get him back if you want…” You had to know Clara pretty well to catch the teasing merriment in her suggestion, but Julian had spoken to her at least twice a day for the last six months. They had a solid professional friendship.
“No, no…” Julian managed to avoid sounding hasty. “We’ll be okay.”
”If you insist,” Clara’s smile was audible. “Anyway, Professor Mitchellson’s super excited about that feature you said might have been an old knickpoint, could you check that out for him please?”
“Gladly.”
“Thanks.”
A ’please’ and a thank-you’. Such basic courtesies seemed like a welcome luxury as Julian hoisted the last empty sample crate easily onto his shoulder and hummed along with his music as he made his way to the feature in question. He grinned at Allison as she turned and took his picture. The Group’s PR people were going to love that one.
Martian gravity was kind of a pleasure to work in. It was lower even than galactic standard, and Julian was entirely familiar with the distinction between mass and weight. In the low gravity the weight of even a full box was entirely manageable and so even though the mass of the crate was unchanged, once he had it in hand and moving it was pleasantly easy to transport.
“So,” Allison began as she joined him, “How’s our rock collection coming?”
Julian laughed. “Our scientifically invaluable samples are coming along just fine,” he said with a teasing grin as they ambled up the rise toward a feature that had been tentatively identified as the possible remnants of an unimaginably ancient prehistoric waterfall.
“You gonna collect a souvenir?” she asked.
“Oh yeah. Of course! But, uh… okay, how about some of this fine gravel? We could line the bottom of a fish tank with it.”
“Martian fish tank?” Allison considered it. “…That’d sure be unique. And decadent. Anybody else wanting some would need to spend a few billion.”
“Yyyup.” Julian grinned.
“We can hear you guys, you know,” Clara interjected. “If you wanted a fish tank on the ship you kinda shoulda asked before now…”
Allison snorted and waved her hand in front of her helmet cam as a greeting. ”Spoilsport.”
“How about if I requisition a live specimen holding tank?” Julian asked.
”We’re not that dumb, space cowboy.”
“Too bad. The equipment room could do with some life and color.”
Clara didn’t reply. Julian didn’t mind that—they’d reached the knickpoint, and he knelt in the dirt to start the process of identifying the samples by location and painstakingly gathering them.
It wasn’t exactly the glamorous end of the scientific wedge, but Julian didn’t care. He hummed happily along with his music as he worked and let Allison do her job with the camera. She hadn’t been thrilled at first to inherit the role of mission chronicler, but had warmed to the idea when Xiù had pointed out that it placed control over their privacy in her hands. Besides, her job was to look after them. She was the engineer who kept their ship flight-worthy, the medic who’d stabilize them and secure them in the stasis safety of their bunks if they were wounded, and the gunman who’d keep them alive if the violence started. Recording and filtering their public image seemed like a natural extension of that role.
Finally, he was done. Even in Martian gravity, kneeling on the floor was a recipe for feeling strained, and he stood up with a grateful sigh. “Last crate’s full, Clara.”
”Copy that. Soil samples?”
“Check.”
”Geophysics survey?”
“Did that.”
”Air samples?”
“Taken.”
“That concludes the mission, then.”
Julian nodded, and looked around. “…Think we’ll ever come back?” he asked.
”Humans? Definitely,” Clara predicted. “You specifically? I don’t know.”
He nodded and hoisted the crate onto his shoulder before striking out back towards Misfit.
“We’ll see, I guess.”
Date Point 10y8m3w AV
Dataspace
665
Space combat, as ever, was a massacre. A shocking one, although Six-six-five was somewhat uncaring on that score given that he had been pulled away from annihilating a deathworld species to be here.
Both Alliance and Dominion military dogma called for seeding the enemy fleet’s space with gravity spikes, meaning that once the fleets committed, disengagement was effectively not an option. Battles that weren’t a one-sided slaughter inevitably resulted in the victor limping home a shadow of their former strength, leaving most of their fellows to mingle with the wreckage of the annihilated foe.
