Date Point: 12y AV HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Major Owen Powell
“Thoughts?”
Burgess checked his tablet. “By Gaoian standards, his performance is incredible. In fact in some areas, his performance is incredible by human standards.”
“Oh aye?”
“Hell yeah! Four paws, lotsa traction and those long back muscles? He can cart-pull like a bulldozer. He can’t haul ass for distance, though.”
Powell rubbed his jaw as he considered Daar, who was panting in the water feature on the obstacle course, having flung himself in there as soon as he was given leave. It was a popular spot for all the Gaoians—where humans could sweat away their workout, Gaoians were adapted for a much colder planet, and only really lost temperature through their ears and nose. They overheated easily, which sharply limited their endurance—not an ideal trait in a serviceman as far as Powell was concerned but one they had been able to adapt for in the Whitecrests.
He took the tablet from Burgess and considered the data. Daar was in many ways a very different creature to the Whitecrests. He was stronger by a huge margin and shared with Burgess a degree of embarrassment about his own intelligence, while the Whitecrests approached intelligence with the same kind of fierce competition that the Beef Trio felt towards heavy weights.
“They only have the one like him,” he commented, reading the statistics.
And there was the rub: With the Whitecrests they had enough men to develop new doctrines. Daar, however, was just one man and that meant finding room for him in what they already had.
And the HEAT, frankly, just didn’t need him. He just wasn’t physically capable of conditioning to wear a MASS, but his talents would be wasted wearing the Gaoian version which was a much lighter and higher-tech thing built around forcefields and smart fabric with profile-blurring metamaterials and nanite-based camouflage that could reprogram on the fly to reflect its surroundings. Regaari had demonstrated the suits when they had first arrived and left Powell thoroughly impressed, and determined to get some of that tech sent to C&M Systems for installation on the next generation of EV-MASS.
Daar could, on four-paw, carry a Protector’s load but he couldn’t easily stand upright under it, which meant he couldn’t fight. He was more comfortable with a Defender’s gear but would be a sitting duck without the MASS, and every single one of the Aggressors outstripped him in combatives. Powell hadn’t tangled with him yet but knew beyond any doubt at all that it would have been a quick and conclusive duel. He had the skills and the ability to use them, that was plain to see: What he lacked was appropriate practice. Maybe with a bit more training…
But, no. Daar just wasn’t going to fit in the HEAT, which was a tragic thing to say of an intelligent and exceptional specimen with useful political connections.
Which only left the JETS, around which there remained a lingering aroma of stigma. The HEAT didn’t think the brother unit was second-rate at all thanks to Murray and Firth’s glowing endorsements of Coombes and Walsh, but outside of the SOR there was still a miasma of historic failure, accompanied by uncharitable whispers from the candidates in the Huntsville pipeline that Walsh was a washout settling for less.
Bruised egos after he’d beaten the pants off all of them, Powell guessed, but he would have very much liked to catch somebody spreading that particular bit of gossip. They would have soon found themselves sharing the sentiment with Sergeant Arés, who’d had a hand in devising the JETS training regime.
Walsh himself certainly didn’t seem to think there was anything “settle for less” about it. This was a man who had already made the grade for HEAT, and now he had even been heard to grudgingly admit he was finding the JETS course ’a good challenge’.
The question was, what role would Daar play in the JETS? The mission statement mandated deployment to high-end deathworlds. If they sent him somewhere with microlife as vicious as Earth’s…
Well, the man to ask was standing right in front of him. “Arright, opinion time and don’t fookin’ sugar-coat it for me,” he said. “If we sent him to Earth, how would he do?”
Burgess considered it with an uncomfortable, grit-toothed expression. “…We learned a lot from Ayma and Regaari’s tour,” he said. “Viruses ain’t a problem at all, they’re too choosy about DNA. The Gaoian immune system can handle most bacteria pretty okay but a staph infection and antibiotic-resistant strains would be a major fuckin’ problem. It’s fungal infections that’d be the big deal. Scratch his paw while he’s diggin’ in the dirt and he might lose an arm. On the flip side though, hell sir… you change your socks today?”
Powell snorted. ‘Take a Motrin, hydrate and change your socks’. Burgess was a medic, after all. The point was well-made however—fungal infections had had plenty of impact on human servicemen over the centuries, and even if Athlete’s Foot was a vastly more serious complaint in a Gaoian than in a human the fact was that any man in the field was going to be taking disease-prevention steps. Daar’s would just have to be more diligent.
“Arright. So you think he could hack it?”
