Date Point 12y7m AV
Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Xiù Chang
“You had clear and specific instructions!”
Special Agent Darcy really didn’t strike Xiù as a woman prone to anger, and there was a…restrained quality to her anger even now. As if she was more disappointed than angry.
Not that they didn’t deserve it, maybe, but Xiù was feeling sick and weak for lack of sleep and she knew that the other two were just as bad. Returning Misfit to Omaha via Cimbrean, the customs inspection, clearing things with the military, and all the rest of it…
The only half-decent sleep she’d achieved had been before the final jump to Sol and the re-entry down over the Pacific and Continental USA, and that had been a mere four hours of dreaming that she was lying there awake. It hadn’t been restful at all.
Darcy had been waiting for them. Byron Group had apparently called her up the second they took the ship’s multiple hardened drives away for transport not only to the Group’s holdings on Cimbrean, but also back through the relay for the attention of Allied Extrasolar Command, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Global Representative Assembly.
*Misfit*‘s systems weren’t even cooled down yet, the ship was still safely discharging all its stored power back into the municipal power grid ahead of a full systems maintenance and replacement cycle, and Darcy was simmering at them from across a table, apparently on the cool verge of boiling over.
She didn’t look like she’d had much sleep either.
“At the first sign, I said! The first sign of Hierarchy activity, your job was to get the hell back in touch and tell Kevin about it and wait for instructions!”
Allison, of course, was fighting back. She would have been even if she hadn’t been irritable after three days of non-stop work. “They were literally under attack! We had drones all over us while we were there!” she shot. “We couldn’t just—”
“Miss Buehler, you had weeks.” Darcy snarled. *”Misfit*‘s jump drive could have had you back at Cimbrean in a moment, and back on that planet again in two hours, so do not dare to bullshit me.”
She glared into Allison’s eyes with such fierce force that Xiù had a sudden ridiculous mental image of lightning bolts crackling between them, and she had to suppress the inappropriate urge to giggle. Allison backed down.
“We won’t. It was a judgement call.”
“A judgement call that you had no right to make and which went completely against the instructions you were given!”
“We are not military assets,” Julian informed her. Fatigue was deepening his voice to a glacial growl. “We agreed to cooperate with you, but we’re not under your employ, and you have no right to order us, instruct us, threaten us, or cajole us. We answer to Byron and his orders explicitly required us to explore.”
Darcy rested her knuckles on the table and leaned forward. “I can make Byron’s life hell if I want to,” she warned.
“Darcy.”
Kevin Jenkins was the only one in the room who looked well-rested but he had so far been leaning silently in the corner with his arms folded, listening. Now he kicked away from the wall and swayed upright.
“You’re pissed. I get it. I’m kinda pissed about it myself, and so’s the boss. But making Byron’s life hell ain’t gonna help,” he said. “He will pull out if you act a horse’s ass, and then you lose the only experienced exploration team the entire human race has put together so far. You have no right to threaten anybody here, and you know it.”
Darcy spared a glare for him. ”Et tu, Brute?”
“You’re damn fuckin’ straight,” Jenkins drawled. “You’re outta line. Now, we’ll talk this out but Etsicitty’s right; the Byron Group is cooperating with you, not obeying you. We don’t take our marchin’ orders from you, ‘cuz this ain’t a fuckin’ dictatorship.”
“We were faced with the death of a people.” Xiù said, quietly. They all seemed to remember she was there and went still to listen. “Leaving would have made it worse. Staying would have made it worse. Anything at all we could have done at any point had a downside. Giving them steel could kill them all! But what should we have done?” She looked Darcy in the eye. “They’re on the edge. Any little tiny thing could kill them off, Hierarchy or not. The only moral choice, as we saw it, was to give them the tools to save themselves.”
Darcy’s expression was so cold it could have condensed the air, but she didn’t venture a reply as she turned it on the three of them each in turn. None of them so much as flinched.
In the end she glanced at Jenkins again, then picked up her briefcase. “…Kevin, I’ll talk with you later,” she said, and let herself out.
When she had left, Kevin let out a big breath and shook his head sadly. “I believe y’all may have just cost that lady her job,” he said, slowly.
“I think she just cost herself her job, threatening Byron like that.” Allison folded her arms. “Aren’t spooks meant to keep their cool?”
“She ain’t a spook, she’s an analyst, but…” Kevin shrugged. “Reading between the lines, she’s staked her reputation on risky propositions more’n once. Guess it’s finally come to bite her in the ass.”
“Risky propositions?” Julian asked. ”You backed us too.”
“Yeah, and about that.” Kevin grabbed a chair, turned it so that it was facing away from the table and straddled it backwards, resting his arms on its back. “God dammit guys, I know you know you’ve rolled a fuckin’ heavy dice here.”
