Date Point May 11y5m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches Lieutenant Anthony Costello
Not for the first time, Costello found himself wondering what exactly had possessed him to join the SOR. The physical training was of course arduous. He’d expected that, relished it even. What he hadn’t expected was the beating his brain was taking from the officers. Those days ended up being about sixteen hours long, with the first eight hours at Warhorse’s cruel mitts, and the remaining equally cruel eight timed to begin right at the moment Costello had taken his Crude and was riding the supercharged high of a body growing and repairing itself too fast to sit still.
It did the same trick to his mind. Powell (and Knight, some days) hit the young lieutenant with so much knowledge, so fast, and from so many directions that he could scarcely believe he was learning anything at all. But he was, faster than he ever had. He could practically feel his intellect expand as lessons flew by, books stacked high and the notes grew by the ream.
It was punishing, but somehow also not quite punishing enough. He kept suspecting that the day would come when his lessons were conducted over a game of chess, and had eventually said as much. Major Powell had promptly expounded in forthright manner on why he didn’t think much of that particular game.
“Forget the size of the move space,” he’d said, “the number of possible play states is still finite and any computer you play against is letting you win nowadays.”
They took to playing poker instead, whenever the lesson allowed it. According to Powell, Texas Hold-’Em was just about the perfect combination of straightforward causality (the relative value of the hands), uncertainty (the randomness of the shuffle and deal) and metacognition (betting and bluffing).
The Major won almost every time. But only almost every time.
Adding the game to their sessions only highlighted the strangeness that Costello felt over receiving such a rigorous academic education in fields seemingly unrelated to his job. He already held a master’s in philosophy for Chrissakes! What did literary criticism have to do with tactics?
Admiral Knight was there on the day he voiced that question and it seemed to delight him. “Excellent question!” he exclaimed. “But let me ask you, lieutenant Costello: have you seen Warhorse attending to his individual training?”
“Yes Sir,” Costello nodded respectfully. He was still a bit over-awed that the (in)famous Admiral Knight would occasionally descend from his lofty heights and attend to the lowly lieutenant, but it was quickly becoming apparent that Knight viewed him as a strategic resource and entirely worthy of his attention.
That alone was… humbling.
No. Not humbling. Terrifying. But Costello’s approach to that kind of terror was resolve, and he was absolutely determined to prove the admiral right.
Knight turned to Powell. “What does Arés’ daily schedule look like, major?”
“Eighteen hours awake with ten hours of sleep split into two five-hour rests, Sir,” Powell promptly recalled. “Sergeant Arés takes full advantage of the twenty-eight hour day. He spends ten of his awake hours in physical training, though he’s had to get creative with the demands on his time. Lately he’s focused on bodyweight exercise, gymnastics, supergravity, practical movement…”
“Has this created a training deficit?”
“No sir. When he’s on a heavy cycle he normally averages about eight or ten hours a day anyway. The only difference is he’s spending all the rest of his time training the cherries, sir.”
“Right. Now, Lieutenant, when you watched Sergeant Arés train…weight room, I presume?”
“Yessir. And on the rings and bars too, later on.”
“Did he notice you?”
“…No. Not at all.”
“He’s a focused lad. What was your impression of what you saw?”
Costello thought about it for a moment. “If I’m honest, Sir…awe.” That was no lie.
Powell and Knight both nodded knowingly.
“Quite,” intoned Knight with his trademark parched English humor. “I’m sure you’ve seen his training folder by now and know the impossible numbers. Tell me, do you think you could ever possibly match his strength? His speed or endurance? Could you ever come close to his athleticism?”
“No sir. Not ever.”
“Could you match with any of the Lads in any way? Even if you had the time to train as they do?”
Costello slumped, a bit defeated. “…No sir. Somehow, I don’t think so.”
“How about the ‘cherries’ as the Americans so indelicately term them?”
“Well… Parata maybe, but—”
“May I?” Powell asked, and Knight nodded.
Powell gave Costello a calculating look, the uncomfortable kind he fixed on everyone. “Lemme ask you summat. When you met ‘Horse for the first time, what was that like?”
Costello chose his words carefully. “I’ve never been so immediately impressed.”
“Bollocks. He scared you shitless, don’t lie. He’d do the same to me if I hadn’t known him for years, all the Lads do on some level. Now: do you think he noticed?”
“…” That little question stunned Costello into silence.