“With care, yeah. Might increase the medical supplies he carries but if he’s careful then I don’t see no reason Daar couldn’t handle Earth. But, uh, we should probably, uh, talk with his Clan before we do. I think Daar maybe glosses over some of the details when he writes home….”
“He’s an adventurous sort.”
“Yeah. I bet some pressure from his Clan will sober him up. But,” Burgess added, “I still don’t doubt he can do it. I just…we need to maybe scare him straight, yeah? He ain’t dumb but he’s got an ego and he really can’t afford that, not on Earth.”
“Hmm. I reckon if you and Sergeant Kovač put your heads together you can put a healthy fear of Mother Earth into him.”
Burgess grinned. “Oh yeah. Couple’a Gaoian tissue samples, a sample of Tinea Cruris, and…”
“Tinea Cruris?”
“Jock Itch, sir.”
Powell chuckled. “Pair that with the daily bathing…” Yet another way Gaoians were slightly canine.
“Ayup. He’ll get it, sir. I’ll see to that.”
“Good lad.” Powell handed back the tablet feeling inwardly pleased. He placed enormous trust in his Protectors, and they were worthy of it. If they were optimistic, so was he. And if Daar could handle Earth…
He could handle anywhere.
Date Point: First Contact Day, 12y AV
Light freighter ’My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon’, Entering Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches
Dog Wagner
“I’m just saying, it was a shitty fuckin’ disguise, brother! Ain’t no Chehnash if he shakes the deck like that when he walks.”
On Dog’s screen, Nofl spread his hands delicately. Dog had called forward to lambast the little gray bastard the moment they were within superluminal wake range of Cimbrean and had waved politely to the system’s watchdog, the Gaoian strike ship Racing Thunder.
“Dog, Dog, Dog. I never met him myself. How was I supposed to know? His reputation said Chehnash, so…”
“Oh, so you didn’t fuckin’ vet your courier?”
”How was I supposed to? The Contact on Perfection went dark immediately after the Hunter attack over there. Nobody’s heard from them in more than a year. They were probably eaten.”
“There are other fuckin’ contacts, brother. Thousands of the fuckers.”
”Oh yes!” Nofl nodded agreeably. “Yes, yes, and they’re all scrambling to fill the void that The Contact has left. It’s all very… unstable.”
Dog rubbed his stubble. “More unstable than sending me to meet a Jamaican whose idea of a Chehnash disguise is fuckin’ Sith robes and some springy stilt boot things? Brother, that guy’s scary.”
”He delivered the package, didn’t he? …What’s a Jamaican? I thought you said he’s human.”
“Brother, I don’t even have the fuckin’ time to explain Jamaica. They’re the humans other humans think are oddballs.”
Nofl quirked his head and blinked slowly. Corti did that when they were being consciously patient. ”But he did deliver the package.”
Dog relented and sighed. Even he wasn’t really sure why he was venting over his unnerving encounter with ’Dread’. The guy had just left him with a pervasive sense of being creeped out that he needed to be rid of. He picked up his paddle-ball on the grounds that it might just annoy the tiny Area 51-lookin’ fuckstick and nodded grudgingly. “Yeah, yeah. All professional, too. I got it right here.”
”And he didn’t ask what was in it?”
“Don’t think that guy’s much interested in anything more than bein’ angry at fuckin’ everything, brother…” Dog looked up as his room chimed. “…Okay, we’re about twenty out. I better go be all captainly. You get your skinny gray ass up to Armstrong, though how the blue fuck yer gonna smuggle this package back down dirtside is beyond me. CCS border force have got the tightest fuckin’ pucker I ever heard of.”
”They’re only really interested in jump beacons. Which makes sense, I suppose: They don’t want Hunters to get past the shield.”
“Shit, no.”
”Trust me, the border is much more permeable for everything that isn’t a jump beacon”
“Hey, yer the one takin’ the risk brother. I just went and picked up yer mail. I’ll see you ASAP, and remember; you pay first.”
“Yes, yes, yes…”
Date Point: First Contact Day 12y AV
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Earth
General Martin Tremblay
Rogers Arena had a small monument installed outside nowadays to commemorate the Hunter attack. It was a small and unassuming testament to what was arguably the most significant event in human history, but Tremblay rather liked it. To this day, the world didn’t quite seem to know how to react to the revelation of humanity’s status as the most arguably dangerous things alive. A conservative little abstract piece fit that global sense of bemusement perfectly.
