Date Point: 12y7m1w AV
Etsicitty Property, North Clearwater County, Minnesota, USA, Earth
Kevin Jenkins
“You mean to tell us you’re good friends with the supreme allied commander of extrasolar defence?” Julian asked.
“Shit, I helped him through his divorce.” Kevin smiled fondly at the memory. “You think I got the Byron Group job on charm and sophistication alone?”
“Oh sure I did,” Allison snarked, “Talk to you for five minutes and your natural player just oozes out all over the place.”
“Oozes. Thanks, I’ll remember that.” Kevin snorted. “Point is…Tremblay’s a good man. Not a half-decent man, not a merely good man, he’s a good man. Kinda guy who gives you real faith in humanity. Now, his job is to look out for the safety and security of Earth, Cimbrean, all the human colonies…”
“Why’s he gonna care, then?” Julian asked. “Resources sent over to help out the People aren’t going to be defending humanity, are they?”
“Mm…” Kevin wobbled his head. “They’ll sure as shit be defending our humanity, but you might be right. Except it’s probably not a bad investment anyway. Those guys could be valuable down the road, y’know? Then there’s all the Hierarchy tech on that planet just waiting for Bear Bartlett to rip into it, and… shit, maybe we could put a base out there? Hell, even a whole colony? So it’s not like there’s zero strategic value there.”
“Isn’t there anybody out there who’ll do it just because it’s the right thing to do?” Xiù asked.
“No,” Kevin said bluntly. “And that’s honestly the way it should be. Guys like that, they’ll pick up a new super important Cause every week and never get anything done. Guys like Tremblay, they’re obligated to look after their duty first so when something comes along that needs their attention, they have the resources to handle it.”
“I don’t wanna have this argument again,” Julian groaned.
“Well I’m sorry, bro, but Earth doesn’t work the way your relationship does. You three look out for each other. Back here on the Planet Dirt, the pictures are bigger and the stakes are higher. Self-interest ain’t just a lifestyle choice, it’s the only way things can work.”
“You ain’t gotta be a dick about it, Kevin. We do get it.”
“Then quit complainin’ and use it! Guys, you are fuckin’ celebrities right now. Walked on Mars! Toured alien worlds! Made first contact! And look, these guys have the same fucking enemies we do. Ain’t that a hell of a coincidence?”
He leaned forward and put his hands flat on the table in front of him. “I don’t think you three realize just how much power you have right now, but that power won’t last long. And you can use it without pissing anyone off, either. That is a rare gift. All you need to do is talk. Show a pic of Yan and Vemik! It isn’t classified…and show the Abrogator thing. That isn’t classified either as long as you don’t get into details.”
“…Is that wise?” Xiù asked.
“Define ‘wise,’” Kevin shrugged. “‘Cuz the answer to that one comes down to whether you think the consequences are worth it.”
“Vemik’s pictures might be a good idea,” mused Julian. “He got a hold of my camera one day and took hundreds of ‘em. Some are pretty good, too. And he figured out the video button.”
Allison chimed in. “The video he took of Yan was really good. Yan tackled him and he dropped the camera, and it caught like ten minutes of them wrasslin’ in the dirt before they hugged it out. Maybe edit out the bad, uh, ‘viewing angles’ but…”
Julian snorted. “Yeah. Their loincloths don’t really do much for modesty, do they?”
Kevin grimaced. “…Really didn’t need that image.”
“Eh, it’s humid as hell in their jungle, I don’t blame ‘em. Anyway, Vemik likes to play keepaway so I waited until Yan had worked ‘em over real good before I took the camera back,” Julian remembered fondly. “Me and Yan figured out that tag-teaming worked best on the bouncy little fucker. Vemik didn’t like that at all, said I was cheating. Yan just noogied me and laughed.”
Kevin quirked an eyebrow. “No shit, the big fucker’s playful?”
“Like a kitten!” Xiù enthused. “Um…when he wants to be.”
“Well, there ya go! The People make their own PR! And here you three are sulkin’ in an old house in the country, pissin’ and moanin’ about how shit everybody else is instead of gettin’ off your asses and using it! For fuck’s sake guys, you put yourselves through a couple years of hell for personal reasons, but when the chips are down and a whole species is at stake suddenly you expect somebody else to carry the ball? You’re better than that! All of you!”
The three of them went very still.
“…Consider that the punch on the nose from me to you,” Kevin finished, looking at Xiù specifically. “Sometimes, we all need a punch on the nose.”
