Date Point: 12y 2m AV
Given Man Lodge, Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
Yan Given-Man
Yan should have been feeling better.
They were into the third moon of the lodge. He and his fellow Given Men had put in good hard work and repaired the huts after a year of neglect, which had done a lot to burn out some of the simmering omnipresent hatred of everything that was their annual curse.
And then they had filled the lodge hut with heat, steam, sweat, the scent of roasting meat…and the magic smoke.
There had been initiations. Tarek and two others had undergone the rites (the secrets of which were among those things that Yan fervently hoped his great-niece’s young father would never learn) and had their adult names taken from them. There had been feasting, hunting, playful fighting, serious fighting.
…And the Magic Smoke.
They had traded stories, traded news, traded knowledge. Yan had shared Sky-Thinker’s innovative new weapon and they had tried their hands at building some. With those new bird-spears they had brought home a real prize, a great stamping Manak.
Manak-hunting was usually far too dangerous. The beasts could knock a man flying with a swipe of their great tusked heads, or crush him underfoot. This time the Given Men had crashed and hooted through the trees above a solitary male and maddened it with bird-spears. It had charged at their trees and been left frustrated as they evaded its reach, then grown panicked as more and more sharpened shafts had pierced its back, until finally they had given it an opening to escape.
It had charged desperately in that direction…and off a low cliff. With its legs and back broken, the honor of striking the blow that killed it had fallen to Yan.
Its meat was now roasting over the fire, its hide was tanning on the rack, and shreds of its jerky were curing high in the rafters among those beautiful…
Entrancing…
Thought-provoking curls…
…of Magic Smoke.
Yan sighed and relaxed as he took another deep breath from over the fire pit where the medicine roots were twisting and crackling as they writhed and smoked off among the coals.
The smoke was the Given Men’s secret. He suspected that the root was probably the same one that the women used to make the magic powder, but if it was he had no idea how they made it… and no desire to know. That was a woman’s magic, the magic of giving and life. Men were killers and takers, there was no room for either side to use the other’s magic. That was the way of things.
Heh. Although, men could give good and hard too, in the right circumstances.
He became aware that he was trilling a soft laugh to himself. Even though they didn’t know the thought that had tickled him so, some of the others joined in and a lazy wave of merriment swept around the lodge.
“‘S good smoke…” Tarek managed. He leaned forward and waved his tongue through the thickest part of it then sat back with a sigh. “Makes me feel… soft…”
“Makes the anger go away…” somebody else said.
“Good smoke,” Yan echoed, nodding sagely.
He should have been feeling better. He was feeling better. But he should have been feeling betterer. More better. Whichever. There were nagging worries in the back of his head.
A lot of the Given Men had simply never shown up.
A few failed to show up every year, of course. Everybody died eventually after all, and if a sickness or bad fall didn’t get you then a yshek or a particularly wiley or lucky Werne might. But this time there were more men missing than not. That, combined with Tarek’s account of other tribes being hit, a long way from Yan’s own…
Yan finally identified the feeling that was itching away in the back of his head: It was the feeling of being hunted.
And having realized that, he knew that it was time for his Vision.
He stood up a little unsteadily and coughed as he inhaled some of the denser smoke that was coiling around the lodge’s low roof. “It’s… time,” he managed.
The Given Men looked at one another solemnly, then stood up and joined him.
The Vision was the most important part of a Given Man’s retreat, a repeat on male terms of the Rite Of Manhood he had undergone years ago.
He had killed. He had feasted. He had taken his fill of the pleasures of the world… and now he would See.
A Vision always began slowly. Each man grabbed a stout stick from where they rested against the lodge wall and formed a ring around the fire. They looked to Yan to start the dance and calculate whether they should move left or right first, and then began to ram the sticks slowly, heavily and steadily into the packed earth underfoot, until they settled into a strong shared beat.
Then came the song, a steady deep drone from all of their throats that wavered and clashed and changed until they were all holding the same note, or a pleasing harmonic of it… and then they started to move.
Step forward, slam, step back, slam, turn to one side and raise the stick to crack! sharply against first one neighbor’s, then the other’s.
It was a simple rhythm, underpinned by a simple wordless song that each man changed and contributed to as he saw fit… but it was exhausting. That was the point. Within a minute their hands were stinging. Not long thereafter their arms were growing sore as the dance got faster and more physical, testing their endurance.. In the sweltering humidity of the lodge there was nowhere for the sweat to go so it ran off them and soaked their fur to their backs.