Something important had happened here and everybody knew it, but how important? People still worked in call centers and retail, still drove Fords and Toyotas, still drank Budweiser, still prayed and cheated on each other and…
Looking around, it was hard to see anything other than the monument that was different about the arena. Okay, so the LED boards had been replaced by holographic emitters maybe… but that was about it. You had to look pretty hard to see the ways in which the world was different twelve years on. Good fridges—the ones built by Byron Group subsidiaries—had stasis fields installed so that once they were cold they halted the flow of time and massively extended the life of the groceries, but they still looked like a fridge. The air was cleaner now that more a nd more cars were running on electricity and that electricity was being generated from high-atmosphere collection fields that never suffered from a cloudy day, but power cables and electrical substations were still power cables and electrical substations.
It was all… subtle. A man could blink, and be forgiven for not noticing the difference when his eyes opened. The world kept on doing its thing, and thus First Contact Day was a minor ceremony nowadays.
One day, hopefully, it would be remembered more fervently. People didn’t know how important that day had really been: they didn’t know how precarious mankind’s position was, and how the wakeup call of the Rogers Arena attack might be the only reason Earth was not already a burning nuclear wasteland.
For now though, microphones were still microphones and the four of them on the lectern in front of the PM looked not much different from the ones that had confronted his ten predecessors… too bad they weren’t facing a man of any real caliber.
The Right Honorable Philippe Martel was not Tremblay’s favorite politician. He wasn’t a leader at all but a kind of human chihuahua, so media-whipped that he reflexively checked over his shoulder at the first faint whiff of a scandal. He was the premier purely because his party had found him to be pathologically averse to controversy, and the voters found him inoffensive.
Tremblay found him ineffectual, and now was not a time for ineffectual. The world needed leaders more than ever, not political animals who was less inclined produce a concrete commitment than the average stone was to produce poetry.
Thus the usual harmless sound bites about “historic moment” this and “changed the world” that, which Tremblay was enduring as he sat anonymous and forgotten off to one side in his dress uniform with nothing to do except look composed and attentive and dream of his No. 5 dress and actual productivity.
He didn’t even have the pleasure of driving himself. He’d have murdered for the chance to put his foot down and listen through ’Back in Black’ on his way back up to Scotch Creek, but nope. He had a staff car and a helicopter instead.
But it was important that somebody should be there who fully grasped just how incredibly important FC Day was.
He escaped as quickly as he diplomatically could and endured the drive back to the airport in bored silence, staring distractedly out of the window and musing on how it might play out if the Hunters ever did find a way to attack Earth in earnest.
Special Agent Darcy was waiting in the helicopter. He gave her a tired, slow blink then hauled himself in and fastened his seatbelt. “You really prefer the personal meeting, don’t you?”
“Yup. But you were on my way anyway,” she said and shook his hand. “Gabriel Arés asked me to talk with some of the candidates to replace him. Get the measure of them.”
Tremblay nodded unhappily. Arés’ retirement to an advisory position after his fall was a blow. Not a serious one—there were plenty of possible men and women who could take over the job just fine—but it would still have been better to retain the incumbent while his replacement was brought up to speed. Cimbrean was strategically vital, and its colonial security force was more on the front line than most of them knew. Arés was a strategic asset that Tremblay would have preferred not to lose right now, especially because he was originally American.
The Brits were keen to install one of their own, and given that the colony technically recognized King George VII as their head of state they really had the deciding vote. Governor-General Sir Jeremy Sandy had yet to weigh in but Tremblay suspected he cared less for the politics than for the result. Sir Jeremy was a leader.
President Sartori had asked the Foreign Secretary to lean on them to expand the pool to include more Americans, incentivized by some better deals for the colony’s exports flowing through the commercial jump array to Chicago, the British PM was prevaricating on the subject, goodness only knew what Martel’s thoughts were, the Chinese and Russians had both voiced “concerns” about Cimbrean’s transatlantic nature and questioned when they would have a say in its operation or else a colony of their own, their concerns in turn were being balmed with minor concessions and political favors…
In short, billions of dollars and more power than the average person even knew was possible had been sent rustling agitatedly through the political long grass all around purely because the Gaoians hadn’t made their commune wheelchair-accessible.
“Are you pushing for an American in that seat?” he asked.
Darcy shrugged. “I don’t make policy, I advise.”
“You must have some opinion.” The helicopter jolted as it was towed out onto the concrete.
“The president and my superiors all seem to think that Arés caved to British sensibilities too quickly.” Darcy told him. “They think he should have encouraged CCS to be armed in case of an invasion if for no other reason.”