He watched the sensor data with about a quarter of his attention, idly marvelling at the energies being deployed. The “Dominion” fleet had narrowed into a tight speartip and aimed itself at the heart of the looser Alliance formation. It was an utterly callous tactic—the smaller ships screened and died for the bigger ones. Their sacrifice, as overlapping Alliance firepower tore them to shreds, allowed the heavy hitters in the core of the wedge to drive forward and deliver their big guns right into the enemy’s midriff, where they could wreak indiscriminate havoc. A flesh-and-blood commander using that tactic would have been feared and reviled by their subordinates.
But of course, there were no living crew aboard any of those ships.
The gross gigajoules on show though were… spectacular. Barrages of iron plasma were being hurled across hundreds of kilometers of space at single-digit percentages of the 3-causality limit, with one of two results: At first they were slapped aside by equally potent shielding systems, but as those shields overheated and failed they would burst through, and the structure of a starship would melt and run like candlewax.
Through this high-energy carnage zipped fighters by the dozen, tiny ships that were little more than a big gun, a bigger reactor to power it, and enough engines to get those two things moving. The accelerated plasma in the battlespace was pouring off radiation, from which the pilots of those little craft were only barely shielded. Six-six-five couldn’t imagine tolerating an existence like that—it seemed like a death sentence. Not a second went by without one of the strike craft being smashed by some hazard or another.
They were undeniably effective, though. Wherever a squadron managed to outmaneuver their opposite numbers and line up an attack run, one of the big ships was doomed.
Six-six-five’s command ship was at the core of the formation, behind layer after ablative layer of more expendable craft whose overlapping shield envelopes meant that by the time the odd stray iron ions reached it, they were far too alone to have any effect.
Everything was on course for a decisive victory. The enemy fleet hadn’t even started out with enough firepower to ablate the Hierarchy fleet quickly enough to prevent the objective’s destruction, and they were suffering from significant attrition of their own. The target’s survival was measured in minutes, at most.
++0014++: <> Curious…
Alone on the ship he’d depopulated, Six-six-five paced anxiously. Their victory wasn’t so completely assured that nothing could conceivably go wrong…
++0665++: <Query> A problem?”
++0014++: <Explanation> Some strange local dataspace activity. Be on your guard—the traitors may attempt something.
++0665++: <Wary curiosity> Could you define ‘strange’?
++0014++: Some traffic that shouldn’t be present. It seems to have slipped into your subnet. Can you verify?”
++0665++: <Compliance>
He withdrew his attention from meatspace, trusting in the daemons he had injected into the fleet’s command systems to handle the business of the battle while he hunted down the anomaly.
Local dataspace was a warzone in its own right. Swathes of it had gone dark thanks to the demise of every living thing aboard the Dominion fleet, and more nodes still were crashing and rebooting in response to the digital assault on the data confluence that was the Cabal traitors’ little cache, and those were just the devices he could ping. Dataspace could be claustrophobic in its way, something analogous to foggy. One was never quite certain exactly how many devices or nodes were two or three steps down the chain but not visible. Six-six-five had once imagined diving into a deathworld ocean and sinking far down into the translucent blue-blackness where monsters as big as starships might be lurking. The concept of deep water strangely terrified him, even though as a digital sapience he was by definition permanently beyond any harm it might do him.
Dataspace, like physical space, had its warm and comforting shallows, where Igraens were “born” out of the combined seed algorithms of their “parents”, where their personalities grew and developed and where, for the most part, the species was content to live in a near-perfectly post-scarcity society made possible by their entirely data-based nature.
They were not in the shallows. The dataspace around Six-six-five was deep, it was dark, it was enclosing and confusing, and he had a tradeoff to make between visibility and security.
The most powerful of his defenses were also the most… obvious. They would scour nearby nodes for anything and everything they might contain and turn up then annihilate anything that might be hiding in them, but in so doing would also make his own presence clear. If there was some hostile presence then he would be easily outmaneuvered, avoided and ambushed. On the other hand, if he kept his profile as low and as unobtrusive as possible then being stumbled across by bad timing or misfortune might be disastrous.
