Date Point 10y9m AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Byron Group AAAF, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth.
Allison Buehler
Allison’s work station, Engineering, was the largest room of the three but also the most cramped. It was a crowded orderly maze of computer racks, capacitor banks, the two huge deuterium fuel tanks that fed into the fusion reactor, the solid structural plates for the aft engine arrays, the coolant pump and its bouquet of pipes, the transformer, the fuse box…
Her control station was in front of all that in a neat semicircle of display and buttons. She’d queried why they weren’t touchscreens instead and the explanation had been quite an education. It had nothing to do with technological reliability, but was all instead about human fallibility—people needed the haptic feedback of a button to assist their muscle memory. With it, they could reach out and hit exactly the right control; Without it, they couldn’t.
So, the station looked oddly low-tech despite being anything but. There was the power-balance board to her left that looked like something a sound engineer might be parked behind, the pleasantly noisy mechanical keyboard front and center, and the WiTChES field controller which was literally a videogame controller on a kind of stiff swivelling tentacle that she could grab or push out of her way as needed. It had been daunting to look at the first time she’d laid eyes on it, but months of intense daily training later she was pretty sure she could have done a good chunk of her job blindfolded and deaf.
And then there was her chair. She loved that chair. It was her chair, a bespoke bucket seat built to her measurements that folded her up comfortably and securely and in bored moments she could spin it so hard it threw her against the four-point seatbelt. She could have sat in that chair all day it was so comfortable, and thanks to its heating and massage rumble she could do so without fear of soreness or stiffness.
But that was Misfit through-and-through. She’d been refined even as she was being built, and the little customizations that fit her to her crew were everywhere, right down to a drawer handle that was in easy reach from her chair that hadn’t been back in the Box’s mock-up. The attention to detail was humbling.
“Okay baby girl, time to wake up…” she crooned as she sat down and buckled herself in. Misfit’s master power button was prominently placed in the middle at the back, right under her main monitor, which flickered through the usual wall of rapid-fire plain text as the ship booted up. Misfit yawned and stretched, bringing up her power from the most basic level subsistence to something more awake. She was still lazy and dozing but she was actually alert to commands now. Fans whirred up quietly, LEDs danced, relays and circuit breakers clicked and Allison watched all the important power bars on her left-hand monitor settle comfortably in their green zones.
She adjusted their balance slightly. Misfit liked to provide gravity throughout the whole ship by default but Allison had quickly discovered that she could turn off the G in the hab, storage, central transit, the staging room and the airlock while they were at station and save herself a lot of watts that way. They didn’t have anything on board that would suffer from a little microgravity anyway and it was all strapped down or securely stowed.
She put her headset on. “Okay. Checklist?”
”Ready when you are,” Julian replied.
“Deuterium flow control on. Check.”
”Check.”
“Virus scan, and priming fusion power.”
”Check.”
“Running CapBank diagnostic…All green.”
”Check.”
“Environmental diagnostic… green.”
”Check.”
“Cooling’s green.”
”Check.”
“Main power…” She ran a well-educated eye over the information in front of her. The GUI wasn’t exactly pretty, but it laid out all the information she needed so clearly that she could assess whether Misfit was good to go at a glance. Satisfied, she reached out to her right and slid up the cover on the fusion reactor controls. “Primed and pressurized, containment field online… start.”
Several bars shifted on her monitors as Misfit went from idling on her stored power to producing enough to run on her own. The inevitable power spike as the reaction stabilized was handily dealt with by dumping it back into the reactor’s own on-board capacitors as seed energy for the next time they turned it on.
”Check. Purring like a kitten.”
“Aaand final pre-flight diagnostic…” Text scrolled on her top-left screen and informed her that all was well. “Green.”
”Check. Okay Xiù, ready?”
”Ready.”
Allison grinned to herself as she listened to them work through the pilot’s checklist, and micro-adjusted the power to give as much of it as she could to the warp engine’s inertia compensation circuits. They were about to jump from Earth gravity to orbit over an exoplanet, that was a jolt she could do without.