Xiù gave him a long, steady stare and then sighed and gave her own hands an ashamed look. “…Yeah.”
“So… what? Book deal? Press release?” Allison took Xiù’s hand. “I mean, you’re right, but we don’t really know how this stuff works.”
“You let me worry about that,” Kevin promised. “Upshot to being a senior Byron Group executive. You wouldn’t believe some of the strings I can pull…”
“You’ve already got a plan,” Julian guessed.
Kevin put on his best winning smile. “Yeah. Reckon I do.” He stood up. “Come on. We’re goin’ down to the city.”
They blinked at him before Julian asked the question. “Uh, we are? What for?”
“I’m findin’ you three some good tailoring on my dime,” Kevin said. “After all. You’re gonna need to look good for the cameras…”
Date Point: 12y7m2w AV
Adam’s Apartment, Demeter Way, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Martina Kovač
One advantage to dating Adam—he did all the cooking. And most of the eating. And he cleaned up as he went, too, so really the only thing Marty had to do was set the table and watch. There were worse ways to have dinner.
“So, your dad got him a plea bargain?”
“Somethin’ like that. I mean, it’s the prosecutor who offered the plea bargain but… y’know, he plays golf with the governor. And Dad’s been workin’ with Sir Jeremy Sandy since day one and the only reason he doesn’t play golf with the governor too is because his handicap’s so bad.”
Marty nodded. “Right. Guess it’s hard to play golf in a wheelchair.”
“No, I mean it’s, like, thirty or something.” Adam grinned at her and returned to his cooking, and Marty grudgingly awarded him several points while plotting her revenge. She was too used to Adam playing the amiably straightforward doofus: there were moments when he’d pull something a tiny bit subtler like that and make her feel like a dumbass for not catching it, because she’d have seen it coming from anybody else.
She respected him, of course she did. He just didn’t throw curveballs very often, so the rare ones he did throw invariably tripped her up.
And then he got all smug about it, and he was unfairly sexy when he was smug.
A comical image sprang to mind. “Have you ever tried golf?”
Adam burst out laughing. “Oh man! Would I have to wear the polo shirt and a flat cap?”
“Yup.” Marty grinned at him over her lemonade.
“I’ll stick to Gravball.”
“Yeah? I dunno, it’s got everything you could want. Fine motor control, hitting something really hard…”
“No way do they make clubs that could take the HEAT.”
“Murray golfs.”
“Of course he fuckin’ does, he’s Scottish!” Adam snorted. “And he’s tiny,” he added, affectionately.
“Only by HEAT standards.” Marty sipped her drink and put it down. “Anyway. Nofl. Didn’t think your dad was the kind to go easy on a smuggler.”
The topology of Adam’s back shifted intricately as he shrugged. “He didn’t. Nofl has a lot of community service to do, and we’re gonna benefit from it. You’ve heard some of the things he’s promised?”
“Yeah. full regeneration of an amputated limb, nerve regrowth. I wrote a report with my own opinions for Powell.” Marty shrugged. “I dunno. I get the impression Nofl’s passion for science outweighs his caution or sense of ethics. I don’t care if we have the latent DNA for tissue regeneration still present in our genome or not, hell I don’t care if we could splice it in. That’s dangerous territory.”
Adam nodded slowly, but didn’t comment.
“…Your dad’s eager to get full use of his leg back, I get that-” Marty began.
“He ain’t reckless, Marty.”
“No,” she soothed. “But come on, tell me how you’d cope with spending half your time in a chair and the other half on crutches? ‘Cause I don’t need to be your girlfriend to know you’d go crazy.”
“Dad’s calmer than me, though. He always has his shit together.”
“Sure, but he’s still only human. He’s got hope.”
Adam loaded the chicken into the oven, wiped down the counter and then turned to lean against the wall, facing her. He only rarely looked so troubled.
“It just hits close to home, you know? I mean…” he twisted, and lifted the leg of his basketball shorts to reveal a bright blue Crue-D patch on his inner thigh. The minimum-dose maintenance patch that every single HEAT man wore constantly to stop their own excessive and growing strength from giving them chronic trouble. “This is Nofl’s work too. And then the little maricón turns out to be an irresponsible jackass smuggler.”
Marty let the homophobic slur slide, this time. Adam was clearly badly troubled, and there wasn’t actually a bigoted bone in his body: He’d have been appalled if somebody had suggested there was. “So you’re worried about yourself, not your dad?”
