Date Point 12y6m3w AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
The Singer
The Singer knew that it was best to sleep when the baby slept, but right now getting the baby to sleep in the first place was hard work. The constant sound and smoke of the ‘steel’-magic made her grumpy, so she would suckle only half-heartedly and make grumpy noises for a long while before she could be persuaded to suckle again, and only fell asleep reluctantly.
Once asleep though, she slept just fine through the loud noise and bustle of the men, which was an opportunity for the Singer to leave her with one of the older women who had more experience with babies, and get some much-needed sleep in the low branches of the largest Ketta near the high-forest-place village.
She slept only fitfully. The sound of Jooyun striking the ‘metal’ over and over again kept her on edge.
She dreamed of blue fire and a knife made of the sky, and woke to find that Awisun and Shyow had chosen to take a nap too, leaning against each other at the base of her tree. Everybody was tired right now, even the sky-people.
She considered the two women for a long time before deciding that her sharp, Vemik-like curiosity was too much to endure and dropped from the branch to land a few steps away from them.
Shyow, apparently, was a light sleeper. She woke up almost before the Singer’s feet touched the earth, and gave her a warm though exhausted smile. “Is everything alright?”
The Singer wrung her tail nervously in her hands without really noticing. She liked and respected the sky-people, but something about them made her afraid and nervous.
“I was dreaming about…Things.”
“I dream too,” Shyow nodded, then glanced fondly at Awisun who was still snoring faintly. “All the time. Always strange dreams, too. Never anything… safe.”
Her use of the People’s words was easy and confident, and the words didn’t even seem to fit strangely in her mouth the way some Engwish words tried to slip sideways between the Singer’s teeth
“That’s bad magic…”
“Mm. The sky-thinkers back home say it’s because I was hurt badly once. One of the Big Enemies used a powerful weapon on me, and it left a mark…” she trailed her fingers down the horrific scars on her arm. The Singer had to wonder what kind of medicine had kept her alive. A man with wounds like that would have seen the arm go black and sti nking before the rot killed him.
“You don’t speak about your home much…” the Singer ventured. She finally noticed that she was playing with the end of her tail and tucked it aside as she sat down. “This… place-under-another-sky.”
They both jumped when Awisun spoke. Neither of them had noticed her wake.
Awisun’s attitude always intimidated the Singer a little. Cautious. Always watchful. Coiled like a man’s arm before he threw his spear, that was Awisun. It had taken work to see the softer, caring person underneath, the one who was only so tense because she was afraid for the People… but that didn’t change the fact that she had released a torrent of taking-magic on the death-birds. It was hard not to be scared of a woman like that.
“We call it ‘The Earth.’” she said.
“Thyurth?”
[“The. Earth.”] Shyow spoke carefully and clearly. “‘Earth’ means… well, the ground under our feet. The soil that plants grow in. This.” Xiù reached down and scraped up a handful of dirt. “But our place-under-another-sky is called the Earth.”
The Singer considered that at length, then nodded. “A good name. Powerful magic in it.”
“It’s… a strange place in some ways,” Shyow mused, gazing thoughtfully off toward where the men were doing inscrutable things with fire and stone. “I think we… beat it.”
[“Julian wouldn’t agree,”] Awisun remarked, then snorted and said something strange in a singsong way. [“Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”]
Shyow gave her a look, the kind of fond impatient one that the Singer aimed at Vemik herself quite often. Awisun shrugged. [“He wouldn’t,”] she repeated.
Shyow glanced over at the forge. [“Well, yeah…but it’s not like here. If a woman dies while having a baby, it’s… And if a child dies, I mean, that’s super rare now on Earth.”]
[“Not in most countries,”] Awisun said.
[“I know, but you remember what we felt in San Francisco don’t you? That whole… I don’t know… that whole soft feeling.”]
[“You’re the one who said that wasn’t a nice thing to think.”]
[“Yeah, it’s not. But you were still right…”]
Their Engwish was getting too dense for the Singer to follow, and she said so. “You’ve left me behind…”
“Sorry, sorry…” Shyow apologized, and sighed. “The Earth is…A lot like here. But…this place is like a part of the forest where no village has stood. On Earth, almost all places have villages.”
”Big villages,” Awisun added. “Made of stone and steel, where so many people live that they don’t all know each other.”
