Date Point 10y10m2w AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Cruising on spacelane CSR-orangepentagon-92034-L, The Border Stars.
Xiù Chang
Regency-period English balls with their fancy gowns and choreographed dances have always fascinated Xiù, and she’s delighted to find herself attending one. And Julian looks so fetching in a high-necked frock coat and cravat too…
Of course there’s still the question of justifying their presence to the hostess. They bluffed their way in by pretending to be a standup comedy act but the time is soon coming when they’ll have to actually deliver on their bluff, so the three of them sit down with her brother Wei at a table in McDonald’s to discuss their routine, where Allison starts telling jokes.
The first two are funny enough but the third… She can’t hear the joke properly but it has something to do with a jar of pickled beets and is so funny that she woke up giggling with the real Julian and Allison sitting up in bed beside her and giving her strange looks.
“Uh, babe? You sound really creepy when you laugh in your sleep…” Allison declared, wiping an eye.
Xiù descended into a fit of the giggles that just wouldn’t go away, especially when Julian and Allison exchanged a bemused look and he shrugged, got up, stretched and vanished into the shower for his morning rinse.
Eventually, the laughter died down enough for her to apologize. “Sorry, sorry…In my dream, you were very funny.”
Allison snorted and shook her head. “I was, huh?”
“Yeah. Did I really sound creepy?”
“You laughed like ’hurrr hurrr hurrr…’” Allison imitated a slow, low and gormless laugh.
“Oh God…” Xiù buried her face in her pillow, feeling her cheeks burn red.
“Hey, at least your dreams are funny…” Allison beamed.
Xiù threw the pillow at her. The pillow came back with interest and they quickly got into a happy twisting wrestling match that Xiù, being shorter and stronger, won easily. Allison quickly found herself pinned by the wrists and helpless with Xiù grinning down at her inside a private curtain of hair.
Of course, Allison was far too competitive to take defeat gracefully. She wriggled and squirmed and tried to fight loose, but her longer limbs were no use at all. Xiù had all the advantages. “Agh… nooo! Get-!”
“Give up?”
“Never!”
“Give u-up!” Xiù tightened her grip slightly.
“Owowow…ow!”
Xiù relented again. “Give,” she repeated slowly, lowering her face for emphasis “U-Mm!”
Allison had surged up and kissed her.
Oh. Well. If that was the game she wanted to play…
Julian was treated to quite the show a few minutes later when he finished his shower. He paused in the doorway and watched until Xiù noticed him.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” he replied. “Uh… Do, uh… do I get to join in?”
“You can make breakfast?”
“You’re evil.”
“Yeff she iff!” Allison managed to call, in a muffled voice. She was face-down in a pillow with her hands held inextricably behind her back and Xiù sitting astride her legs.
“Hush, Shǎguā…” Xiù grinned down at her.
At long last, Allison finally gave up and went limp. “…Yeff m’m…”
“Good girl.”
Julian muttered something to himself that sounded like ”Fuck, that’s hot…” and wiped his face on his towel before going to find something to make for breakfast.
“Where were we?” Xiù asked. Allison managed to turn her head enough that she was no longer breathing pillow.
“You are evil, you know that right? We’ve created a monster.”
Xiù bent forward and nibbled her ear, which she’d found was a sure-fire way to get Allison flustered. “Mm-hmm…”
Allison gasped and shivered. “Fuck…!”
“Relax, Shǎguā. You brought this on yoursel-”
Either the world or Misfit had an awful sense of timing, or perhaps a sadistic one. Whatever the reason, the general alarm made all three of them pause for a second before Xiù rolled off the bed cursing colorfully in three languages and performed some high-speed gymnastics as she flung on her clothes as fast as she ever had.
This wasn’t just modesty. Their clothing was comfortable, breathable, easily cleaned and practical but it was also protective equipment that was both flame retardant and cut-proof. Even in an emergency, the protocol they’d had drilled into them was to dress first. Quickly, of course.
They bolted for their stations and Xiù was in the pilot’s seat and buckled up inside thirty seconds of the alarm sounding. She jammed her headset on as she surveyed what the ship was telling her.