The heady blend of motion, heat, magic smoke and exertion was exactly what they were after. It quickly burned the conscious thought out of them and left only themselves with no barriers up, no walls between themselves and their experience until even the detached watchful places in their minds dissolved away into nothing….
Yan needed no prompting—he knew when the time was right. There was a skin by the fire full of Ketta sap and the juice of medicine root. It was bitter, astringent and foul but he drank it like it was water then stepped back and let the universe overtake him.
And he Watched.
Date Point: 12y2m2w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space
Lt. Col. Claude Nadeau
Nadeau had found common ground with Vedregnenug over a shared interest in art, and the two of them had held some fascinating conversations over the last few months. Guvnurag color theory in particular differed wildly from that of humans, but that was probably inevitable when dealing with a species that had pentachromatic vision.
It was rarer that they got to discuss military matters. It wasn’t a field in which Vedreg was knowledgeable, and he found violence distasteful. On this occasion, however, his interest was piqued.
“And nobody was hurt?”
“As I understand it, the worst any of them would have suffered would be irritated eyes, a cough and perhaps some bruising. Maybe some light scratches from the shieldbreaker rounds.” Nadeau shrugged. “Major Powell seemed impressed, and what little I know of his service record says that if he’s impressed then the Gaoians pulled off something special.”
“Major Powell was pleasant to me, but he always managed to make me feel afraid…” Vedreg rumbled. Nadeau decided that the motes of light racing down his flanks were signalling a mixture of respect and intimidation coupled with a genuine but futile desire to like the man.
It was amazing just how much information those chromatophores could convey even when one couldn’t see all the subtleties they had to offer.
“He’s an intense man. That’s normal for combat arms.”
“Every human I have ever met has been ’intense’,” Vedreg replied.
“I guess we would be, yeah…” Nadeau acknowledged. “But, we got the football blueprint. Lewis and Lee are playing around with it now, working it into the coltainer design. How’s the shell company?”
“Bankrupt. The fines for permitting the theft of such a valuable technology…” Vedreg pulsed smug satisfaction. “When they come to arrest the founder and president they will discover that he never really existed, but of course that is all much too late. The trail will never lead back to me, nor to my herd.”
“Nicely done.”
“Thank you.”
“What will you do now? Do you have anything more to contribute to the project?”
“Not to this one, no,” Vedreg’s flanks rippled through an uncertain rainbow. “But I have something else to begin thinking on now.”
“Oh?”
“My species is riddled with implants, Lieutenant-Colonel. “They have become as ubiquitous in our society as clothing is in yours… I think the time has now come to think about how I might resolve that problem.”
Date Point: 12y2m3w AV
Alien Quarter, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Nofl
Nofl’s everyday work, alas, did not involve his magnum opus. Mostly it was honest work funded by a grant from the Folctha Ministry of Housing and Immigration, tracking cross-species disease vectors and possible human contamination of the Alien Quarter.
Which meant unlimited access to human tissue samples, which was fascinating of course, but it was no Cruezzir.
Cruezzir had made him and destroyed him, and equally quickly in both cases. He’d gone from being the researcher who developed an effectively perfect regenerative medicine to being indirectly responsible for unleashing the so-called “Human Disaster” on the galaxy in only two short years, and nobody’s reputation survived a history like that.
Hence why he was counting antibodies in a tiny and frankly primitive lab on a backwater in the Far Reaches, rather than holding his rightful place as Professor of Regenerative Medicine at the Grand Central Origin University.
He really ought to have been more bitter, but Corti weren’t supposed to do bitter. They weren’t supposed to do anything, emotionally speaking and yet ego, bitterness and ambition were rife.
Nofl’s concerns that this indicated the possibility that official Directorate thinking on the subject might not be completely supported by the empirical evidence would have probably cost him all the prestige that Cruezzir earned him in the long run anyway. But at least he’d have been in a position to exert some influence about those concerns, for a while.
His train of thought was interrupted by his doorbell chime, and he buzzed the visitor in with a simple command through his implants.
“…Goodness gracious me! Chief Arés! This is an unexpected pleasure!”