That was ninety percent of her job, in fact: Predicting what was coming up next and tinkering with the power balance in anticipation. It sounded simple and even dull on paper, but in practice there was a lot of brain involved. Misfit had dozens of different systems all thirsty for power, and only a finite ability to replenish her reserves. Those reserves in turn were best kept at about eighty-five percent to give her a buffer to dump into in case of a surge, which sometimes meant starving the systems, and other times meant letting them drink their fill.
Of course, any actual flight or use of the warp drive inevitably drank energy faster than they could generate it on board, which was where the WiTChES came in, and so on and so forth et cetera.
She loved it.
”Okay!” Xiù finished. ”Goodbye, Earth. See you in a year…”
The only thing that let Allison even know they’d jumped was the dance of information on her displays and the dip in reserve power as Misfit recharged the jump engine. Back on Earth, the hangar they’d just jumped out of must still be reverberating from the bang as the air rushed into where the ship had just been, but here and now…
She switched her top-right screen to the view from behind Xiù, who was rolling them gently so that a dismal grey ball of a planet was ‘above’ them as she smoothed out their elliptical orbit into something a little less eccentric. Watching the pilot cam was enormously useful, to Allison. By watching where Xiù’s hands went as she worked, she was able to predict, pre-empt and provide her power needs with a good deal less latency. Xiù detected the extra help and raised a hand and gave her a backwards thumbs-up through the camera in thanks, then sat back, waved her finger searchingly at her instruments, and nodded satisfaction.
”Okay. Done.”
“That easy?” Allison asked. She grabbed the WiTChES controller and tacked the fields against the sunlight, anticipating that they’d be waiting a while and she could afford to charge slowly.
”Yup! Welcome to Cimbrean-five.”
”Dang. Kinda feels like we oughta celebrate.”
”Seconded.” Julian agreed. ”I’ll break out the hot chocolate and marshmallows.”
“Nice.” Allison restored gravity to the rest of the ship. “Let’s take a load off.”
They sat and talked and hung out in the hab’s cupola window as they waited for the system border patrol to find time for them. Julian spent most of that time playing around with an app that let him explore the alien star background.
With no existing Cimbrean zodiac to draw on, the astronomers at Folctha’s observatory had drawn creatively from more modern sources to name the patterns in the Cimbrean sky, hence the presence of constellations like Isambard the Engineer (so named because it looked like a stick figure wearing a tall stovepipe hat), The Fourteen Valar, and everybody’s favorite: Bruce the Bat, which was an alarmingly good match for the Bat-Signal.
It took three hours for the border patrol to finally get around to them in the form of a Dominion-made shuttle that rolled up on their port side. For some stupid reason the shuttles weren’t designed to dock with anything, so two men in familiar EVA suits space walked over, one of whom was built to a distinctive scale that made Misfit’s staging room seem much too small as the pair of them squeezed inside.
Sergeant Arés had a huge loveable smile as he took his helmet off. “Well, lookit you! Y’know, you guys are kinda my heroes?”
Julian shook his hand and let him scan for implants while his comrade—a much smaller man they didn’t recognize—scanned Allison’s head. “Us? Nah, come on-”
“Dead serious, bro.” Arés said, diplomatically ignoring the way Julian had to massage his hand after the shake. “Last time I saw you and Miss Buehler—hi ma’am—we were pulling your busted asses out of an escape pod. Ain’t even been a year and here you are, back in the saddle. That’s fuckin’ impressive, ain’t that right bro?”
The other operator nodded and offered a tight smile and an “Aye,” in a Scottish accent. He was sweeping the ship with some kind of scanner.
“Don’t mind him, he’s always that quiet. Hell, the fact he spoke at all means he likes you,” Arés said with a grin, waggling his implant scanner at Xiù. “Hi, Miss Chang.”
She tilted her head for the inspection. “Hello sergeant. How are you? How’s Baseball?”
