Date Point: 12y3m AV
Planet Guvendruduvundraguvnegrugnuvenderelgureg-ugunduvug, Capitol planet of the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy
Druthegvurnag
Somewhere deep in the impenetrable horror of it all, the thing that was bothering Drutheg the most was one of the civilians. The legal clerk.
She was pretty, in a bookish way. Her wool looked as though under normal circumstances it would be surprisingly silky despite perhaps being a little neglected, and there was a permanent halting, nervous tangerine stipple to her chromatophores whenever she spoke. She was…what was that blunt alien word he had learned somewhere? ‘Cute.’
Except that her mind had completely snapped under the pressure. She kept mumbling something to herself, some long-winded thing that she clearly only half-remembered. ”The Society For The Acknowledgement Of…something. High something? And there was respect for biological…? Something? I wish I could remember. It would all be alright if I could just remember…”
Drutheg almost fluoresced dark mirth. The mere idea that simply remembering the name of some society or another could possibly make things alright was so utterly insane that he could almost feel his own mind fraying simply from being near her and hearing her absurd litany.
It would hardly be inappropriate. The whole world had gone insane. White-skinned death was raining from the stars, dragging good Guvnurag away or eating them where they were caught. There hadn’t been enough warning!
No. The all-too-imminent alarm hadn’t been the problem. The homeworld defense armies had been woefully underfunded for long generations; they were too small, too diffuse. Drutheg prided himself that he was as fierce a warrior as his people had ever trained, but he was alone with six civilians in tow and none of his war herd at his side. They were all dead, and he knew it.
Which was why his own chromatophores betrayed no emotion beyond black. He had filled himself with the grim resolve that the Hunters would feast on him only when he was already a corpse, and that he would not die without first taking down as many of them as he could. There was no room for any other feeling.
So far he had killed three, and had carved for himself a minor island of tattered calm in the middle of the stampede and slaughter all around them. Perhaps that was something to be proud of. Or perhaps his own mind was falling apart. The homeworld, every year of the millennia his people had been, all of that ancient history and heritage, it was all dying today. There was nothing to celebrate in such a trivial accomplishment.
And yet…he felt proud of himself. He hadn’t run. He had held, he had fought. If only for a little while, he had defied the enemy. He could not succeed…but he had not failed. Perhaps that was something to be proud of.
Or perhaps his mind was falling apart.
His racing cyclical thoughts were interrupted by the shriek of more assault pods impacting nearby, and he might have been perversely glad to hear them if he had been able to think about it. Instead it took all the willpower he had not to obey his screaming instincts and stampede.
The civilians were not so steady: The only one of them who did not immediately stampede was the muttering clerk who didn’t seem to register the horrors from orbit at all.
For what little it was worth, Drutheg put himself between her and the most likely source of danger and tried not to listen to the panicked, agonized bellowing as the stampeding citizens were caught and set upon.
He’d already spent two of his grenades just collecting the frayed knot of hangers-on that had just run away. He had one left, plus a couple of smoke charges. His war harness was at full shield strength, his pulse rifle was the latest military issue with the more efficient heat sinks, and he had enough food in his belly to fight.
If only it weren’t so absolutely, utterly hopeless.
He knew his position was effectively surrounded. Whatever the Hunters used to detect their victims would not have missed him or his collection of civilians, nor the body-count of Hunters that he had left. He had the high ground and he had a pulse rifle, but that was not enough against their shields, especially the larger, more grotesque ‘Red’ Hunters.
The only outcome that had something that even looked like a positive attached to it, and even then only in the crazed light of futility, was any one in which he left no corpse behind to be eaten.
That had him contemplating something quite alien to the Guvnargnaguvendrugun mindset. Self-sacrifice.
He watched as the Hunters swaggered into the clearing, weapons up and unafraid. They were drooling and that sight steeled Druthegvurnag’s resolve. He contemplated his last grenade, turned the yield charge all the way up, depressed the safety, turned it past safety-close, and charged with a bellow of defiance.
It was no kind of a gesture at all, really. In the face of the sheer scale of what was happening, one warrior’s proud finale made no difference at all.
But if the Humans were right and there was an ‘afterlife’ for warriors, then perhaps…
He was dead before he reached them. But a Guvnuragnaguvendrugun had mass, and therefore momentum, so there was little the Hunters could do as the mammoth warrior barreled into their midst—
The grenade exploded with enough force to level a small city block. Nothing survived, not the hunters, not Druthegvurnag, and not the civilians.
