Date Point 12y6m2w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
Allison Buehler
The annoying thing about bodyguarding Xiù was that it was so easy to believe she didn’t need it. Allison had seen her take down a guy much larger than her without much difficulty, knew of at least one nose that Xiù had broken and was acutely aware that they’d tracked her down as much on her reputation for single-handedly (and bare-handedly) taking out an entire Hunter broodship as anything else.
But all the kung fu in the world wasn’t going to work if Yan got it in his head to tear her apart, and all three of them knew it. Yan was no Hunter, he was a fellow deathworlder and leagues stronger. He’d mellowed out, but there was no suggestion that he’d got round to trusting them yet or even that he ever would. If he decided to kill Xiù, then he would. Not could; Would.
Xiù herself seemed much less concerned by this upset in the balance of power than Allison was on her behalf. She and Julian were both used to the idea that their diminutive Chinese girlfriend could leave them both winded and stunned on the mat at the same time, and for Yan to just swagger in and overturn that dynamic simply by being huge and strong felt vaguely insulting.
Not that it mattered: Allison had a Mossberg 590 and whether the target was a world-class martial artist or a stone age gorilla-critter from an alien deathworld, an average Joe with a shotgun was gonna fuck them over fifteen ways to Sunday. And Allison was no average Joe.
Fortunately, Yan seemed smart and knew the score. He mostly kept on the periphery but he always watched intently.
There hadn’t been so much as a sniffle among either the humans or the natives, fortunately, which had forced Allison to reluctantly concede that maybe the cross-species disease problem wasn’t quite as scary as she’d feared. They were still being vigilant, but they’d stepped down to green decon cycles with only three of the intense decontamination cartridges left spare.
Good thing, too. She knew Julian was sneaking food from Vemik when he thought she wasn’t looking, but she’d let it slide for the sake of peace. Somehow that hadn’t irked her as much as his increasingly “gone native” habits, but…well. The tan that had been robbed from him by months of living in a spaceship was reasserting itself, so she wasn’t gonna complain about how he was walking around shirtless a lot right now. Definitely not.
Besides, going native had gone over well with the natives. And Xiù had her elf thing going on, which had the tribe treating her almost with the same deference they showed the Singer. Both of them had got impressing the locals down pat. Allison meanwhile had settled for maintaining a more aloof attitude: she’d picked out her Oakleys on the grounds that the aliens probably had no idea how to handle bright orange mirrored wraparounds.
A black sleeveless top completed the whole Sarah Connor look and was damn welcome, because it was unbearably humid in the fog between the trees. Not hot, but any sweat she did produce stuck around forever because there was too much moisture in the air for it to go anywhere. She’d interrogated Xiù on the secret to staying cool and ethereal under such conditions and Xiù had just shrugged and said something about ‘thinking cool and dry thoughts.’
The natives seemed to have that problem licked—they mostly sweated through their hair crests as far as Allison could tell. Those fluffy, kitten-soft furs wrapped around a core of stiffer capillary hairs and drew the moisture and heat away from the skin in a second.
As she passed the Singer, who was taking an afternoon nap in a low branch, Allison took the opportunity to consider the young shaman’s crest in closer detail. It was noticeably redder than those of her female peers; almost as red as a mature male’s bright blaze hunter’s orange in fact, while most of the other women were more like a bright ginger or strawberry blonde. Julian had mused about hormones and sexual dimorphism long enough to make Allison yawn despite being genuinely interested.
It looked soft and strokable, too, but so far the natives were understandably a bit too standoffish with her for her to have felt it first-hand. The information on how soft those crests were came from Julian, who seemed to enjoy being wrangled by Vemik during their play-fights and had reported that the crest was as soft as dryer lint around those stiffer hairs.
She circled the clearing slowly and returned to where Xiù was meditating beneath a tree. Xiù had taken to doing that after her language sessions with Vemik to clear her head before she tackled the chore of recording as much Peoplespeak as she could for posterity before English could pollute it and destroy it via Vemik.