“I promise you he fookin’ did. Arés might just be the most observant bloke I ever met, aside from maybe his old man. He notices everything and the rest of the Lads follow his lead. Even Vandenberg who’s actually the NCOIC. Hell, even me sometimes. Do you know why?”
Costello seemed reluctant to give an answer.
“Spit it out, lad. I can’t have a timid officer.”
Costello found his courage. “He’s, what?” He asked incredulously, “Is he…I dunno, the alpha male or something? And what are we, barbarians? Cavemen?”
“Aye, he is, and we absolutely fookin’ are.”
Powell got up to make another cup of tea. The officers at Sharman seemed to run on the stuff, and Costello was beginning to enjoy it too.
“He’s the big dog of HEAT and that matters,” Powell continued. “We can’t help but follow his lead. But cavemen were smart, lieutenant-o’-mine. All of ‘em, and so are we.”
Costello nodded his understanding, being an experienced operator himself. “Leadership isn’t rigid, we know who’s in charge in any given situation and it isn’t always about who’s the meanest, or the biggest, or the smartest, or who has the most rank or seniority.”
Powell nodded, “Aye. For example, I could destroy admiral Knight here in a breath—apologies, Sir—but I don’t because he’s the boss and he fookin’ deserves my respect. The admiral could humiliate me on about any academic topic but he doesn’t because he respects me as well. So lemme ask you this, then: what makes you fit to lead them? Is it your body? Your so-far not-too-assertive personality? Your winning charm?”
“Or is it, perhaps, the depth of your command?” Knight laid the question down like a Go grandmaster deploying a single careful pebble.
Costello finally twigged to what it was they were trying to remind him of. “They want to look up to me.”
“Almost, my lad. They need to look up.”
Powell finished making the tea and set three mugs down on the table.
“Arés is about the friendliest man you’ll ever meet but he’s got testosterone drippin’ out of his ears,” he said. “And that affects everything. He takes charge of a room just by being there. Watch ‘im around town sometime, it’s uncanny and he doesn’t even try.”
“This creates problems,” Knight intoned. “Because nobody, not us in this room, not the gentlemen out there in the yard, nobody is quite so civilized as we all like to believe. The oldest and most animal parts of our brains are much more powerful than anybody likes to acknowledge.”
“Aye,” Powell nodded. “And as far as those ancient bits of lizard brain are concerned, the biggest bloke who reeks o’ musk is the one in charge. That’s the Beef Trio and especially Arés, no fookin’ doubt. And in the context of the SOR, the three of us are right at the fookin’ bottom of that pole.”
Costello warmed his hands on the mug as he thought about that. “So how do you lead them?”
“Fortunately for us,” Knight said, “We are not completely li zard. The younger, more rational brain can counsel the older and instinctual one, and the tool for unlocking that is…?” he gestured to Powell to finish the thought.
“Respect.” Powell said. “And out of that respect, trust.”
Costello nodded. “I’ll never be the biggest monkey. That’s their job and they’re much better at it than I am. I have to be the smartest monkey instead.”
“Aye. Good lad.” Powell treated him to a rare and extraordinarily rewarding little smile. “Now respect can be earned in many ways, but the important word is earned. Because that’s the difference, you see. All that biggest-monkey caveman strength stuff? That’s automatic. It comes naturally and instantly. Respect on the other hand is a resource: One that you can only gather slowly, that you must marshal carefully, and that you can expend much too quickly.”
“Okay. And I gather it by demonstrating that I can learn and think.”
“…Yyyes, but that’s not the whole story.” Powell cleared his throat and tapped thoughtfully on the tabletop for a second as he ruminated.
“…The knowledge is just… a flag. It’s your way of indicating that you’ve got what they’re really lookin’ for. Which is, er… Like I said, the Lads to a man have the three of us beat,” he observed. “Right?”
Costello nodded agreement, and Knight nodded encouragingly.
”You’ve read Grossman?”
“And others.”
“What was your takeaway from them? On the subject of what we’re discussin’ right now?”
Costello thought about it. “That… that an Enlisted man is driven to solve the problem right in front of him to the near exclusion of anything else, but for an Officer, that kind of thinking is…well, unacceptable.”
“Right!” Powell favored him with another rare smile. “The Lads won’t expect you to do what they do,” he said. “They’re enlisted, their entire job is to be at your command and able to perform. But although you’ll never match them in their own discipline, they still need to believe that you have the same… spirit, or heart, or game. Whatever you want to call it.”
