Date Point: 12y3m AV
Uncharted Class 12 deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
Vemik Sky-Thinker
“Ya-an!” Vemik grunted and tried to work an arm free. “We are in deep trouble!”
Yan grinned and applied a little more of his prodigious strength to painful effect, while Vemet trilled nearby as he watched his son wriggle and fight to get free. The big Given Man had Vemik pinned face-down in the dirt, both arms held fast behind his back in one huge hand. Yan sat on his haunches with most of his substantial weight on his left leg and the rest smashing the slight young man’s hips to the ground. His other thickset limb curled around and under Vemik’s stomach and crushed powerfully, while Yan’s tail coiled tightly around Vemik’s legs and squeezed.
It was all playful: Yan wasn’t really mad, he was just…well, being a Yan. Instead of a thrashing like Vemik had been silently dreading, Yan had instead challenged the young upstart with a happy, boisterous hoot. Vemik accepted with a grin—who didn’t like to tussle?—and lost the match instantly, which was mildly humiliating even despite the huge difference in strength and skill. Yan had pinned him almost gently too, with an insultingly weak hold that should have been easy to escape…but Yan was far too strong. He trilled smug and happy and playfully dominant, while Vemik struggled uselessly to escape. Showoff.
At any other time it would all be good fun, but right then, the Sky-Thinker wished fervently for Yan to maybe stop being a Yan and maybe start being a Vemik instead. “This is important!” he protested, and tried to lash his tail around to get a grip on Yan’s ankle.
Yan was too old, too big, too strong and far too experienced to fall for such a simple maneuver. He whipped his leg out from under Vemik as fast as a lightning strike, then stomped the writhing tail and pinned it with a breathtakingly powerful squeeze of his foot-hand, drawing an involuntary yelp from Vemik and another light amused trill from Vemet.
Vemik struggled on, which earned him a grumbling approval from Yan. In response he settled his full weight on the young man’s hips, which earned him a loud groan of pain and a desperate look to Vemet, who smiled even bigger and trilled in sympathy. Every man in all the neighboring villages knew defeat by Yan, Given Men included. He tightened his grip with all four hands to the point where he felt the young man’s body spasm slightly underneath him.
“Give?”
Vemik shook his head defiantly. That amused Yan, who wrapped both his legs around Vemik’s stomach, squeezed mightly with legs and tail, then leaned in and pressed Vemik’s arms as far up his back as they could safely go. That hurt. A lot.
But Yan wasn’t done. He muscled himself up and forward, then whispered, “Y’know, I could go a lot harder if you want to test yourself, Sky-Thinker…” Vemik struggled briefly then gave in with a pained sigh when Yan yet again tightened his grip. In fairness, he relented the instant that Vemik surrendered. He sat back on his haunches and loosened his crushing leg-and-tail smash to Vemik’s groaning relief, though he still didn’t let Vemik wriggle free.
“You always think sky-thinking is the most important thing, Sky-Thinker,” Yan growled affectionately before letting go. “Think down here in the dirt with the rest of us, sometime.”
“I am!” Vemik objected, as he was roughly spun around and helped up to his feet. Yan ended the match with a painfully affectionate hug and a rough rub of Vemik’s crest, which he took with a grumble as he dusted himself off. He tried not to bristle—Yan had worked off his bad mood playfully and in good humor, but he wasn’t about to let a much younger man give him that kind of attitude. “Yan, they said—”
“I heard.” Yan took a sip from his water skin in a we-do-things-at-my-pace way, taking his time over it. He shook his crest out and made a scoffing noise in the back of his throat. “Big en’mee.”
Vemik tried not to scowl. The impression had not been charitable.
“Yan, they have—” he began again, and this time Yan gave him a flash of fangs.
“I’m not blind, Sky-Thinker. They have weapons and a flying…thing and a rock that makes light and the sky only knows what else. I saw. And they claim that thing is their foe, and if people like that have a foe, a ‘big’ foe…” he made that scoffing noise again “…Then we may as well be fighting gods. Is that what you’re about to say?”
Vemik gawped at him, then found a new objection. “…Aren’t you worried? I mean…Shouldn’t you be?”