“Why leave?” The Singer asked. “It sounds…why would you come here?”
“Because, ummm…” Shyow trailed off, but Awisun stepped into the gap.
[“Tell her about Mount Everest.”]
[“Right! Yes.”] Shyow nodded then looked thoughtful for a moment before speaking. “There’s a big mountain on Earth,” she said. “So tall that you’re almost above the sky at the top. A few people die every year trying to climb it, even though others have done it before.”
“Then… why climb it?” the Singer asked, genuinely confused.
Awisun shrugged and used the People’s words for once. “Because it’s there.” Her faint smile looked almost like an apology.
“That’s…” The Singer couldn’t think of a word. There was probably one in Engwish, but if she’d tried to make the thought in People-Words she would have run out of breath first. It sounded wrong, like the kind of idea a man might have after taking a hard blow to the head.
“It’s a ‘challenge,’ you see.” Awisun added.
“Challenge means what?”
“Something difficult that you do anyway because it’s difficult,” Shyow explained.
“…Like the trial our men go through to become men…” the Singer saw. “Then… you are taking something like a trial of manhood all the time? Why? Life is difficult enough!”
[“Not on Earth it isn’t,”] Allison said. [“Not for a lot of us. Xiù’s right, we beat the Earth.”]
“You can get so good at sky-thinking that life gets easy?”
Shyow nodded. “It gets too easy. And if things are too easy, you get weak and soft.”
“You make sky-thinking sound like a trap.”
Shyow nodded again, but more solemnly this time. “It can be.”
The Singer found that she’d subconsciously started playing with the end of her own tail for comfort again, and let go of it. “…Can I ask you something?” she asked, deciding that she didn’t want to hear more about softness and ‘challenge’ for now. Those were big thoughts for later.
Both of them gestured for her to ask.
“You…you’ve shared taking-magic with the men, this steel of yours. Do you have any giving-magic for the women? It would help Yan persuade the women of the other tribes to join us…”
Awisun and Shyow both looked deeply uncomfortable at the idea.
“Giving you even that was, um,…difficult,” Shyow said, slowly. “And very dangerous.”
“If you give us nothing but taking-magic, the balance will be gone!” the Singer wrung her tail again until it almost hurt. “The men will have power that the women can’t answer, that’s…you can’t…”
“Is it just a taking-magic?” Shyow asked. “I know the men are doing all the work now, but the women were doing a lot earlier…”
“It’s… I don’t know,” the Singer confessed. “But it feels like a taking-magic.” She glanced back at the ‘forge’ again and watched Jooyun hammer relentlessly at the metal while both Yan and Vemik tended to the fire and kept out of his way. The magic felt very…male. There was nothing feminine about it.
That by itself was maybe fine. Maybe. But seeing Yan listening like an eager child at an elder hunter’s feet while Jooyun explained something about the work was…
She was glad that the sky-women had told her to be afraid. She knew now just how honest they were being.
“…Yes,” she decided. “It’s a taking-magic. A powerful one. And I trust my uncle and I love Vemik, but they’re just men, and too much taking-magic makes men forget themselves. I need something to help them stay balanced.”
“I don’t think we can give you that…” Shyow said at last. “I think…I think that’s your ‘challenge,’ Singer. We can’t do it for you.”
“…I guessed you would say that,” the Singer sighed. “But…”
She wanted to argue, or cry, something, but instead she sighed again and gave up. The Sky-People spoke with such strength about how terrible the danger was. Part of her wanted to not believe them at all, but it was clear that they knew every word was true.
She caught herself playing with her tail again and finally gave up and let herself do it for a while, if it made her feel better. “…I wish the Old Singer was still here,” she confessed. “I know she would have seen what to do.”
“You’re still young, aren’t you?” Shyow asked.
“I only took my trial of manhood and had my tattoos only a hand of seasons ago. I’ve had only one child. The Old Singer hadn’t finished teaching me, I…I don’t—”
To her surprise, Awisun—the Sky-Storm, a woman with more taking-magic than Yan,—scooted forward and gave her exactly the kind of comforting hug that the Old Singer had used to give in times like these.
[“It’s okay,”] she said. [“We don’t know what we’re doing either.”]
Her words shouldn’t have been comforting at all.
But they were.