Misfit herself was fine, which came as a relief. The alarm had been thrown up by the sophisticated decision-making algorithm that monitored the FTL sensors for them when they were asleep or off-duty. It had seen something, something massive where nothing should be, and promptly called for a human takeover.
”Bad news,” Julian called within seconds. His voice sounded grim. ”It’s a gravity spike.”
Xiù’s breath caught in her throat and Allison said what they were all thinking. ”Jesus…”
“But we’re not caught in it…” Xiù pointed out.
”No, it’s a couple of light-months ahead of us on the spacelane… Misfit says we’d have hit it in four minutes.”
”Thank you Clara…” Allison muttered. ”We’d have run right into it without her…”
“Nah, they’re not just set up and left waiting…” Julian said. ”That thing got fired to catch somebody.”
Xiù checked the sensor logs. “We were cruising about a quarter of a lightyear behind a cargo ship…”
”I’m going dark.” Allison declared. Xiù watched with a chilly feeling in her spine as available power dropped down to standby levels.
“…Hunters?” she asked.
“Or pirates. Or Alliance. Whatever the answer…” Allison left the thought unfinished. They all knew that they were unarmed, and that their best bet for safety lay in silence first and speed second. Space was vaster than anybody could comprehend, and Misfit was very very tiny. Without power to her warp drive there was no practical likelihood of discovery and even the infrared radiation they were putting out was so faint and so short-ranged that anybody placed to see it would already have effectively found them.
”Can’t we do anything?” Julian asked. ”Jump back to Cimbrean, inform the Royal Navy?”
There was a long, unhappy pause on the line, and Xiù knew what the answer was. She sat helplessly and watched the stars in the long seconds before Allison confirmed what the sensors were already telling her.
”It’s already too late. Whoever those poor bastards were… All we can do is pray for them.”
Xiù sighed and pulled her feet up into her chair, hugging her knees. Suddenly, she was feeling very small, very frail, and very helpless. It was a horrible reminder that their mission was a dangerous one.
And the day had started out so well, too…
She sat, and she meditated, and she watched until the spike was taken down. Even then they waited a further two hours before they finally decided to brave the road ahead again.
None of them left their posts until the incident was six hours and twenty lightyears behind them.
Date Point 10y10m2w AV
Command Station 1053 ’Linchpin Of Infinity’, The Orin Line
Fleetmaster Garal
Garal disliked chaos.
This was a shame, because chaos seemed to love her, especially since she had been thrust up through the ranks so abruptly after the eleventh patrol fleet’s sudden suicidal jaunt into enemy territory. Now she was having to rebuild the destroyed fleet from scratch and it was anarchy. All of the shipmasters were still sorting out their place in the pecking order relative to one another, their undershipmasters and junior officers were doing the same, new ships were arriving that had barely cooled down from the nanofactories before having an entirely novice crew stuffed into them and sent Garal’s way to sort out.
She wished she could go back to her old role as a military foreman. She would have bid away her twin, if she’d had one, for the comforting simplicity of mathematics, forces and loads. She knew where she stood with concrete, which was usually looking up at several thousand tonnes of the stuff poised and solidified overhead into a defensive structure whose tolerances she knew to a fraction.
Marshalling people of two dozen alien species of varying rarity, temperament and ability was something else entirely. The world had not built Locayl to be diplomats and commanders.
It had certainly not built them to try and lift that baton when Celzi warships accompanied by legions of Qinisi fighter drones were stabbing here and there in the border worlds. With a more seasoned fleet she might have felt comfortable drawing some of her ships back and compiling them into a response force that could strike back into Alliance territory and take the pressure off.
As it was…
Her requests for reinforcements had been met with a quiet inconsequential reprimand that made it quite clear she was on her own, and confirmed several dark suspicions she’d held about Dominion high command for some years. Whatever their priorities were, the actual protection of colonies and vulnerable civilians seemed to be far down on the list.