Julian nodded solemnly. “Yeah. We know. And it sucks.”’
“You really, really believe that you couldn’t have spared two hours to come back here and squeeze off a burst transmission? Couldn’t have asked for backup, for any kind of oversight?”
Allison had her legs crossed, and she knocked irritably on her boot in response to that. “At the time we were trying not to get our heads literally ripped off by a talking cartoon gorilla with a foot-tall, candy-red, head-to-tail Mohawk. And a spear. And inch-long fangs. Sound like fun?” she asked.
Kevin had clearly learned a few things about patience, because he let the jab’s tone slide and focused on the content instead.
“For a whole three months? Surely these gorilla-guys sleep sometime?”
Julian sighed. “Okay. Look. Let’s walk through it, okay? Meet Yan. He’s scary as fuck, and he’s distrustful, and he’s got a tribe to protect. We’ve got a clear and present threat we need to communicate to them. We can’t assume we’ll be able to leave and re-establish any kind of…fuck, anything. The entire thing was a goddamned freak accident from the word go. We had to calm the situation down before we could so much as walk away and that took hours. You think it wouldn’t have hurt that rapport if we’d just got back in the ship and gone?”
“Julian. I ain’t talkin’ about much here. I’m talkin’ about you couldn’t have fired off that jump drive, got in touch, and gone straight back in the middle of the night sometime?” Kevin pressed. “That still woulda gone against what you agreed to do, but it woulda covered your asses, y’know?”
“We only had one jump beacon left,” Allison pointed out. “Because we left the others at explored worlds as per our orders, Kevin. We wouldn’t have been able to come back without stranding ourselves. We knew coming back would mean refit and resupply, and downtime, and… well, this woulda happened. ‘Cept now, you’d be angry at us for not doing what we did do, so how ‘bout we cut the goddamn bullshit here?”
Kevin rubbed a hand down his face. “Guys…There is every fuckin’ chance that you’re gonna go down in history as the ultimate cultural destroyers here. The history books might remember you three as pure fuckin’ evil, okay? I am on your side here!”
“Or they could remember us the other way ‘round. We’re fucked either way.”
“And do you really think Moses wants to play with a hot potato like that? Shit, it’s gonna take every trick in my book for me to stop him from firing your asses! Play it wrong and he might fire me too!”
“Y’know what?” Julian snarled, “What the fuck did he think was gonna happen when he commissioned a goddamned exploration team? This was always gonna happen, and if he’s too fuckin’ full of himself to see that then what the fuck are we even doing? News flash of the fuckin’ century: first contact always sucks. My grandpa’s people know that firsthand. Don’t you dare think for one goddamned second I ain’t been thinkin’ on that!”
Xiù touched him on the arm, and that little gesture kept Julian seated. The hostility crackling over the table stuttered and dissipated.
Kevin was the first to settle down again. “…I’m on your side,” he repeated, resting his elbows on the table with a defeated set to his shoulders. “Really guys, I am. But we ain’t talkin’ about facts and hard choices and difficult truths here, we’re talking about public opinion, and there ain’t nothin’ more fickle.”
Julian gave him the most disgusted look Xiu had ever seen him wear. “Fuck public opinion. I don’t care what people think when the stakes are the survival of a sapient species.”
“You really think we’re gonna save them without public opinion on our side?”
“If they’re so terrified of offending, or trampling, or whatever the fuck you’re worried about…then it wouldn’t matter, ‘cuz we wouldn’t have the will to act in the first place.”
Kevin shook his head. “Will to act is a resource. You can farm it. We’re gonna have to farm it. ‘Cuz you guys are forgetting that hardly anybody outside this room even knows about the Hierarchy! How’re we gonna convince folks that these guys need our help if we can’t even say what they’re in danger from?”
“Are you—?” Allison’s tone was incredulous. “Stop. Listen. They are going to die if we do not intervene. Full. Stop. End of fucking discussion. Everything else is goddamned secondary!”
“And that don’t matter a bent nickel to folks like Byron!”
Julian slouched back in his seat with an expression like chained murder and folded his arms. “Then he better find his fuckin’ humanity or fire us,” he declared, slowly and evenly. There were frozen spikes of contempt hanging from every syllable, which somehow made it worse than if he’d snapped or shouted. “‘Cuz I think we’ve said all we can say.”
“Or we can make it in his best interest.” Kevin sat back too, though his body language was more open, more bargaining. “I don’t like it. I hate it. I hate that this is even a conversation we’re having. If we lived in a world with any fuckin’ ethics to it then we’d be pilin’ stuff onto the ship right now to go help these people, b ut that just ain’t how folks really work. People will go to war over their neighbor’s tree droppin’ leaves on their lawn, while kids starve to death in Africa, okay? That is what we’re fuckin’ up against here, that whole stupid parochial bullshit mindset except on the political billionaire business scale. And if we’re gonna get them to do the right thing then we have to show ‘em it’s in their own best interests. That’s how the whole system works!”