Arés was a small man by human standards, with shrewd dark eyes that fidgeted under his brow like iridescent black beetles as he limped into the room on his cane. He was looking good, Nofl congratulated himself. You couldn’t tell he’d suffered a near-fatal brain injury at all.
“Hola, Nofl.”
“And what brings you to my lab today? Ooh! Have you finally caved? Want me to take a look at that nerve at long last?”
Arés half-laughed in that breathy, nasal way that humans did when genuinely amused but not to any great degree. He prowled the lab looking with uncomprehending interest at Nofl’s projects, tapping his cane thoughtfully on the floor.
“Let’s say I might be more open to the idea today than I was a few weeks back,” he offered. “But that’s not why I’m here right now. I had an interesting delivery recently.”
“Oh really?”
“Cruezzir, Nofl. The real thing. Which was very welcome considering my condition…”
“You know, you are looking well…” Nofl complimented him, calculating furiously. Arés manner was light and friendly, but he had the strangest feeling that he was watching some kind of predatory beast stalk him and the pounce was coming any second.
“I had wondered if maybe you had synthesized some here in your lab, perhaps…” Arés looked around. “But you don’t seem to have any equipment like that.”
“Well…”
“So I find myself in a difficult situation. You see, I spoke with Myun.”
“Ah, now-”
Arés gestured to the door and two CCS officers joined them.
“Nofl. You’re under arrest on suspicion of smuggling,” he said. “Sorry. Do yourself a favor and don’t say a damn thing until your attorney’s present.”
Nofl sighed, and put down his tablet. “That’s more than fair. …Thank you, Chief.”
“Well, you did do me a favor.”
Nofl took the advice and didn’t say anything.
Date Point: 12y3m AV
BGEV-11 ’Misfit’, Deep Space, 3Kpc Arm
Xiù Chang
“This is new! What’s the occasion?”
Allison wasn’t one to mince words, especially when it came to food. Her query was an enthusiastic one though, and she slipped an arm around Xiù’s waist to lean over her shoulder and check the contents of the frying pan, smelling faintly but not unpleasantly of maintenance and hard work.
“Uh… your birthday?” Xiù asked.
“…That’s today?”
“Yup.”
“Huh.”
Xiù smiled sideways at her as Allison mulled over the news that she was a year older, then shrugged and kissed her cheek before throwing herself on the couch. “Well… cool! So what are we having?”
“Jamaican jerk chicken with rice and peas. I broke out that can of coconut milk and a lot of Thyme…” she opened the oven and showed off that the pan was full of two fat brown chicken breasts, glistening and covered in spices. “One whole breast for you.”
Allison sighed at the sight of it. Meat was something they had to ration quite carefully as it took up proportionately a lot of space in their stores, which were really starting to run low. The chicken situation was especially dire, and getting a whole breast to herself was a queenly treat. “God. You really do love me.”
“Yup!” Xiù beamed at her. “Wake Julian up?”
Allison nodded, kicked up to her feet and hit the touchscreen in the wall to bring up the hab controls and shut the field down.
This alone was enough to wake Julian, who shifted and looked up just from the sudden intrusion of cooking sounds into his quiet space. He gave her a stupid look with his hair sticking out at a crazy angle before he blinked and got his thoughts together. “…Hey.”
“Hey. Food’s ready.”
“Uh…? Oh. Yeah. Happy birthday.”
Allison kissed him. “I’d forgotten,” she admitted.
“I didn’t get you anything,” he joked, hauling himself out of the bunk. “Just couldn’t find the time to go shopping.”
This earned him a laugh, and Allison tidied his hair up for him. “Dummy.”
He grinned and gave Xiù a good-morning kiss as well before going for his shower.
The chicken was exactly as good as Xiù had hoped, though she and Julian were left to watch in suppressed envy as Allison took her time enjoying having a whole breast to herself, which was of course accompanied by a hint of enjoying herself at their expense.
“So… we got anything to do today?” he asked eventually, as she put the fork down on a clean plate.
Xiù looked pleased with herself. “Land.”
Allison blinked at her. “…That’s today too?”
“Yuh-huh.”
“Wow. Best girlfriend ever.”
Xiù blushed, but waved her down. “I can’t take credit for this one. Just good luck.”