Mercifully, the confused clerk still trying to remember her mystery society never felt a thing.
Date Point: 12y3m AV
HMS Violent, Guvendruduvundraguvnegrugnuvenderelgureg-nugdurnuveg system.
Commodore William Caruthers
“…Fuck.”
The fleet was at full strength. Everything humanity had, every ship they’d ever built and captured, every single strategic asset Earth could bring to bear was at Caruthers’ command. Six V-class destroyers, thirty-six ‘Bulldog’ USVs, HMS Caledonia, HMS Myrmidon, USS San Diego, the Racing Thunder, no fewer than one hundred and eight ‘Firebird’ strike craft organized into three squadrons, the nine humans and six gaoians who were cleared and ready for HEAT operations. An effectively unlimited supply of nukes, anti-ship missiles, 30mm FTL rounds, Aster 45 missiles, RFGs…he even had access to the ultra-secret, as-yet unplayed trump card that was WERBS.
No commander in human history had ever wielded the resources available to him, and every spare bolt of it was useless. The Hunters had won this fight before the humans had even shown up.
Hence his whispered, futile monosyllable.
The Guvnurag were being slaughtered down there—their formation and tactics were classic Dominion, right to the core, and the Hunters knew how to handle Dominion warfare doctrine just fine. More so, now that they’d figured out how to add FTL capabilities to their railguns. The Swarm-of-Swarms was as mobile as smoke and just about as easy to shoot, and their own weapons could strike from so far out that the only limiting factor was sensor latency.
But it would have been a bloodbath even without that tactical superiority. There were a hundred Hunter ships for every non-Hunter contact in the system, and most of those were freighters, mining barges, passenger shuttles. The actual warships were outnumbered more than a thousand to one, and that kind of numerical mismatch multiplied the mass of the Hunter fleet, in the military sense of the word.
Human doctrine focused on force multipliers; mass was really a concept that meant ‘ability to impose force’ and in that regard any human fleet element had a mass that far outstripped mere gross tonnage, but here in this situation there was no possible way to finesse that mass. Caruthers may as well have fantasized about flattening the Himalayas using a team of dedicated men with shovels—not even the best men with the best shovels would have sufficed.
Which meant the only feasible response was to inflict as much damage as he could before withdrawing. And he could, in theory, inflict a great deal of damage indeed.
But there were a million ships out there. It was a number that defied comprehension. A million ships. It was doubtful in the extreme that if he were to tally up every single carrier, destroyer, submarine, cruiser, battleship, gunboat, frigate, ironclad, clipper, galleon, caravel and trireme ever constructed by the combined navies of all Earth’s history that they would even clear a tenth of that number.
He reached up under his flash hood and scratched despairingly at the back of his neck while thinking over his options.
To leave without inflicting some damage was unthinkable. Utterly unthinkable. And yet…
And yet strategic assets needed preserving. There was no sense in wasting resources on a token gesture and he had no reason at all to believe that these million represented the entirety of Hunter capabilities. And there was certainly no sense in tipping their hand any further than it had already been tipped—Every time humanity showed the Hunters a new trick, the bastards picked it up and used it. He’d be damned if he would contribute to that process today.
So, as unthinkable as effective inaction was right now…it was his only option.
He raised the Fleet Intelligence Center on Myrmidon.
The FIC, frankly, was possibly his most potent weapon. All those ships, missiles and guns were of absolutely no use at all if he didn’t know where to aim them after all, and from the second they arrived the churning data engines that IBM had kindly developed had begun digesting every last datum the whole combined Allied fleet’s collective sensors could generate.
The FIC was worryingly competent under the worst circumstances. Under optimal circumstances, when networked with the lesser Watsons aboard all the other ships, it was terrifying. Far too many people had joked about calling the whole linked system ‘SKYNET’ and not without justification, especially considering that the man holding its leash answered to the name and rank of Lieutenant Connor.
They were looking subdued over there, and Caruthers couldn’t blame them at all. Of all the people in the fleet, the intelligence staff over in the FIC were easily the best-informed about exactly what they were watching.
“Lieutenant. I need a target. One target, if you please…and make it a bloody good one.”
Date Point: 12y3m AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
Vemik Sky-Thinker
The strangers were…Well, strange.
It was an obvious strangeness at first: They were the wrong shape for a start, tall and lean and straight-legged and most disturbingly of all they entirely lacked tails.