Yan shrugged expansively, and turned back up the hill toward the village again, setting a brisk rolling pace that left Vemik and his father struggling to keep up. Most of the other men had already straggled out across the slope, partly for scouting purposes, partly to hunt if the opportunity presented itself, partly to give the tribe’s undisputed leaders their privacy.
“Worry about what?” he asked. “Is there anything we can do? That skithral-thing the two of you killed—” he turned and nodded respectfully to Vemet, “wasn’t moving. If it had been, you would both be dead and so would the village. Am I right?”
“…I guess…?” Vemik conceded, slowly.
“Those people down there are either the enemy, or they’re the enemy’s enemy. Now, some people are stupid enough to think that a shared enemy makes you friends, Sky-Thinker…”
“But what if they *are?*” Vemik asked. Yan rounded on him for about the fifth time in their short walk so far.
“They are not,” he snarled. “They are death, Sky-Thinker. They bring tools and magic we don’t know from a place we could never go and claim an enemy we could never fight. Things will never be the same after today.”
“But what if things are better after?” Vemik asked. “What if they…what if they teach us their magic and tools, or how to make huts that shine in the sun and fly?”
Yan shook his head and turned away again. “What did you teach the boy, Vemet?” he asked. “A man makes his own spears, hunts his own meat and provides for his own children. If the boy wan ts a hut that flies, he should learn how to make one for himself, not go begging to strange thin people from the sky to make it easy.”
Vemik should have bristled. To be called ‘the boy’ twice when he had the knives of manhood he had won himself strapped securely to his chest…But he sensed that now was not the time for that fight. Instead, he met Vemet’s eye. “…You’ve been quiet so far, father…” he observed. “What are you thinking?”
Vemet mulled the question over, and replied slowly. “I’m thinking…that if I had never taught you how to make a spear, you wouldn’t have figured out how to make that spear-thrower of yours. And when you teach that to your son, what then?” When Yan glared at him, he shrugged and spread his hands wide. “Men teach their sons how to hunt so that their sons can be better hunters than their fathers,” he pointed out.
Yan stood for a long moment and thought. At length he took another swig of water and grumbled, “Vemet’s got wisdom in his head.” He looked at Vemik and bared his fangs in a friendly sort of lopsided snarl, “I can see where you get it from.”
So. Vemik still had Yan’s respect but his patience was badly worn. That meant that Vemik needed to choose his words carefully.
“We are still alive, Yan,” he pointed out. “That means something.”
Yan flicked his ears and nodded. “Sure. It means we’ve got strange gods down the hill in a flying stone hut and we have no idea what they want or how to even talk to them. And they’re maybe fighting other gods that want to kill us all. Does this strike you as safe?”
“…No. But that means we really only have one choice. We need to talk with them.”
“Oh, sure. We go talk to the gods! Do you know what the problem there is? We need to pray and sacrifice and put our Dancers and Given Men through awful things just so the gods notice us. What do we do if we anger these strange People? Are they gods? Does it matter?”
“If we do nothing,” Vemet observed thoughtfully, “we still risk angering them.”
Yan barked angrily. “This would have been easier if you’d just let me rip them apart,” he grumbled.
Vemik nodded warily. “Yes, and if you did you might have been killed by those…weapons of theirs. And don’t forget about the skithral-things. What happens when they wake up?”
Vemet answered for him. “We die.”
There was a long and uncomfortable pause.
Vemet cleared his throat. “So. We had better make friends, so we know where to stand.”
Yan sighed loudly and shook his head. “Godshit! Why us? Why now?”
Vemik only shrugged.
“Right. Well. I guess the three of us need to meet with the Singer and figure out what’s the best way to keep these god-People happy and not inclined to kill us.”
Yan stomped up to a Ketta tree, walked up its trunk, then swung towards the distant village.
That was a sure tell that Yan was straining against a very bad mood. Normally he wouldn’t tackle a Ketta like that because it could damage the thick bark and the People respected the trees. While most anyone else had to climb a Ketta with their hands and feet gripping the huge trunk, a few Given Men were so strong and their feet could grip so powerfully that they could simply walk up trees as if they were just a particularly steep hill. That left their hands free for other things and Yan’s were flailing as he grumbled angrily to himself, lost in distracted thought.
Vemik and Vemet looked at each other. “You better go after him, Sky-Thinker.”