“Pretty damn good, all told. We’ve been workin’ with Regaari some more. When he heard you were comin’ he told me to pass on a message.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah. He’s back on Gao right now, but he said to look up a mutual friend, uh… what was her name, Murray?”
“Myun.” The Gaori name sounded very odd in a Scottish accent.
Xiù gasped. “Myun’s on Cimbrean?” she asked. She seemed delighted.
“Apparently. I don’t know her myself. Anyway, we’d better get this inspection done. D’you have anything to declare?”
“Fifteen jump beacons.” Allison said, and indicated the black crate full of them that they’d pulled out of storage for exactly that reason.
“Gonna need to confiscate them, then. They’ll be returned when you’re back outside the shield.”
“That’s fine. Uh, look, guys it’s kinda cramped back there… I’m not sure you’ll be able to search everything.”
Adam glanced at Murray, who opened the Engineering door, glanced inside, and then shook his head with a ‘she’s right’ gesture toward Allison.
“Yeah, uh… Hmm. Can’t get in there at all, huh?”
“No’ even in my undies,” Murray said. “‘S bloody tight in there.”
“Yeah, it’s kinda crowded for me too…” Allison said apologetically.
“Dude. The sooner we hand this shit off onto the fuckin’ marines the better…” Arés grumbled. He hit the cockpit button and scratched his head at the Xiù-sized workspace. There was no way in hell either of them were going to get in there. “‘Kay, I’ll go get the drone while you inspect what you can bro.”
“Aye, sure.”
The drone turned out to be a bright red thing the same size and general shape as a cantaloupe. At Murray’s request, Allison turned off gravity everywhere except for the hab and Murray guided the ball drone through the ship on puffs of compressed air, guiding it into crawlspaces and all the other spaces where they couldn’t fit.
Allison, Julian and Xiù got out of the way and let them work. They did their exercises and Allison practiced her Tai Chi under Xiù’s tutelage before the three of them settled down to watch a movie.
Allison didn’t notice falling asleep. She just found herself with her head on Julian’s shoulder and Xiù curled up on his lap when Arés folded himself carefully halfway through the door to inform them that the inspection was complete.
It had taken them nearly three hours to finally declare that, yes, Misfit was clean and safe to proceed. The beacons were secured in a stasis crate for transfer to a safe impound outside the system shiel d and the end result was that they were finally slave-jumped to the orbit of the planet Cimbrean nearly seven hours after their arrival.
Arés and Murray rode in the ship with them.
“So, what actually brings you to Cimbrean anyway?” Arés asked a Xiù flew them down. “I thought you were heading out into way deep space?”
“MBG News interview,” Julian said, with a shrug. “They want us to spend a day or two being celebrities before they let us actually do our job.”
“Sucks, bro.”
“Thanks.”
”Being celebrities is our job!” Xiù called via the speakers.
“Part of it,” Allison agreed, trying to keep the sigh out of her voice. From the sympathetic look Arés gave her, she failed.
“I can relate,” he said. “The whole ’beef brothers’ thing? It’s fun but it kinda gets in the way too. I didn’t really see myself doing Public Relations stuff. Pretty cool though, I’m being tutored by Major Rylee Jackson.”
“Yeah, Rylee’s a sweetheart. She gave us some pointers too,” Allison nodded. Arés chuckled.
“Don’t think I’d get away with calling her a sweetheart…” he said.
“What, ‘cause she’s Air Force too?”
“‘Cause she’s going steady with our CO.” He glanced at Murray when the Scot cleared his throat pointedly. “…according to rumor.”
“Rumor my ass,” Julian grinned. Both the SOR men made very similar complicated shrug-and-smiles that said he was right, but…
“So, what’re you doing with today?” Arés asked.
“Playing tourist, I guess…” Allison said. “Guess you wanna catch up with Myun, huh Xiù?”
”Yup.”