Date Point 12y6m3w1d AV
Uncharted Class 12 Deathworld, Near 3Kpc Arm
Yan Given-Man
The work, which had seemed so tiring and so unending before, now actually began.
Yan learned more words under Sky-Hunter’s tutelage. ‘Refining,’ ‘forging,’ ‘quenching,’ reheating, ‘tempering,’ folding the hot metal. ‘Laminating’ by beating a chunk with the hammering-rock until it was thin, then folding it over and starting again, all while holding the fire-hot metal steady with one hand using the ‘tongs.’ It took days of work that somehow taxed even Yan’s prodigious strength and certainly tested his endurance.
All of that only resulted in something knife-shaped. Jooyun called them ‘blanks.’
More words. ‘Grinding,’ ‘bluing’ to ‘retemper’ the metal, ‘honing’ on a ‘whetstone,’ carefully reheating and hammering to ‘furrow’ the knife and shape its ‘profile.’ Slowly, the blades grew shinier, keener, stronger.
The work took its toll on everybody. Vemik would grind away and Yan worked himself exhausted beating on the metal while Jooyun kept the furnace fed and supervised their work, but the rest of the Tribe was just as busy. Doing this one thing was a trial for all of them. Vemet was so busy keeping the rest of the men working together that he lost weight and worried himself sleepless.
Thank the gods for the Singer and the women. The Singer even went on a hunt, an unthinkable prospect in more familiar times but she alone of all the women had done it before. Only she had the taking-magic as well as the giving-magic.
She brought back a good kill, too, and seemed… happier, somehow. As though something that had been troubling her wasn’t quite so heavy for now.
It was all worth it, though. All of it. Yan learned the answers to questions that even Vemik had never thought to ask, and at the end of it all he was left holding something…
Beautiful. Truly, perfectly beautiful. So much so that he spent half a morning’s good light just admiring his handiwork. The blade shone like water and had ripples and waves that seemed to flow as one tilted it this way or that. The edge was so fine that when he held it in the best possible light and looked down the blade it was as if the metal blended into nothing.
They even somehow managed to make Jooyun’s own blade seem somehow… dull.
Jooyun was just as pleased. “You’ll want to take very good care of those, the way I told you,” he suggested. “In some ways they’re maybe better than mine.”
He was examining the blades with a different kind of look on his face. Not awe, or wonder, but something else. Something that began with pride. He looked up and waved at his women, gesturing for them to come and see.
Awisun made that funny shrill noise she sometimes made by pursing her lips when she saw them.
[“Damn! Shit, if the People ever need some dollars they could clean up selling these. Real collector’s pieces.”]
Jooyun raised one of his eyebrows and wiped some soot off his face, but said nothing. Shyow’s face, however, went even paler than usual. [ “We are NOT teaching them the concept of money!”] she said. Yan didn’t understand the important words there, but her alarm was obvious.
“Mun-ee…” Vemik mused. [“What does that mean?”]
“Nuh-uh, friend of mine,” Jooyun shook his head firmly, though there was that faint amused smile around his mouth. The sky-people said many things with their faces. “That’s dangerous magic and you really don’t need it yet.”
How could something be both amusing and dangerous at the same time? Yan wrestled with the question in his head for a heartbeat and then decided not to worry too much. The Sky-People were strange, there was no sense in trying to figure out everything about them.
[“Well, it’s about time you finished, anyway,”] Awisun said. [“Because we’re gonna have to break into the bugs and peanut butter if we stay any longer.”]
[“Besides, you stink,”] Shyow added. Yan knew that word—it meant something like ‘tastes bad’ but with their face-holes instead of their tongues.
“…That means you’re leaving,” Vemik realized. All the triumph and pride he had in what they had just done vanished: he gave the sky-people a pleading stare. “Aren’t you?”
Jooyun knelt down in front of him and put a hand on his shoulder. “We have to. Our people don’t know you’re here. We have to tell them, or else not even steel and uniting the tribes will be enough.”
“But… you will come back?” Vemik asked. He sounded more like a boy than a man to Yan’s ears, but then again Yan himself was fighting to keep his strength. Somehow, even though they were strange, the sky-people’s presence was… comforting. They seemed to know the shape of the days to come, and without them to help him see the way…
“We won’t lie to you, Vemik. We can’t promise that,” Shyow said. “But yes, we will if we can. We will probably have to fight with words and thoughts when we get home, and fight hard.”