Julian leaned over and unstuck his tablet from where he’d velcroed it to the wall. “Lemme see…”
Xiù shuffled over and watched as he brought up the sensor data and scrutinized the information on their destination planet. It would have been nice if the information came to them in the form of some kind of flashy animated GUI, but in fact what Julian was studying was a spreadsheet.
Still the right-hand column, which was programmed to change color depending on where the planet sat inside a range of values, was a friendly mix of greens and blue which meant that in many ways the world they were approaching was a close or near-identical match for Earth. The only amber in the whole list was the gravity, which was a still-not-unreasonable 1.2G.
“Looks good,” she commented.
“That gravity won’t be a problem?” Julian checked.
“No.” Xiù shook her head. “Not for modern ship propulsion and not for us. We’ll probably be a bit tired for a week or two, though.”
“Good exercise,” Allison said.
They got up and cleared their meal away, musing on what they might find on this new planet, then spent an hour checking over their equipment in the excursion room.
The suits had undergone some overhauls after Lucent. The white and high-vis yellow that had been deemed so appropriate for Mars was gone, replaced with an (allegedly) universal camouflage pattern that Julian had some vocal doubts about even with human eyes, let alone potential alien eyes for whom the scheme might be bright grurple or whatever
“Grurple” was his name for hues the human eye couldn’t see, and had made its way into their private lexicon alongside “Happyxhausted”, “Snudying” (studying while snuggling), “Compornsion” (like compersion, but for sex) and a few Gaori and Mandarin loan words.
Grurple or not, the hydrophobic and acid-resistant coating was going to be welcome if they needed to hit the red decon button again. Then there were the GR-1d rifles. These were the latest version too, after the two they’d had before had been ruined by the decon shower. Allegedly the updated version corrected some of the original’s design flaws and offered improved performance.
Things were maybe a little sharper, a little leaner. That seemed to be how the Byron Group operated, really—learn by doing—but it had Allison happy. She’d geeked out hard over some detail of the updated weapons, and had left Xiù nodding and smiling uncomprehendingly as she waxed enthusiastic about something arcane involving…a bus scope on the piccadilly rail? Something like that.
The upshot of it was that the gun had a camera on it, she’d followed that much and had consoled herself with knowing that Allison got similarly unfocused whenever Xiù broke out the movie trivia, linguistics jargon or Gung Fu terminology.
Which was fine. They didn’t need to really understand one another’s interests after all. Xiù didn’t get what it was that got Allison so fired up over guns, Allison somehow found wire-fu boring, and neither of them had any idea what Julian found so interesting about rocks.
They suited up ahead of the actual landing, having all had it hammered into them throughout their training that Misfit was at her most vulnerable during takeoff and landing—that was when things were most likely to go wrong and also the moment where, if they did go wrong, the consequences would land on them soonest. The excursion suits might not achieve anything but they couldn’t hurt, and they might just be the difference between life and death.
Still, Xiù preferred flying in just her sportswear. The suit was stuffy and restricting and made her hands clumsy as she ran them over *Misfit*’s controls and her seat slotted properly into place.
“Ready?” she asked.
”Ready!” Allison chirped.
Julian sounded in equally good cheer. ”Take it away, bǎobèi.”
“Alright. Dropping our bugout beacon…” the hull rang as a dose of compressed air drove a beacon microsat out of them to linger harmlessly among the uncharted star’s comet halo.
That done, she angled them in-system.
She had a good feeling about this one…
Date Point: 12y3m AV
The High Forest Village, Uncharted Class 12 planet, Near 3Kpc Arm
Vemik Sky-Thinker
“Yan’s back! Yan’s back!!”
The whole village flocked down the hill in a rush, summoned by both the shrill cry of the sentry boy and the slow thrum of his roaring-stone, the single strong beat that said “returning hunter”.
Yan was looking his usual self—burly, strong and swaggering, with the hair running down his back back to its usual bright scarlet blaze rather than the sickly pale orange he’d been sporting by the end of the winter. Vemik didn’t know what secrets the Given Men had that made their crests so red or made them grow so big and strong, and Yan had refused to share in his usual gruff, cryptic way.
He scooped up two of the children as he ambled up the slope, grinning as they hung from his shoulders. As he got closer though, Vemik detected a slightly forced quality to his good cheer. Whatever the Given Men got up to, it had left Yan worried.
