Date Point: October 11y10m3w AV
Byron Group alien research labs, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Kevin Jenkins
“So it IS valuable?”
“Potentially, yes.”
“Well, what can it do?”
“That’s… actually a very good question.”
This earned Doctor Simon Graves one of Moses’ sharpest looks. “You mean you don’t know.”
“They didn’t know what graphene could do, either, and now it’s absolutely critical to our hypercapacitors and forcefield emitters,” Graves pointed out. “And the same is true for all kinds of other substances when they were first discovered. But I can see significant potential in this… stuff.”
Kevin cleared his throat. “I think what Mister Byron means,” he said, “is he’d like to know what potential you see, in what kinds of fields.”
Graves nodded and cleared his throat.
“Have you ever heard of plasmids?” he asked. Moses shook his head.
Kevin had, but he doubted he and Graves had the same thing in mind. He shrugged. “Only in a videogame.”
Graves laughed. “Hah! Right. But… uh, yeah, real plasmids are basically just little loops of DNA that bacteria use to share genetic information.” He called up a slide. “Now this, uh, ejaculate is absolutely full of plasmids. So, that’s already plenty of opportunity to study alien DNA in a lab environment, but the really interesting stuff is some of the enzymes and hormones that are in the fluid alongside the plasmids.”
“Ejaculate? DNA? Are we looking at a jar full of alien jism?” Moses demanded, giving the sample a grossed-out frown.
“No! No. No, this isn’t a reproductive fluid it’s… well, we’re pretty sure that it’s a biochemical weapon of some kind. To judge by the way the insects sprayed it all over them.”
“…Suddenly I’m awful glad it’s in that box,” Kevin commented.
“I don’t recall ’biochemical weapons’ being part of our business model,” Moses added, eyeing the sample warily. “Is it… dangerous?”
“That… remains to be seen,” Graves admitted, then hastened to mollify his employer. “But Botulinum Toxin is about the deadliest poison known to man, and nowadays it’s a cosmetic treatment, so just because it’s a biochemical weapon *right now*…”
“You’ll be… careful with it. Right?”
“Oh, absolutely Mister Byron.”
“…Kevin?”
Kevin shrugged. “We need to know what it can do if we’re gonna send people to that planet either way. I might, uh, let my friends at Scotch Creek know about it though.”
“If you think that’s best,” Moses agreed. Kevin could almost hear him internally grumbling about not receiving another phone call from President Sartori.
“Relax, boss. I’ll tell ‘em keeping them in the loop was your idea.”
“You’re too kind, Kevin.”
Graves gave them a wary look. “So… That’s a ’go ahead’, yes?”
“Yeah. Go ahead.” Moses waved a hand. “If we’re gonna send people to that planet, I need to know if they’re meant to avoid the bugs or milk ‘em.”
“Thank you, Mister Byron. I should be able to tell you fairly quickly.”
Kevin ushered his boss out of the biological materials lab and back towards the comparative safety of the geophysics lab. “So. Lemme show you some of the plans the team came up with for exo oil…”
Date Point: October 11y10m3w AV
Hephaestus Trade Station 1 ’Armstrong’, Orbiting Cimbrean-5, The Far Reaches
Nofl
Any Corti field researcher saw their fair share of trading stations. They were ubiquitous. In fact, the prolonged absence of such a station from the Cimbrean system had been truly remarkable, and a mark of just how difficult the human race’s position was, politically.
And of course there wasn’t one at Earth at all. The humans really were being fought against at every turn. The pressure they were being forced to keep up was immense, unrelenting, and exhausting, made all the more baffling by the absence of any concrete demands from the Dominion. Sanctions sans stipulations: Stupid.
As usual, however, the deathworlders had found a loophole. If governments could not be persuaded to establish the interstellar infrastructure of a cleared spacelane and a suitable station… oh well! No such services were denied to major established private interests such as the big trading franchises. By far the biggest obstacle involved in negotiating a partnership of sorts had been the communications delay.
It was already paying off. Earthling grains and vegetables from Folctha’s sprawling farms were proving to be an enormously popular export commodity – they were so nutritionally rich and so flavorful, and their resilient biology gave them a substantial natural shelf-life even prior to processing.