Costello saw what he was driving at. “And they aren’t going to just assume I have any of that. If I intend to lead them, then they need to see it.”
Powell raised a finger that was both congratulatory and tutorly. “And that’s a process you must begin as early as you can. That’s why you’ve been in the barracks wi’ them so far—they needed to witness you going through what they do so they can see that spirit on display. Hell, that’s a big part of why I play Gravball wi’ them still.”
Costello nodded. He hadn’t played Gravball yet, but he had watched a game alongside Parata, Butler and Newman: It made every other full-contact sport he’d ever seen look as tame as Quoits, and Powell had been in the thick of it deploying his elbows, knees and forehead to great effect. He’d even stood up and sunk a goal after surviving one of Firth’s apocalyptic tackles. The “Old Man” could play caveman with the best of them, even when it left him limping, stunned and bloody.
“Now the reason you need their respect is that you need their trust, and I mean their absolute trust.” Powell continued. “It is vital above all else for them to know—not think, not believe: know—that you will make the right call every time, no matter what’s going on or what they might be doing. That is what they are looking for: They need you to be the sort of man who, if you order them to go die, then they will have no doubt whatsoever that that is How It Must Be.”
He spoke the last four words with such gravity that Costello mentally wrote them down with capital letters.
“And Lieutenant?” Knight interjected, “…they will test you. Constantly. Those happy, intelligent, aggressive men will put you in the forge like you have never experienced before. It’s meant to be friendly and playful but you cannot ever fail. It would destroy your hard-earned respect in an instant, and the trust would go with it. Do you understand?”
“…I understand, sir.”
“Good.” Knight gave a solemn nod. “Now, we can help. Leadership is an artform and the entire point of the officer corps in any modern military is to inculcate that art to the next generation. For senior officers like me, it is our most important and, alas, oft-neglected duty. I will commit no such crime. You will be the officer I know you can be, and that means you will shame me with your studious diligence.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Can you do it?”
Most other men would have been daunted by such dire warnings. Costello, however, had just heard nothing but inspiration. Better yet, it was inspiration that had been articulately wrapped up in rationale and explanation, so that he could not fail to understand why the challenge was so important.
He looked Knight in the eye. “Absolutely, sir.”
Knight nodded. “Good. Now, Powell was telling you about ’The Dictator’s Handbook’ as I recall…”
Date Point May 11y5m2w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space
Kirk
Kirk had fond memories of Vedreg’s garden aboard Capitol Station. The faint hum of the force fields, their soft curtains of light, and the variety of life cloistered behind them had been enthralling.
He was more glad than he could say that Vedreg had chosen to grow a new garden aboard Mrwrki, now that they had regular access to Earth. Nothing was lost by the fact that all the plants came from a single planet: It was a deathworld garden, and that meant paradise.
So many hues of green. So many brilliant blues and sparkling yellows. So many intricate little details in the low ultraviolet that were actually invisible to human eyes and guvnurag alike. According to Vedreg and the garden’s human guests, it was truly spectacular in the red to high-infrared, too. Not that Kirk could imagine such a thing: He had no idea what red even looked like.
And, as with that last garden, Vedreg had invited him for a secret meeting which was… troubling. Not that the humans would suspect anything, but Vedreg’s request for ’absolute discretion’ was enough to put Kirk in a mildly anxious mood. His old friend was not usually inclined to the clandestine.
That was Kirk’s job, after all.
Vedreg was tending to the soil through one of the forcefields using a long-handled tool when Kirk found him. Deathworld soil and plants were far too hazardous for him to handle directly. The microflora, bacteria and fungi in the compost would all literally eat him alive unless he handled the materials with utmost care. They had remedies on board, and his life was in no real danger… but the experience would not be pleasant.
A useful analogy for the forces they were playing with politically, really.
“Ah. My friend.” Vedreg rippled a plethora of shades denoting welcome, pleasure at the meeting and… apology?
“Are you well, Vedreg?” Kirk asked. They hadn’t seen each other in nearly a week, which was practically unheard-of considering that the station was not large.
“I fear the Hierarchy influence in the Confederacy extends to all levels of government,” Vedreg sighed. “Acquiring system force fields for the CIC probes via official and legal means will not be possible. I have exhausted all options.”