It was maybe part of the elf act, too. When Xiù got into character it took her a while to return to just being herself.
“You okay?” Allison checked with her, as she patrolled past. Xiù opened h er eyes, smiled at her, and nodded.
“I like the way this forest smells,” she said.
Allison had to agree. “Natural. Alive.”
“Yup! And…quiet. It’s funny to think that if we look up we won’t see, like, an airliner contrail or something.” Xiù looked up through the canopy anyway, as if daring the universe to prove her wrong.
“Or a satellite,” Allison agreed. “Our surveysats are all way too small to see.”
“For now. When do they burn up?”
“About a week,” Allison informed her. “And we run out of food two days later. Unless you want to break open the bug crate.”
“Ew, no. Which is why Julian needs to hurry up and finish his—”
They both looked up as Julian crashed into the camp in the precise opposite of his usual stealthy style, with Vemik trying his arboreal best to keep up. Allison straightened, Yan stiffened, and Xiù stood up.
“Julian? What’s wrong, bǎobèi?”
Julian sketched the absolute bare minimum level of respect to Yan that he could get away with and jogged across the clearing.
“That volcano’s active,” he reported, keeping his voice low and urgent. “Are the surveysats still up there?”
“Uh, yeah. Still got a week,” Allison reassured him.
“We need to find a place for them away from the caldera. Now.”
“Is…it really that bad?” Xiù asked. “I mean, people live near active volcanoes on Earth…”
“Yeah, but there’s nearly eight billion of us,” Julian waved a hand. “If ten thousand humans get killed in an eruption, that’s a good day to own a news channel. If ten thousand of these guys get killed then there goes the whole species.”
“Julian!” Xiù seemed a little taken aback, but Allison nodded.
“I mean, yeah. Hard-ass way to put it, but…”
“No, sorry…” Julian rubbed his face. “I’m just…If it was just the fucking Hierarchy then that’s a problem the fellas on Cimbrean can solve. Show up, blow shit up, take the death robots…these guys don’t have writing. A few thousand years from now, the sky-people in their flying hut who fought the demons are a quaint religion and I kinda doubt it’d matter much. But if Big Hotel wanna make these guys go away, all they have to do is make that thing pop its cork—” he jerked his thumb toward the volcano, “—and let mother nature do the rest. We have GOT to get them away from it, and that’s gonna matter.”
“What do you mean, ‘matter?’” Allison asked.
“We can’t move them. We’re one tiny ship and just this one tribe is, what, over fifty people? They’ve gotta move themselves. And they’re not the only tribe, ‘cuz Vemet and I’ve already met dozens out there while hunting, Vemet’s introduced me as the Sky-Hunter. They call you the Sky-Dancer, Xiù. Guess they saw you doing taiji or somethin’.”
“…What do they call me?” Allison asked, intrigued.
“They don’t really know what to call you yet. But they’re starting to talk about us, and there’s probably discontent…we’ve already done damage, and now we’ve gotta do more or they’re all maybe going to be dead in a few years. But we can’t just conquer them and order them around, either.”
Xiù nodded, seeing where he was going. “Somebody needs to persuade them to migrate, and it can’t be us. And the only language they’re going to listen to is if somebody knocks their heads together and makes them follow.”
“Somebody like Yan,” Allison glanced across at the chieftain.
Julian steeled himself and made a decision. In his best Peoplespeak, [“Yan! Can we talk?”]
Yan eyed him carefully, stood up with his water skin and lumbered over deliberately. It was hard to tell if he was intentionally swaggering or if that was just how he moved, but he curled up his tail, sat down and offered a neutral [“Yes?”]
[“Can I speak in] English?”
That seemed to pique Yan’s interest because he nodded, and to their surprise he replied in English too. Clearly the big chieftain had been listening more closely than he pretended. “Okay. Important?”
“…Yeah. Very.”