“Well hey, if you want I can show you the best spots…”
Allison glanced at Julian and saw immediately that he liked the idea. “Sure! Sounds good,” she agreed.
“Awesome.” Arés had an endearing little quirk of bouncing slightly on his toes when pleased. He stopped instantly when the deck under his feet creaked in protest. “…Sorry.”
“Jesus, how heavy ARE you?” Allison asked.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“You really wouldn’t,” Murray agreed. “I canny believe it myself an’ I work wi’ the big bastard.”
”Hitting atmo in five minutes,” Xiù called.
“Gotcha.” Allison aimed her thumb back to engineering. “I better go do my thing.”
“Don’t mind us, we’re just cargo. Ain’t that right Murray?”
“Aye.”
Allison laughed and slipped back into engineering, glad that the day’s work was almost done. She was looking forward to Cimbrean. After all those months in Nebraska, a bit of socializing and sightseeing, even if it was only for a day or two, was going to feel like a well-earned vacation.
Xiù opened a private channel as soon as she was settled. ”Julian seems to really like those guys…”
“That’s good,” Allison said. “He’s not had a proper male friend the whole time I’ve known him.”
”What about Lewis and Amir?”
“He more kinda got along with them. Same goes for Kevin, Dane, Doctor Ericsson…”
”So this could be good for him.”
“I hope so.” She gave the EARS field and inertial compensation as much juice as she could spare. “Let’s get down there and find out.”
Date Point 10y9m AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada
General Martin Tremblay
“Messier Twenty-Four again…”
“Technically, it’s the same intel source. BLOWN ASH version two point oh, if you will.”
Tremblay chuckled grimly, but it was the kind of black humor that lurked at the bottom of a very deep pit of worries and alarms. Senior staff from every single little twig and branch of every allied intelligence service were writing to each other and cc-ing their correspondence to him in response to the revelation that a person’s brain could be scanned and their knowledge extracted from that scan.
It wasn’t panic, but it was certainly a storm of concern. They’d known that the Hierarchy were digitized intelligence, of course, but finding out that the scanner necessary to perform that digitization process was so small, so portable and could work at range from inside a desk…
The only silver lining he could see was that if the Hierarchy had compromised anything truly sensitive, they didn’t appear to be acting on that intelligence.
Really, there was nothing for it but to carry on as if they hadn’t. He just thanked his lucky stars that it was the brain of a well-compartmentalized girl that had been scanned, rather than somebody more informed like Darcy.
“No,” he shook his head. “Not the same. It knows things she didn’t and couldn’t. It’s clearly gathering intel, wherever it is and, um, what-ever it is.”
He glanced at the message again. He wasn’t quite sure why it made his skin crawl – it was methodically laid out, concise, thorough and enlightening. Its claims, if substantiated, laid to rest some long-standing questions about not just the Hierarchy but also about Igraen civilization as a whole and the civil war with Six’s ’Cabal’, and it included detailed means by which those claims could be proven. It was, in short, as perfect an intel resource as a message could be.
There was just something… autistic about it. The word selection, the pacing, the painstaking utilitarian accuracy of it, all of it reminded him of the talented young corporal who oversaw the mass and power balance down in the jump array. There was nothing wrong with the guy at all, in fact he was excellent at his job, but he wrote in the exact same conscientious way. He would painstakingly assemble just the bare facts and expect the reader to derive the exact same narrative from them as had the author.
This was not a trait shared by Ava Ríos herself who seemed, like most journalists, to fall into the opposite trap of hunting for a narrative among all the data to feed to the reader. Or better yet, of having a narrative she wanted to feed the reader and then hunting among the data for anything that might support it.
Lt. Col. Miller had for once turned out to be on the right planet when he was wanted which was a minor miracle in its own right. As the liaison officer between the US Air Force and the SOR he practically had an interstellar commute through the Jump Array. He was even better-placed to offer certain kinds of insight on the SOR than Powell.