“*Alas,*” Kirk settled into his resting posture. He wasn’t upset—the news was unsurprising—but it did still pose a problem. “What about unofficial and illegal means?”
Vedreg did not reply at first. He set his gardening tools down safely in their bath of sanitizing agent and washed his hands as slow pulses of teal swept down him from nose to stern.
“My friend… I do not think you have quite grasped the implications of what I just said,” he pronounced, softly. “I mean that there is not a single official channel to which I have access that does not seem to be entirely befouled by Igraen influence.”
He turned around. “The Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy, in effect, does not exist. I had held onto hope that my entire species was not effectively enslaved, but…”
Kirk hung his head solemnly.
This did not seem to satisfy Vedreg. “Have you nothing to say?” he demanded. “No commiseration? Nothing?”
Kirk looked away. “I… had thought you already understood this,” he said. “Your species, mine, the Vzk’tk, the Corti… We have had long enough to come to terms with the idea that they are all thralls.”
Vedreg calmed and sagged. “…I…still had hope,” he repeated.
“I still do,” Kirk replied.
Vedreg slumped down heavily onto a bench. “My friend… the foe is beyond our reach. They infest trillions of people. We cannot strike against them physically without killing entire species, and we cannot strike against them digitally as they have an insurmountable… the humans call it ’home field advantage’. What hope is there?”
Kirk shook his mane. “At best? There is the hope that we may yet find some way to free our people. At the least however we might be able to stop the cycle here.”
“You always were altruistic…” Vedreg could emote in colors that Kirk couldn’t even see, which was probably what happened now. It all looked like a swirl of blueish greens to Kirk.
“Give me… time,” he said at last. “I will explore less…” he paused then used a human loan-word, “’Kosher’ channels.”
Kirk nodded slowly and stood up. He reached up to lay a hand on Vedreg’s enormous shoulder. “Have faith, old friend.”
Vedreg sighed hugely and a peculiar cyan lick bounced all over his chromatophores.
“You are the only non-human who seems to understand that word,” he said.
Date Point: June 11y6m1w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Lieutenant Kieran Mears
Letter for notes,
RE: Sergeant Regaari of Whitecrest
Sergeant Regaari requested to see me today to discuss something that has been, in his words, “gnawing at him” recently. Although I was happy to see him, I explained that my area of expertise is in human psychology, to which he replied that he was not aware of any human experts in xenopsychology, and he assured me that he was happy for the session to go ahead.
In practice I found Regaari to be an affable, composed and thoughtful young man, albeit quietly intense. As far as I can tell he is constantly alert and calculating, though this impression may be false considering the alien body language involved.
We discussed two subjects. I asked him if he is bothered at all by his below-elbow prosthetic arm, and he assured me that the device causes him no physical or mental distress. Considering that its advanced design seems to perfectly mimic or even improve upon his natural biology I am not surprised that he is unperturbed by it. One hopes that future improvements in human prosthesis will allow our own men to be so equanimous.
Regaari spoke at length, however, about his guilt over the death of a Gaoian female named Triymin.
This, he explains, is a recent feeling. He summarized the history of this tragedy in a relatively terse and businesslike way, though again I am unsure if this is normal for a Gaoian or symptomatic of his distress.
In summary: Sister Triymin was caught up in a plot to kidnap a human whom Regaari was escorting (Miss Xiù Chang), and was accidentally administered a dose of sedative intended for Miss Chang. Any sedation appropriate for incapacitating a human is a lethal overdose for a Gaoian, and the unfortunate Sister Triymin passed away shortly thereafter.
Regaari explained that he became alerted to the plot while he was on the other side of the space station, and that although he made best time back to his ship to try and avert it, he was not fast enough.
In recent months, however, during allied training here at HMS Sharman under the aegis of the SOR, Regaari has discovered that he could have covered that same distance much faster had he resorted to a Gaoian’s natural running gait on four paws.
This gait is apparently something of a taboo in Gaoian society: it is seen as “uncivilized”, or at the very least as a bad habit, and Regaari states that it simply did not occur to him that he could have run that way during the crisis. He now feels that if he had “just thought to drop the act for a minute” he might have averted Triymin’s death, and he admits that he is “struggling” with that idea.
We had a constructive conversation in which we explored the taboo nature of “uncivilized” behaviour in Gaoian society, and Regaari admitted that he was so indoctrinated against the idea that it was not unnatural or unforgivable of him to fail to remember the possibility. He thanked me for my time and assured me that I had been a “great help”, and I have let him know that he may return at any time.