It could be no coincidence that all the best ships, all the most seasoned crews and all the most decorated commanders were bodyguarding the wealthy corporate fiefdoms of the core worlds while the border stars were being tended by overstretched rookies under the command of a fleetmaster who would have given three of her arms to not be in command.
From what she knew, the territories abutting Hunter space (or at least, what everybody presumed was Hunter space—that whole swathe of the galaxy had for obvious reasons never been scouted) had it just as bad.
It was enough to grind down even the most hardened and jaded commander, and Garal was still young and idealistic enough to feel like there had to be a better way. To an engineer’s mind the whole idea of wasting strong materials—and materiel—on reinforcing the places that were already strongest while the weaker supplies were frittered away on the corroding edge of civilization was not only backwards, it was frustratingly, infuriatingly, obviously backwards. And anybody who hadn’t actually been lobotomized couldn’t fail to see it as well.
Which meant that the whole milit ary structure of the Interspecies Dominion was corrupt, perhaps irredeemably so.
So when she was left swiping listlessly through the latest reports on what new carnage her opposite number, Warmaster Ekrat, was inflicting on the colonies and civilian shipping in the region, it was enough to make her want to quit. The morning’s tally included a freighter with a crew of two hundred: Alliance strike craft had pounced on it, ripped it in two and left bodies and crates to drift unclaimed in deep space. They hadn’t even taken any of the cargo.
Break her bones, but it was enough to drive her to the edge of despair. If the Alliance weren’t the very enemy whose successes were going un-countered and if they had been less ruthless about it all then she might almost have considered defecting. Whatever accusations of callous and casual violence might be directed against the Celzi, they at least did things with intelligence and, more importantly, with integrity.
Unfortunately, their intelligent and integral campaign was arrayed against her sector, her ships and the colonies under her watch, and there were no right answers. If she spread the fleet wide enough to have a patrol in every vulnerable volume, then those patrols would be too pathetic to do more than run away at the first sign of Celzi. If she concentrated her forces enough to be effective, then the Celzi just struck wherever her ships weren’t. There was no balance point.
Which meant, as any engineer knew, that an alternative approach was called for. Infuriatingly, she couldn’t think of one.
But she could think of somebody who might.
She called the station’s communications center.
”Station comms… Ah, Fleetmaster. What can I do for you?”
The Linchpin’s commsmaster was a Ruibal by the name of Thlenth. Ruibal were fellow four-arms, but with knobbled orange skin and an odd number of legs—she’d read once that their fifth leg was actually an evolved tail, though she had no idea what kind of habitat or stimuli might have induced such an evolution—and unsettlingly large mouths. They were one of the rarer species in the wider galaxy, given their fondness for parochial bickering on their homeworld…
She folded the thought up and put it away. Different species had different priorities and she would respect that: unconscious bigotry had no place in the mind of a commander.
”We have a line to the humans, do we not?” she asked, without preamble. Thlenth went a little paler.
”A direct line? Well… yes, Fleetmaster. You have the authority to directly contact their ambassador in fact…”
“Good. I think it’s time for them to start living up to their promises…”
Date Point 10y10m2w AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
The Singer
They weren’t dead.
They weren’t.
Nobody had found their bones or anything of theirs, therefore they were not dead. Until she had proof, until she had a better reason than that they hadn’t come back…
Even if they’d been gone for more than a moon cycle. Even if-
No. Better not to think about it. Better to just throw herself into her work.
The old Singer had given her an insight early in her apprenticeship, into the difference between the magic of men and the magic of women and why one was not better than the other. She had said “We both know that men take and women give. They take lives, we give birth. They take their time, we give our time… but we can give them our pain and they will take it off us.”
And Sky-Thinker was so good at that. So good that when he was away on a hunt, she felt like her arm was steadily falling asleep—she could still do everything, but not as freely and it was all more of an effort that only got worse as time went on.
Which was why she almost collapsed from the relief when she heard the thrum of a sentry’s shouting-stone welcoming home a successful hunt. On any other day it would have only been a hope, but today there were only two men not accounted for.
She burst from her tent.