“Messier Twenty-Four is a long way outside of our yard,” he commented. “Without HMS Caledonia, I don’t see how the SOR can reach it and even with Caledonia, they’re best at smash-and-run ops.”
Tremblay nodded. “They’re not appropriate. Not even remotely. We need somebody who can spend months in the field undetected.”
“Yeah, the beef trio would starve to death.”
Tremblay’s counterpart in the Pentagon, General Homer Mayfair, tapped his pen thoughtfully on the desk. He was the kind of guy who liked to listen and then interject by fast-forwarding through several minutes of conversation. “We need to resurrect the JETS team program,” he declared.
Tremblay glanced at the wall screen where his colleague’s face was projected. “JETS didn’t go so well last time,” he recalled.
“‘Cause we had no idea what we were doing,” Mayfair summarized. “We’ve got new expertise and experience now. There’s a couple of seasoned men who’re already mixed up in this from Egypt, they have experience in nonhuman situations. I’d say they’re prime candidates for pinning together a new shot at JETS.”
Tremblay rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. JETS had been Mayfair’s pet project and he’d been both embarrassed and upset when it fell through. There was always the possibility that he was sticking to his guns out of stubborn pride… but even if he was, he was right. The conception of JETS teams as special operators who were trained and capable of working in exosolar conditions was an excellent one. The execution had been… less impressive.
Tepid interest from eligible operators had been caused and exacerbated by inadequate incentives and no clear advertisement of how the JETS teams would differ from the SOR. Even when Major Jackson had gone on a late-night talk show and laid it out, interest had barely rippled. The few men who had taken the introductory stages of extraterrestrial operations training had gone on to apply those skills in the war on extremism instead.
Tremblay couldn’t blame them. It was a lot easier to take suicide bombers and hijackers seriously than it was to feel threatened by aliens whose most infamous public appearance involved being dismembered by men with hockey sticks. Especially when those aliens were up against a high-visibility force of nature like the SOR.
He scowled as he searched is memory for the details of EMPTY BELL. The intervening months hadn’t helped his memory any, and he was sooner or later going to have to admit to himself that, yes, he was an old man now. His memory really wasn’t as reliable as it had once been.
“…These would be… Coombes and Walsh?” he recalled.
“Right. I looked ‘em up just before this meeting, and Walsh is trying to get himself on the SOR highway right now. Coombes was wounded but he’s back in training. There’s a couple of other likely candidates but the problem we run into is they see JETS as just a second-rate SOR and ask why the hell they should settle for less.”
“If we can just get one team established and working, that’ll help. Especially if it’s made up of guys the community respects.”
Miller nodded. “We need to sell JETS as being… not better, but certainly as good as the SOR,” he suggested. “Stress the SOR’s weaknesses, their limitations, their logistical dependency…“
“Yeah. That’s the only way they’ll go for it,” Mayfair agreed. “It needs to be seen as a viable alternative.”
“We don’t want that to happen at the SOR’s expense,” Tremblay cautioned. “Those men are a rare breed anyway, we really don’t want to drive away candidates who could actually make the cut.”
Mayfair nodded. “Sure. It’s a fine balancing act, but we need JETS, this new intel proves that. Maybe instead of treating it as a qualification, we should take a note out of the SOR’s book and just form it as its own unit.”
“And attach them to who?”
“…Well… to the SOR.” Mayfair suggested.
“But then what do we call the current Spaceborne Operators?” Miller asked. “And how do we avoid muddying the sales pitch?”
“They already differentiate between Operators and Techs,” Mayfair pointed out.
“Gentlemen…” Tremblay gently interrupted them. “We’re in that awkward stage of a paradigm shift where we have to make shit up as we go along. So let’s focus on assembling and training one team who can go to Messier Twenty-Four. It’ll be chaos and we’ll have to work out solutions as we go but that was true of the SOR as well and if we do it right we’ll have a framework for the future. Right now I care less about how it gets done than that it gets done, eh?”
“I’ll talk it over with Powell,” Miller said. “If he were to weigh in and tell these guys what the SOR can and can’t do, it’d carry more weight.”