“Vemik trust. He smart, I trust. Speak good words, he does.” Yan’s English was halting and slow, but excellent considering that he’d never used it in earshot of the three of them.
Julian tilted his head. “You keep your own counsel, don’t you?”
Yan didn’t reply.
[“Sorry. You do your own thinking, on your own. That’s good.”]
Yan snarled in that weirdly friendly way he reserved for Julian. “You tell story or not?”
Vemik settled in a branch above Yan—technically a subservient position in their society, because it placed him behind the Given Man and under his protection—and listened. The whole tribe was doing that, sensing that the sky-people had suddenly become deadly serious about something. Only the Singer settled at ground level alongside Yan, and the big man actually moved over to make room for her.
Julian turned to Xiù. “Fill in for me if we get stuck?” Xiù nodded and fetched her tablet, and they settled down to talk while Allison hung back.
Something was pricking at the back of her neck, and she wasn’t sure what. It wasn’t just the tension with Julian, Xiù and the Tribe, they were all engrossed as Julian launched into his halting best to try and explain exactly what a volcano was and why living near one was a really bad idea, supported now and again by Xiù’s ludicrously fluent grasp of the native language.
No, something else was wrong. Something that nobody else was paying attention to.
She prowled away from the impromptu powwow and tried to do what Julian had taught her how to do in Minnesota and really listen to the forest around her.
And she heard what was missing. The whole tribe jumped when she charged her shotgun.
Julian gave her a confused stare. “…Al?”
“Birdsong.” There wasn’t any. The animal background noise of the forest had gone completely hush.
Everyone went silent at that single word. Clearly the Tribe had learned English more widely and better than they had let on. After a tense several heartbeats of listening, the whole tribe began to make stealthy preparations. Up in the tree, Vemik readied his bow. Yan’s huge fingers clawed a fist-sized rock out of the soft earth for throwing, and Julian unfolded himself and stood, readying his gauss rifle.
In the silence, there was a faint sound, one that didn’t belong at all. A kind of…mechanical whine, like a turbine spinning up for just a few seconds.
Vemik almost fell out of his tree. [“I know that sound!”] He blurted, resorting to his native language. [“Death-bird!”]
The humans wasted a few seconds looking at each other bewildered before Xiù realized what he meant. “Hierarchy drone!”
Allison gritted her teeth. “Back to the ship. Now.”
Xiù took Julian’s reluctant hand to drag him ship-wards, then stopped in her tracks as a similar whine sounded from among the trees in that direction. Then another from the south.
[“They’re all around us!”] The tribe shot up the trees like fireworks, making shrill hooting alarm sounds. Yan remained on the ground, hefting his rock and baring his fangs.
Everything became angles in Allison’s head. Lines of fire, lines not to fire, places where allies were standing and how to move to safely shoot past them. With one arm she shepherded Xiù to whatever protection the dead bulk of the Abrogator could provide while Julian called for Vemet, leapt, and the native man hauled him easily up into the low branches of a Ketta tree.Julian was a decent climber, but Vemet was strong enough to practically throw him into the higher branches, where the pair of them settled and Julian scanned the gauss rifle back and forth, searching for targets among the trees.
They’d all taken tactical training together back in Omaha, with…mixed but largely positive results. Julian’s persistent problem was that at heart he was a varmint shooter: He took his time over every shot, made every round count, and wasn’t really mobile enough for tactical situations. By nature and practice he was much more of a sniper. Xiù meanwhile had started out handling guns like they might explode with every trigger pull and though she’d improved with practice and was mobile enough, her strong and obvious distaste for firearms shone through. They’d both scraped through the training, but…
But Allison had aced it.
Her hand was barely back on the shotgun when the first Hierarchy scout drone spun through the trees, flipping like a thrown playing card as it caught sight of her and took evasive action.
Not quick enough. It was smashed by hurtling twelve-gauge buckshot.