“Well,” growled Julian, “Sounds like you have your hands full, huh? Meanwhile we’re gonna fuck off to Minnesota and enjoy life while we still can, since it’s perfectly fuckin’ clear we ain’t saving shit. Right?” He glanced at Allison, then at Xiù who found herself nodding out of reflex.
Kevin winced as though Julian had punched him in the gut. “…I’ll come see you,” he said. “Soon as I got a plan.”
Julian couldn’t even work up the wherewithal to agree politely. He and Allison both knocked their chairs over and left them on the floor when they stood up, and it fell to Xiù to be the diplomat.
“…Thank you, Kevin…” she offered, picking up the chairs. “I know you’ll do what you can.”
“Bein’ the conscience around here is kinda my job,” Kevin grumbled. “I’ll… just… look after those two for me?”
“Always,” Xiù promised. She gave him the strongest smile she could in the circumstances, then slipped through the closing door.
The other two hadn’t gone far. Allison was leaning against the wall with her arms folded and was staring gloomily at her boots, while Julian was jabbing fiercely at his phone. “Three tickets?” he asked, as Xiù joined them. “Or are you gonna go visit your folks first?”
Xiù made eye contact with Allison and saw the unspoken plea there. She shook her head. “Three tickets. I think… my parents can wait.”
Julian paused, looked up, and some of his glacial hatred melted away. Every angry line of him became just a little softer. “…Thanks.”
Xiù put a hand on his back as she stepped up to him. “I’m angry too,” she said, carefully.
“You’ve got a funny way of showing it,” Allison remarked. “How are you so calm?”
“…We won’t get anything done by, um… by flailing around,” Xiù told her. “I learned that the hard way. You have to, um, direct it. Make it work for you. Otherwise you just tire yourself out and…” She trailed off, feeling entirely too upset and exhausted for coherent sentences right now.
Fortunately, both of them spoke fluent Xiù. Allison and Julian stared at her, then at each other, then both sighed the exact same frustrated sigh, and gathered her up in a three-way reassuring hug.
Moments like those reminded Xiù of why she loved them both so much. They were anchors of morality in an inherently amoral world, and they understood her probably even better than she understood herself. It put a pleasant kind of ache in her chest, which threatened to become tears if nothing happened to interrupt them.
Something did. Julian’s phone pinged, and he extracted himself to inspect it. “Welp. Tickets are confirmed. We gotta leave in two hours, so…”
“Better get our stuff from the ship,” Allison nodded, sensing as she somehow always did when she needed to be sensitive and letting her hand run down Xiù’s arms so their fingers intertwined. “And we’d better say sorry to Clara. We promised her that barbecue…”
“D’you think…” Xiù began. “What happens if—?”
“Right now, I just wanna get back to Minnesota, get home, and get really fuckin’ drunk,” Allison grumbled. “We’ll worry about flying again and Byron and all the rest of it after the hangover.”
“Amen,” Julian grunted with feeling.
“But—”
*”Bǎobèi*… It’s out of our hands now. For now. Maybe. I hope. I don’t know.” Julian sagged. The anger was draining out of him fast, now that there was nobody around for him to aim it at. It was still there, coiled and quiet and terrifying, but at least he’d holstered it. “Let’s just… go home.”
“…Alright.”
Date Point 12y7m AV
Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Moses Byron
“Kevin. How are they?”
One of Byron’s little pleasures in life was when he got a chance to exceed Kevin’s expectations. The man was a sharp judge of character, but it was always nice to remind him that he wasn’t infallible. The question seemed to throw him.
“They’re… tired. Upset. Angry.”
“And your CIA puppetmaster?”
Kevin settled in the seat opposite Byron’s desk and adjusted his cuff. “Crossed a line: She threatened you personally. I shut her down.”
Byron scowled. “She did, huh?”
“Yeah. Said she could make your life hell if she wants. That ain’t gonna fly well with her superiors…“
Byron gave him a careful stare. “You sound like you’ve got no trouble stabbing her in the back, Kevin…”
“Boss, I work for you. I work with them,” Kevin retorted. “Darcy’s good people, but if she’s gonna muscle on a private citizen like that, I start having a problem with her.”
Byron sat back and folded his hands lightly on his stomach. “That’s the behavior of good people in your book, huh?”
“You don’t know what kind of pressure Darcy’s under. I only suspect how much pressure she’s under.” Kevin shrugged. “Even the Company’s only human, boss. She’s good people, like I said. Good people screw it up sometimes.”