Vemet saw it too. “He’s troubled…”
“Badly troubled,” Vemik agreed. “Things must be bad out there…”
Father and son shot each other a glance, then reached a mutual unspoken resolution to let Yan relax for a while before they broached the subject. He was usually so full of good cheer when coming back from his annual journey that to see him looking so tense was… worrying. And definitely a matter for the respected men of the tribe to discuss in private, when the opportunity presented itself.
As always there was a feast and playing, with the added joy this time of Yan being reunited with his great-niece, who couldn’t seem to resist grabbing his new-and-improved hair crest.
The baby was a whole series of mysteries that Vemik was trying his best to grapple with, only for one of the women to swoop in and rescue the infant from her father before he could…
Well, he wasn’t sure what they were so scared of. By and large it seemed to be a magic thing: Men Didn’t Look After Babies.
This was a shame in Vemik’s view, because he and the little one seemed to get along just fine. He carefully held her the same way the women did, rocked and made soft reassuring noises to her, and she rewarded him by turning those wide, barely-focused eyes on his face and trying to grab his crest, his ears or his finger. She had remarkably strong little fingers.
Sometimes, she’d even smile. And then a jealous woman would descend, muttering about ’sky-thinking strangeness’ or whatever other ache it was had rotted her belly. Quite why his interest as the child’s father was less acceptable than Yan’s interest as her great-uncle was another one of those mysteries that seemed infuriatingly unlikely to be solved.
Thank the Gods for the Singer, who was more than happy to indulge him some alone time with his daughter in the spice-tasting privacy of her hut.
Yan relaxed as the afternoon wore on, and his usual bluff smile returned. Pretty soon he was playing with the children, joking with the men, flirting with the women and playfully wrestled Yafek to the ground in a jovial show of just how prodigiously strong a Given Man should be.
Vemik never got the chance to ask him what had so badly affected his mood, however. The relaxed day was winding down and couples were sidling away toward huts in discrete pairs and they were definitely approaching the time when grabbing the Given Man and getting some answers would have been appropriate when a noise quite unlike any they had ever heard before shook the whole village.
Two loud slams, like a rock face collapsing or a stretched skin on the tanning rack being beaten with a stick, or maybe like thunder… but not exactly like any of those things. Just two deep, sharp bangs that echoed strangely off the rock walls around the High Forest.
They were still looking around and trying to decide what had made such an extraordinary noise when there was a shriek unlike anything Vemik had ever heard and something impossible caught the light of the setting sun down below them, out over the forest where the dead destroyer rested.
Vemik put a hand to his brow and squinted at it. It was… it could only be as big as a large hut. Bigger, even. But it hung in the air in a way that not even the most agile birds could have imitated, less like it was flying and more like it simply didn’t care for mundane things like the ground. It sat in the air in the same way that a r ock might, if rocks weren’t confined to the surface of the world.
The whole village stood up to watch it as it hung where it couldn’t, then dipped and vanished from sight among the trees.
There was a long, shocked silence before Yafek finally spoke.
“…Sky-Thinker?”
Vemik tried not to wilt. Now was not a time to look weak or cowardly in front of the other men.
“…Yes, Two-Moons?”
“Any thoughts?”
Vemik could only shake his head. “Not… I’ve never even dreamed of anything like-”
“What Sky-Thinker means,” Vemet interrupted, putting a kindly hand on his youngest son’s shoulders, “Is that we need to know more.”
Yan stood up. “Then let’s go,” he grunted, hefting his spear. “All of us.”
Julian Etsicitty
“So this is an Abrogator…”
Allison kicked its leg and swore violently. “Fucking…fuck! All this way and we find Big Hotel ripping some poor locals apart. God dammit!”
”Keep your guard up, baby,” Xiù advised. Ever since Lucent, the policy had been for her to remain in place at *Misfit*’s helm, where the ship’s sensors could maybe give them an early warning if anything hostile was heading their way.
“Right.” Allison turned around and scanned the tree line while Julian continued to pick over the gutted Abrogator.
“Weird…” he commented after a few seconds.
Xiù was watching over his helmet cam. ”Yeah.”
Allison didn’t stop watching the forest for trouble. “What?”
“The locals didn’t crack this bitch open the violent way, they opened the maintenance hatch. But then it looks like they hacked the inside apart with knives rather than undoing the connectors.”