Then there was Soy. Soy protein, soy milk, soy beans, miso, tempeh, tofu. Soy cereals, soy cheese, soya flour… The factories of the New Belfast Soy Bean Co. never stopped, and a growing proportion of their output came through the heavily controlled jump array up to the trade station, after an extensive vetting by colonial security.
Nofl knew that for a fact—he rode up to the station leaning against a shipping container with the NBSB logo on the side.
It was a very… human trade station: It stank of them. Humans didn’t smell bad as such, but even to a Corti’s relatively atrophied olfactory organs, their scent was pervasive and impressive. They smelled of temperature regulation, of the complex oils in their skin and hair, of ketones and pheromones and hormones. He shuddered to think what Earth smelled like, with that wonderful nasal bouquet overladen by the permanent stench of the bacteria in their sweat. That component was mercifully almost entirely absent on Cimbrean.
Deathworlders. Pleasant people, but definitely an acquired taste.
He found the one he was after overseeing some improvements to a light bulk transport at one of the docking hardpoints. Some Hephaestus workers were standing next to their bright yellow vacuum hardsuits—miniature humanoid spaceships, really—discussing the minutia e of whatever it was they were doing to the ship.
Nofl waited patiently for them to finish before moving to introduce himself.
“Excuse me? Captain Wagner? Dog Wagner?”
The human was aging, scruffy and his skin looked… loose somehow, but there was no dulling that deathworld sharpness. He gave Nofl the cold assessment that all human abductees not unjustifiably directed toward Corti.
“Who’s asking?”
Nofl didn’t bother to extend a hand. It could only possibly end in a cold glare.
“I understand you have a trade run out to Trade Station Fifty. I have a package waiting for me there.”
“I look like a fuckin’ mailman to you, brother?”
Nofl clasped his hands lightly in front of him. “By reputation, Shipmaster Wagner is known for delivering… sensitive premium packages…” he pointed out.
This earned him the kind of penetrating stare that only humans could achieve, like the deathworlder was taking his mind out and picking it apart. It was a terrific skill, the talent they had for metacognition allowed them to assemble a probability tree of motives for literally everybody they met in just seconds, and instinctively.
Those Corti researchers who had successfully worked with humans and not met an unfortunate end, a clique that included Nofl, all agreed that it was… vexing to be so completely assessed.
“…How big’s this package of yours?” Wagner asked, eventually. Nofl held his hands about shoulder width apart and Wagner nodded. “Gimme a price,” he said. “Good ol’ U S of A dollars”
“Are you sure? The currency of Cimbrean is the Pound Sterling…”
“Dollars,” Wagner repeated.
“Very well…. Ten thousand.”
Wagner shook his head. “Fifteen thousand.”
“Twelve,” Nofl counter-offered.
“That’s twelve thousand dollars, right?” Wagner checked
Nofl employed the device that he’d found tended to disarm humans the most and giggled lightly. It was an unnatural and effete sound in a Corti throat, and it was wonderful for getting them off-balance, as were all the other camp mannerisms he affected.
“Oh yes, yes! Twelve thousand dollars, yes. Goodness me, you don’t think I’d be so stupid as to try that trick on a human, do you?” He asked.
Wagner tried to pretend he was unmoved. “I don’t know you from Adam, brother…”
“Well. Twelve thousand US dollars,” Nofl repeated the offer.
“…Done. Who’s handing this package off?”
“As I understand it, it will reach Station Fifty in the hands of a Chehnash who works under the alias *’Dread’*…”
Date Point: November 11y 11m AV
CIA offices, Chicago, Illinois, USA, Earth
Darcy
“I swear to God, it’s like playing whack-a-mole over there. Just when I think things are going well, just when Melissa does some fine work and brings Sister Niral on board, that’s when Gabe Arés falls down the stairs and we’re left scrambling to find a replacement.”
Darcy’s lotus green tea pearl began to unfold and bloom in the hot water, and she leaned against the wall to watch it.
The office was bigger, these days. More people working with her and under her. SIGINT, mostly. A veritable army of communications experts, hackers, engineers and half a dozen superhuman analysts who spent their professional time poring over intercepted data in search of anything even remotely relevant.