“I won’t stand for being threatened, Kevin. I pay my taxes.”
“I won’t stand for you being threatened either. I just try and remember the reasons why, keep some perspective. You know?”
“Mm.” Byron nodded, then stood up. “Mocktail?”
“Sure, why not?”
Mixing up his non-alcoholic cocktails was one of Byron’s pleasures. He had no objection to a drink in principle, but he’d seen too many colleagues and acquaintances medicate themselves into an early grave to try and stay on top of their job pressures over the years. It always started with nicotine and alcohol. For most, it had ended there, too. One way or another.
For a few, the slope to cocaine had been all too slippery. Moses had stayed out of it and become a teetotaller not out of any great moral objection, but out of the certainty that it could only end badly for him personally. So, he’d learned a few interesting ways to combine fruit juices, sodas and grenadine, and joined the church of the Shirley Temple.
It was a useful way to gather his thoughts and claim some powerful energy in the conversation. It made the other guy wait on him, and that was necessary for Kevin. It wasn’t clear at all to Byron whether Kevin even knew just how much natural force of personality he had, but he had a natural talent for the difficult trick of persuading people to shut up and listen when he started speaking, even if they didn’t agree with what he was saying.
Byron would have waded through the bones of thousands for a gift like that.
“Right,” he said, turning around and handing over Kevin’s drink. “We’re gonna back our kids. I want this thing spun to our best advantage, got it?”
He enjoyed the rare sensation of leaving Kevin dumbfounded for a second.
“…I honestly kinda expected you to be pissed over this,” Kevin admitted, after a second.
“I’m a smart man, Kevin.” Byron sat back and sipped his drink. “I can put two and two together. San Diego got bombed, you landed in my boardroom after that affair with the jump drive, I’ve got the CIA poking around my stuff constantly, and now our exploration team comes back with… this…”
He indicated the tablet he’d been reading about the People on. “I’m only here because my great-grandma was smart enough to get the hell out of Stuttgart back in nineteen-thirty-three. I know what it looks like when a class of people are being systematically murdered, Kevin, and you can probably guess how I feel about it. Somebody or something out there wants deathworlders dead, and as a deathworlder myself I take exception.”
“Amen to that.”
Byron grinned. “Besides, saving a species of stone-age hunter gatherers is a Moon Laser I can get behind. So, we’re backing our kids. We just need somebody who can engineer it.”
“…I ever tell you how much I love workin’ for you, Moses?”
“Your job is to be the opposite of a brown-noser, Kevin,” Byron chuckled.
“My job is to tell you the truth. Sometimes, the truth is nice.”
Byron chuckled again, drained his mocktail in one go, and set the crystal tumbler smartly down on his desktop. “Alright. I know you have ideas for this already. Let’s hear ‘em.”
Kevin nodded, drained his own drink, and sat forward. “The trio’re gonna have to do the heavy lifting…” he began.
Date Point 12y7m AV
SOR HQ, HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Major Owen Powell
“At ease, lads.”
Two boots moved a neat, parade-ground perfect double handful of inches to the left. Like they were fresh from Basic, it was bloody unreal. Technical Sergeants Arés and Burgess might have been authorized for civilian wear, might have spent their days permanently be-stubbled and scruffy… But it was quite clear that not a man in the SOR took being called to Powell’s office lightly. They invariably showed up looking, and acting, completely razor-sharp.
It was a sign of respect, he knew, but it had long since gone beyond wearying and into borderline troubling. The Lads, especially these two, clearly had no idea how to unwind—or rather, how to unwind gently—and if there was an element of ‘physician, heal thyself’ in that thought, then… hell with it.
“Alright, fook at ease,” he grumbled and sat back. “Bloody relax already. I just thought I’d remind you both that you’ll be past sixty days of use-or-lose leave by the end of this year and I thought I might nudge you to fookin’ well use it.”
The pair looked at each other warily for a second, but relaxed. John spoke first, “Begging your pardon, sir, but my understanding was we could sell it back?”
Powell not only admired their dedication to the mission, he could relate perfectly. He was all too eager to skip out on his own leave allowance and stick by the Cherries himself… But Costello was coming along nicely, the training was going well, the official strategic evaluation was…not positive, but it made it clear that now was the time for people to get their R&R in.
He’d picked the Beef Brothers first because he needed them to switch off, at least for a little while. They were young, driven, painfully earnest and were unquestionably missing out on some of the indefinable yet important little experiences of life. Their single-minded focus on the Mission meant that much of their young adult years had been…skipped, as it were. Or at least, experienced in a hyper-focused environment with like-minded battle brothers.