Vemik nodded and chased behind. The Given Man had already swung across the wide gap between the huge Ketta and its neighboring twin, which was so big a distance that Vemik could only climb up and jump down from a great height. Smaller men like him preferred lesser trees like Nara. They grew closer together and didn’t need nearly as much oompf to cross the gap.
That did mean it was work catching up to Yan, who seemed pointedly uninterested in Vemik’s graceful yet exhausting efforts through the upper branches to catch up.
“Yan! Wait, please!”
Yan turned around, settled himself on a massive branch at the bottom of the tree, and presented himself squared up with Vemik. “What!?” That time he could not hide the exasperation in his voice.
Vemik caught up, panting, then squared himself up as well. “Yan…I’m sorry.”
Yan blinked, then sort of…fell into himself. Vemik boggled. Yan was a man’s man, one everyone looked up to and wished they could be. He was handsome and playful and an unmatched hunter. His perfect, bright red crest stood tall and straight from head to tail. Every line of his body was big, tight, plainly visible and better than any other man.
It was amazing how something as simple as sagging shoulders and a less threatening, laid-back crouch on his haunches could transform someone like Yan from the most impressive man Vemik had ever met, into something merely big and rounded and…tired. Tired, and maybe a little melancholy.
He sighed deep in his chest and gave Vemik a contrite look. “I know…You did good today. Godshit, you probably saved our lives.”
Vemik didn’t know what to say to that and stood there, slightly embarrassed.
“…And I’m sorry too,” Yan added. “I saw your look when I called you ‘boy.’ That…was disrespectful. You didn’t deserve that.”
“Yan—”
“No, I mean it. A man owns up to his mistakes. It doesn’t matter if only two years ago you were still riding on my back and asking so many questions.”
Vemik scratched at the back of his head, where his crest met the nape of his neck. “I never really stopped, did I?”
Yan trilled sharply and recovered most of his usual Yan-ness and Vemik suddenly found himself swallowed up in a big, friendly hug. “No, you didn’t!” He noogied affectionately for a playful moment while Vemik squirmed fruitlessly, but the moment passed all too quickly. Yan sobered up, gave Vemik a hard look, then held the smaller man’s shoulders.
“Maybe take a little advice from a big, useless Given Man like me. Sky-Thinking and wisdom aren’t the same thing. Don’t spend so much time with your head up there,” Yan pointed straight up, “that you forget the dirt beneath your feet or the woman in your hut. Or your child, or your friends…or us.”
“I won’t!”
“I know.” Yan gave him a genuinely warm look, and explained. “Everybody has their strange ways, Sky-Thinker, and everybody needs reminding of it sometimes. You need to think of us first and not your gods-ignored burning curiosity about all the things. Can you do that with these strangers?”
Vemik nodded seriously.
Yan trilled softly and warmly. “I know. I always did. But we Given Men, we can’t help but worry like that. It’s our nature.”
“But why? And why do you get so big? And why is there only one in any tribe? And why—”
“Vemik!” Yan shook his head, radiating indulgent frustration.
Vemik deflated. “…Sorry. But will I ever know why?”
Yan gave him his most serious look. “Gods, I hope not.”
Vemik couldn’t refuse his impulse to grumble unhappily, but he finally held his peace.
“Anyway. Come, we need to make good time back to the village and we only have…” Yan squinted at the sun, “…one finger of the daylight left.” Yan gave another aggressively playful snarl, “I’ll race you!”
Before Vemik could accept the challenge, Yan turned and charged through the Ketta trees’ bottom-most canopy like an angry bull werne. Vemik trilled softly to himself then grinned, swung over to the better Nara trees, and chased after his friend.
All, he hoped, was forgiven.
Date Point: 12y3m AV
Guvendruduvundraguvnegrugnuvenderelgureg-nugdurnuveg system, Capitol system of the Guvnuragnaguvendrugun Confederacy
The Alpha-of-Alphas
Time, and obsessive analysis of Human tactics and philosophy, had radically altered the way that the Alpha-of-Alphas thought about certain important things. Once not so very long ago it would have been pacing in futile rage at the thought of missing out the grand Hunt going on far below it. The Brood of Broods was broadcasting the ecstatic high of the hunt through every channel as they tore through the population below in a frenzied orgy of delighted feasting.