“And you think…?” Darcy was even harder to pin down than Martel, though in her case inscrutability was a sign of competent composure rather than Twitter-fearing meekness.
The question was met with a disinterested shrug. “I don’t see what difference it’d make,” she said. “Cops aren’t there to fight alien invasions, they’re there to keep the peace.”
“Finally, somebody speaks sense… It’s good to see you by the way, even if you do have a habit of showing up when you’re least expected.”
Darcy actually grinned. “I do have hobbies…”
“Ones you can indulge in on the road?”
“Oh yeah. You should see my coloring book.”
Tremblay chuckled. “So your hobbies are relaxing ones. Coloring book, green tea…”
“Huh. How’d you know that one?”
“Kevin Jenkins. You know he won’t mind if you ask for tea whenever you visit him, right?”
“And deprive him of a chance to use that big commercial espresso machine of his?”
“You know what he’s like. If he sets to making you a cup of tea, it’ll be the best damn tea you ever had.”
Darcy laughed. “Right. And ruin me for other tea forever? No thanks.”
Tremblay gave her a curious look as they lurched off the ground and gained altitude. “You’re in a good mood today…”
She looked around “Is there any wood in here to knock on?”
“‘Fraid not…”
“Well… don’t look now, but things are going pretty well. You heard about Vedregnenug’s little cups game?”
Tremblay snorted. “Hah! Yeah. Nadeau said he had a hard time keeping a straight face when Vedreg asked if he’d ever heard of a shell corporation.”
Darcy smiled. “It got onto the pre-approval list for a limited term lease of the system shield’s assembly schematics for testing reasons.”
“So they haven’t actually released one to us?”
“The lease is supposed to be for evaluation purposes and it’s all under close guard so that whoever’s testing it can’t duplicate the emitter prior to receiving a full license.” Darcy crossed her legs demurely and sat back looking smug. “Of course, if the testing ship were raided by privateers…”
Tremblay nodded, seeing why she had let herself aboard his helicopter. “You want me to send in our HEAT Gaoians.”
“Exactly. The Racing Thunder could get them in and out quick and quiet. As far as the Guvnurag are concerned the emitter blueprint was snatched by Gaoian pirates, Vedreg’s little shell company declares bankruptcy because it can’t afford the fines…”
“And we get our system shield.” Tremblay nodded. “I like it. Think I’ll come on over to Cimbrean with you and discuss it with Knight…”
Darcy smiled again and produced the coloring book from her handbag. “It should,” she said, “be a productive trip…”
First Contact Day, 12y AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Sister Myun
Myun was under no illusions about whether or not she was anonymous in a crowd: She wasn’t. She was half a foot taller than any of her Sisters and almost as bulky as a strong male. Being one of only six thousand Gaoians on the planet, and the one that anybody who visited the Commune saw first just completed the absolute certainty that she couldn’t go anywhere in Folctha without being recognized.
But if she’d learned anything from watching TV, it was that a strange kind of anonymity came just from walking confidently as if nothing remotely unusual was happening. Look busy, focused and authoritative and the attention of others would just skip past. People—humans especially—noticed suspicious or shifty movements instantly. They were wired to look for something out of place. If you pretended you were in place, then…
That was the theory, at least. She’d never actually put that theory into practice, but it seemed to work. She walked confidently from the commune to the right address, marched in through the front door, dropped the package she was carrying into the right mailbox and lifted the flag with a bored expression, and then returned to the commune via the kebab shop on Tennyson Street. Just a Sister out running some errands and grabbing a snack.
Besides: Kebab meat.
Kebab meat and getting to do a good deed, and put something into practice she’d seen on TV?
That was a good day.
Date Point 12y AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’. Uncharted System, Near 3Kpc Arm
Julian Etsicitty
“So yeah, uh… Happy First Contact Day everyone, this is the survey log for our fourth planet. We aren’t gonna stay on this one. It’s a terrestrial world, right temperature, looks mostly pretty good down there, but the Corti classification algorithm is turning out to be useless again.”
Julian cleared his throat and took a sip of water. It seemed kinda stupid to be recording these logs: Nobody could listen to them until they got back to Earth anyway, which was months away. The idea was supposed to be to record events as they happened but in that case why not just give him a word processor and tell him to write a journal?
Xiù thought it was a publicity thing. Allison had pointed out that if that was the case, they’d have a jump array on board to send the mail back instantly.
“Why don’t we have a jump array, anyway?” he asked, the question suddenly occurring to him. Across the hab, Allison looked up from the technical manual she was studying.