Sky-Thinker and Stone-Tapper both looked awful. They were caked in mud, emaciated, and had the dead look in their eyes of men who hadn’t slept properly in far too long… but they were smiling, and they were dragging a litter with a prize of some kind on it.
The Singer considered the gravitas of her position for a moment and then discarded it. She bounded across the village clearing and crashed into Sky-Thinker’s chest in an enormous flying hug. He did quite a good job of weathering the impact considering he looked half-dead already.
He stank, and was filthy with dried mud, but he was back.
They both ignored the amused trills from the villagers as he ran his hand through her hair crest and sighed happily. “By the gods, I missed you…”
“What happened?!” she asked. “It was only a hunt, you’ve been gone for…what’s this?”
She had seen the… object on their litter. It didn’t quite look real, somehow: its edges were too straight and clean and its surface was as flat as still water. It was made of the same strange material as the sharp death-bird wing that Sky-Thinker now used as a knife, apart from a tangle of four strange dark flexible tubes like thick black guts that sprouted from one end.
Sky-Thinker and his father exchanged the proud looks of men who had brought back a truly legendary prize.
“…This is the heart of the beast that destroyed our village.”
Date Point 10y10m2w2d AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada
General Martin Tremblay
Mid-week strategic meetings were sometimes sprawling affairs where dozens of the most powerful people in the world were at loggerheads, and sometimes they were smaller and more intimate. Today’s was tiny—the only person other than Tremblay and Admiral Knight to have called in was President Arthur Sartori, who had never missed a meeting and probably never would unless he was unconscious in a hospital bed.
He especially wasn’t going to miss this one. With the Dominion-Alliance war rekindling itself in fitful bursts of alarming violence, the Global Representative Assembly’s ambassador to the Dominion had been flooded with increasingly strident calls for humanity to step in and honor its default status as a Dominion member, the most recent coming directly from the Dominion’s fleetmaster on the front lines who had painted a grim picture of civilian casualties.
The GRA’s policy for the time being was that humanity officially resented being considered a Dominion member by default and would have preferred to be invited and negotiated into the fold rather than being effectively conscripted.
Unfortunately, while the membership may have been unsolicited it was also beneficial to humanity’s interests. The Interspecies Dominion was compelled by its own charter to furnish newly interstellar species with a supply of “Dominion Development Credits” that could be used to introduce the technological and logistical fruits of interstellar culture into the new member’s society at a controlled and manageable rate. Among the many things they did for the human race, including the purchase of new technologies, they were the only currency that the Corti Directorate would accept in trade for Cruezzir-D.
This was valuable, but as President Sartori was explaining, it was also leverage.
”The Dominion is getting impatient with us. They’re even talking about cutting off our DDC allowance.”
Tremblay grimaced. “If we lose those funds, it’d kill the SOR,” he said. “And our hopes of a customs and trade station at Cimbrean.”
Sartori nodded grimly, and not for the first time Tremblay counted his lucky stars that he was working with this POTUS rather than his predecessors. Sartori liked to present himself as hard-nosed but calculating and thoughtful, and by and large he walked that talk.
His election campaign had played to the fears, anger and grief of a country reeling from the aftermath of San Diego, and of a public who were no longer interested in hearing sound-bites and platitudes from their political caste. Far from the headline-grabbing shenanigans that had characterized previous Republican candidacies, Sartori had marched boldly onto the public stage armed with solid, concrete and realistic plans for revitalizing America’s staggering agricultural and technology sectors via a policy of aggressive for-profit investment.
With the slogan ’Eyes On The Prize’ he’d contemptuously demolished his fellow Republicans whom he’d characterized as irrelevant, out of touch and misfocused, and he had successfully wielded constitutional rhetoric to attack his Democrat counterpart, who had been unable to convincingly repulse the accusation that their platform was in conflict with the first Amendment.
He hadn’t exactly swept into the White House, but he had taken it with a convincing majority. His response to being briefed on DEEP RELIC and all the other information he, as leader of the free world, had need-to-know on about humanity’s status in the galaxy had been to quietly go and sit in a secluded room for several hours and then come out swinging.