That wouldn’t do. Powell needed them fit, happy, and as well-adjusted and well-rounded as possible, and that went doubly in light of some of the urgent noises the base psychologist, Lieutenant Mears, had been making.
“Bluntly, lads? It’d be a giant mistake if you did. Think of this as another kind of training and conditioning if you want to, I don’t care, but I want the both of you to get your arses off Cimbrean for a bit and rest. It’s not an order, but for God’s sake heed it anyway. Right?”
Again, that wary glance to each other. “That’ll leave just Butler, sir, and—” Arés began. He trailed off when Powell nodded.
“Look, Arés. I know that Butler’s green, and I know we’ve only got three Protectors in the first place, not counting Thurrsto. You will obviously need to plan this carefully, I get that. But I want a schedule by the end of the week. Understood?”
The two looked at each other again, and finally caved. They’d put up less of a fight than he’d feared in the end.
“Yes sir,” Adam told him. “We’re going to need to spin down on the Crude, and the calories, and the training, and—”
“Aye. How long?”
Arés looked at Burgess, who frowned as he calculated. “Maybe a month? We don’t know really. We’ve, uh, never done it all the way. Not to last for two straight months, anyway.”
Powell nodded and scratched his chin. “Hmm. Any risks to your training or development?”
“There…shouldn’t be, sir,” Burgess decided.
“We’ll watch it carefully, of course…” Arés added.
“Good enough. See to it, lads. And bloody cheer up! Have some fun! Don’t be old men before your time.”
The two nodded.
“I note that Technical Sergeant Kovač is in a similar situation,” Powell added. “Might want to remind her before I drag her in here as well, aye?”
For the first time in the conversation he saw Arés brighten up, and knew that he’d scored a win. The two set off to plan with something that finally resembled enthusiasm for the idea, and Powell returned to his own planning; he too had a week of leave to use up and the timing was just right…
He turned to his computer and composed a message to Rylee.
Date Point: 12y7m1d AV
North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth
Julian Etsicitty
“You know what I really, really want right now? Like, way more than this beer?
Xiù lowered her own beer bottle and glanced sideways across the fire at Allison, who was lying at the log staring up at unblemished blue sky between the swaying trees. “Hmm? What?”
True to their word, Byron Group had taken good care of the house that Julian had inherited from his grandfather. They’d hired the services of a specialist homesitter from downstate who’d visited once a week to keep the place clean, maintained and aired out, and the protracted court battle over the inheritance had resoundingly gone the corporation’s way and resulted in a landmark ruling in a higher court of appeal that was going to have several long-term positive repercussions for American Indian property rights.
Julian hadn’t noticed. The three of them had staggered into the house in the dead of night, local time, after five days of sporadic and unsatisfactory rest. They’d thrown themselves onto the big bed in the master bedroom in a big warm pile and slept for twelve hours.
Then there had been a modest breakfast with the house’s limited long-life supplies, airing out their own clothing, and just… re-familiarizing themselves with Earth.
It felt strange to be wearing cotton again.
Allison, as promised, had grabbed the truck after breakfast and headed into town, returning a couple hours later with enough beer to drown a herd of cattle.
Julian had mounted a one-man expedition up into the woods to check on all his wildlife management measures, which were still working fine, and had come back to find Xiù on Skype apologising profusely to her parents and promising that her visit to Vancouver was imminent. She’d apparently been on that call for hours, and only Allison’s return finally brought it to an end.
The non-alcoholic groceries were almost an afterthought, even if they were a pretty comprehensive inventory of everything they needed. Allison had thrown in some luxuries that had been in short supply on the ship such as candy and cheese, and she was now lying on the log staring up at the sky while Julian lit the fire, draining beer bottles like she was making up for lost time.
“I want…A fucking joint. I haven’t had one in years,” she sighed. “I mean, it’s legal in forty-seven states now! Hell, give it a few more years and they might even start selling it in Wal-Mart! You know, next to the cigarettes you can smoke and the mind-altering drugs you can take,” she waggled the bottle for emphasis. “But one positive urine test, and that’s it: We never get to take Misfit back out there.” She indicated the sky with the bottle. “Stupid.”
“Byron Group’s behind the times there,” Julian agreed. “I dunno. I never tried it.”
“Me either,” Xiù admitted. Somehow, Julian wasn’t surprised.
“It’d sure as fuck help me relax right now…” Allison sighed again, and drained the remaining half of her beer in one long aesthetic moment that made the muscles of her throat move in waves before she reached out and gently dropped the empty bottle into the plastic tub they were using for throwaways, where it joined the five others she’d already finished.
Julian was only just starting in on his fifth. Xiù was still nursing her second, but then again she was a lightweight.