“Good. We’ll have Walsh, Coombes and any other strong contenders invited to Cimbrean for a training week. If nothing else it’ll be a good opportunity for the SOR to practice working with other Operators…”
“Can do,” Miller nodded.
“Alright.” Tremblay ticked that one off on his mental checklist. “On to the next thing, then… Let’s talk about this transport ship that Hephaestus want to show us…”
Date Point 10y9m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Gabriel Arés
Ava was curled up on the couch when Gabe got home, and for the first time since her arrest she was looking something like herself again. She’d brushed her hair, put on some clean clothes and was lying there hugging a hot water bottle, staring distantly through the steam rising off a cup of hot chocolate on the coffee table.
He knelt—not an easy maneuver with his bad leg—to give her a fatherly kiss on her forehead, which earned him the tiniest smile.
“Cramps?”
She nodded. “And… everything.”
“Pobrecita…” Gabe sat down next to her. “But, I hear you’re off the hook.”
She nodded again, although she couldn’t possibly have looked less enthused.
“Entiendo,” he said softly, and put a hand on her head. “Tuviste una mala semana.”
She nodded and curled up on herself some more, and they sat in silence for several minutes until she took a deep breath. “Papá… Promise you won’t… can you keep a secret?”
“Por supuesto! Of course!”
“Have you… I, uh…” Gabe stroked her hair and waited. “Have I been…Am I a burden?”
“No.” Gabe shook his head emphatically. “You worry me sometimes though. You drift off and…Jess and I, we’ve been worried about you. It’s obvious something’s been eating at you for months…”
Ava shut her eyes. “…I, uh… I’ve been thinking of killing myself.”
“…Oh no.” Gabe ignored the agony in his side to gather her up into a huge protective hug “Dios mío, mija, no. Please.”
She buried her face in his shirt. “It’s not… I don’t want to and…”
“Do you… how often does…?” Gabe didn’t even know how to ask. “How long-?”
“…Since… I dunno. My second year at UCL? I think I’d just… Yeah. Just after Valentine’s day. That was the first time I thought about…” she swallowed and didn’t finish the sentence. “It’s gotten worse though. Just, like… in the last few months, since Egypt. I don’t want to have those thoughts, but sometimes when things get tough…”
“Like right now?”
She nodded, then slowly turned and hugged him round the chest, burrowing her face into his shirt. Gabe quickly became aware of spreading moisture against his ribs.
“You need me to watch out for you,” he said.
She nodded again. “I’m so sorry, Dad. I just… I feel like such a burden sometimes…”
“Burden? Eres mi hija, you know that, right? I love you like you’re my own blood.”
She nodded again. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I fucked everything up and I keep trying to make it right and I just fuck up worse, and-!”
“Sh, shh, sshhh…” Gabe hugged her close with his hand protectively around her head.
There was a long and very damp wait as she got it out of her system.
Eventually, she sat up and wiped her face off. “I saw two guys die.”
Gabe turned painfully and listened.
“I can’t talk about, like, the details, but it was in Egypt. Just, one minute they were alive, and the next…” she trailed off, and stared through the coffee table. “It took a while to sink in, but now… Now I’ll smell something, or hear a noise or see, like, just the right shade of red, and…”
“And you’re back there.”
“…Yeah…” she nodded and stared down at her fingers. “And I blame myself. Stupid little girl wanted to save the fucking world, and I got two good guys killed. And I thought…I don’t know what I thought. But after this shit with the email as well, I guess… I guess, like, I just feel useless and, and selfish! ‘Cause even when I’m not getting people killed I’m taking up other people’s valuable time, and for what?! So I can feel better about myself? Is that who I am? Just a spoiled bitch who gets in everyone’s way and hurts them? I… If that’s who I am, I don’t think I can live with myself.”
Gabe put his hand on her back. “Ava…”
“…I don’t know what to do.” She finally turned to give him the most profound look of misery Gabe had ever seen. “What do I do, Dad?”