And then the little details began to creep in. The strange terrain in the middle of their faces, below and between the eyes that distorted their lips upwards in the middle. They seemed to breathe through it! And Vemik didn’t once see them flick their tongues out into the air to taste it.
Then he looked into those eyes and saw that the pupils were perfectly round, as round as the sun and the moons rather than the horizontal slots of normal People.
He’d still been mesmerized by those eyes when the slimmer, shorter one had waved a hand in some kind of gesture at her partner and he’d been nauseated to see that she had five fingers! And so did the other one, too!
Those fingers were quick and clever, though. He watched them fidget dexterously with objects that defied his understanding but which were undoubtedly tools of some kind.
Every time they did, Yan somehow got tenser still. He was smouldering like a particularly ornery coal, pacing where the strangers could see him, always facing them front-on and ready to charge. That fact wasn’t lost on the strangers, either—neither of them had actually put their weapons down, Vemik noted. The woman had put hers away, slotting it neatly into a kind of open-topped bag on her hip, but the other one was as long as a short spear. The man was holding it loosely in his arms in as non-threatening a posture as possible but it was still *there*…ready.
They seemed to be waiting for something.
Or, as it turned out, someone.
A third stranger joined them, stepping cautiously between the trees and this one was not wearing that strange bubble of ice around her head, allowing Vemik to get a better look at her.
Her face was more People-shaped than the others’, though not by much—she still had that strange feature in the middle and her mouth still had those fuller, curiously contoured lips.
It was her crest that was the greatest surprise, however. Hers was the wrong hue entirely, a deep lustrous black rather than the proper shaggy orange or red, and it looked like she had gathered and tied it into a tight bundle into the back from where it fell in a shimmering rope down as far as her hips. And her skin! Every inch of it that Vemik could see was pale, smooth and delicate. Maybe shaded a little redder on the cheeks, a little darker around the eyes, but overall it was a complete contrast to everything Vemik knew of skin, which he had always known as being a dark, thick, tough beige thing.
The other two, he realized, were equally pale but it would be a mistake to assume that their strange smooth skin was a sign of any weakness. While the newcomer projected warm grace and peace, those two were both still as sharp and watchful as sentries. They prowled like hunters and never relaxed. This new one…
She paused in front of Vemik, smiled at him so prettily that the Singer would have made a jealous snarl had she been present, and then lowered herself serenely into a kneeling posture that Vemik would have found awkward and painful, but which she seemed to find effortless. She rested her hands lightly on her knees and then dipped forward at the waist until her forehead almost brushed the leaf litter.
Vemik had never seen anybody move with such effortless grace. When she straightened up again and settled herself she did so with such poise that Vemik, who could flip through the canopy like the wind when he wanted, was made to feel lumpen and brutish. Even the way she raised one of those strange, slim-fingered hands and brushed some stray hair from her face was composed and precise.
He glanced to his father for guidance.
Vemet shrugged, and gestured toward the ethereal being in front of them, inviting him to lead the way. “You’re the sky-thinker, son,” he said, “you talk to them.”
“It was your idea not to fight them,” Yan added, with angry gravel in the back of his throat. “…But I have my spear for you, if you need it.”
“Thanks, Yan…” Vemik decided not to say how much he doubted they would need the Given Man’s weapon today.
He stepped forward cautiously and considered how to reply to her gesture, whatever it had meant.
What had it meant? That was the important part. She had knelt, bowed low, exposed the back of her neck for a killing strike. She had intentionally made herself vulnerable in fact. A gesture of peace, then?
Among men of strange tribes who did not know one another, Yan had once told him, they would remove their knives of manhood and present them to one another for inspection. How one greeted a woman from a strange tribe he didn’t know, and certainly he had no idea how to greet a…a sky-person. Would she know to return his knives? Maybe she would think the gesture was a threatening one…
Maybe the thing to do was to just…sit. There was no sense in being undignified and trying to imitate her graceful contortions, but he could do something she couldn’t.
He squatted, and coiled his tail beneath him for a third point of contact with the ground. A man could sit like that for hours quite comfortably.
The strange woman from the sky smiled again, then slowly reached into a pocket on her strange garment and offered him something.
It was a disk. Round again, just as round as the moons, and made of some substance he didn’t know at all. It was white, and there was some kind of a mark on it, a series of short dark lines that crossed and bent in strange ways. He had no idea what it was and he glanced at the sky-woman in the vain hope that she might be able to clarify.