She said what they were all worried about, though. “Do you think… do you think we will get to take Misfit out there again?”
Allison sighed a third time, punctuating it with a complicated mix of shrug and head-shake as she twisted open another beer. “…God, I hope so.”
“If we don’t, I’m buying the weed myself,” Julian growled, with feeling. He lit a single match, placed it carefully in the right spot among the logs he’d assembled in the middle of their ring of breezeblocks, and sat back to let the fire come to life.
“Nah. You’re too straight-laced, dummy,” Allison told him. “Both of you,” she added to Xiù.
“Eh,” Julian shrugged in a complicated way, “I dunno. I just never was interested. And we’re not allowed more than one beer a night on Misfit, either, so they ain’t exactly being inconsistent.”
“Dude. We weren’t even carrying a beer a night…”
Julian grinned, and downed the last of his bottle. He was definitely beginning to feel its effects, and they were thoroughly welcome. “Need a bigger ship.”
“Don’t you dare say that. *Misfit*‘s perfect!”
“Well,” Julian stumbled off towards the woods for a comfort break, “I suppose we’ll just hafta deal, then. Be right back.”
“Julian!” Xiù complained. “The house is right there! You know, with plumbing?”
He laughed, “I don’t wanna miss the pot!”
“Ugh. You went so native over there on…” Allison paused. “What the hell do we even call that planet, anyway?”
Julian had by then found a tree and decided he wasn’t gonna talk while relieving himself.
Xiù stepped into the gap. “Akyawentuo,” she said firmly. It meant [all-things-under-sky-place] in the People’s language.
Allison tilted her head. She’d never quite mastered Peoplespeak so much. “Shouldn’t that be, uh…like, way longer? That sounds like parts of a bunch of words.”
“Yesh,” Xiù frowned at the slightly slurred way her word came out, and started enunciating a little more carefully. “But it’s a fusional language, so you can just sort of…smash it together and leave bits off.”
“Babe. Language jargon.”
“‘Just sort of smash it together and leave bits off’ is not language jargon!” Xiù protested. “Besides. The People will know what it means when we tell them, and that’s the important part.”
“Yes it is!” Julian stumbled back with his fly only partly zipped up and the button undone, and flomped back down on the ground where he’d been sitting. He’d missed jeans. He checked on the fire, which was coming along perfectly, and cracked open beer number six. “I like it! Sounds good, and I bet Vemik’d like it too.”
Allison nodded slowly, and then to Julian’s profound surprise and Xiù’s too she sat up and angrily scrubbed a tear off her face. “God fucking dammit. We shouldn’t have left. We should have…”
“We had to,” Xiù interrupted delicately.
“I know we had to, but we shouldn’t’ve!”
Julian, acutely aware that he could have stayed there for a lifetime if need be, tactfully refrained from saying anything. Allison meanwhile drew her knees up and stared into the growing flames.
“…How many have I had?”
“That’s your sixth.”
“…Shit. I lost my tolerance.”
Xiù almost choked.
Julian grinned up at her from his slouched position. “Girl that’ll drink a big man under the table? Hot.”
”Several big men. Several times.” Allison grinned at the memory. “I told you, those biker fucks in Massachusetts just saw a skinny blonde.”
Julian chuckled at the story. “My liver wasn’t made for booze. Oh well.” He pawed at Allison to encourage her to lie next to him and she acquiesced with a giggle, rolling off the log to land beside him with a thump and a splash of wild wasted beer.
“Gah!” Julian giggled too, which was a little out of character for him. “A party foul! You gotta pay for that!”
“Hey, I bought the beer…” Allison objected.
“Nope. Party foul.” Julian grinned, and had a mischievous moment of mutual understanding eye contact with Xiù, who gleefully chimed in.
“I’m referee!” she announced, beaming.
“Allison’s been a bad girl. What should we do to her?”
“Well, she got your jeans wet. You’re gonna have to take them off… It seems to me the fair thing is if she takes hers off too.”
“Ugh, fine!” Allison’s mock-disgruntled tone didn’t fool either of them for a second.
Julian grinned at her. “I like this referee. She’s fair, honest. Everything right with America!”
That one was one of Xiù’s easier buttons. “Canadian!”
“Eh, they’re cool too.”
“I’m gonna get mud on my butt!” Allison objected, half-heartedly.
“Shagua, I’ve seen you covered in oil all the way up to your neck,” Xiù interjected.
“And you took pictures!”
Julian grinned at the memory. “Yeah, she did. Anyway—” He rolled on top of Allison and bit gently at the side of her neck, “I think this’ll be a good punishment…”
Allison squirmed and pressed her hands to his chest with a sudden urgency. “…Get off…”
“Nah.” He growled the word into the dimple at the base of her throat.