Gabe kissed her forehead. “There are four types of people in the world who want to help you deal with your problems,” he told her,rubbing her arms. “Parents, friends, priests and therapists. Parents and friends you’ve got… What about the other two?”
“Therapist? I… is there a therapist I can talk to? I’d have to tell them about everything, and it’s all classified!”
“I can sort that out for you,” Gabe promised. “The SOR should have somebody.”
“And they’d see me? The SOR kind of… hates me.”
“Trust me. Let me sort that out. In the meantime…What about church?”
“…Uh…I haven’t been to church in…” she paused, plainly drawing a blank. “…It’s been too long.”
“It’s never too long, mija.” Gabe reassured her. “And it’ll help.”
Ava sighed, but nodded. “I guess it can’t hurt.”
“Vamos, then.”
She blinked at him. “…Now?”
“Now,” Gabe nodded, gently but firmly. “Because while you’re gone, I’m gonna make this house safe for you. I’m gonna lock up the knives, the pills, everything. And you’re gonna stay here a little while, okay? Until you feel safe. I’m gonna have to tell Jess…” Ava nodded, “…and we’ll take it one day at a time, okay?”
Ava nodded again, and hauled herself upright. “…I love you, Dad.”
“I love you too. Don’t you ever forget it.”
“I won’t,” she promised. “Ever.”
Date Point 10y9m AV
The Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Xiù Chang
“Nervous?”
“It’s been years. The last time I saw her she was a tiny cub, and I had to run away and leave her. I keep worrying she’ll be mad at me.”
“Or she could be real glad to see you,” Allison proposed.
“Or both,” Julian added, unhelpfully.
Xiù nodded and took a nervous breath to steel herself. The Folctha commune was so new that it was still under construction but it was already a very different edifice to the one she’d lived at all those years ago. That one had been sprawling and open, airy but bustling.
With such a tiny budget of space, the commune on Folctha was a very different thing. It wasn’t quite a skyscraper, but it was still remarkably tall for a building that looked like it was built of wood. It must have been assembled around a concrete and steel core, and to judge from the dump trucks parked around its south side the builders were excavating a warren of basements. It contrived to look much smaller and more modest than it probably was.
“You’re sure you’ll be okay without us?” Allison asked.
“I’ll introduce you, I promise,” Xiù replied. “I just…” she shrugged helplessly.
“It’s okay. You don’t need to explain.” Julian looked around. “The guidebook said there’s a microbrewery in the Quarter, a couple blocks over. ET-made beer sounds like one of those things we just have to try…”
“Mm.” Allison nodded in agreement, then gave Xiù a hug. “Good luck, bǎobèi.
Xiù hugged her back, and Julian too, then squared her shoulders and started the long walk.
Part of her knew that she was being needlessly anxious, but there was no point in knowing that—it didn’t change anything. She just had to focus and the next breath, and the one after that. Keep breathing, that was the key.
The Sister serving as the commune’s front gate guard was a small one, smaller even than Xiù herself, and welcomed her with her ears up and friendly. She was barely an adult, in fact, and her fur still had that cub-like downy softness to it.
“Good evening!” she called cheerily, in English.
“Mi o!” Xiù replied, causing the sister’s ears to flick in surprise. “Ya si bäyo bì kan ushu na tò?”
“[Your accent is very good!]” the Sister observed, in delighted Gaori.
“[Thank you!]” That was uplifting news. Xiù had spent so long pretending to be a Gaoian outside of their actual company that she’d feared her accent and pronunciation were awful. Ayma hadn’t commented on it, but Ayma could be tactful to a fault. “[Is there a Sister Myun here?]”
“[Myun? Yes, she normally guards this gate, but she had her first cub last week and mother Semya is being like she always is with… well, you don’t know mother Semya, do you? I’m sorry, your Gaori is so good it’s uncanny.]”