And that was just at the Chicago office.
“Don’t complain.” Darcy’s office-mate Jake was eating his habitual lunch ’al desko’—a pastrami and avocado deli sandwich. “You wouldn’t want a boring assignment, would you?”
“Hell no. I’m just saying, it’d be nice if things over there stayed fixed after I fixed them.”
Jake snorted. “That’s the story of intelligence work right there.”
“Yeah.” Darcy sighed and poured her tea. Jake was right, of course, and there was no sense in wishing about what was never going to be. The job in front of her hadn’t really changed, in fact—She’d just have to keep pre-empting the situations she could see coming, and responding to the situations she didn’t.
Cimbrean was too important, and the role of its chief of colonial security too vital, for her to waste time fantasizing about a pleasant world in which things went smooth.
She pondered her options as she drank the tea, then picked up her phone.
“Nick? Darcy. I’m going to need a list of potential candidates to replace Gabriel Arés as chief of CCS, thought it sounded like your kind of job… Yeah. Ideally? Two weeks from now. Good. Yeah, thanks. You too.”
“Thinking we might get one of ours in there?” Jake asked as she hung up.
“Whoever gets the post, we need to work with them,” Darcy pointed out. “Having an American in the job made things a lot easier…”
Jake finished his sandwich and turned back to poring through the emails in front of him. “Huh.”
“What?”
“So, you’ll never guess what the Misfit crew brought back…”
Date Point: November 11y11m AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada
General Martin Tremblay
“Your guys brought a fucking bioweapon back to Earth?”
Kevin Jenkins had moved a long way up in the world from his days as a bartender and kind of abductee pilgrim bringing the first dregs of alien intel to Scotch Creek. Once upon a time he’d never have been seen out of his t-shirt and jeans. Nowadays he wore expensive tailored suits and the inerasable subtle facial expression of a wealthy man.
Still. His conciliatory mood was obvious, even over Skype.
”Under heavy lock and key. It’s in a clean room you could safely study fuckin’… Ebola or some shit in.”
Tremblay frowned at him. “I’d sure like to know why though, Kevin…”
“We’re researching deathworlds,” Kevin pointed out. “We’re gonna find potentially dangerous shit sometimes. You want us to just leave it out there for the colonists to deal with on their own?”
“I guess not…” Tremblay conceded, reluctantly. “Still, an alien bioweapon?”
Kevin shrugged. “You ever hear of Botulinum Toxin, Martin?”
Tremblay shrugged too. “Uh, maybe?”
“Deadliest poison known to man. Causes Botulism, kill you stone dead with a couple micrograms and it was discovered in fucking pork sausages, man. And wrinkly old women get it injected into their faces for that gen-yoo-ine youthful stung-by-a-bee-as-big-as-a-hummingbird look.”
“Your point?” Tremblay asked, in the hopes of heading off a trademark Kevin Jenkins rant.
“Point is, it probably ain’t no worse than anything here on Earth, especially ‘cause the source world is an Eleven.” Kevin shrugged. “I reckon Moses is being over-cautious, but he sent a real careful Christmas card to the White House last year.”
Martin chuckled. “Hah! I bet. I talk with Sartori a couple of times a week and I honestly wouldn’t want to piss him off.”
“And you’re on the general staff of a foreign military.”
Tremblay shrugged again. “I could be forgiven for forgetting it sometimes. Nearly all the assets are either American or British. It’d be nice to see more of my countrymen on the front line…”
“Don’t sell SCERF short. It’s fuckin’ valuable. Hell, I kinda miss it up there.” Kevin chuckled ”Only person I ever serve coffee to nowadays is Darcy, and she only drinks it ‘cause she’s too polite to ask for tea instead.”
“She’s a tea drinker?”
”Yeah. Fuckin’ treasonous ain’t it?”
“I just never would have guessed.”
”She ain’t exactly an open book,” Kevin pointed out. “Anyhow. That’s the lay of the land right now. One deathworld full of giant slime-spewing alien bugs. The misfits’re back out of contact again, we probably ain’t gonna hear from them until, uh…” He looked up and his lips moved as he calculated. “…June. July maybe. ”
“Assuming they don’t get killed. Byron doesn’t have a great track record there, Kevin.”