For the Alpha-of-Alphas to miss out on such carnage would once have been unthinkable. But its thoughts had been so small then. It had seen only the meat, and the maw, and the claw and the prey. Its understanding of what a Hunt truly was had been constrained by simple fleshly appetites.
Since the battle of the prey-station, it had transcended such trivialities. Now, while lesser Hunters gorged themselves on mere meat and blood, the Alpha of Alphas congratulated itself on this successful hunt of a whole planet. Today, it had struck a grievous maiming blow to the large furred prey and left a wound that would never heal—the scar on an entire species would always be there.
Delicious.
Doubly delicious. The Humans were out there, watching. It didn’t know where, exactly—they were truly accomplished predators when they chose to be, and had elected to stalk and be watchful for the time being. They were unquestionably choosing their moment to pounce.
Let them pounce. No matter what they chose to strike, they could inflict no real harm on the Hunters, not with any of the tricks or tools they had yet chosen to show. They most certainly had others, of that there was no doubt, but if they did employ something new, then the Alpha-of-Alphas would learn, again. Would expand, again.
Would feast, again.
It was so engrossed in metaphorically salivating over the prospect of what it might learn that it almost missed the moment when the humans chose to show their token of defiance. It was over in a flash, literally in a flash. There was the most minute and guarded distortion of spacetime and the largest slave transport ship in the Swarm-of-Swarms was immediately gone, along with its crew of seven thousand Hunters.
Not gone: smashed. It took the Alpha-of-Alphas nearly ten minutes to piece together the precise sequence of events and after it had done so it reclined what little of its flesh remained within the cradle of its command edifice and considered what it had just seen.
Much of its body was gone now. This was nothing unusual for any Hunter of any seniority: the natural claws were usually the first to go, swapped for a universal cybernetic mount capable of bearing any kind of weapon from fusion claws and heavy pulse rifles to nervejam launchers and even plasma guns. Superior eyes, superior limbs, superior bones, muscles and nerves. Everything about a Hunter’s organic form was weaker than they wished to be. There was catharsis in personal transformation.
The Alpha-of-Alphas merely occupied the pinnacle of an obsession shared by all of its kind—the will to dominance. Now that its dreams of dominance encompassed whole species and their worlds, and had assembled a fleet of millions, an army of billions and the poised tidal wave of a species that viewed itself as the force of nature, ready to crash down on everything else and remind them where the real power lay in this galaxy…
Such a will to dominance demanded more than better claws and teeth. It demanded that its claws be whole spaceships, that its eyes and ears be scout craft.
Increasingly, the Alpha-of-Alpha’s proprioception was less and less aware of the truncated shreds of meat resting restlessly in its command facility, and increasingly it viewed its body as being the Swarm of Swarms.
And now the humans had torn off a scale, or bruised a finger. An irritation, certainly, but one that inspired interest rather than outrage. It was always entertaining to see how the deathworlders struck.
On close examination, the tactics and equipment used were nothing new. The Human Alpha must be aware of its foe’s hunger to learn and had sensibly withheld any new information. The fact that the materiel and maneuver involved was nothing new didn’t make it in any way less effective, however. The humans had fired an extreme long-range shot from somewhere out in the extreme reaches of the system, at such a low warp velocity that its passage had barely registered at all. They must have fired it hours in advance, in fact, and yet it had neatly drifted through the appropriate volume of space with commendable precision.
It hadn’t actually hit anything, of course. The slightest drift or acceleration at such ranges was enough to ruin even the most careful firing solution…but it had been close enough. The jump beacon carried by that round had fired up, and a claw of the Human strike ships had pounced through, lit up the transport ship with targeting sensors, summoned their weapon with millimeter precision, and departed in a pulse of bent reality all in a shorter interval than it to took the Alpha-of-Alpha’s heart to beat three times.
The weapon had been nothing special, either. An ordinary hydrogen-based fusion weapon in the megaton range, shaped to blast the great majority of its destructive energies out as a coherent lance of high-energy EM radiation that had torn the transport ship into two melting and partially vaporized uneven halves. Crude and low-tech, but very few things in the galaxy had the kind of defenses that could withstand energies on that scale.
It forwarded the data to the Alpha Builder. Meager pickings from the humans, but the builders were drooling to sink their fangs into the prey-species data banks and pick apart the secrets of the system shield technology. With scrutiny and time, surely a weakness would reveal itself.