She smiled, and mimed a curious motion with her hands-she cupped her left one as if holding a small object about the thing’s size, and the other moved as if she was peeling a fruit, or…
Vemik considered the object again. Turned it over in his hands and looked at its edges. One edge was clearly different to the other and after a moment’s deliberation he experimentally cupped it in his hand as she had indicated, gripped it firmly with his thumb, and pried it open as she had shown.
His own face was inside.
He nearly threw it across the clearing in alarm and surprise but he chewed back on the impulse and considered what he was looking at.
It was like…looking in a stream, or a puddle as he had done many times before. The image of his own face looked back at him and moved as he moved. He frowned at it, and saw his own frown. He cocked his head, and saw his image do the same.
Like the ghost of himself he saw on water, but sharper, cleaner, more real. He considered himself for a moment and took the opportunity to consider what he must look like to a stranger.
Handsome, he realized. It was an odd thought.
Thoughtfully, he closed the object and handed it back to her while wondering what she had hoped to convey by giving it to him. For her part she seemed pleased, and he wasn’t sure if he had passed a test of some kind or simply if they were speaking two different languages.
She considered him carefully for a moment as she pocketed the item, and then placed her hand on the middle of her chest with those strange, slim, five fingers splayed.
“*Shyow.*”
Vemik cocked his head, so she turned to her armed companions and gestured to them.
“*Awisun. Jooyun.*”
She turned back to face him and extended a hand in much the same way that Vemet just had, and Vemik silently cursed himself for being slow on the uptake. Of course! when you met somebody, what did you do first?
He rapped his fist on his chest. “Vemik.”
Shyow smiled brilliantly again and this time there was a friendly flash of teeth. This one was a real smile, a warm and genuine one rather than a polite one. But if the fingers, the black crest and the odd thing in the middle of her face had been strange, nothing could possibly have prepared Vemik for those teeth. They were straight, even, unnaturally white, small and numerous. They looked like a child’s teeth after they had first grown in, sitting incongruously in the mouth of a woman who was clearly fully grown.
Something about the way he stared at them seemed to dismay Shyow. She raised a hand to cover her mouth, which had the effect of making Vemik feel strangely guilty somehow.
She lowered her hand again after a second once her teeth were no longer in view, then twisted at the waist to retrieve something she was carrying in a pouch low on her back. It was a flat, square rock of some kind which did something utterly unexpected when she touched it on one corner—it lit up.
Vemik heard Yan grumble something behind him, but ignored it. The object in Shyow’s hands fascinated him as she tapped and swiped at it, making patterns and shapes move and dance on its surface though he had no idea what she was accomplishing.
People from the sky were strange.
In a few seconds, Shyow had arranged the rock’s light to her satisfaction. She set it on her lap, smiled at him again, then looked around, pointed at a nearby Ketta tree, and spoke carefully.
“*Twee*”
Vemik glanced over his shoulder again and saw Vemet nodding.
So. These people didn’t speak as the People spoke, they had different words for things. He was going to need to teach them the words, and maybe learn a few of theirs as well.
He sighed, took out his water skin to take a quick sip, then turned back to Shyow, pointed at the same tree, and told her how to pronounce its name.
She nodded, tapped something on her rock, then looked calculatingly around before pointing at a Nara tree, and repeating the word for tree.
“Nara tree,” Vemik told her. He pointed back at the first one. “Ketta tree, Nara tree.”
She nodded again, looked around some more then pointed at three trees of three species “Tweez?”
It wasn’t like teaching a child to speak at all. Shyow clearly already knew how words worked, and she knew it well too. Vemik only had to tell her something once and then she’d tap on her stone, and ask a different question. She looked around, pointed at a nearby boulder, and spoke a word. “*Wohk.*”
Vemik nodded, taught her the tribe’s word for a rock, and in short order she had requested and been taught the difference between talking about one rock, two rocks, three rocks, and more than three rocks. He taught her the different words for men and women, for varying numbers of tree and the names of different kinds of tree, the words for grass in general and individual grass stalks, and the word for stone that had been worked into a tool as opposed to raw, unworked stone. He taught her how to say “My name is,” “her name is,” “his name is” and so on and never ever had to tell her something more than once.
Sometimes she would look at her flat rock as if seeking guidance there, and he got the distinct and crazed impression that it was somehow doing her remembering for her. Which was…how could a rock remember things? But then again how could a rock light up?
Maybe the light was the secret? He looked at them again and thought hard as Shyow raised the stone and showed it to Jooyun, who nodded sagely as though what he was seeing made perfect sense to him.