Without his clout, the mountain that Allied Extrasolar Command had to climb would have been much steeper and higher.
”I think we need to put our money where our mouth is,” he said firmly. ”We were hinting this whole time that whichever side decided to break the ceasefire would answer to us… well, the Celzi have broken the ceasefire. I don’t think we can afford to have a reputation for bluffing on an empty hand.”
Tremblay nodded. “Agreed. But we can’t afford to be the Dominion’s plaything either.”
“Fortunately,” Admiral Knight interjected from his usual spot in a chair next to Tremblay’s desk, “We can probably have our cake and eat it. Neither side is any good at concealing their movements and we’ve identified a target of opportunity… This fellow.”
Sartori scrutinized the file as it was called up. “Trez Ekrat. What is he, a Celzi general?”
“The equivalent. And he’s exposed. Last week the Alliance annexed an agricultural colony in the border territory. The colonists have been fighting back and so this Ekrat chap committed a few more of his troop carriers to the fight, along with their escorts. He’s badly overextended himself and now his command post in, erm… this system…”
Tremblay stifled a chuckle. No wonder Knight hadn’t tried to pronounce the star’s name, even the pronunciation guide in parentheses next to its name was a mouth-mangler.
“…is vulnerable,” Knight finished. “He’s a vicious cad too, this one. Ruthlessly imperialistic, unflinching in the face of appalling casualties, and with the rumours of how POWs and civilians get treated by his forces, he’d be up in the Hague if he were human.”
“Capture or kill, then,” Tremblay said.
“Exactly. Either one would badly disrupt the Alliance’s plans for the region and most likely save civilian lives. I’m inclined to suggest an overwhelming show of strength, scare the bastards straight.”
“Overwhelming strength is the SOR’s forte,” Tremblay commented.
”Break everything,” Sartori advised. ”We wanna scare the Dominion a bit as well. Make it clear just how hot of a fire they’re playing with here, otherwise they’ll call on us every time they spot a Celzi scout.”
“I daresay Major Powell will enjoy that suggestion…” Knight smirked.
“I daresay you’ll enjoy giving it,” Tremblay told his friend, smiling as he imitated Knight’s violently English mannerisms.
“I daresay you’re right.”
Sartori grunted and directed an amused look at his camera while raising his hand reassuringly at somebody outside of its field of view. ”Any other business?” he asked.
“Not right now. Thank you Mister President.”
“Same time next week, then.” Sartori touched a finger to his eyebrow and ended the call. Somebody must have been figuratively tugging on his sleeve for attention.
“D’you get the impression he enjoys our meetings?” Tremblay mused.
Knight chuckled. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Interstellar war has to be refreshingly straightforward compared to Congress.”
“Don’t say that. The moment words like ’straightforward’ creep in…”
“Perish the thought. I’ll go tell Powell to expect Hell and give it back twice as hard.”
“Yeah. Let’s show them what war really looks like.”
Date Point 10y10m2w2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Adam Arés
Adam tried to avoid bad moods. It wasn’t that they weren’t a normal and understandable thing, but he’d had some truly awful days in his life, and knew just how black his own moods could get if he let them. He cultivated good moods as best he could, tried to think the best of everybody and generally played the role of a happy hulk.
Some days, however, conspired against him.
The first sign that he was having such a day was when his sandal broke. Those hiking sandals had been with him since Alabama, and had survived what lesser footwear had not. He’d rucked, jogged, run and trekked hundreds of miles in them and they were among the few items in his life whose reliability he’d been able to take for granted. Everything else needed to be treated with care.
The creak, snap and sudden sensation of looseness on his right foot as he shifted his weight to strap on the second sandal, therefore, gave him the same sinking feeling as he’d felt when he was twelve and had gone to pet his neighbor’s cat only for the idiot feline to hiss at him, scratch his hand and bolt out into the road straight under the wheel of a Prius.
He’d preferred dogs ever since.
He sighed and assessed the damage, wondering if it was something he could repair himself and quickly decided that it wasn’t worth it – the whole sandal was on the verge of collapse, as was its counterpart. He considered putting them up on his wall out of sentiment and then realized he was being, as Major Powell would put it, “daft” and threw them away. He’d gone caveman-barefoot plenty of times anyway.