“No, Julian, I need to pee, get off!” She insisted.
He stared stupidly into her eyes for a second, then his brain finally caught up with his ears. “…Oh. Durn.” He chuckled ruefully and rolled off.
“Lucky me, I don’t have to worry about missing!” Allison rolled over backwards and sprang upright, before meandering in a straight-ish line toward the house.
“That’s a quitter’s attitude!” he yelled behind her as she walked off.
She turned, and walked backwards a few steps as she replied. “Didn’t we just go through this?”
“Yeah, but I’m a boy. I’m allowed.” He grinned into his beer trollishly.
“…Xiù, shut him up for me, babe?”
“Yes ma’am!”
There was a blur and Julian found himself flat on his back with Xiù sitting triumphantly on his chest. He did little to fight back and grinned up at her harder, folding his hands behind his head.
Xiù pouted a bit. “It’s no fun when you don’t fight back!”
“But I like it!”
“…Fine. You leave me no choice!”
Julian knew his most ticklish spots—his ribs, his armpits, behind his ears and the insides of his elbows. Unfortunately, so did Xiù. Worse, she had an evil streak and much faster hands than he did, and every desperate attempt he made to swat those hands away just resulted in her picking a new target. The only resort was to half-curl himself up in a ball and writhe until he could stand it no longer and instead grappled her end-over-end away from the fire, where he finally pinned her after three twisting turns.
And… oh. Yeah. Right.
He’d wrestled too many sweaty alien gorilla-men recently, and the moment it struck him that what he’d instead managed to trap was his girlfriend…
…His gorgeous, lithe, acrobatic Chinese girlfriend…
…Who chose that exact moment to innocently and unthinkingly bite her lower lip while that warm brown gaze danced excitedly across his face and the breath caught in her throat…
His mental gears clashed for a few seconds. Then he kissed her.
The beer fuzzed things a bit so he didn’t exactly recall what happened next, but in very short order both he and Xiù were shirtless, her hands were pinned, and he was working his mouth diligently on her throat, then his hands slid down her body and—
“I said shut him up!” Allison flopped down next to them. “You were supposed to wait until I came back to make him moan!”
“Mmm…” Xiù made a kind of creaking pleasure noise in the back of her throat. “Not sorry.”
“How un-Canadian of you!”
Xiù snorted, then looked her up and down “…Didn’t I order you to take your pants off?”
“Oh! Yes ma’am!”
Julian re-gathered his wits and went back on the attack. “No talk.”
“Caveman,” Allison grinned at him, peeling her jeans off those long, long legs of hers…
“Mm-hmm,” Julian agreed, undoing Xiù’s jeans as well. Allison snorted, and gave him a hand by wriggling down alongside and under Xiù, who shut her eyes and licked her lips. They hadn’t had room to just… explore like this on the ship, and while months of being cooped up together had resulted in plenty of intimacy… It hadn’t been the same. They’d been sleeping in shifts, trying not to wake the sleeping one, building their love lives around the constant job of keeping a ship running.
Julian had generally let the girls have their way with him. It was a role he usually liked to play anyway, he enjoyed it when they objectified him and it kept things harmless and light in the confined environs of the ship. Now, things were different: He was carrying a crackling charge of pent-up frustration and hostility aimed at the whole world, and sometimes a guy just needed to find a healthier outlet for that kind of intense energy.
Xiù didn’t complain. She really didn’t complain. She left stinging bloody fingernail marks in his shoulders and damn near fainted, but neither of those were a complaint.
It was short and intense for all three of them. Allison, who had managed to insert herself under Xiù and hold her from behind throughout looked almost as stunned as if she’d taken a more direct role.
She was the only one with enough energy to speak, though. “Jesus, Julian!” She swept his hair out of his face and planted a kiss among the perspiration on his forehead. “You’d better have saved some of that for me!”
Julian made an inarticulate noise that was supposed to be a general agreement, and rolled sideways to collapse on his back on the grass.
“…Gimme a minute,” he panted. “Christ.”
“Just one?”
“…Might be a few more than that.”
“I bet…” Allison grinned, then checked on Xiù in her arms. “You okay, bǎobèi?”
Xiù managed a dazed, half-lidded smile, and wriggled comfortably into her chest as though Allison was a full-length warm pillow. “Wǒ hěn hǎo…Wǒ cào…”
“Damn, you fucked the English out of her!”
Xiù giggled at that, and seemed to recover some of her focus. “…Yuh-huh. Wow. Sorry. Um… yeah. More than okay. Wow.”
Julian laughed, and pushed himself up on his elbows because it was that or fall asleep. Right now, just resting and letting all his troubles be a long way away was almost more tempting than he could stand, and he resisted it.