It watched as the last few fortunate contacts flickered out of the system at FTL speeds, and peeled off a few pursuit ships to run down the slow and limping. Not all of them, though: The fastest, the healthiest, the strongest it let go to carry the word of what had happened here. When the sensor records and video footage they carried began to circulate, the panic would spread through the prey herds like a burning disease.
Finally, it relaxed. It sank back into the sensory feeds from hundreds of millions of Hunters below…And it feasted.
Date Point: 12y3m1d AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada
General Martin Tremblay
Some events were so huge that the usual system of talking over video calls wasn’t going to cut it today. Sometimes, when a good officer was in the hotseat to justify his actions, then the resulting meeting needed to be done properly. No phone, no big TV screen. Just a handful of the most powerful people on the planet, sitting down for a solemn talk.
Commodore Caruthers had not, in Tremblay’s view, done too badly from what he knew of the situation. The total loss to humanity’s military from the operation was a single, expendable, Nuclear-Pumped Highly Directional X-Ray Laser.
Sooner or later, somebody was going to want a stylish acronym for those things. It was a dull name for one of the deadlier weapons in their arsenal, and that weapon had been deployed to excellent effect. It had entirely shredded a spacecraft that dwarfed even oil supertankers. Even for the Hunters that had to be a loss that stung just a little.
But when one considered all the hundreds of thousands of ships that said attack had left perfectly unscathed and still ravaging the surface of the Guvnurag homeworld even while they sat here…It really didn’t seem like enough.
Sartori was having trouble containing himself. The president was usually a poised and garrulous man who was well-equipped to keep himself afloat in the sphere of public opinion. He wasn’t, it seemed, so great at handling the revelation that all that military spending that had so bedevilled his presidency to date wouldn’t have achieved jack shit.
Tremblay could hardly blame him. Sartori wasn’t exactly taking his displeasure out on Caruthers, he wasn’t so unreasonable as to assign blame where it wasn’t due, but Caruthers was certainly the conduit through which the president’s rage at all of Hunterdom was being channeled. He was bearing it remarkably well, considering that he was technically under no obligation to bear it at all: As a British officer his commander-in-chief was the King, not Sartori, but he was diplomatically choosing to ignore that fact.
“Yes, Mr. President. The tactical situation was hopeless, as we’ve reviewed. The best I could hope for was some form of moral defiance, in the hope the Guvnurag would understand the gesture.”
“Well, it backfired!” Sartori had cooled substantially in the last few minutes, but he was still boiling. “That transport was full of prisoners, and now they’re accusing us of contributing to the slaughter.”
“Meat-slaves, Mr. President,” Caruthers delicately corrected him. “Those prisoners would have been reduced to livestock in short order. We have the statements from Mother Ayma, Sergeant Regaari and miss Chang about that escaped Gaoian slave a few years back, Triymin.”
“A fate I wouldn’t personally wish upon my worst enemy,” Knight interjected, quietly.
Sartori sat back, disgruntled. “The Guvnurag don’t share our definition of mercy,” he pointed out. “As far as they’re concerned, that bomb cut-and-dried killed some of their people. And to hell with the circumstances, apparently.”
Caruthers nodded understandingly. “No matter what we had done, we would have been vilified,” he observed. “If I’m to be damned, I’d rather be damned for doing the right thing at least…by our standards.”
Tremblay and Knight exchanged the almost-psychic glances of old friends, and saw their private approval of that sentiment reflected in each other’s careful poker faces. Sartori meanwhile was getting steadily less red in the face.
“That’s not to say I didn’t find it a bitter pill to swallow, Mr. President,” Caruthers added, and Sartori finally backed off him.
“…I follow your reasoning, Commodore,” the president said at last. “I guess you’re right, too. How do we even begin fighting a million ships?”
Tremblay had no good answers, there. “We have to play the long game,” he said. “The fact is, that we’re at an insurmountable logistical disadvantage. We only have the resources of Earth, realistically: Cimbrean isn’t developed enough yet to count. Fortunately, both systems are secure against the kind of attack that hit Guvnurag-One, but…
“…But who knows how much territory the Hunters really hold?” Knight finished for him. “A race where one side has an enormous head start is no race at all.”