Sign number two—or number one, really—was that he’d struck out last night. For some reason, the girls were being… not chilly, but a lot less warm than they had been before. So he’d been forced to spend the night alone, cleaning his rifle one-handed.
These two facts combined to put a small thundercloud over his head as he tromped down the stairs barefoot and out into the street.
Today was as close as SOR got to an off day, and it was kind of a party. Major Powell had finally bowed to the inevitable and had taken his homesteading money both from the military and from the Folctha colonization program and had finally made his permanent home on Cimbrean: a comfortably large and well-appointed place on Persephone Lane. He and Murray insisted on calling it a bungalow, but to the rest of the Lads it was unquestionably a rambler.
He’d reluctantly accepted some input and contribution from the Lads too. Adam had crafted for him a compact but well-appointed gym perfect for his specific training regimen. Vandenberg and Sikes had assembled a deck and barbecue pit with surprising speed, and thanks to Akiyama and Blaczynski the house’s home electronics were absolutely state-of-the art. The house was almost a butler despite the teething troubles with the voice recognition software.
Persephone Lane was a short walk over from the little complex of properties that the Lads had assembled on Demeter Way. It would have been shorter still to cut across the broad green space between them that they were keeping as a kind of rough grassy park for anybody who wanted a nice open space for a soccer game or something. About a dozen guys in white were playing cricket on it, a game that Adam had finally got his head around enough to decide that he wasn’t interested.
Disinterest was no reason to disrupt a game though, so he took the long way on the sidewalk, which was where he ran into the third sign as a young mom ushered her kids across the road to get out of his way.
This was something that he usually managed to avoid. He smiled, he kept a light bounce in his step, he did his best to avoid swaggering, stomping or looming… it wasn’t perfect, but there were some pretty simple ways to downplay his immense size. Ever since his dad had taught him about watching how people moved, he’d realized that it really was movement that made people react. He could be as big as a shipping container and strong enough to crush a man’s skull with one hand, but when he moved like a carefree ray of sunshine then his presence actually seemed to delight people if they noticed at all.
He must have been moving like a thundercloud this morning because a wave of people getting out of his way rolled up the street at fifty yards which just depressed and upset him even more and when he tried to force some jollity into his step he failed miserably and instead managed something that was at best an alpha-male swagger.
Which led to the fourth sign. He got to Powell’s new house ready for the moving-in barbecue and party they were throwing for him, heard movement and voices on the deck ‘round the back and jogged round eager to be around his buddies. There were three steps up onto the deck and he was so distracted with waving and calling out greetings that he forgot to put his foot on one of the structural beams and it crunched right through the wood like the deck was made of saltine crackers.
“¡Coño!”
Vandenberg helped him extract himself with some affectionate smack-talk.
“I just got this shit built an’ yer already busting it…” he grinned as Adam wiped splinters and blood off his shin.
“Every fuckin’ thing is breaking today…” Adam grumbled as he straightened up. He ignored the graze—he’d already endured far worse pain during that morning’s light PT routine.
“Yeah, my bad bro. Shoulda built it Warhorse-proof.”
“Beginning to think there’s no such thing…” Adam grumbled, adding a muttered “¡La madre que me parió…!” as he examined the damage. “…Sorry, man.”
“Don’t even worry about it. ‘S a quick fix and I can make it stronger’n before.” Rebar smacked him on the shoulder. “Firth’s got the barbecue going, there’s iced tea and football indoors and maybe something for that leg. And, y’know, the floor is made’a concrete.”
“Tch!” Adam laughed for the first time that day, flipped Rebar the bird then turned it into a fist bump and headed indoors.
Blaczynski laughed them moment he saw him. “Jeez. So that crash from outside was you, huh?”
“Don’t even.” Adam shook his head and hit up the pitcher of iced tea. He had to reach over Bozo to do it, and the SOR’s mammoth dog whined uncertainly in response to his bad mood, which earned him a reassuring scratch behind the ears.