Hierarchy doctrine in such situations was usually the “four-twelfths rule”: Two parts stealth to one part aggression. Unfortunately, if he was searching for a sneaking saboteur, that wouldn’t work. He needed to be shining a light about him rather than tip-toeing around.
He lit up, pulsing a search routine through nearby nodes and sure enough something changed in response. It was subtle—a few kilobytes out of place, a handful of reassigned floating point operations. The digital equivalent of a broken twig, or an unlatched window that should have been closed—barely anything, but there for a wary tracker to see.
++0665++: <Confirmation> Proximal dataspace is infiltrated.
++0014++: <Urgent command> Purge. Use overwhelming force.
++0665++: <Compliance>
Six-six-five lit up all his most powerful tools and began smashing nearby nodes. A blizzard of corrupted data kicked up around him, overloading and crashing physical-space and savaging whatever information they contained.
Through that blizzard, however, something moved. Something shockingly fast that was always a step ahead of him, that seemed to know what he was about to do even before he did it.
He almost didn’t notice the other presence at all. Not until it was almost too late.
++0665++: <!>
++0014++: <Alarm> Report!
++0665++: <Relief> …Hostile neutralized.
++0014++: <Suspicion> What hostile?
++0665++: Unclear. It’s… hideous, whatever it is. Like it was patched together out of dozens of mind-states.
There was a long, tense pause.
++0014++: <Disbelief> Are you telling me you killed that thing?
++0665++: <Confusion> I killed something…
++0014++: <Order> Do nothing. This supersedes all other concerns. Guard whatever is left of that abomination until I can verify its destruction.
++0665++: <Compliance>
++0014++: We have broken through in physical space. You should see the siege rounds hit… Now.
The distant edifice of the Cabal device imploded, taking down dozens of adjacent devices along with it—objects that were adjacent in the dataspace, adjacent in the network, but might be on opposite ends of the galaxy in physical terms. Everywhere across civilized space, important devices would be crashing, services were being disrupted, and contingencies were activating. Most likely, not a single living being would notice.
Seconds later, Fourteen transferred into the node. He swept the mangled data remnants with a battery of the most sophisticated analytical tools the Hierarchy owned.
++0014++: <Awe; Relief> Amazing… You did it.
++0665++: <Confusion> What was it?
++0014++: Something that should never have been. You may just have saved us from a powerful scourge. What happened?
++0665++: I don’t think it was expecting me to strike so aggressively.
++0014++: You got lucky… but I will commend you to the single-digits anyway. Well done.
++0665++: <Pride; request> I should get back to purging my deathworld. The natives are tenacious and crafty. The longer I’m away…
++0014++: <Agreement> Yes, you’re free to go. We shall see if your number drops after you return…
++0665++: <Gratitude>
Fourteen signed out.
Behind the borrowed facade of Six-six-five’s identity codes, the Entity finally permitted itself to feel relief.
Date Point 10y8m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Martina Kovač
The coverage of the Martian landing was big news, bigger than even a movie night. The Lads’ huge reinforced couch was as full as it ever got, buried under a Gordian Knot of relaxing Operator.
It wasn’t live coverage of course—Sol was kiloparsecs away and the very best instant FTL comms in the galaxy had a range of less than a lightyear. The data was coming through in periodic updates via BGN who, being a Byron Group company, had the next best thing to a live stream that was allegedly no more than half an hour out of date. Titan had speculated that instead of using a synchronizing FTL relay they were probably just sending flash drives via jump array.
The Lads preferred ESNN though, which was buying the footage from BGN and then condensing it into a kind of live documentary: a highlight reel with expert commentary . What it lacked in immediacy, it made up for in intellectual stimulus and in the distinct absence of masturbatory Byron Group self-congratulation.
After the cheer of the landing and the historic words, however, they had turned the volume down and got to just hanging out and chatting.