Yan grunted. He’d expected that things wouldn’t be simple. He summoned the best of the Engwish he had learned and spoke carefully and slower. [“Then…] the Sky-People [fight good. We fight too.”] He sensed Shyow’s nervousness and gave her his friendliest snarl. [“With words, if we can.”]
Jooyun stood up. “We will, Yan. I promise.”
Yan nodded, and returned to the People’s words. They fit his mouth better. “I know you worry. This is powerful magic you’ve given us, I can see it too. We’ll…try to use it well.”
He’d made many promises in his life, and had meant every single one of them. Promises were sacred, after all. They weren’t made lightly. This one, though, somehow went beyond a promise and beyond sacred. He wasn’t making a promise at all, really: He was making a prediction.
There was some awkward standing-around for a few seconds before Awisun finally cleared her throat.
[“Guys…I don’t wanna go either. But the sooner we do, the sooner we come back.”]
Jooyun and Shyow both seemed to come out of a trance of kinds. They nodded unhappily, looked around, and then back up the slope toward their ship.
“You’ll come to see us leave?” Shyow asked.
Yan nodded. “Yes.”
The whole village did. Mostly it was out of curiosity—the Sky-People were trusted and liked thanks to Yan’s acceptance of them but they were still strangers, still strange. People like that needed watching. Caution demanded it.
Besides, a chance to watch their steel hut fly again—!
Yan was even more in awe of it now that he had the smallest inkling of just how much work must have gone into making it. To make that much steel alone was beyond what his tribe could ever do, and he knew in his breath that the steel was probably just the smallest and easiest part of making a hut fly.
Except that this time, it didn’t fly at all. The sky-people said their goodbyes solemnly, vanished inside, and there was a long silence. The moment when the ‘ship’ whined deep like a wounded Yshek made everybody jump and step away nervously. The whining built up to a rumbling growl, and then with a thunder and a short-lived gale, rather than leaping into the sky the impossible thing flashed as black as the moonless sky and simply vanished as if it had never been.
If not for the depressions in the earth where its feet had sat, the whole tribe might have felt as though they were waking from a strange kind of dream. They stood there for a long moment, weighing the gravity of what they had been given.
Yan finally broke the silence by grunting and turning back towards the forge.
“Come on,” he said. “We still have work to do.”
Date Point 12y6m3w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space
Kirk
“Okay. Coltainer version oh-point-nine-seven-five. And if we’re lu…”
“Don’t say it, you’ll jinx it!”
Kirk shot a sideways glance at the man who’d urgently interrupted the test run. It had always interested him how Human superstitions managed to influence everybody in their society, even their most devoted rationalists, futurists and engineers. Crossed fingers, little rituals, never saying the word “luck.”
Sergeant Lee nodded apologetically, though. As though the objection was a perfectly logical one. “Right. Sorry. Beginning test.”
Lewis’ original vision of the device had literally been a colony in a container, hence ‘coltainer.’ The modern incarnation exceeded that simplistic brief in every way. It was a scout, a probe, a scientific instrument, a mapping tool, and a kind of hyper-macroscopic interstellar vaccine.
Its ability to identify viable colonization sites from orbit and deploy a series of automated assembly devices that would literally ‘print’ a basic complex out of local materials was almost an afterthought. It was certainly…crude. Humans had never designed a system like that which could work all by itself with no intelligent operator’s control. The massive shortcomings in its design and capabilities were compensated for by the certain knowledge that any temperate world was so large as to guarantee that somewhere on the planet would have exactly the right conditions and resources.
Kirk would have preferred something more sophisticated, something that took full advantage of the best the Dominion species could produce, but the arguments against were just too good. This needed to be a Human project as much as it could, for everybody’s sake. Nobody else had the imagination to exhaustively think about all the horrible ways in which something like the coltainer could go wrong. Everybody else’s technology was too badly compromised by Hierarchy influence.
So, so what if humans needed their rituals? So what if they filled their work with elaborate attempts to imbue the finished product with good fortune? Kirk was used to it, even if it did make him think that they must constantly be expecting the worst possible outcome. That paranoia where they expected the worst every time and then prayed for the best actually resulted in an efficient, mostly error-free development process.
Which went some way toward explaining why Lewis’ ludicrously overambitious coltainer idea had actually borne a kind of fruit within a mere two years.