“Going somewhere, babe?” Allison asked him.
“…No. Not right now,” Julian decided. He settled back, scooted up against the pair of them, and this time he didn’t resist. Sleep came easily, and instantly.
Date Point: 12y7m1d AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada, Earth
General Martin Tremblay
“So it works.”
“Yup. As of this morning we officially have a functioning Von Neumann Colonization Probe. Everything works to spec.”
Tremblay was a fan of the relaxed and informal meeting, especially among his oldest colleagues. The Human Race owed a lot to Claude Nadeau.
Still. He’d been expecting more enthusiasm. “You don’t sound all that happy, considering you and your team pulled off a tall order in just two years…” he suggested.
Nadeau sighed and shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“It’s all human hardware… built in a Kwmbwrw nanofac, running a Domain galactic map, and using Corti planetary survey software to build a colony on uncharted deathworlds that it then protects with a Guvnurag forcefield,” he griped. “Hell, the engines are a modified Gaoian design based on the Racing Thunder and I really don’t wanna think about how much of the stuff we packed into it is reverse-engineered Hierarchy tech from the Egypt Device.”
“You know, even Bartlett calls it the UFO.”
Nadeau shrugged. “I’d rather remember where it came from and who built it.”
Tremblay nodded. Nadeau’s foibles were mild compared to some of the other personnel who worked or had worked with SCERF. Being a stickler for official nomenclature was no big deal really.
“If you have any concerns, say so. I don’t want to greenlight the launch until you’re perfectly happy,” he said instead.
“More like the release than the launch, sir,” Nadeau sighed. “I’m just glad we built in a twelve-generation limiter on these things. Beverote was against it.”
“Mm, I read his recommendation. Something about inoculating the galaxy against potential intergalactic Von Neumann machines?”
“A case of the cure being potentially as bad as the disease,” Nadeau replied. “I mean… it’s potentially a valid concern, now that we know VNMs are even possible, but we need much longer than two years of development before I’d be happy to release a… a galactic vaccine program.”
“Then the limiter stays,” Tremblay decided. “But for colonization as part of the war strategy?”
“We’ve done everything we can to make the most harmless VNM possible,” Nadeau reported. “I’m happy that the need outweighs the risk. Twelve generations is still more than four thousand probes but that’s at least a number we could conceivably handle if they started to go rogue.”
“And it’s a small enough number that the odds of one of the probes, uh… mutating?” Tremblay frowned. “That doesn’t feel like the right word, when you’re talking about machines…”
“Experiencing an RCE, sir. Random Copying Error.”
“RCE, Mutating, effectively the same thing. Point is that inside only twelve generations, it shouldn’t happen.”
“Not with all the checks we put in place, no.”
“Good.”
Tremblay picked up his coffee mug and took a thoughtful sip. “There was something else. Beverote’s friends, the Misfit crew. They had a Big Hotel encounter out in the field.”
Nadeau blew air across his own coffee and listened warily. “They’re okay?”
“Green as you could ask for. But they caught a xenocide campaign in progress. Pre-contact species. Hell, pre-agricultural. Flint spearheads and tribal hunter-gathering, that kinda thing. And the poor bastards have got Abrogators marching across the continent burning them out.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. But here’s the bit that stays as dark as dark gets, okay? Their ship carried a message back. STOLEN GHOST is back in touch.”
“…I’m not sure I see how I have need-to-know on that, sir…” Nadeau said, slowly.
“The message was inserted into *Misfit*‘s communication systems, carried back through screening and sent to a CIA analyst’s inbox all while going completely undetected. It slipped through every security measure we have in ways I’m told are impossible, which is…”
“Troubling.”
“Yeah. Anyway, impossible or not, I’ve got two specialists so far who’d bet their grandmother’s ashes that it happened anyway, and it involves a digital sapient accidentally created by the Hierarchy. Which is also impossible.” Tremblay sipped his coffee. “Impossible things seem to happen twice a week these days.”
Admiral Knight was obviously rubbing off on him. For his part, Nadeau gave the news some troubled thought, sipping his own drink.
“…the CIA must have flipped,” he decided eventually.
“Yeah, and I don’t blame them,” Tremblay agreed. “Byron Group have already agreed to pull the whole system out of the ship and send it to us. I want you to get that hardware the hell off Earth and back to Erebor, and I want to know exactly how it was done and how we can stop it from happening again. Bring in whoever you need.”
“Isolate the hardware, analyze it, duplicate the effect, prevent repeats. Got it.” Nadeau nodded. “Can do.”
“Good. So. Now that the VNMs are ready, what are we going to do with those resources instead?”
Nadeau smiled, put down his coffee and sat forward. “I have a few ideas…” he said.