Marty had long since discovered that the best spot for her on the couch when it was full of men was a kind of reclining perch along the back, supported by broad shoulders and thick cushions. It was a good position that didn’t aggravate the lingering twinges of uncomfortable tightness in the burn scar down her back, and it meant she wasn’t too crunched up among men who were all far larger and more massive. She tended to favor Warhorse by sitting with her head closer to him, but this time he was at the foot end. Yet again the subject of his sex life had come up, and yet again he’d obliviously neglected some basic and even obvious courtesies.
“You left her a box of eggos in the fridge.” It wasn’t a question. This was a familiar kind of story for Marty now; even if the props and actors changed the essentials didn’t. Ever since Burgess had steered… what was her name? Natalie? …Into ‘Horse’s lap and he’d discovered to his surprise that yes there were women who did actually want to ride the pony, he’d leapt into the life of a man-slut with thoughtless abandon. Even his buddies, highly charged alpha-males to a man, were starting to get a little disgusted with him.
‘Horse wasn’t so dense that he couldn’t pick up that the general mood was disapproval, but it was in that slightly uncomprehending guilty-puppy way of his. “Uh…Yeah?”
Martina aimed a look at Firth that said ’this shit is why I’m not dating him’ and then touched the space between her eyebrows for a second as she thought. The fucking infuriating thing was that she knew him just as well as did any of the Lads, and knew just what caliber of a human he was. Good men didn’t come any gooder than Adam Arés, but when it came to being even minimally attentive to the girls who swung through his orbit looking for some fun, he had a blind spot as big as his namesake.
“‘Horse… You seriously couldn’t think of anything more, uh… considerate?”
“Like fucking anything?” Firth asked. “Why didn’t you toast those waffles? Make her a coffee?”
Adam shrugged, accidentally lifting both Sikes and Rebar. “I had to get up and get to work!”
“So you shoulda got up earlier, dumbass! Or hell, taken her home and THEN gone to bed.”
“I guess, but, I mean, I apologized-”
“‘Horse,” Marty told him, reaching the end of her patience, “you treated that poor girl like she was a fucking fleshlight. If I were her, that apology had better have grovelling and chocolate, minimum.”
“Uh…”
“What’d you do, leave her a note?” Firth asked.
When ‘Horse shrank and cleared his throat, Murray summed up what they were all feeling—he barked a bitter laugh and pinched his nose. “Ugh, you epic dribbling cockend…”
“Shit, you got him to break out the Scots cussing, bro,” Burgess punched Adam affectionately.
“She’s an adult, though, It’s not like she needs me to- OW!!”
Marty had caught Blaczynski’s eye and mimed a slap upside the head. Blaczynski, who was more commonly on the receiving end of such rebukes, had seized the opportunity with vigor.
“You’re being an ass, bro,” Firth told him, without malice.
Adam rubbed the back of his head, looking around at the identical disapproving expressions being worn by all his favorite people. “…I’m really that bad?”
“If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were a rampant misogynist,” Rebar commented. “But let’s change the fuckin’ subject, yeah? We all said our bit, lesson’s over.”
There was general nodding, and mutters like “right” and “yeah” and Titan turned up the volume on the news again.
They watched the three Martian explorers survey their landing site and gather rocks while a geophysicist, an expert brought in from the Cimbrean Biosphere Reclamation Project to offer an expert opinion, commented enthusiastically on what he could already tell from just looking at the samples, and explained how exciting it would be to get those samples—and so many of them!—into a lab.
On the screen, Xiù Chang caught the survey drone then shared a few words with Julian Etsicitty before returning to the ship.
“Y’know, folks on Reddit reckon they’re probably a threesome,” Sikes commented.
“Maybe that Etsicitty fella can give Horse some pointers,” Blaczynski joked. Rebar swatted the back of his head, and he flinched. “…Okay, yeah. Deserved that one.”
“Who gives a shit anyway?” Marty asked. “They’re on Mars!”
“You know how folks be, celebrity gossip…” Sikes shrugged.
Burgess had a fond look in his eye. “Hard to believe they’re the same guys we pulled outta that escape pod.”
“Can kinda see why Dexter was so impressed by her though,” Titan said. “Too bad he couldn’t be here, huh?”