It was strange to reflect that in all that time, only three people on the station had never taken any “shore leave.” Kirk and Vedreg were both exiles, trapped in the safety of the Erebor system by the threat of Hierarchy assassins, and Lewis…
Lewis seemed to have no interest in seeing Earth ever again. It was a sticking point in his relationship with Sergeant Campbell. Under her tutelage he’d developed something that resembled an actual deathworlder physique but he still detested exercise and was perfectly adamant that nobody but Lucy Campbell could have got him into the gym.
For her part, she seemed to have a knack for playing him like an instrument. The best way to bring Lewis around on a subject was via his girlfriend.
Usually, though, Lewis was the one doing the bringing-around. He was easily the most intelligent being on the station and seemed to have the coltainer blueprint memorized right down to the individual diode.
But going back to Earth even for a visit was a sticking point with him, usually. He’d always been adamant that there was nothing for him on humanity’s homeworld.
That was, until the news filtered through that Misfit had returned from its exploration mission. His sudden new and unprecedented interest in visiting the Earth had not impressed Campbell, who had hitherto been forced to take her shore leave without him and was understandably unimpressed that three estranged friends could lure him where his girlfriend couldn’t.
The argument had kept people awake.
“I told you, first moment I hear Julian and the girls are back, *that*‘s when I head over there, didn’t I?” he whispered. “I’m sure I told her before too. She said she was fine with it.”
“Lewis, is now really the time?”
“Yeah but, dude, Lucy’s all mad at me and—”
“Lewis, your literal life’s work is on the verge of completion. Can it not wait?”
Lewis shot a disinterested glance at the stream of data flowing back from the probe. “It’ll work. Angry girlfriend, more important.”
“And why come to me?” Kirk sighed. “I have repeatedly said that human romance is a subject I do not touch.”
“Dude. Makes you the most qualified man in this can.”
“That makes no sense at all.”
“Dude. Means you don’t crap it up by trying to give me an opinion and shit. I can just unload on you. Bore the ass offa you maybe, but…” Lewis shot a cheeky grin upwards at him, and Kirk rolled his eyes.
“So you do not actually want an opinion?” He asked.
“…I mean, it’d be fuckin’ interesting to hear you finally share one, but mostly I just need somebody to listen while I get my head-filing done.” Lewis kicked his toe idly into the deck. “‘Sides, I know what you’re thinkin’.”
“Do you.”
“You’re thinkin’ she’s completely right and I’ve treated her like ass over this.”
“Am I.”
“Nobody’s fooled, dude.”
“Aren’t they.”
“Dude.”
That particular word could mean literally anything, Kirk had learned. He was a dude, Lucy was a dude, the whole team were dudes, as was the station. The coltainer was a dude as was any particular volumetric display or screen Lewis happened to be viewing. An unexpected gust from an air vent had once been “dude.” Then there was the way it could mean practically anything, beyond just referring to somebody or something. A whole conversation seemed to be possible just from nuances of stress and expression while saying nothing but that word.
This particular nuance meant “come on, quit yankin’ me around” so Kirk relented a bit.
“You want my opinion? The literal salvation of your species is in final testing stages, but you are worried about an argument with your romantic partner. I think your priorities are skewed,” he said.
“Dude. The fuck is the point of having a future if you aren’t gonna get laid?”
Kirk snorted and shook his mane, not taking his eyes off the volumetric readout of the test’s progress.
“I know that snort. That’s your ‘not-my-problem’ snort.”
“Is it.”
”Dude.”
Kirk sighed and unwound. He swung his head around at the end of his long neck and spared Lewis some more attention. “Lewis, it is entirely probable that I will never ‘get laid’ in my life. It is less of a concern for my species than for yours, we don’t work the same way,” he said. “I do not share my thoughts on these things because I am not qualified, not out of stubbornness.”
“Bullshit. You’re a thinkin’ sapient and you’re good with knowin’ people and what they want. That’s, like… ninety percent of it.”
“Well, you have already said what you think, so what do you need my opinion for?”
“Dude.”
“That was your ‘I-don’t-have-a-good-reply’ dude.”
Lewis chuckled. “Was it?”
Kirk crackled a laugh too, and finally turned his full attention to Lewis for a few seconds. “You said it yourself. She is right and you treated her like ass. You already know this. You just want to hear somebody say it.”