“Allied Extrasolar Command vetoed it,” she said.
“They did? Why?”
“Something about how if we’re eaten by Hunters or whatever, they’d be able to use the Array to get past the system shield and invade Earth or Cimbrean…” she shrugged. “Cheery thought, ain’t it?”
“What about Armstrong station?”
“Dude, we can jump back there any time we like,” Allison pointed out.
“Exactly! Why not give us a jump array that links there and we can send updates every day?”
Allison just shrugged and went back to her reading. “Ask Clara and Kevin.”
Julian turned back to the camera. “…Anyway. We’ve named this new planet ’Curie’. According to the Corti algorithm it’s a nice class nine… until we tried to land. Then *Misfit*’s radiation hazard alarm went off, and the rating got bumped up to an eleven. Turns out the planet’s magnetic field is kinda on the weak side and maybe getting weaker, so there’s a lot of solar particles hitting the upper atmosphere and that’s creating lots of secondary effects… which is something that happens on Earth too, but this was way, way more so. A couple of orders of magnitude more.”
“We landed successfully but the background count at ground level was still as high as you’d find in a uranium mine – not terrible, but you wouldn’t want to stay for long and it sure ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. It’s a nice place: pretty snowy mountains, these big fern tree things, lots of interesting critters, but with the radiation we figured it was best to just move on. I’m not sure, but I think that planet might not be habitable too much longer anyway. That much solar wind hitting it has got to be blowing the atmosphere away…”
He cleared his throat and took a sip of water. “So yeah, after Lucent, Curie is kinda disappointing but we’ve still got four strong leads ahead of us. Here’s to the next one, I guess…”
He toasted the camera with his water bottle then turned off the feed.
“You’re turning into a showman, you know,” Allison commented, swiping right on her tablet to ‘turn’ a page.
“Been talking to Xiù about it.” Julian nodded toward the bunks, where Xiù was curled up asleep. She mumbled something and turned over on hearing her name, but didn’t wake.
He was definitely looking forward to the next time they could make planetfall and synchronize their sleeping cycles for a while. The two-awake-one-asleep system they had to use during flight was nowhere near as much fun—they’d switched the clock to Cimbrean time and used the extra couple hours a day as “triple time” to do stuff together but he was starting to think longingly of Minnesota. He didn’t get enough time nowadays to just sit and watch the girls.
“Right.” Allison swiped through another page, much too soon to have read it properly.
“…You okay?”
She looked up in the suddenly attentive way of somebody whose attention had been hauled violently back to here and now. “Hmm?”
“You okay?” Julian repeated.
“…Yuh. Think I’m goin’ a little stir-crazy though.” Allison put her book down, stretched and yawned.
“Did you exercise yet?”
“Ugh.” She threw her head back, stared at the ceiling for a moment then rubbed her face and stood. “Okay, yeah. Maybe that’ll help.”
Julian nodded and activated the quiet field around the bunks for Xiù’s benefit. Clara had installed it for them during their quick stop at Armstrong Station and it had made a huge difference—both he and Xiù were light sleepers, and wrapping the beds in a protective cocoon of silence had dramatically improved things for both of them. It made it much easier to do the noisy stuff around the hab too.
Allison of course could hibernate through a hurricane, flat on her back and snoring. Even as an abductee she’d had somewhere safe to sleep where discovery and life-or-death questions of survival hadn’t been an issue.
She checked the exercise schedule Xiù had prepared for them, then folded the couch back into the wall and unfolded the treadmill instead. Julian hit the weights and put his music on, on the grounds that Allison honestly didn’t seem to care what was playing, so he may as well please himself.
“So what’s up next?” she asked, once she’d hit her stride. “We’ve had giant bugs and radiation… man-eating venus fly traps?”
“Yurgh. Bad memories there. I ever tell you about the mangrabber vines on Nightmare?”
“I don’t think so?”
“They’re fuckin’…The vines are super-stretchy, like bungee cord, and they pump sap into them to extend towards a nearby warm thing… like, say, a sleeping Julian that picked the wrong place to bed down for the night. And they’re covered in these backwards-facing hook spines like a bramble, so they tangle something up, haul it back to the base, it dies of thirst and the rotting meat fertilizes the soil.”
“Ew.”
“Yeah. Getting out of that one the first time scratched me to shit and blunted my knife.”
“Hope we don’t run into anything like that…” The treadmill picked up a gear. “Imagine if they tangled up the ship!”
“Yeah.” Julian grunted as he started a set of leg extensions. “Here’s hoping the next planet’s nice and boring…”