“No! …Yes. Uh, both. And the Lads. And you, I mean, you’ve used Crude…”
Marty nodded. The HEAT program needed the Lads to be able to trust Crue-D. Taking the medicine was a life-altering experience anyway with permanent ramifications. It was a huge step—if there was any doubt at all about Cruezzir and its derivatives…
“Well, has it done anything bad to you?”
“…um…okay. Yes and no, I think. Lemme…” He started pacing like he did whenever he was trying to string thoughts together; thinking and motion were to Adam as peas and carrots were to dinner. “I mean, a while ago? Dad noticed I’m way more aggressive than I used to be.”
Marty sipped her lemonade again. “Are you?”
“I dunno. I mean, I got into fights in school… But, I trust Dad, you know? If he says it…”
“Okay…” Marty conceded. “But you can’t have been a teddy bear. I mean, from what I hear you could out deadlift anyone in Folctha before you even left. Legsy said you were the most determined man he’d ever met. Hell, even ‘Base says you were scary as hell all the way from Basic. And you got through selection and all that…”
Adam sighed and leaned on the counter island, resting his knuckles on the polished granite. “…I dunno, Marty. I’ve been talkin’ a lot with Lieutenant Mears about this. About the Hate, and the… I mean, I’ve got good reasons for feelin’ the things I do. But I don’t know if I have good reasons for feelin’ them as much as I do, you know? I mean, it’s been eight years since San Diego. Seven months on from that I was just startin’ to put it behind me and then we lost Sara. But nowadays… some days those wounds still feel raw like they happened yesterday. Shit, there are days I wanna tear Ava’s head off, or hunt down that little bitch Sean and fuckin’ crush him.”
He launched himself away from the counter, and paced aimlessly around the apartment. “Or there’s times I look at you and my whole body hurts from how much I love you, or, or times when I’ll be sparring with John and he’s, y’know, he’s my fuckin’ brother but, like, I could break him easy and the thought just feels so good…but then I blink and just, I feel bad and I wanna fuckin’ cuddle for even thinkin’ that. And I thought all that was just me, right? Like, that’s who I am…”
He sighed. “And then the little gray shit who invented Crue turns out to be completely fuckin’ irresponsible. I’m…”
“Scared,” Marty finished for him.
“…Yeah. I’m afraid of myself. I think…I think we all are.”
“I can see why, but…” Marty swirled her lemonade thoughtfully.. “…Is that the Crude? Or is it the power you earned? How many people besides you could pick up a truck and toss it?”
“No,” he shook his head emphatically. “It’s the Crude, I know it. Those feelings are raw baby. I feel stuff like it’s new and intense all the time, that can’t be just ‘cuz I’m strong.”
“True,” Marty agreed. “But I don’t think it’s anything wrong with the Crude, or some accident because Nofl cut corners.”
“Then what?”
She used her glass to wave at the all of him. “Have you looked in a mirror lately?”
“…Huh?”
“Seriously. Go look, right now.”
Adam blinked at her, then shrugged and headed for the wide, full-length mirror in the corner next to his sewing work bench. The apartment had a lot of mirrors, actually, from the big one that filled half a wall in the bathroom to the small face mirror on the closet door, but he needed them because he was forced by circumstance to do his own tailoring. So, the biggest and best mirror stood between his sewing machine and the mannequin that Rebar and Sikes had made for him, the modular one built to a HEAT operator’s scale. They all benefited from Adam’s needlework, after all.
He was wearing his favorite jersey that day—the Cimbrean Speedsters sports team jersey complete with a ridiculous sports car that had left skidmarks wrapping around to the back. There was no such team, in fact—Adam did a lot of community work as part of the Folctha government’s fitness promotions, and made a point of not taking sides in any sport. The only teams he allowed himself to support were the San Diego Chargers (now a well-respected NFL legacy that had never officially been closed down as a kind of living memorial) and the completely fictional Speedsters. One of the colony’s soccer moms had made that jersey for him and had somehow managed to get his dimensions right.
He carefully took it off to study himself in closer detail, turning to and fro to make sure she wasn’t pointing out some injury or another. Once he figured out that nothing was wrong he settled and stood there to frown uncomprehendingly at himself. The nanotech ‘E-Tattoo’ that covered his prodigious slab of a chest was set to his favorite pattern: marching Green Feet that wandered aimlessly across his chest in time with his pulse. At his heart, Adam had joined the Pararescue Jumpers first, and remained committed to their mission.