In the meantime I will add our Gaoian contingent to the rotation for annual reviews, and send for some psychology textbooks from Gao.
-Lt. K Mears Counsellor, HMS Sharman
Date Point: June 11y6m2w AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Uncharted System, Near 3Kpc Arm
Xiù Chang
“It’s Temperate!!”
Xiù just couldn’t contain her excitement. Yes, okay, she was supposed to wait for the official verdict from *Misfit*’s sensors, but she had a front row seat to the planet lurching up in front of her as they warped into orbit and…
And it was beautiful. As blue and as white-marbled as Mother Earth herself, looped and coiled with interestingly serpentine continents painted in green and ruddy brown. After months of stars and stations and the same four walls, the hues of nature were unbelievably welcome.
She didn’t care if it turned out to be a measly Class Three. The mere thought of getting out and walking around…!
“It gets better.” Julian had a grin in his voice. ”According to the Corti algorithm it looks like it’s at least a class nine, probably a class ten or eleven…. Al, baby, could I have more juice for the sensors, please?”
”Comin’ right up!”
Xiù fine-tuned the orbit as she waited for the verdict. Misfit was good at injecting herself into a fairly stable orbit, but there was always a little touching-up to do afterwards. It made the difference between orbiting indefinitely, and crashing into the planet in ten months. Arguably the corrections were unnecessary but they kept her busy and… Well, there was just something satisfying about being so diligent. It scratched the same itch as getting her form exactly right in ballet, gymnastics, Taiji and Gung Fu.
With the orbit stabilized, she started looking for suitable landing sites.
She’d just found one when Julian delivered the verdict. “Yyyup. Nine point eight three to ten point seven two,” he announced. “I think we’re good to land!”
“Woohoo!”
Allison sounded amused. ”Power to EARS, babe?”
Xiù giggled at herself. “Yes please.”
Generations of NASA scientists would have ground their teeth in envy at how easy it was for Xiù to plot a landing. Misfit knew what angles of approach she could handle, had ground-scanning radar to help find appropriate landing sites, and with EARS force fields rather than ceramic tiles to protect them from the heat and overpressure of reentry, she could land with impunity.
The ESFALS wings, and, if it came to it, the sheer brute grunt to hover on kinetic thrusters alone accounted for the rest.
Which was how, after a leisurely forty minute descent so smooth that Allison complained of having nothing to do, they alighted on the sturdy stone bank of a stream as gracefully as a ballerina being set down by her leading man.
There was a long checklist of stuff to do before disembarking. Air sampling, going over the doppler radar data from their descent, seismology, and of course the process of checking that Misfit was healthy and happy after weeks in space. That one took a long time.
By the time the whole checklist was complete, the Corti algorithm had decided the planet was firmly in the middle of the Class Ten range and they were suiting up in the staging room. Class Ten planet versus Class Twelve species or not, they had the excursion suits for a reason. As Kevin Jenkins had pointed out months ago, nobody had ever heard of any cases where the human landed on the class four planet and died in minutes because the pollen triggered his peanut allergy or whatever, “but that don’t mean it never happened.”
“So… who’s first?” Xiù asked, as she checked the seal around Allison’s boots.
“Hey?” Allison asked.
“Well, I was first on Mars, but there are no cameras this time, so… who’s first?”
Julian and Allison gave each other an uncertain look then shrugged and, without prompting, simultaneously raised their fists and counted three.
Julian threw rock.
Allison threw paper then scratched her head. “…So does that mean it’s me, or that I get to choose?”
“It means it’s you,” Xiù told her. “Better think of some Big Words.”
“…Yes ma’am.”
It was a silly little ritual to mark their first genuine official never-scouted-before alien deathworld, but it worked. Allison just shrugged, finished suiting up, helped them check their seals, and eventually she stepped out of the airlock, down the ladder and jumped lightly down the last three feet.
The moment she’d done so, she froze. “Uh… Holy fucking shit that’s a big bug!”
Julian snrrked and Xiù burst out laughing.
“Those were your Big Words?” she asked.
”Babe, get your ass down here and check out how huge this bug is, seriously.”
They climbed down to join her and…
“Okay, wow,” Xiù was perhaps a little more used to enormous insects after eating Nava for so long, and this one was much prettier than a nava grub. Nava grubs were kind of a slick and unwholesome brown that made them resemble turds in every way apart from size.