Prime Minister Philippe Martel finally ventured to say something. “We don’t have any idea at all?” he asked.
“Neither the Dominion nor the Alliance have ever successfully mapped any part of Hunter space. All their scout ships vanish if they stray beyond a certain point, but that’s about as defined as the limits of Hunter territory gets,” Tremblay explained. “We know roughly where their home ground is and roughly how many cubic parsecs it encompasses, but there’s no clear or reliable way to identify how many habitable worlds are inside that volume, let alone any orbital structures, space stations, asteroid facilities…”
“In other words, we have no idea at all,” Martel repeated.
“We don’t really know a damn thing about our enemy,” Tremblay agreed. “In fact we know so little about them that we don’t even know what we’d need to beat them.”
“*If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle,*” Caruthers quoted verbatim.
“…Sun Tzu?” Martel guessed.
“Yes indeed,” Caruthers nodded.
“The closest he ever came to a spaceship was a few observations about chariots,” Sartori pointed out.
“True,” Tremblay granted, “but this is old warfare, classic warfare right back to basic principles. He’d still take one look at this situation and say that we don’t stand a chance if we try to fight the Hunters directly.”
“And indirectly?” Sartori asked. “Or is the Supreme Allied Commander for Extrasolar Defense telling us to bend over and kiss our asses goodbye?”
“Indirectly…” Tremblay met Knight’s gaze, then Caruthers’, and saw that both men still had plenty of resolve in them.
“…We’ll work on it,” he promised.
__
Date Point: 12y3m1d AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space
Lewis Beverote
Lewis had found the station’s master systems console inside the first week after arriving on Mrwrki. To his quiet joy it hadn’t been holding pride of place in the middle of the control room or anything, no: Like all the best IT infrastructure he’d found it tucked away in an overcrowded office a long way from where all the ‘important’ end users worked.
While booting it up he’d amused himself with the mental image of a Kwmbwrw systems tech boredly instructing some super-senior Matriarch to try turning the faulty hardware off and waiting ten seconds. That amusement had turned into a frown when it requested an eight-digit numeric passkey for access.
More out of despair and the spirit of at least making a token attempt than anything else he’d half-heartedly entered “12345678” and to his shock, delight and disgust he had immediately been granted top-level Admin access.
Poking through the station’s OS had turned into one of the things he did for fun when he wasn’t designing an asteroid-eating, planet-hopping engine of unstoppable galactic conquest. That quiet fun had turned into obsessively cataloging everything wrong with the horrific mess of half-assed shell scripts he’d found in there in place of a sane or sensible system. In some ways he felt like a lepidopterist with a whole planet of alien butterflies to wave his net at, and in other ways he felt like a particularly morbid surgeon poking at a uniquely purulent abscess. Either way, it had made for a grossly fascinating diversion.
One of the worst bugs would actually let anybody who knew it exploit their way through any door on the station. He’d let that one live mostly because he had a horrible feeling it was caused by something in the life support controller, and no way was he fucking with that. Besides, it was a pre-existing bug in the code and he could hardly be blamed if he “forgot” to mention its existence to the Army dudes in all the excitement could he? It wasn’t like he’d ever planned to use it or anything…
Except that Vedreg wasn’t answering his door chime, and hadn’t been for several days.
Hold down the door chime, the five button and the intercom, wave his lighter under the air vent and….
The door hissed open. It SHOULD have sounded the fire alarm as well, but that was part of the glitch. It was something to do with the fire containment protocols and the way they interacted with the emergency escape pod access. Apparently Kwmbwrw engineers had never invented the VLAN, or even the concept of isolated networking in general, which was a head-shaker par excellence and had given him a funny twitch in his eye for the first few days after he realized it.
To his immense relief, somewhere in the darkened depths of Vedreg’s quarters there was a deep sighing sound and the sound of somebody huge moving slightly.
“…Go away, Lewis.”
Crazily, Lewis almost obeyed. Vedreg never used anything less than a person’s full name, or their honorific and surname. That was just…who he was. That was his way.
Which meant that his friend was at the worst he’d ever been, and who could blame him?