“He sent me a text message,” Horse said, subdued. “Said something came up.”
Rebar frowned at him. “Something more important than seeing his friend make history?”
“Clan business, he said. I dunno what it could-”
The Mars landing footage cut away to the ESNN TV studio, and drew everyone’s attention not least because there was somebody very familiar s itting at the desk waiting to be interviewed.
”Breaking news this evening, Dominion and Alliance war fleets clash in neutral territory, the war may be back on.”
They all sat up straighter as the network’s musical sting punctuated the headline. A rekindling of the A-D war was of imminent personal concern for the SOR—it was almost certain to mean operations of some kind.
”Good evening. We interrupt our coverage of the Mars landing to bring you this breaking news: War fleets of the Interspecies Dominion and the Celzi Alliance have clashed in a massive battle deep in the border stars region. Nonhuman media are already reporting the total destruction of the Dominion fleet with the death of all hands, and it’s been suggested that the Celzi fleet was badly mauled in the engagement. With me here in the studio are our xenopolitical editor William Fisher, and alien affairs columnist Ava Ríos.”
Marty sat upright and folded her legs under her, paying attention. Ríos looked… harried. It was subtle, and well hidden by her makeup and her slight smile, but she had the look of a young woman who was in serious danger of being made old before her time by stress.
Of the two, however, she was the one with more to say. Fisher’s report on what the two embassies had to say was a straightforward “so far they have refused to comment.”
Ava meanwhile was full of perspectives from residents of the Alien Quarter, which she punctuated with sharp insights of her own. She stuck to the facts, too—what people had said, where they had drawn their opinions from—and stopped short of venturing an opinion of her own.
”So what will this mean for humanity, and for Cimbrean?”
Ava tilted her head thoughtfully. ”So, we’re going to face…I think three challenges in the near future. First and most immediate will be the question of keeping the peace in the alien quarter. About a tenth of our permanent nonhuman residents are from Alliance species. Then there’s the question of the two embassy stations and whether the Royal Navy will need to keep the peace between them, and in the long term there’s the question of whether the Navy, the USAF and the SOR will be pulled into the conflict.”
”Why would they be?”
William Fisher nodded. ”The GRA’s exosolar policy has been neutrality, but we have committed to humanitarian aid. It’s my understanding that the SOR’s mission includes search and rescue…”
Warhorse stood up, not incidentally shoving aside five of his buddies without much in the way of effort, and stalked away into the gym. After a round of shared glances, Marty hopped off the back of the couch and chased him.
He was already loading up some weights to do squats.
“…I’d spot for ya,” Marty offered, “But I’m pretty sure I can’t.”
“You mean you know you can’t.”
“…What do you need right now?” She asked him. She sat down on the bench and gave him a sympathetic smile. “You wanna talk it out, or should I just shout at you while you pump iron? Or, should I go away?”
“No, stay.” Adam shook his head. He abandoned the weights and sat down next to her. “…You still think I’m okay, right?”
“Yeah. You’re okay.”
“…Thanks.”
She put a hand on his massive shoulder. “Look. We tell you off because we care about you. You know that, right?”
“I know…This is just another fuckin’ drill I gotta learn, and the TI’s gotta get it through my thick-ass skull. I just hate how slow I’m gettin’ it. If I’m gettin’ it.”
“Well… you’ve always been good at watching people. Maybe you should go on a double-date sometime,” Marty suggested. “You know Firth’s going steady now, right? Ask him to mentor you. You can watch how he treats Freya, so long as you don’t neglect your date while you do. ”
“Hmm. You volunteering?” A flash of puppy-Adam shone through, riding on his trademark smile. God help her, it was tempting but Marty knew better.
“Ohhh, no. No. We are friends, you and me, until I say otherwise. And when I do, I will ask you. Is that clear?”
He nodded with a slight smile and with his mood clearly picked up a bit. “Yes, Tech Sergeant.”
She chuckled. “…Come on, big guy. That bar’s not gonna squat itself.”
“Actually…would you rather go for a run?”
Marty smiled.
“You’re learning…” she said.