“Okay…?” he asked, after the Feet had done half a lap of his left pectoral.
“What do you see?” Marty prompted.
“…Me?”
“How old do you look?”
“I, uh…”
She laughed softly and interrupted his confusion by sliding up behind him and running her hands around his waist and up his chest, resting them lightly over his heart. She noticed with secret delight that those Feet sped up a little, and she could feel his life thumping steadily away warmly under her hand..
“Ignore all the muscles and the body fuzz, and the jawline and the stubble. Look past that and look at your face, look at your eyes. Do you see it?”
His heart beat slightly faster. “…I’m young.”
”You look almost like you’re fresh out of high school,” she said. “You haven’t aged a day and your bloodwork backs that up. John’s the same way, all the older guys are getting younger and healing up…hell, even Firth is inching perilously close to handsome.”
Adam snorted, and covered both her hands with one of his. “Pretty Firth? That’ll be the goddamn apocalypse…”
“Well, it’s true. You’re all on the fountain of youth…tell me that isn’t gonna affect your mind.”
His reflection gave her an anguished look. “Yeah. Exactly. This is scary stuff we’re playing with, and Nofl…”
“…Is a Corti. I know. I don’t think he’s malicious or anything, but they didn’t get that reputation for playing fast and loose with the scientific method by accident…” She kissed his shoulder. “But if you don’t trust Nofl, babe, trust me.”
“…I scare you too to, though. Don’t I?”
“Yeah,” Marty acknowledged. “But…I like it. You’re exciting when you’re scary. And I know that because you’re scary, the safest place in the world is when you’re holding me.”
“…You don’t want me walking comfortably, do you?”
She winked at him, and the Green Feet paused in their wandering for just a moment. “Never.”
He tried and failed to be discreet about adjusting himself through his shorts with his free hand. “…Goddamn I love you.”
“I love you too.” She rested her head against his spine and breathed a happy sigh. “And… thank you.”
“For what?”
“For talking about this stuff with me. It means a lot that you don’t try and pretend nothing’s wrong. That’s…thank you.”
He turned around and drew her close to his chest. “…I learned that lesson the hard way.”
“I know.”
Adam’s whole body heaved slowly with an enormous sigh, he gave her a comparatively gentle squeeze that was still overpowering by anybody else’s standards, kissed her hair and then let her go.
“We ain’t gonna trust Nofl after this,” he said, quietly. “I know he’s supposed to be workin’ for us, but…”
“He’ll be working with me,” Marty said. “Like I said: Don’t trust him, trust me. I’ll keep him in line.”
Adam chuckled, and returned to the kitchen. “Reckon you will…” he said. “After our vacation though, right?”
“Yup. He has community service to finish first. Where are we going, anyway?”
“I had a few ideas…”
Date Point: 12y7m2w AV
Starship Negotiable Curiosity, Orbiting Planet Aru, Elder Space
Bedu
The Negotiable Curiosity wasn’t the same ship any more. Vakno had categorically refused to leave Perfection without bringing most of her…equipment….with her.
Bedu was no idiot; most of the gear Vakno had removed from her bunker and installed in his ship had nothing to do with science, it was communications and datamining equipment. She’d paid for the shipyard time to have the Negotiable Curiosity expanded, extended and rebalanced. The ship was if anything a huge improvement on what it had been, and Bedu was practical enough to appreciate that, but it still felt inappropriate. The ship was his house after all, and Vakno had extensively remodelled it, effectively turning it into her new flying office and Bedu into her personal pilot.
Most of the remaining equipment was outside of his knowledge, but he knew what some of it did. Negotiable Curiosity had an extensive and hypersensitive sensor suite that could trace the lingering spacetime distortions of a ship at FTL for years after the fact, and Vakno had expanded on that functionality. Information was her business—he should have guessed that she would be an expert at gathering it in all its forms.
“There are power signatures here and there on the planet, you’re correct,” she reported. ”They seem to be focused in hospitals.”
“The population in general?” Bedu asked. Vakno glanced up at a peripheral display.
“Declining rapidly. A few million remain.”
“The OmoAru used to be a spacefaring power just as widespread as we are now. This decline cannot be natural, can it?”
“No, I don’t believe it can,” Vakno agreed. “And I find it worrying that I have become more interested in the mystery since de-implanting myself. Something like this should be of universal concern.”