He grabbed a severed and shredded length of hydraulic tubing, pinched the connector at its end, twisted it and took it apart to dangle the pathetic length of oily rubber in front of his helmet cam.
Allison glanced at it. “Shit, Misfit has components that look more high-tech than that. Is this really Hierarchy tech?”
“Guess hydraulics don’t change much even with millions of years of progress…” Julian mused. He dug a little higher in the Abrogator’s guts and came across something that looked much more promising. “Here we go. This could be its computer core, maybe. What do you think, Al?”
Allison handed him her rifle and took his place in the genocide machine’s innards. “…Maybe?” she agreed. “But I think it’s probably just the control unit for the hydraulics. Lemme see…”
There were several quiet minutes as she dug further into it before she emitted a low whistle.
Julian quirked his head. “Al?”
“Well, this is either something important or Big Hotel love to put swanky flashy lights on stuff for no good reason…” There was a sharp click and Allison emerged from the Abrogator’s innards with oily substances running unheeded off her suit’s omniphobic surface, and triumphantly holding up a black cube about the size of her fist.
“So the question is-” Julian began.
He was interrupted by Xiù, who had a thoroughly apprehensive note in her voice. ”Uh, guys? Misfit says there are heat signatures approaching…”
That got Allison on her feet instantly, drawing her gauss pistol. “Back to the ship?” She asked.
Julian nodded. “Yeah. Think you’re right.”
They’d barely gone three paces before Julian caught a flash of bright red moving low in a nearby tree, though he almost missed it in the gloom. He hissed sharply and Allison was at his side with her weapon raised.
“I can’t hardly see shit…” she grumbled.
“Turn your light on. If it’s the locals, maybe we’ll scare ‘em off…” Julian suggested.
“So much for the Prime Directive…”
A second later, Allison’s tactical flashlight banished the darkness entirely, and all around them a tribe of the biggest, strongest-looking monkeys Julian had ever thought of flinched backwards and brandished spears at them.
The biggest of them, with a crest as red as a Coke can and muscled like a silverback, tumbled down the tree and snarled at them, and Julian was suddenly acutely aware that the stab-proof material of their excursion suits was going to be no use at all in this case. That big one looked strong enough to just twist his head off.
“…Back to the ship,” Allison repeated slowly and softly. “Nice and slow.”
Vemik Sky-Thinker
Magic to make stone fly and to shoot blue fire. Magic to make blades walk and to poison the land. And now, magic to banish the darkness as if the sun had come up. Vemik turned away and scrubbed at his eyes to banish the floating purple-green blob in the middle of his field of vision.
Beside him, Yan crashed down the tree and bared his teeth at the strangers.
There had never been strangers so… strange, either. They looked almost like People, but their legs were too long and too straight, their bearing too tall and upright.
And their tools, their clothing, the odd objects in their hands, all had too much in common with the nearby corpse of the destroyer. Right down to the clear ice or quartz substance over their faces and the peculiar sheen of the axe on the taller one’s hip.
Yan had clearly arrived at the same conclusions and like a true Given Man he was angry. He looked about ready to tear their heads off in fact, and the strangers were so slender that he might just manage it. They certainly seemed to be scared of him, because they backed away slowly, speaking to each other in worried tones and words Vemik either couldn’t hear properly, or couldn’t understand.
They were about to get vengeance for all the dead villages, all of Vemik’s dead sisters and cousins.
But…
Vemik paused for no longer than the time between his own heartbeats, and would later struggle to explain the full convoluted river of insights that caused him to spring down the tree and throw himself in front of the enraged Given Man before he could lead the charge. He was not an instant too late—rather than being bowled over by Yan’s charge, he instead brought him up short.
Yan was in no mood to be stopped. “Get behind me, Sky-Thinker!”
“Yan, if they were the enemy we’d be dead already!” Vemik snapped.
Possibly nobody else could have used that tone of voice with Yan. Possibly the logic of what he was saying wouldn’t have penetrated coming from anybody else. But for whatever reason, Yan listened. He took a long hard look at the two strangers and at the strange tools they were holding, pointed levelly and unwaveringly in his direction, and Vemik saw him follow, rather more slowly, the same line of thought that had hit him between the ears.
“It came to me. What happens if you take an idea like my spear-thrower and add a lot of sky-thinking?” Vemik prompted.