Xiù giggled, and touched her hands together and duck-bowed, which was how she recalled a polite-but-friendly gesture of greeting between strangers. “[I’m sorry, I should introduce myself. I’m Shoo. Sister Shoo.]”
Some gestures were nigh-identical between humans and Gaoians. The guard-sister’s jaw dropped.
“[…Are you? Really?! I… that is, you do look like her, I mean you look like you, I mean…]”
Flustered young Gaoians were just too cute.
“[I was the last time I checked,]” Xiù joked, borrowing a leaf from Allison’s book. “[What’s your name?]”
“[Oh! I’m Sister Nenna. It’s… really a pleasure to meet you, I never thought I would!]”
Xiù laughed, falling easily into her best approximation of a Gaoian chitter. Somewhere in the back of her brain, a nervous little voice noted that she was finding it all too natural, but she ignored it. She was enjoying herself far too much.
“[It’s a pleasure to meet you too, Nenna. Myun and I are old friends, but I was hoping to make my visit a surprise…]” Xiù had long ago mastered the trick of suggesting the set of ears she didn’t have by inclining her head instead, and on this occasion she did her best to convey harmless mischief. There was something about harmless mischief that Gaoians, especially young Gaoians, just couldn’t resist.
“[…It has been a week…]” the Sister mused. “[And Mother Semya can’t keep her in bed forever. Knowing Myun she’ll be clawing the walls soon…]”
“[Just as full of energy as ever, then. I haven’t seen her since she was a cub…]”
“[Very full of energy…]” Nenna duck-nodded. The set of her ears suggested both exasperation and fondness. Clearly she liked Myun. Then her ears came back up into mischief mode. “[I’ll call for her, but I won’t say who her guest is…]”
“[Thank you!]”
Sister Nenna backed away and raised her paw to the communicator clipped to her ear. Xiù fidgeted and adjusted her clothes as she waited. She was feeling much less anxious now, or rather she was now anxious about different things. Myun had a cub for goodness’ sake! With Regaari! The reality of that hadn’t properly sunk in past the anxiety over the possibility that Myun would be furious with her and refuse to see her, or some equally unlikely scenario.
She wandered over onto a grassy landscape feature away from Sister Nenna and focused on her breathing. She shut her eyes and began the painstaking process of focusing her attention on each part of her body from the top of her scalp right down to the tips of her toes. With each step she tried to notice how that part of her body felt at that moment then let it be and move. It was a good technique for getting the jabbering monkey on her shoulder that wanted something to focus on to turn its manic energy towards constructive, calming ends.
She was in the middle of contemplating her knees when she became conscious of a kind of galloping, thumping noise from behind her. She had just enough time to open her eyes and start turning around, which gave her the chance to see the battering ram of excited brown fur that ploughed into her at a dead run.
Anybody who spent time around Gaoian cubs was used to being pounced on: it was their most favouritest game. Adults—especially adult females—were typically more reserved but that didn’t seem to stop this particular female who compounded her overenthusiastic high-speed tackle with being absurdly large.
The result was painful. Xiù was knocked off her feet and tumbled in a dizzying tangle down the small slope of the landscaping engulfed in soft brown fur. She fetched up flat on her back and a touch winded, being hugged furiously and keened at by a Gaoian female who was at least as tall as Julian, and nearly as heavy.
Since when did Gaoians get so big?!
“Shoo! Shoo! [You came back!]”
The Sister backed away and sniffed her vigorously, keening delight: a human would have been weeping tears of joy. “[It is you!] Shoo!”
Xiù’s impact-addled brain finally managed to see the markings around the eyes and the muzzle, but even though she recognized them it took several stunned breaths before what they meant finally settled in and she realized who she was pinned under.
“…Oh my God,” she half-laughed, incredulously. “Myun?!”
Myun duck-nodded, still keening a little. “Surprised?” she asked in remarkably unaccented English.
Xiù put her arms around her old friend and hugged her close. “…you got big!” she said.
She couldn’t think of anything else to say.