“Yes. I have…hypotheses on that subject.” Bedu called up his notes. Doing so without implants was vastly less convenient, but if even one of his hypotheses were accurate then he had done himself an enormous service by removing them. “It’s telling that every single expedition to investigate the phenomenon has devolved into grave-robbing.”
“If the implants can somehow control what a user is permitted to think…” Vakno mused, without finishing the thought aloud.
“Theoretically trivial,” Bedu opined. “Simple stimulus-reward, stimulus-punishment system. Mechanically much more complicated in practice, of course. Constant monitoring of both neuroelectrical and neurochemical patterns, species-adjusted… Any control software capable of interpreting those data and determining intent would be effectively sapient.”
Vakno blinked at him. “True. That would meet a reasonable definition for metacognition.”
“Exactly.”
“What exactly are you thinking?”
Bedu turned in his seat to pull up a file, which he transferred to the big volumetric display in the middle of Vakno’s lab. “Possibilities. First and least likely: Problem is systemic to implant use, some undiagnosed fault or flaw in their operation. Maybe a functional addiction, subtly discourages thinking about implants in negative ways. Flaws: the behaviour is not species-specific, wouldn’t discourage thinking about species decline in general until the researcher had reasonable grounds to believe implants were involved.”
Vakno nodded. “Not a strong hypothesis.”
“No” Bedu agreed. “Mentioned it first because other possibilities are more disturbing, and seem less plausible at first. Are you familiar with the work of…” He paused, scowled and flapped a hand irritably. “What was her name? The AI researcher? Green banner from Grand Central University, graduated in my year. The digital nihilism theorist?”
Vakno glowered at him. “I can scarcely remember your name without my implants. Don’t ask me about obscure contemporaries of yours. What did she do?”
“She proved that an electronic substrate cannot indefinitely support a genuinely sapient intelligence,” Bedu recalled. “Funny, I can remember her proof but not her name. I’m quite sure we exchanged DNA.”
“Ugh. Green-banners, breeding.” Vakno sniffed. Bedu recalled too late that her own banner was silver.
“It’s an authorized breeding caste,” he asserted with composure. It was easy to remain composed when Vakno got too self-important. She might have developed a contact network worth estimated trillions of Directorate Currency Units, but her actual contributions to science were effectively nil. That prodigious and valuable intellect was largely going to waste.
“I don’t care what the office of species development says,” she snapped, oblivious to his thoughts. “It’s time we restricted DNA exchanges to blue banners or higher.”
Bedu blinked at her, then returned to his work. “I will just focus on the objective,” he declared.
“You do that.”
They worked in silence for a while, though Bedu was counting silently in his head. He was grudgingly impressed that Vakno held out as far as two hundred and sixty-four before her resolve cracked.
“You were saying?” she asked.
“Hmm? Oh. the AI researcher?”
“Yes.”
“She scanned her brain, thoroughly, and simulated her personality. Over a thousand simulations, and every single one attempted suicide before long.”
Even by Corti standards, that experiment had been discomforting. It wasn’t until Bedu had encountered the human phrase ‘heebie-jeebies’ that he’d been able to put a name to the emotion he’d suppressed upon hearing of it.
Vakno of course didn’t seem to care. “And this is relevant how?”
“I was just wondering if there might not be some…counterpart phenomenon. I wonder if the presence of extensive cybernetics might have a deleterious effect on the consciousness of a sapient being.”
“Mechanism?”
“This isn’t even a hypothesis yet.”
“Ridiculous,” Vakno scoffed. “Why should there be a fundamental incompatibility between organic neurons and the implants specifically designed to interface with them?”
“An incomplete understanding of the principles of neurology?” Bedu suggested. “Some emergent property of the neural nets? Or an evolutionary change! Cumulative across many generations.”
“Driven by what selection pressure?” Vakno finally turned away from her instruments and gave him more than a fraction of her attention. “Bedu, you can generate ideas all you want but please do subject them to an internal review before you voice them.”
“Do you not have any yourself?”
“Not yet.” Vakno sniffed. “Some of us practice science with finesse and focus. We don’t…brute-force our way to a result through ill-considered abduction schemes or archaeological vandalism.”
“I have yet to witness any of this science of yours.”
“Then perhaps you should cease your distractions and let me work.” Vakno returned to her instruments. “Land the ship. I will share my hypothesis once I have one that is worth discussing.”