“Bloody typical. Nice new house wi’ a nice new carpet an’ a nice new deck an’ he’s already smashin’ stuff and bleedin’ all over it,” Major Powell commented. He was sitting at his ease in a huge and enveloping recliner looking relaxed and happy with a drink in one hand and a drumstick in the other. He even had a rare faint smile around the eyes and mouth and he was not a man who smiled naturally. It wasn’t that he was actually bad-tempered, but something about his face was much better suited to deadpan humor and a resting expression of mild hostility. You had to know him quite well to know that he was rarely actually angry even though he looked it all the time.
“Ever had those days where it’s like you managed to piss off God and he’s getting back at you?” Adam asked. His CO huffed a one-beat silent laugh.
“Aye, I think I have,” he nodded. “Do us a favour though mate, clean up that leg before it drips.”
“Sorry.”
“I swear, your fookin’ pain tolerance…” Powell chuckled as Adam ambled easily through into the kitchen. Powell’s house had more double-width arches than door and was built to an SOR scale. For once he didn’t have to turn slightly to fit through the frame.
The kitchen turned out to be full of Burgess and Firth. Adam rounded off what had become known as the ’Beef Trio’ and suddenly the huge and spacious kitchen space was not so huge and spacious any more.
“‘Bout fuckin’ time you showed,” Base knocked knuckles with him. “What was her name?”
“I wish. Got anything for this?”
“That little ant bite? Man, I’m not wasting a Crude shot on your fuckin’ boo-boo. Paper towel, water, go. Nut up.”
“You’re all heart, Doctor Burgess.”
Baseball snorted. “Man, get your wimpy ass cleaned up.”
It wasn’t exactly a bedside manner, but it put a smile on Adam’s face and he soon had the scratches on his legs cleaned up and disinfected. Disinfectant was kind of a redundant gesture on Cimbrean, where by and large the ambient microbe count was in the same order as might be found in a good private hospital, but old habits died hard, and it helped turn the slow oozing graze into a dry scuff.
Murray and Akiyama showed up just as he returned to the sitting room and poured himself a cold drink. There was happy chatter about how well the house had turned out, the usual brotherly banter, some commentary on the Steelers defense as they lost another forty yards to the Panthers, and when Sikes—always the last to arrive to anything casual—finally showed up with the housewarming gift they’d all pitched in to pay for, Adam was starting to feel a little more positive about his day. Especially the imminent promise of one of Firth’s steak sandwiches.
The housewarming present was a painting. Sikes had found an artist on the Internet who had produced an absolutely stunning watercolor of the Yorkshire dales at sunset that swept from autumnal peaches and purples in the sky to war golden grass and loose stone walls in the foreground, via a meandering river valley dotted with trees.
It was easy to tell that Powell was moved by the gift—his face locked down completely, and he took the first chance he got to take refuge in bringing up some work-related matters.
“So, seein’ as we’re all here, I thought I’d share two bits o’ news with you…” he said, leaning the painting against the wall on his end table with a fond look.
The Lads all quietened down and listened, more out of ingrained habit than anything. Today was a relaxed day. No booze, because they were all on call, but still a party.
“So, the good news is I got a message from Hunstville yesterday that our four newbies have all passed the first leg of their Crue-D assisted training and they’ll be joinin’ us next month ready to start really becomin’ SOR. I gave Sergeant Kovač the go-ahead this morning to start preppin’ their EV-MASS suits, and we’ve taken on some new suit techs to work with ‘em. There’s another ten young men in the pipeline just startin’ their indoc, we’ll see how many of ‘em make it to Huntsville, but all told it looks like we’ll finally start fillin’ up our MTOE.”
He met Adam’s eye. “I don’t need to tell you not to go easy on ‘em, right?” he said.
Adam grinned. “Hell no.”
“That’s what I like to hear. Anyway, this next bit’s, er, officially unofficial, like. Keep this quiet ‘cause it’s not actually rubber-stamped yet, but the stamp’s bloody well inked up and raised, right?”