”Urgh, don’t remind me.” Kevin looked troubled. ”I… don’t really wanna think about it. Those three kids are about the best people I ever met, I don’t wanna think about what kind unpleasant shit they have to put up with…”
Date Point: November 11y11m AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Deep Interstellar Space
Julian Etsicitty
“Oh, come *on!*”
“No, seriously! Think about it, they’ve got transporters and replicators, those are basically the same thing. They could build a ship in seconds out of any old asteroid with a bit of power, and crew them with holograms. They could have, like, millions of ships, and they’d all be expendable, so why do they spend months building these ships in shipyards instead?”
“Because the writers are fuckwits and the whole idea of a post-scarcity economy like that is dumb?”
“Well, yeah, but… what’s the in-universe explanation?”
“Ugh, you two are such huge dorks…”
“Love you too, *Shǎguā*…”
“Omigod, you did NOT just call me that! Only she gets to call me that, you ass!”
“You’re the ass, you butt!”
“You’re the butt, dummy!”
“You’re the dummy, you dork!”
“You don’t get to call me a dork, either! I called you a dork first!”
“Will you two get a room already?”
“Why? You wanna watch, or join in?”
“Nah, I’d rather watch more Deep Space Nine.”
“…You’re right. What was I thinking? Sex versus Star Trek?”
“Mm. Star Trek wins every time.”
“Mm-hmm!”
“Ugh, you two are the fucking dorkiest! …Is it really that good?”
“Why don’t you come and watch?”
“…Yeah, okay. Move over…”
Date Point: November 11y11m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Martina Kovač
Marty had a game, and that game had exactly one rule: Make the Lads as uncomfortable as she could.
It was only fair. Here she was, quite probably the most highly educated person on the base, certainly one of the most highly educated on the whole planet, but she spent a small but… memorable… part of her work schedule intimately contemplating all the wonders of the male pelvis and everything attached to or produced from it.
And of course, they were competitive about it, too. Which should have made it worse, but Marty had run out of fucks to give long, long ago.
Naturally, she seized any opportunity she could to get her vengeance. Such as, for example, being the only one with the balls to bring a porn flick to Bad Movie Night when it was her turn to bring the movie. And then she sat in Adam’s lap, because that just provided so many wonderful ways to make him extra uncomfortable.
Tonight’s was a British-made porn parody: “Fantastic Breasts And Where To Find Them.”
It was awful as only British porn could be, and it made the Lads extra-squirmy because the Gaoians were there too. They of course had an entirely academic relationship with human porn, and they asked questions. She suspected they were trolling—they deliberately used a curious uptick to their questions that made them sound cub-like and innocent.
“Are all human males so…ample?”
“Only the lucky ones,” grumbled Adam, who shifted uncomfortably under Marty.
Firth, of course, was trying to pretend like he didn’t give two bites on a turd, and barely succeeding at best. The problem wasn’t the Lads, the problem was Marty herself—he was, at heart, a Southern Gentleman, and there was something deep in his brain that rebelled against the idea of watching porn with women. There were so few opportunities to really embarrass him, though, that she would have had to be crazy to give up on this one.
There was another advantage to bringing porn—the cuddly man-pile got broken up a bit as the Lads put some safe distance between them, which meant she got Adam all to herself. Firth shifted in his beanbag and reached over to grab some of the popcorn. “Man, Kovač. You gettin’ ready to measure us again?”
Marty gave him her sweetest and most innocent smile. “Tuesday. Reckon you can keep it going that long?”
Rebar groaned. “For fuck sake, don’t challenge him!”
“Righteous has combatives scheduled with us tomorrow,” Regaari pointed out. “I’m already going to be broken, I’d rather not be torn in half, too.”
This earned him a number of impressed looks from the Lads. The Gaoians had their own style of banter, which differed from the human mode. Less explicit, more… sneaky. A joke in the human mode was rare and unexpected.
Firth grinned hugely and waggled his eyebrows, momentarily forgetting Kovač. “Dexter, I’m shocked! You know I always lube up first!”
“Ain’t enough lube in the galaxy,” Blaczynski grinned.
“I wonder what perversion of evolution compelled such…impressive gifts,” Thurrsto mused.