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “Dude…”
His eyes adapted to the gloom quickly. It wasn’t completely dark in Vedreg’s suite of rooms: the little lights he’d put up around Nadeau’s little Bob Ross oil painting and the black pseudo-glow of a monitor in standby mode were enough to give some shape to the darkness, just enough to make out the shaggy furred mass of his friend huddled in a corner.
Guvnurag couldn’t help but wear their hearts on their sleeves, as it were. Their body language literally glowed, and there was always some small amount of bioluminescence visible along their bodies, even when they were at rest and feeling no particular emotion at all.
Vedreg’s chromatophores were completely inert, a sure sign of a Guvnurag in the grip of soul-wrenching despair, grief and depression.
They pulsed the barest, almost invisible hint of red as he repeated himself wearily. “Go *away*…”
Lewis ignored him. Instead, he sat down at Vedreg’s side and reclined into him. Guvnurag wool was thick, shaggy and smelled faintly like a clean barn, but it was warm as hell and damn comfortable.
“Lewis…” Vedreg was clearly too numb to work up a real emotion at all, but ghosts of red, blue and pink shot all over him as he thought at length about what Lewis was doing…and then surprised green.
“…Are you…weeping?”
Lewis nodded slowly, and dragged a sleeve fiercely across his nose. He’d been holding it back around all the military types, but…here in the dark, it seemed safe to sit back and let it all hit him.
“I know…fucking stupid, right? Not like it was my homeworld, right?” He had a bitter touch in his voice, and Vedreg drew away slightly to give him an even more confused look with the short tentacles around his mouthparts waving uncertainly. “Not like billions of people are dead. Not like my friend’s hurtin’ and there ain’t fuck nothin’ I can do for him. Ain’t like…I…”
Vedreg went very still as Lewis’ voice got caught and wouldn’t come unstuck. There was a long, defeated, silent moment and then an imperceptibly faint glow returned to his chromatophores. It was a confused off-white, but to anybody who knew how to read Guvnurag, there was a definite blue-ish tint of gratitude in there.
Slowly, his enormous pillar of an arm circled out and drew Lewis into a warm enveloping, woolly hug.
They co-miserated in silence until Lewis had long since run out of tears and was quietly growing desperate for a drink when Vedreg finally spoke.
“Tears seem…cathartic.”
“Guess they are…” Lewis scraped some dried salty stuff out of his eye. “Shit dude, I dunno. Not like they do anything…Not like I can do anything”
To his surprise, Vedreg rumbled and for a second a flicker of mirth of all things literally lit the room.
“…Dude?”
Vedreg sighed, and stood up. “I have found that it is the small every-day deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love,” he said in the special tone he used when quoting.
“…Dude?” Lewis repeated himself, feeling stupid.
“Tolkien. Gandalf. I read those books after the name for this system was settled upon. It was bewildering at first: I do not know what an elf is or how a keyhole can be hidden except in a specific light, and much of what I read was strange and impenetrable, but there were thoughts that…resonated.” He shook himself and glanced at Nadeau’s painting. “Especially now. Thank you for reminding me of them.”
“…I never read ‘em,” Lewis confessed. “I ain’t read much of anythin’, TBH.” He added, pronouncing the abbreviation.
“Oddly, that is comforting.” Vedreg sighed again, and shook himself. The dim hue of a Guvnurag in a neutral state of mind reasserted itself—perhaps a little dimmer, perhaps a little grimmer, but back. A human might have rolled up his sleeves—Vedreg just shuffled around in place and his mouthparts shifted enigmatically behind that thick fringe of wool and tentacles as he considered Lewis for a few seconds.
“We should get back to work. There are ten billion souls to avenge,” he announced.
“Dude. That was almost fuckin’ human of you.”
“Thank you.”
“Well, shit.” Lewis kicked his feet out and surged upright. “Transform and roll out, my man.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Hey, you have your quotes, I have mine.”
Vedreg fell in alongside him as Lewis led the way. “I thought you said you haven’t read much?”
“Dude. All the best life lessons come in cartoon form, everyone knows that.”
“…You are very strange, Lewis Beverote.” Vedreg stopped, and put a hand on Lewis’ shoulder. “But you are the best friend I have ever had.”
Lewis was amazed to find that his dehydrated eyes got wet again. He patted the huge hand on his shoulder gently, then hugged the arm it was attached to and turned back towards the workshop.
For once, he couldn’t think of anything to say.