In his head, he was tying things together. The way that hunters would pile stones or cut a notch in the bark of a prominent tree to mark where the Werne roamed, or waters where Yshek lurked, to point back toward the village or toward a safe trail down a cliff. Those were all things that a man could remember, but which the right pile of stones, or the right mark in the wood could remind him of…or tell him, if he had never learned it in the first place.
So…he had successfully tied rocks together with memory. And he knew beyond doubt that the strange thing in Jooyun’s arm was a kind of a spear-thrower, a weapon for killing from afar.
Which meant…
He stood up and stretched from having been sat down a while, and asked a blunt question.
[“What do you have to do with *that?*”] he asked, pointing at the gutted destroyer. Yan stiffened and shot the strangers a suspicious glare.
Shyow frowned and tapped something on her stone, then nodded. She beckoned to Awisun and stood up, dusting leaves off her knees.
“…*Fwend*” she said, and gave Awisun an affectionate hug. Vemik nodded to indicate that he understood, so Shyow stepped back then mimed vigorously and hatefully attacking Awisun, who did something unexpected and giggled at the ferocity of the pretend attack. Like Yan, Awisun clearly had a playful side under that hard bark.
Shyow turned back to him. “*En’mee*” she said. When Vemik nodded again she turned to the destroyer, scowled at it, and held her hands far apart. “[BIG] En’mee.”
“[So they claim],” Yan growled. Shyow looked at him, then gave Vemik an apologetic smile before looking back to Yan again.
“Fwend.” she said, clearly and firmly and pointed from her chest to Yan’s.
Yan harrumphed, turned away and headed back toward the village which left Shyow looking…disappointed, perhaps, but certainly not surprised.
“Yan?” Vemik asked. He would have protested but now was not a good time to pick any kind of a fight with the big Given Man.
[“The Singer needs to hear of this!”]
[“Let him go, son,”] Vemet advised. [“It’s his job to not trust strangers.”]
“[He’s right, anyway],” Vemik conceded. [“The Singer does need to see this.”]
He turned to Shyow and wondered how in the name of everything under the sky and beyond it he was going to explain that they needed to pause and resume tomorrow, but she seemed to understand already. She nodded and took a step back, gesturing open-handed for him to follow Yan.
Vemik was honestly faintly awed. She seemed to effortlessly know his thoughts and he didn’t know if that was guilelessness on his part, or sharp insight on hers. Either way, she stepped back and let him go with a confident smile.
Vemik nodded, and dashed up the hill after Yan. They had a lot to discuss.
Date Point: 12y3m AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
Allison Buehler
Julian ghosted forward to the edge of the clearing to check that the last of the natives really had gone, and it was a long tense wait before he finally looked back and nodded.
Xiù sagged and the ethereal, angelic being she’d been pretending to be for the last several hours vanished like smoke. She seemed to lose a couple of inches, even—the transition was that dramatic. Suddenly she looked small, nervous and drained.
“Well…that could have gone worse I guess?” She commented, returning her tablet to the elasticated pocket behind her back.
“Fuckin’ A…” Julian’s agreement was soft but heartfelt as he scanned the trees while returning to them. “I thought that Yan guy was gonna twist our heads off for sure. He looks strong enough.”
“They all do,” Allison agreed. “That coulda been real ugly if Vemik hadn’t stepped in like that.”
“Yeah, and he’s gonna pay for it,” Julian opined. “Reckon Yan’s their chief or something, and I don’t think Vemik’s that old…”
“He’s really young,” Xiù appraised. “Like…really young. I think if he was human he’d be, um, maybe fifteen or so?”
“If they’re anything like some human cultures back on Earth then that’s old enough to be seen as a man…” Julian mused. “And it looks like he’s got the respect and trust of the older men too. But he’s still gonna have a hard time if he undermines Yan too bad.”
Xiù nodded exhaustedly and yawned. “…Ai ya…”
Allison wrapped her arms around Xiù’s shoulders from behind and hugged her. “Babe, you were incredible,” she said. “Since when are you an elf?”
“Hmm?” Xiù blinked at her. “Oh, um…since Mrs. Marshall’s drama class back in high school. She had us act out some scenes from Lord of the Rings and…” She shrugged. “I guess those lessons stuck. I enjoyed that class.”
“So what did the translator get?” Julian asked, leading the way back toward the ship.