Daar made a grumbling noise. “…Don’t seem so impressive to me…”
Thurrsto ignored him. “But what could the advantage be?”
“I can answer that!” Marty said brightly, and truthfully.
The Lads all flinched, and Adam hastily whispered in her ear in a bid to avoid the explanation. “You’re in the trolliest mood tonight…”
But Regaari wasn’t about to let her—or the rest of the Lads—off the hook that easy. He enjoyed making them uncomfortable almost as much as she did. “Please, do tell! This could prove very useful in our psychological model of human males.”
Baseball, as always, seemed utterly impervious to shame but he deflected the question when he tilted his head at the screen. “That’s new. How did she manage that?”
The Gaoians tilted their heads too. It was adorable.
Thurrsto was the first to speak. “…that seems anatomically…unwise.”
“Don’t knock it ‘till you’ve tried it,” grumbled Firth, and a round of male guffawing swept the room.
Faarek’s ears were almost flat against his skull. “Wh—No Female would ever agree to such a thing!”
Marty grinned and pounced on that opening like a cat on a laser dot.
“Uh, hello? Sitting right here?”
Victory. The whole room was struck silent—even Daar stared at her, ears erect and forward at what was possibly even a faintly scandalized angle. And Adam, bless the huge galoot, was utterly crimson.
Firth actually giggled. “Wait… ‘Horse? You? I mean, way to go, but how—?”
“Can’t be worse than his therapy massages.”
“His massages don’t involve—”
“ANYWAY…!” Adam interrupted desperately, and Martina decided she’d had enough fun with him, for now…
“It is odd,” commented Regaari a bit more seriously, “The entire industry. We don’t have anything quite like…” His prosthetic hand clicked as he waved it at the screen. “…This.”
“Different instincts, different hormones,” Baseball said, unconsciously waxing intellectual in the way he only did when he was relaxed and among friends. “We’re more flexible regarding family arrangements and the like than we generally permit in society. Though that’s changing. I’ve read that has a lot to do with tribal arrangements in our way back when but…” He shrugged hugely. “We don’t really know. It’s all just educated bullshitting, really.”
“Seems to work fer some folks,” Firth grunted. “Like that Etsicitty fella.”
“That rumor’s true then?” Parata asked. “I thought it was just the tabloids stirrin’ shit.”
“Nah, man. You just gotta spend time with ‘em to see it’s all true.” Firth, as ever, was conscientious regarding his friends. “But hey! They’re happy and it seems ‘ta work for ‘em, so who am I to say anything? We ain’t really delved sexual psychology in my coursework yet, anyway.”
Baseball looked as if he wanted to launch a long and tedious dissertation on the subject, but Blaczynski beat him to the punch.
“Wait, weren’t we just talkin’ about butt stuff? D’you think those three’ve—OW!!” Firth smacked him upside the head.
Adam’s arms squeezed Marty a little tighter as he buried his face in her shoulder. “You are so gonna pay for this…” he grumbled, for her ears only. Mission accomplished. If she wasn’t carried away draped over his arm like a waiter’s towel later tonight, something would have gone badly wrong…
The movie was now being entirely ignored as Thurrsto and Baseball got into a lengthy, exhaustive and cringe-inducingly forthright conversation about the relative merits of Gaoian and Human sexuality and the roles each had played in the history of their cultures. Marty found it fascinating, but decided that she’d probably better not contribute any further. The boys got adorably squeamish about some things…
Daar suddenly raised his nose and sniffed. “…Nachos?”
He dashed out of the room in the kind of undignified four-footed scramble that made the Whitecrests shake their heads, with his claws slipping and sliding on the polished concrete flooring.
They weren’t above doing the exact same thing, though. Marty had to cover her mouth—it was like watching overgrown puppies scrambling after a tennis ball, all pretensions at civilization forgotten. She knew all the Whitecrest brothers quite well by now, and knew for a fact that they would never let any Gaoian female see them like that.
At some point in the conversation, unnoticed and silently, Murray had slipped away into the kitchen. He didn’t usually cook: It wasn’t really his thing. But for some strange reason there was a strong overlap between the Glaswegian and Gaoian palates that he enjoyed servicing.