Yan howled and leapt like a salmon to clobber another drone as it swooped in past him on an attack run. The goliath blow knocked it twisting out of its path and it clattered harmlessly to the soil, still whining and trying to fly but disabled.
More of those whining sounds among the trees, three flashes of metal. Angles were wrong. Drop shoulder, bully sideways, turn, fire, spin into the cover of a tree to guard her flank. The two surviving drones wrenched through bewildering tight arcs to try and spoil her aim.
Feet under her, weight balanced, face ice-cold. Step. Advance. Fire. Missed. Julian finally took a shot and winged one, though, and the damaged drone glinted as it skipped behind a tree and vanished.
The undamaged one was circling like a wolf, using the Abrogator’s hull to cover itself. She couldn’t shoot it, it couldn’t shoot her. Harmless, just for a second or two.
Long enough for her to turn at the waist, step back and obliterate the sixth drone as it flashed out from between the trees. Then step, turn, step, kneel, breathe, wait—
And fire. Buckshot slapped the circling-wolf drone out of existence the instant it came into view.
Silence. A long, long tense one full of only the sound of the damaged drone retreating until even that had finally faded below the level of hearing, and the disabled one in the grass still trying to twitch back into the air.
Nobody dared move until the first chirp of some bird coming out of hiding dispelled the silence.
Allison let out a long breath, and the world became a place of people and things again, instead of angles and movement. She noticed in an aloof way as her hands reloaded the shotgun on their own, but tried not to really think about it—She was worried that if she noticed she had a body then it might start shaking and throwing up.
Julian, thank God, came bustling down the tree and rolled as he dropped the last few feet. He touched her on the shoulder and somehow said everything just by doing so, giving her the strength to shore up her composure and pretend to be unaffected as Vemet jumped down and landed behind him, and the two men both went on an immediate patrol of the area.
Yan…he had picked up the disabled drone in his mitts and walked over with it like it wasn’t any big deal. He grunted, and crushed it into a squashed sort of disc with visible effort, then slammed it on the ground with so much force it embedded itself in the dirt.
Then he looked up at Allison, and nodded respectfully before he turned to check on his tribe.
The Singer dropped down from the tree she had fled into during the attack and gave Allison a long and thoughtful stare, then looked back at Vemik. She thoughtfully scraped one of her stubby claw-nails across her teeth to excavate the ketta sap from under it before nodding as she seemed to reach a decision.
“I think we call you…“ She said something in Peoplespeak. The word-bit for ‘sky’ was in there, but Allison didn’t know the other bit, which gave her something to focus on while she gave Xiù a hand up in crawling out from under the Abrogator.
“What did she call me?”
“She called you *‘Sky-Storm.’*” Xiù’s elf act was gone, replaced by naked awe. “And…I mean…that was just…Holy shit, Al!”
“I feel like I’m gonna puke…” Allison confessed for her ears only. Around them, the tribe was slowly coming back down the trees in ones and twos.
Xiù took her hand. It helped.
When the patrol came back, Yan grunted some commands to the men, then he looked at Julian pointedly, returned to where they were sitting, and resumed his position calmly like he hadn’t just leaped clear over Allison’s head and hammered a goddamned drone out of the sky with a rock. Allison wondered if he was feeling as shaky as she was and covering it better.
He inspected his hands and feet quickly, then said politely, “You tell story more.”
Date Point 12y6m2w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
The Entity
<Relief>
Humans. Humans who, quite clearly, had known what the Hierarchy was and had immediately opened fire. The Entity could not possibly have wished for a more positive find from its scouting expeditions.
It could have wished for a more positive outcome of course—the loss of five scout drones stung—but this particular unknown had resolved itself well.
The surviving drone was damaged but stable as it swept wide in the direction the two humans without the shotgun had tried to run. It didn’t take long to stumble across their ship, an unsubtle hammerhead of a thing in gleaming red and silver livery and adorned with the logo of the Byron Group. Unarmed, tiny…clearly a scout ship of some kind.