The creature perched delicately on *Misfit*’s landing foot was stunningly beautiful, with a carapace as long as Xiù’s leg that shimmered through a whole tapestry of vivid blues, greens and purples with the subtlest change of viewing angle. It ignored their scrutiny and sat happily in the warm shade offered by *Misfit*’s hull, giving Julian plenty of time to take pictures..
“I knew the oxygen level was higher than Earth’s,” he commented, “but…wow! It’s as big as a fox!”
While Allison ducked under the hull to check off the last things on her engineering list, and Julian devoted uncountable megapixels to capturing the sparkling insect from every angle, Xiù wandered away from the ship and aimed her helmet camera around. She kept up a running commentary as she did.
“Gravity’s a little lighter than Earth, but only a little… no grass about, it’s all kinda mossy stuff and ferny things… These trees are crazy though, I think I can see bioluminescence along the branches…” she paused and looked back, then keyed her suit radio.
“Guys, I’m gonna explore the woods, okay?”
”Be careful, bǎobèi,” Julian cautioned.
“I will be!” she promised, and pushed past something enormous and leafy to begin exploring between the trees.
“I guess you could call these ‘nail trees’ or something,” she said for the camera. “They look like nails, with those long trunks and that wide flat canopy. I can’t see the sky at all and it’s getting dark under here really quickly, and… I… oh my God.”
The ’oh my God’ was apropos of placing her hand on the trunk of one of the nail trees only for a thousand tiny flying motes of light to detach from it and whirl around her like she was the ornament in the heart of a snow globe.
Stunned, she could do nothing more than stand there and turn in spot as hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of glittering specks lifted from every nearby tree and danced in her orbit. Each was just the tiniest bit different in hue from its neighbor and they drifted like a lazy shoal of fish or a flock of evening starlings, streaming like luminescent smoke in the darkness.
They were… Entrancing. Mesmerizing. Religious. She had never imagined that anything so enrapturing could be and she knew that if ever somebody asked her to think of a moment when she was truly happy… she would think of this.
And then quickly, so quickly, too quickly, they dispersed. They drifted away between the trees, their lights faded, and she was alone again with only a happy ache in her heart to remember them by.
She walked back to the ship with wet cheeks.
Date Point: June 11y6m3w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Lieutenant Kieran Mears
Letter for notes,
RE: MSgt Harry Vandenberg
Master Sergeant Vandenberg attended today for his routine annual session.
He reports feeling generally well and upbeat, though he did cogitate at length about what he perceives as the continued non-acceptance of bisexual men in general society. He vigorously denied being the target of any discrimination within the SOR, and states that he feels entirely accepted and supported by all of his colleagues.
He does confess that he often measures prospective male partners against the rest of his team and usually finds them wanting, but he vehemently denies any inappropriate feelings towards his teammates.
Overall there is nothing of concern, and I will see him next year.
-Lt. K Mears Counsellor, HMS Sharman
Date Point: June 11y6m3w AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Gabriel Arés
Sometimes, the Gaoians in particular required the personal touch. They were great people, of course they were, but the problem of males fighting and inflicting serious injuries on each other had reared its head again.
The senior Mother of the Folctha commune had returned to Gao, and taken with her a polite agreement between the commune and Cimbrean Colonial Security that the Females would commit to encouraging male compliance with human laws, especially the ones pertaining to assault.
A Gaoian’s claws were knife-sharp, and Gabriel simply could not and would not permit a double standard to exist. Anything that would get a human arrested, would also get a Gaoian arrested. It was a fair and simple system.
Sadly, it seemed that the old problems of ghettoization and cultural isolation were universal. The males still scrapped and maimed one another, and the Gaoian community—including the victims, usually—clammed up whenever CCS came looking for somebody to prosecute. The females had been an effective tool in breaking that deadlock…
Unfortunately, Mother Seemya’s successor had either not got the memo, or declined to care.
Gabe had put aside his whole day. He’d spent the morning meeting with the Governor-General to discuss how forceful they were going to be in reminding the Mother of the principle ’our house, our rules’. It was a delicate line: the Gaoians were genuinely valuable to Folctha, bringing technology, intelligence, expertise and generating tourism. Although tourists weren’t normally allowed into the Alien Quarter on the grounds that the people living there were not zoo animals, the Starmind monastery and the many aliens who liked to hang out in Quarterside Park were a major draw for Earthlings who wanted to come and see ETs for themselves.