“A lot,” Xiù said. She got out her tablet and frowned at it—they all knew the core of the translation software was a Corti design, which possibly meant there was some Hierarchy code lurking in there somewhere, but unfortunately it was also centuries in advance of any equivalent human software. It could extrapolate some astonishingly accurate predictions from meager principles, and had begun making respectably near-miss best guesses at syntax and sentence structure within minutes after Xiù had launched the app and started feeding it the data it requested.
It had its limits, of course—there was no way to deduce the native word for, say, “love” from the words for trees and suchlike, and the most sophisticated translation it was yet equipped to spit out would be something along the lines of ‘Vemik, please give me three small brown rocks’. For now they were confined to the simple and the physical—abstracts weren’t about to happen anytime soon, but it already had the basic grammatical and conceptual framework down. The rest was just vocabulary.
Misfit was not far from the wrecked Abrogator’s clearing, parked on the gravelly bank of a fast-flowing clear little river. There had been an even better landing site further upstream where the waters had pooled and formed a small lake but Julian had asked Xiù to hover above it while he scanned its waters, and sure enough he’d turned up a heat signature down there the size of an orca.
With no way of knowing if it was harmless, territorial, or even some vicious ambush predator they had given it a wide berth.
In hindsight, the change of landing site was doubly sensible: as well as avoiding some of the larger local fauna, the river had cut quite a steep-sided valley through layers of bedrock. Misfit was well-hidden in that valley—any other Hierarchy robots lurking around would have to pretty much trip over her to find them.
Unfortunately, there was the problem of decontamination. This wasn’t a green-cycle job, all three of them had been out there for hours, on a world that was landing firmly in the middle of the twelve-point somethings on the Corti chart, putting it effectively on par with Earth. Vemik and his tribe might be carrying the kinds of diseases that could rip through them with just as much fearsome effect as scarlet fever, smallpox or tuberculosis, and of course none of them were vaccinated against such alien diseases.
Therefore, they had to undergo an Orange decontamination—a full-strength sweep with the biofilter field on full power, a heavy powdering and a thorough sluicing-down with strongly chlorinated water.
For Julian and Allison inside their suits, that wasn’t a problem. For Xiù, who had chosen to wear her shipboard wear to make a good impression, it was eye-reddening misery. She endured it with extensive grumbling and then stormed toward the shower in the hab block the second the inner door opened, hell-bent on showering away the stinging stuff immediately, especially before it had a chance to bleach her hair. Uncharacteristically, she threw her soaked clothes on the floor behind her with a wet slap as she went rather than delivering them into Misfit’s laundry as she usually nagged Allison to do.
Allison briefly entertained the teasing possibilities of that, before deciding against it. Xiù was going to have red eyes and a runny nose for a couple of hours, now wasn’t the time for teasing. Instead, she and Julian helped each other out of their excursion suits with rather more care and stowed their gear for cleaning and maintenance.
“Not gonna be able to do that too many times,” she pointed out as she pulled out the spent powder and chlorine cartridges from the airlock’s reservoirs and replaced them with charged ones. “We’ve only got enough of these for ten orange cycles.”
“The biofilter field can calibrate itself for local bugs,” Julian said, doing his part of going over the suit for any sign that the decontamination had missed a spot. “We just need to get a couple of samples.”
“What, like, get Vemik or Yan to stand in the field?”
“That’d be ideal, yeah. Give us a full medical scan in the bargain, the scientists would love that…”
“Sounds like a tall order, babe.”
“The field should cope okay without,” Julian shrugged, and gave her a wry look. “Heck, when Kirk grabbed me from Nightmare, *Sanctuary*’s biofilter fixed me right up just fine. Corti know their shit. Sticking a local in the scanner’d just be…helpful. And hell, in a pinch a blood sample would do just fine, but do you wanna go ask them for some blood?”
“…Magic light in the flying metal hut it is, huh?”
“If we can, yeah. Except they maybe don’t have a word for metal. I didn’t see a scrap of iron, copper or gold anywhere on them.”
“Jeez.” Allison closed the hatch and rubbed her forehead. “How do you even begin telling guys who have like one bow between them just how much trouble they’re in right now? I mean…”
“I know.” Julian leaned against the wall. “But…I dunno, babe. They saw us arrive in a flying thing and Vemik there figured out what a rifle does. Could be, if a guy like that meets magic sky-people in a flying house who turn to this thing and say *‘BIG ENEMY’*…I mean, he’s pretty smart. I bet it won’t take long to sink in…”