This had led to the genesis of so-called “Murray Salad”: Last Friday’s kebab meat with fried chicken and anchovies, diced together and sauteed with mild salsa (hence the dubious ‘salad’ claim) and schlorked over a criminally abused plate of what would otherwise have been perfectly respectable nachos, topped with Biblical volumes of Velveeta.
The Gaoians loved it (especially with cod liver oil) and they returned in a dense knot around Daar who was carrying the vile platterful on one paw.
Adam wrinkled his nose. “I hope ‘ta fuck you recorded what went into that…pile. What about your macros for the day? And the flautas in the fridge!?”
Murray emerged from the kitchen with an honest-to-God plate of real nachos.“Relax, pal. The recipe’s in the app. Anyway, I made you a wee plate of something too.”
Adam snorted and muttered the word “*’Recipe’*…” as if it had personally offended him. He wasn’t above accepting the bribe of nachos, however.
Marty stole a couple of them before he could shovel them away.
Daar grabbed a handful of the “Salad” first, as was his right as the “most biggest” Gaoian, but a thought seemed to strike him just as he was about to crunch into it.. “Hey…. Ain’t today the tenth?”
“Oh, yeah!” Akiyama flipped off the porn and hunted for the news channel.
Marty had to object to that. Turning off the bad movie just went against the whole spirit of Bad Movie Night. “Hey!”
“Give it a rest Kovač, you’ve had yer fun. They’re launching the USS San Diego tonight…”
Date Point: November 11y11m2w AV
Newport News, Virginia, USA, Earth
Major Owen Powell
“Sir, there’s something dreadfully wrong with the notion of a man who looks comfortable in his mess dress…”
Admiral Knight had the decency not to smirk, but it was a close-run thing.
“Practice makes perfect,” he replied. “It helps if you relax.”
“It helps if the bloody thing fits.”
“Quite. You really should take more care to ensure that it does, Powell. This won’t be the last little shindig I drag you to.”
“…Aye, sir.”
“Oh, buck up!” Knight said, not unkindly. “This is a much different affair to the hull launch party.”
Powell didn’t let his retort of ’I bloody well hope so!’ reach his lips. The hull launch party had been torture, schmoozing a variety of well-connected senior officers, politicians and wealthy guests for the sake of bandaging whatever damage his credibility might have suffered in the wake of the NOVA HOUND final report.
If Rylee hadn’t been there to figuratively hold his hand, he might well have caused several scandals. As it was, they’d deported themselves well then departed the very moment that decorum permitted.
This time, she literally held his hand, just for a second. Like Knight, she managed to seem suspiciously comfortable in her mess dress even though no amount of poise, confidence and familiarity could ever quite compensate for the unglamorous but sadly mandatory ankle-length skirt.
Still. The temperature was more pleasant. The hull launch party had been crammed into a convention hotel overlooking the harbor, or rather the carefully constructed jump cradle in the harbor. *USS San Diego*’s hull had been assembled at Ceres where they could make best use of microgravity and forcefield generators, then jumped to Newport News for systems fitting and preparation. She’d jumped into the cradle with millimeter tolerances, and then lowered gently into the water.
It seemed odd and anachronistic to design a spaceship to handle a water landing, but…
This time, the party was along the waterline in a huge pavilion, and as far as Powell was concerned, Virginia at this time of the year was about the perfect temperature. He wasn’t sweating or red in the face from overheating, he didn’t feel lumpen and crude or lumbering…
He felt pretty good. Really, if his jacket had just been generous enough in the shoulder and waist then everything would have been just fine.
Still. He’d have given anything to be back in the hotel room, with Rylee and without the uniforms. She was a sympathetic ear on the whole subject of mess dress too, especially as it pertained to long and unflattering skirts. “I still say SOR should have its own mess dress,” she said. “It’d be good for unit cohesion.”
“Oh aye. Instead of a nightmare of uncomfortable clothing I have to put up with a couple of times a year, I’d have a solid four years of paperwork trying to sort that all out,” Powell agreed, affecting a tone of voice as if the suggestion was entirely reasonable and straightforward.
Rylee had a soft spot for being snarked though. “You do so love paperwork.”