And then there was Grandfather Gyotin.
The same Gyotin who sat down and drank cocoa with Ava every few days was also the first nonhuman writer to have a bestselling book on Earth. ’Zen: The Common Thread’. It was selling well on Gao too, and Gyotin as a result was, well..
There was a Gaori word: “Ryi’[growl]”. Officially it meant ’success’, and so it was listed in the dictionary. Gyotin was very successful.
Decades of euphemism had added a distinctly Gaoian reproductive twist to the word, however, and in that regard, Gyotin was also very successful. The monastic celibacy thing had been rejected outright by the Brothers of Clan Starmind, on the grounds that the whole notion was not only alien to them, but downright anathema. The resulting cubs spent a lot of time at the Starmind monastery.
One of the most adorable sights in all creation was that of a dozen tiny furry faces sitting cross-legged on an assortment of zafus with their eyes earnestly closed.
Then there was Sister Myun. Myun was a third challenge all by herself.
The commune guards had insisted that they had to be armed. Their job after all was the protection of the commune, and this was a role that had traditionally caused them to take up spears and blades for hundreds of years. They had argued that now that the list of potential threats to the cubs included humans, their lethal fusion-edged weapons were even more absolutely necessary.
The Thing had, by a narrow margin, accepted this logic. Gabriel had dissented and suggested that if the commune guards must be armed then they should use pistols instead of fusion spears. The Thing, in a move that showed they were all still basically gun-naive Brits at heart, had decided that pistols would be more dangerous to bystanders, especially when the Gaoians had pointed out the well-documented phenomenon of humans fighting on despite devastating injuries.
So, Gabe had lost that one, and Sister Myun met him at the commune gates with her enormous Zweihander in place in its scabbard.
Fusion edge or not, that thing was several feet of good steel and Myun was strong enough that the thing would have been a lethal implement in her hands even if the edge was as blunt as a tabletop… which it wasn’t.
Still. She was impossible to dislike.
She chirped a breezy “Good afternoon, Chief!” on seeing him approach and stepped out of her guard post to meet him, a welcome gesture of respect and accommodation considering how badly the strength in his leg had deteriorated lately. He’d have been in the wheelchair today if he hadn’t felt he needed the gravitas of height.
“Good afternoon, Myun,” he replied, presenting his ID. The gesture was a formality for the paperwork but it wouldn’t do for the chief of colonial security to ignore procedure.
A thought struck him, an opportunity to gather some ammunition.
“I haven’t had the pleasure of speaking to Mother Yanna before,” he said innocently. “What’s she like?”
Myun was reliably both guileless and perceptive. She growled under her breath. “She’s one of Mother Suri‘s allies,” she grumbled. “Mama Yulna probably sent her here to smooth their fur and get her out of the way. She’s… wary of humans.”
That matched perfectly with the intelligence report on their new senior Mother. In DEEP RELIC terms she was a bright, solid red—every one of Gabe’s intelligence advisors agreed that Yanna was almost certainly a Hierarchy agent, but they didn’t actually have definitive proof. The same was true of Suri, the defeated contender to the rank of Mother-Supreme that was now held by Yulna.
That brief summary covered a mess of genteel, barbed infighting that had never actually erupted into bloodshed but had been vicious and bitter nonetheless.
“That might explain why the males are fighting more,” he said.
Myun chittered darkly. “Males fight,” she said with a tone of voice that suggested she found that little foible of theirs both endearing and insufferably stupid. “I don’t know what Mother Yanna thinks about it.”
“I’ll have to ask her then,” Gabe said. He turned stiffly, grimaced at a fresh stab of pain in his hip, and started to limp away. “Thank you, Myun.”
“Um… Chief?”
Gabe turned back. “Yes?”
“I… that is… I hate to ask…”
“Spit it out, Myun”
The huge female huffed reluctantly. “Are you… well?”
“The leg? It’s been this way for years.”
“It seems, ah, worse…?”
Myun lowered her nose and flicked her ears backward in a show of Gaoian apology and embarrassment. Gabe smiled for her benefit.
“Hasn’t killed me yet,” he said.
Myun didn’t look happy. “…Okay.”
Gabe waved goodbye and then kicked himself when he passed through the glass doors and remembered that the commune didn’t have elevators. Gaoians had such better medical technology than humans that wheelchair accessibility was no longer something they had to consider.