It allowed itself a rare spike of amusement when it saw the ship’s name painted above the airlock. ‘Misfit.’
As with all human systems, the ship was hardened and all but impenetrable to outside access. The rigorous parity-checking, firewalls and checksums made them all but impossible to infiltrate.
But they could be made to carry a message…
Date Point 12y6m2w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
Allison Buehler
It took several minutes before Julian finally sat down across from Yan again to continue explaining… well, everything. The villagers had scattered, and they took the time to ensure everybody was safe before the storytelling resumed, this time with a nervous eye towards the sky.
“…okay. So.” Julian cleared his throat. “The volcano. We good on that?”
“May go ‘ksssh!’” Yan spread his arms wide to imitate the concept. “Like [spitting-pond] in [high-forest-place] but big. Could kill all People. Bad. Must move…far away. All People move. All tribes. Yes?”
“Do you think the other tribes would move?” Julian asked.
Yan pondered that very carefully, and took a good, long swig of his water skin.
[“Jooyun Sky-Hunter, Shyow Sky-Dancer and Awisun Sky-Storm.] You, I believe. Others…not see you. Not know.” He said that last while aiming an especially respectful eye at Allison and her weapon.
Julian gave Yan a very intense stare. “Yan…how big of a leader are you?”
That was a ballsy thing to ask in front of his tribe like that. But Julian had a point; there wasn’t time to be diplomatic anymore. Yan seemed to understand and even respect Julian for it.
“Am oldest [Given-Man] now in all [The People.] Crest dark.” He gestured to the tip of his tail—the tuft there was as turning as dark as wine or spilled blood compared to the brilliant scarlet of the rest of his crest, a far cry from Vemik’s pale ginger and Vemet’s blaze orange. “Not many live so long. Am…[young-healthy-strong], live many [future-seasons] maybe. Am biggest, too.” He said that with his characteristically smug snarl.
Xiù had to translate that bit. Julian then asked, “Will they listen to you?”
Yan nodded after some thought, then added, “But would need…would break many [Given-Men] to make listen. And women. Children. Very sad.”
Well. That was as candid an assessment as they’d ever get. The men and women of the tribe nodded along too, grimly. They collectively seemed to sense they had a mission now and it seemed to Allison they were already steeling themselves for it.
It wasn’t often anyone got to see how wars started. Allison looked at Julian uncertainly, knowing—or maybe hoping—in her head that they were doing the right thing here, but there was a sick feeling settling in her stomach now that had absolutely nothing to do with adrenaline and fear.
For her part, Xiù was unreadable. Her hair had come loose during the attack, and from where she was sitting Allison couldn’t see enough face past it to read her expression even if she was showing one.
“…We need to go,” Julian said, having to force the words out in a grim croak until he cleared his throat. “This attack, our supplies are running short…but we will be back as fast as we can, and we’ll bring friends.”
“How long?”
“It may be a full season.”
Yan thought about that, then looked at Vemet and the Singer. “Will move by then. You find us?”
“Yes. You must move, and you must hide or be ready to hide. Big Enemy may wake up. We can make something to help. And I need your help to make it, Yan. Making this needs strong men.”
Allison snorted internally but kept her calm. Boys. Julian was shamelessly playing to Yan’s literal strengths and Yan permitted him the flattery. [“The People,] *strong!*” He thumped his chest impressively. [“Sky-Thinker] beat you, I hear…” He said it with a surprisingly gentle, playful expression.
Julian chuckled softly and gave Vemik a fond look. “Yeah. He’s got game.” There was a trill of laughter from among the men of the tribe—even if they didn’t understand his words, they knew his meaning perfectly. “But, this is [big-craft-magic] we want to give you.” Julian sobered back up. “I want to teach you to make something. Something that will make it easier to lead the People.”
Yan sat forward. “What?”
Julian drew his knife and stroked the edge. “We call it…steel.”