“I’m champin’ at the fookin’ bit.”
She made an amused noise in her nose and looked around the party. “We’d better go mingle,” she said. “Let the flag officers do things way above our heads.”
“Oh goodness me, no,” Knight said. “No, General Tremblay and I are going to get quite drunk and stay out of the way.”
“See? Lofty affairs beyond the like of us mere mortals,” Rylee gave the admiral a smile, and Powell a wink, and led the way toward…
Well, he wasn’t sure. She seemed to orbit the event without ever meeting any part of it at anything more than a tangential angle. Meet, smile, say hi, share a pleasantry, pass on by while towing him safely behind her.
“I thought we were supposed to mingle…?” He asked at last.
“We are. You don’t stop and talk to people when you’re mingling!”
“…Well, fook me. I’ve been doin’ it wrong all this time, then?”
“Oh yeah!” Rylee nodded. “They invented the term ’social butterfly’ for a reason, you know. Land lightly, and never for long.”
She did just that, guiding him adroitly through the steps of a dance he didn’t know until they were finally able to get a moment alone leaning on the railing overlooking the water and the state-of-the-art warship at anchor.
“I gotta tell ya,” she said, sipping her champagne, “I’ll feel way safer flying under the aegis of that ship.”
“I’ve had too much on my plate to really pay attention,” Powell confessed. “She’s built for formation defense?”
Rylee grinned. “*Aye,*” she said, imitating his accent and earning a roll of his eyes. “Huge-ass forcefield emitters with huge-ass cooling systems and huge-ass reactors to power them. Plus point defence, interceptor missiles, flares… If she performs as promised then anything in formation with her should benefit from her protection.”
“Including Firebirds.”
She turned and leaned on one elbow. “…Worried for me, Owen?”
“I know the numbers. We’ve lost more aircrew and sailors to this war than SOR. Bloody hellfire, we damn near lost you, remember?” He indicated her ribbon bar where the Air Force Cross held pride of place, though it was only there because she’d respectfully and quietly declined the Medal of Honor.
Operation NOVA HOUND had been a blooding for every branch of humanity’s growing space-based military. It had been a legendary day but even among all those stories, the moment when Rylee had literally taken a bullet for the SOR stood out. They all owed her their lives.
Rylee always got uncomfortable whenever it was mentioned. She looked back out at the ship and sipped her champagne.
“…You know Semenza’s retiring?” she asked, suddenly.
“Your WSO? Why? Job’s not done yet.”
“That’s what I said. But… well, he’s met the love of his life, apparently. Gonna settle down on Cimbrean, raise some kids.”
“That’d make me want to protect ‘em.”
“Mm.” She sipped her drink again. “That’s what I said.”
“And?”
“And he gave me a hug and said we could still work together on that. He’d raise them right and …I’d protect them, he said.” She sighed. “He called me a hero. You’d think after we worked together so long he’d know better…”
She caught the look on Powell’s face and the way he folded his arms, and gave him a stern look. “I know what you’re thinking, and don’t you dare say it.”
“Alright. Different question, then.” Powell said. She turned and listened. “What brought this melancholy on?”
Rylee shrugged, and looked back out at the USS San Diego.
“…I guess I’m just tense,” she said after a while. “Things are going so well… *Caledonia*’s back in action, we’ve got the San Diego now, the 946th is at full strength, the SOR is expanding… we’re gaining power and strategic footing with every day.”
“And that makes you tense?”
“Yeah,” she nodded, and finished her champagne. “Call me a pessimist, but… I can’t help but wonder when the other shoe’s gonna drop.”
++0022++: <Satisfaction>
++0014++: Good news?
++0022++: A report from ++0020++ the Discarded have implemented some of the manufacturing processes they were sent.
++0008++: Successfully? Maybe they aren’t as mindless as I thought.
++0022++: Their ‘swarm-of-swarms’ will number a million ships before long.
++0014++: <Troubled> I am still worried by this. Our objective in suppressing deathworld species has always been to minimize galactic instability…
++0019++: There was a consensus.
++0014++: But not a unanimous one.
++0008++: <Rebuke> Enough. You cast your vote and were in the minority. Respect that.
++0014++: Yes, Eight.