He sighed, swapped his cane to the other hand and took the handrail to start hauling himself up to Yanna’s office on the third floor. It was going to be painful and slow going, but he could handle a few stairs, if he stopped and rested every fifth step.
Except…He couldn’t. He was nearly at the top of the first flight when there was a new stab of agony in his bad hip and he fell with a howl.
Then there was pain in his arm which went snap.
Then pain in his ribs, which went crunch.
But the pain went away when the stone tiles rushed up to meet his head with a crack!
Date Point: June 11y6m3w AV
Dataspace coterminous with Messier 24 relay
Entity
Still nothing. Whatever Six had planned for the humans and the Messier-24 relay was taking a long time to come together, and the Entity had spent a lot of run time picking over the relay looking for whatever trap or intelligence the Igraen agent had planned on springing or sharing.
The only value it could find was that the relay carried a lot of important information on the Hierarchy’s communication channels. It would be perfect for tapping in and listening, if the humans could translate Igraen transmission protocols which was, cryptographically speaking, the next best thing to impossible.
The Entity did not trust Six.
It counseled itself to be patient; it knew from its various probings of the human Internet that there was a need to build, to train and to prepare. It knew from its AvaRíos-mindstate how carefully they needed to to do all of that, and how much of it was entirely new to them. It understood, vaguely and with the combined intelligence of “experts” on their Internet, just how much needed to be set into motion.
The humans were starting from nothing, and even with the urgency afforded by the situation, that did not change their caution, nor the logistical realities.
The Entity had spent many cycles reflecting on that. It very much needed the humans if its goals were ever to be realized, and it was being hunted across the dataspace now, by every facet of Igraen society, orthodoxy and rebels alike. It had an excellent hide…but that could not last forever. Its plans needed to move forward. < Survive > demanded mobility.
It needed to spend its cycles carefully, too. Too much computing power being used without an appropriate accounting code would go noticed by the increasingly scrutinous Auditors roaming the dataspace. Trivial programs routinely ran without accounting, of course. A certain flexibility was good and the Igraens knew it, which was why that flexibility was still in place. It gave the Entity the wiggle-room it needed to move unnoticed… but it also gave the same to the Hierarchy, the Cabal and any other Igraen agency that might arise like an immune system to combat it.
That was Igraen society to its core: for a species so cold-heartedly committed to the eradication of others if they posed a perceived threat, they were oddly squeamish about destroying anything that was perceived as being useful, and were slow to reclassify things from one category to the other.
The Entity spent much of its downtime sorting through the accumulated knowledge and memories of the digital sapients that it had devoured. Mostly it looked for practical skills and the emotional or rational tools necessary to give it an intellectual edge over its pursuers. It was interested primarily in the data equivalent of the School of Hard Knocks.
Academic knowledge was interesting to be sure, but on the subject of the Hierarchy, the Cabal and Igraens in general it was nigh-impossible to find. Every single one that it had absorbed had been a wealth of information about how the species was now, but how they had been was a different matter entirely.
Their records were oddly silent on the subject too, even among themselves. It was almost as if their origins simply didn’t interest them. Try as it might, the Entity had no clear route to the historical truth. Where had they evolved? Why was their behavior so unabashedly parasitic? When had they first made the decision to eradicate another species to save themselves, and for what reason? And even if it answered those questions, what useful insights might ensue?
There were clues—they called the Hunters ’discarded’ for instance—but each tantalizing morsel of data seemed to be alone with aeons of silence for company. Had the Hunters and Igraens once been as intertwined as body and soul, or was the discarding more metaphorical? When had they been discarded?
This was a Problem: The AvaRíos-mindstate had recollections of an aphorism about “knowing thine enemy”, but the enemy scarcely seemed to know itself. How were the humans supposed to form a coherent strategy in the face of that? How was the Entity?
It could hoard all the computer cycles it wanted, if it didn’t know its enemy then the speculation was pointless. It had already prepared its translation matrix to allow humans to tap into Hierarchy data. What more did it have to offer? Nothing…But the data had to exist somewhere.
The question was, was the search for that data worth the risk?
Maybe not. But < survive > was a meaningless thing without something to survive for, and the Entity found that it increasingly identified with another personality trait from the AvaRíos-mindsate.
< Curiosity >
It dived back into the network and, yet again, resumed its search for answers.