“…Yeah.”
Sergeant Lee called over his shoulder. “Hey, Beverote! If you’re done conspiring over there, we’ve got the results in from NAVTAP.”
“It worked, right?” Lewis called.
“Perfectly.”
“LOCS?”
“Definitely ready for testing on an actual temperate world.”
Lewis turned back to Kirk. “Think that’s your cue, dude.”
Kirk nodded, and called up his own contribution to the project – a map of every known deathworld in a kiloparsec radius of the Erebor system.
It wasn’t a complete map, not by a broad margin. On that kind of scale, the ultra-high-definition Kwmbwrw designed volumetric display was showing clusters of stars as points of light, rather than individual systems, and temperate worlds were few and far between. In a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars, even the most optimistic estimate for temperate, life-bearing worlds with nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres and a liquid water cycle was in the low millions at most. The Dominion’s cartographers reckoned that a quarter of them at most had actually been charted.
Still. Hundreds of thousands of suitable worlds was by no standard a small number, and Kirk had spent months poring over known candidates in their vicinity for the day—which had finally arrived—when a Coltainer would need testing on a candidate planet.
“This one,” he said, selecting the icon that surrounded a cluster, and zooming down until he could select the star and then the planet. “It’s a class ten, far from any major spacelanes, not claimed by any species, not known to have a native population… it doesn’t even have a proper name, just coordinates.”
“Sounds good. You gonna name it, dude?”
“I thought ‘Gambit’ seemed appropriate…”
“I dunno. Naming it after an X-Men character?” Lewis shook his head.
“I would be hard pressed to identify an English noun, verb or adjective that has not been the name of at least one character somewhere in your fiction, Lewis,” Kirk grumbled, but he had anticipated this. “Kirktopia, then.”
“Dude.”
Kirk snorted a laugh and ventured a serious proposal. “New Enewetak.”
Lewis frowned at him, but Sergeant Lee nodded enthusiastically. ”Good name,” he declared.
“This is goin’ over my head here…” Lewis complained.
“Enewetak Atoll. Where they tested Ivy Mike?” Lee prompted. Lewis gave him a blank shake of the head. “The hydrogen bomb?”
“Oh! Shit, well, yeah. That works.”
“Then we have our name,” Kirk decided.
“Good. The next testing cycle’s in one month, if Nadeau gets the go-ahead from AEC. You gonna take Campbell and hit up Earth for a bit?” Lee asked. “‘Cuz, friendly hint. The answer is yes.”
“Yeah. Absolutely,” Lewis agreed.
“And not just to catch up with your friends, man.”
“Dude, I hear ya.”
“Cool.”
They sat and watched the probe run through its refinery test run. That process, Kirk knew, had been difficult to achieve. Smelting asteroids down and distilling out all of the elements they carried had required not only the ability for the probe to generate an intricate alchemical laboratory out of nothing but forcefields, but also use those forcefields to alternately heat and cool the ore as it passed through the process.
It was surprisingly efficient, thanks to the fact that forcefields could be made to both emit and absorb heat, so most of the energy that went into the process was recycled, but thermodynamics had some stern views on the subject of free lunches. Even with every energy-saving trick they’d been able to conceive of, the refinery process still demanded that the probe relocate to an inner-system orbit and gorge itself on solar radiation.
It was probably a beautiful process to watch in person, though. Looping flows of molten ore and cooling ingots of raw material would be describing tight orbits around the probe while the waste products were vented as a tiny incandescent nebula that cooled to invisibility within seconds. Unfortunately, all they had to see the process by was a stream of diagnostic reports and the station’s remote sensors, and those had to be careful not to be dazzled by the star.
It took surprisingly little time, and the process wasn’t even half complete before the probe’s nanofactory began to spit out the components necessary to build its own doppelganger.
Lee shifted in his seat, and Kirk tried to gauge if he was feeling proud or uncomfortable. Quite possibly both. “Well…Congratulations guys. We did it,”he said at last. “Looks like we’ve built a working Von Neumann probe.”
“You think we’ll be remembered well for it?” Lewis asked.
Lee rubbed his jaw as he watched the probe cozy up to its half-assembled progeny like a mother whale nursing her calf.
“…I fucking hope so,” he said.