Yan nodded slowly. “Those are weapons.”
“Yes. Maybe weapons that can spit blue fire? But the death-birds tried to kill me straight away, and these two are…”
Yan looked at the two strangers. They had stopped backing away, but they were poised with their weight to the rear, ready to keep retreating. They stood and moved in strange, foreign ways but the stance clearly spoke of a desire for peace.
Vemik took a slow step forward then, slowly and deliberately, he pulled his spear-thrower from his back, stooped, and placed it carefully on the ground.
The two strangers looked at each other, said nothing… and then slowly aimed their weapons elsewhere. The taller one tugged the hatchet from his belt and laid it on the ground as well.
“How do we know this isn’t a trick?” Yan demanded. Vemik turned back toward him.
“Please… trust me.”
“If you get us all killed…” the Given Man growled.
“Look, Yan. That one took something out of the destroyer. I think they’re its enemies too.”
“And if you’re wrong?” Yan demanded.
Vemik rounded on him. “They can make rock fly, Yan! They can make light without fire! We already saw they can do the impossible! If they’re our enemies then there is nothing we can do to stop them, but if they’re our friends-!”
Yan gaped at what was unquestionably a challenge to his authority. He bristled with outrage, then paused, shot another look at the strange axe that the newcomer had laid in the grass, and with a visible effort of will he settled down. He gave the two strangers a long suspicious glare and then finally, with a disgusted snort, threw his spear to the ground at his feet.
“…This isn’t what my Vision foretold at all,” he cautioned. “But… very well. We do things the Sky-Thinker’s way.”
The tribe relaxed, lowered their spears, and muttered among themselves. Vemik, knowing that Yan would be reasserting his authority hard later on, turned back to the strangers, and stepped forward.
“…Hello,” he said.
Date Point: 12y3m AV
Guvendruduvundraguvnegrugnuvenderelgureg-nugdurnuveg system, Capitol system of the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy
Fleetmaster Sorudrovag
Sorud’s career had taught her a lot about controlling her instinct to emote colorfully. Her chromatophores were generally a serene magnolia, there to inspire and reassure her underlings.
The Hunters had a bad way of disrupting that. She knew that her magnolia was a little on the worried orange side right now. Something was badly, badly wrong.
The Hunters tried their luck with the Confederacy systems every so often. Usually it never amounted to anything—the Grand Herd Fleet of the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun was as solid and as dependable as the loyal bodies who crewed its ships.
Maybe a small raid might catch a solitary unlucky freighter, at worst. Usually not even that, and the systems themselves were utterly protected, the containment shields able to come up in an instant to provide impenetrable blanket protection against even all conceivable firepower.
But the Swarm of Swarms-!
Yes. Sorud’s chromatophores were definitely more than a little orange.
She double-checked the status of the system shields for her own peace of mind. All three of them were up, a level of redundancy that bordered on the ridiculous even to her cautious and conservative thinking. One such shield had kept the Hunters from flooding Sol and bringing the force of their Swarm to bear on the Humans.
She should have felt absolutely secure. But there were more than a million ships out there, and they were showing no sign of losing interest or leaving.
The projections on the number of Hunters crewing those ships…
“How quickly can the Dominion second fleet be here?” she asked.
The comm operator’s own chromatophores were a sickly yellow with fear. “At best speed, they will arrive in two four-days, fleetmaster.”
Sorud willed her flanks to radiate reassuring neutral tones again. “They cannot get in. Two four-days is no time at all if the enemy cannot-”
She was interrupted by an alarm, and frantic calls from the sensors officers.
“Hostile contacts inside the shield boundary!”
“Twenty swarmships! They’re-”
“How?!” Sorud demanded.
“They must have… I think they must have coasted into the system at sublight several four-days ago, fleetmaster.”
“Intercept them!”
The innermost of the system shields stopped reporting in. Some seconds later, the closest of the system’s sensor buoys sent back over FTL comms that it had recorded a detonation of several megatons, slapping the emitter out of existence.
Suddenly, three shields felt like far, far too few.
It was too few. The Hunters had surprise and planning on their side and every Guvnurag on the bridge contributed the same shade of horrified magenta glow to the general ambience, noticeably changing the lighting hue of the command deck as the second, then third shields went offline almost too quickly to record.
The Swarm-of-Swarms surged in.