He pantomimed raising a stamp and preparing to bring it down hard, and there was a general affirmative muttering.
“We’re bein’ reshuffled a bit,” he said. The Lads made dismayed noises and grumbled until he waved them down. “It’s nowt that’s serious. Probably for the good in fact,” he assured them.
“Ain’t no such thing as a good reshuffle, sir,” Akiyama commented.
Powell half-shrugged. “Allied Extrasolar Command thinks there’s still a strategic need for JETS operators an’ they want to resurrect ‘em. This time the plan is that it’ll be more’n just a cert, they’ll be part of the SOR. They’re rebranding us lot-” he waved an arm to indicate every man in the room, “-as HEAT. Hazardous Environment Assault Teams. Then there’s the techs as the third component. Bit fookin’ messy but that’s what we get for makin’ shit up as we go along.”
“They found guys who’re willing to lead the way on this?” Vandenberg asked.
“Aye, they did. You never met ‘em, but everyone who was in Egypt remembers Coombes and Walsh, right?”
“Great guys,” Firth nodded. “I thought Tiny was fixin’ to take the Crude and wear the Mass?”
“Miller persuaded them to be our first JETS instead. Them and a SEAL called Hoeff.”
“Think I know Hoeff,” Firth nodded again. He knew everybody. “Didn’t he get the original JETS cert an’ then have his ass parked in Germany teaching the Krauts how to murder terrorists?”
“Aye, that sounds right.”
“So we’re gonna have a fuckin’ German babysitter in the regiment now?” Sikes almost laughed.
“Don’t knock it,” Powell warned. “Counter-terrorism experience in Germany counts for a lot nowadays.”
“Yeah, ‘cause they let all the fuckin’ terrorists in!” Blaczynski grunted. Powell held up his hand.
“Ours not to worry about the politics, mate. Besides, that’s all ancient history now. Baseball an’ Horse were still suckin’ tit an’ shittin’ themselves back then.”
“Last week?” Murray joked. There was brotherly jeering and laughter, which Adam rolled his eyes and tolerated, though he reached over and pulled the much smaller man into an affectionate crushing hug. Even Powell chuckled along.
“Anyhow, that’s the potted summary,” he finished. “I’m sure AEC’ll be sendin’ us a fookin’ tome to pore over once the idea’s got Tremblay’s scribble on the bottom, and we’ll have to somehow find room to squeeze ‘em in on the base, but I reckon it’s a sign that the Powers That Be think we’re doin’ summat right-…” he turned and frowned as the phone in his newly-set-up office rang.
“…‘Course, there’s never a dull moment is there? Save me a steak, lads…” He put his drink down and vanished.
Steak…
Among his many, many talents, Christian Firth was the undisputed grandmaster of cooking the perfect steak. He had it down to something that was equal parts science and art. Several arts—he was the symphonic sultan of searing, the baron of browning, the Maharaja of Medium Rare. Firth could cook a steak that made every vegan in a thousand meter radius have a crisis of faith.
Of course, like everything he was good at, he knew he was good at it and took pride in being not merely good, but the best. He also promised to smash any bottles of steak sauce he laid eyes on.
He vanished outside with promises to excel himself and confident declarations about how the steaks were prepared and ready, how the grill was perfect, and so on. Adam—whose stomach ranked second or third on his list of his favorite organs—had to resist the urge to drool. He joined in the chatter and banter half-heartedly, keeping an eye out the glass doors as he watched the master work and vowed that one day, one day he would complete his studies under the sensei of sizzle.
In short order the meat was seared, flipped, seared, probed, whipped out of the fire and rested. The Knife—and it was always The Knife, with capital letters—was produced, whisked briskly across the steel, and the rested beef was efficiently sliced into juicy glistening pinkish strips and laid out in a row like the croupier in a James Bond movie dealing the flop.
Beaming the fearsome grin of a man who knew he’d outdone himself, Firth reverently delivered his creation to his waiting comrades, and it was at that precise moment that the day decided to really kick Adam solidly in the balls.
“Okay lads, party’s over! We’ve got a fookin’ mission…”