Bedu resisted the urge to grumble at being ordered about on his ship, and elected to obey the command. Vakno was a silver-banner after all, a member of a higher rung on the Corti societal ladder. While neither of them were exactly in the Directorate’s good graces, neither of them were exiles either. She did, technically, hold the authority in their relationship.
He comforted himself with the thought that she was at least present and working at the problem. That meant she valued his insight more than she allowed herself to say. If she didn’t see any substance in the data he had presented then she would never have paid to modify his ship, nor flown on it all the way out to this last remote and fading ember of the OmoAru Republic.
Still. He missed his crew. They had been infuriating, but they had respected and engaged with him. Vakno did neither.
He just wished that he could tell her how he had acquired his information…
Date Point: 12y7m2w3d AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Admiral Sir Patrick Knight
“The bloody PM’s coming here?”
“He did just win the election, Powell.” Knight set three cups of tea down on his desk. Earl Grey for himself, a mug of Tetley so strong that the spoon could stand up in it for Powell, and another Earl Grey for Costello. The young Canadian had always had slightly more sophistication than his superior, there.
“Aye, by promising to cut military spending,” Powell grumbled
“Yes,” Knight sat down, and allowed himself a small triumphant smile. “I wrote a small letter to the king. And now the Right Honourable Stephen Davies PM is paying us an official visit. Less than two weeks after the election, no less.”
Powell chuckled and sat back. “Bloody hellfire. There’s times I forget you have more power in your pen than I have in a barracks full of HEAT operators.”
“His Majesty served alongside my father, briefly,” Knight explained. “Apparently I had the pleasure of meeting him, though I was far too young to remember it.”
“And that was enough to get him to send the prime minister our way for an education?” Costello asked.
“I think he’s rather more concerned with the fate of his grandchildren,” Knight explained. “Keep this under your hat gentlemen, but a certain Sub-Lieutenant Wales has applied to serve aboard the forthcoming HMS Vancouver.”
“She has, huh?” Costello angled his head slightly. “You know, that did always impress me about the royal family. Keeping the old traditions alive.”
Powell, a lifelong Republican, just grunted some grudging respect.
“Oh yes. In an earlier age of course they all had swords and plate and horses.” Knight sipped his tea. “Nowadays they have an FTL destroyer or a helicopter gunship. Anyway don’t worry too much about the Prime Minister, Powell. There are powers much older and more influential than him at work, here.”
“So, what’s our role?” Powell asked, picking up his boot-brown insult to the word ‘tea.’
“You’re being promoted, old thing. Congratulations.”
“…Already?”
“You’ve been a major for six years, Powell.”
“I have?” Powell sat and calculated furiously. “…Christ, I have.”
“Mm. Really, I would have elevated you sooner, but that NOVA HOUND report didn’t help matters. Don’t worry, you’re just the first in a wave of forthcoming promotions. Room opening up at the top, you see.”
It took Powell a moment to get the hint. “Aw, no, sir-”
“Less of that, man.” Knight chided him gently. “Tremblay’s sixty-two years old, I’m only nine months behind him. The job isn’t done, but neither of us can stay much longer. Time doesn’t work that way. So, Caruthers will be taking over my office and I shall be retiring to a nice estate I’ve picked out up near Sellers Lake, where my granddaughter will have three ponies and I will grow roses, or some other bloody awful twee thing like that.” He sighed. “Time. The enemy you can’t beat. But at least I can knock some sense into the PM before I go.”
He turned to Costello. “Of course, you’ll need to step up as HEAT’s commanding officer.”
Costello nodded. “Yes sir,” he replied. “Though, I’m, uh, concerned. The Lads haven’t seen much action lately, and none with Butler or Parata on the team.”
“There’s always a mission, sooner or later,” Powell said.
“In the meantime, you might think up a nice team challenge for them. Something that the PM can benefit from seeing. Or, better yet, we might do that for you…” Knight did a rare thing and flashed his most dreaded, gentlemanly smile.
Costello was up to it, though. “Well, how about Daar?” he suggested. “He keeps bragging about that First Fang of his…”
“To be fair it’s mostly the Whitecrests that brag up First Fang. Still,” Powell considered, “I’d like to see what they can do, m’self.”
“Why not replay that Guvnurag scenario in the simulator, and have First Fang take a crack at it? It would be a good comparison.”
The Guvnurag scenario was one of their newer training runs. Inspired by the overwhelming show of Hunter force at the Guvnurag homeworld, the idea was to train HEAT operators for the extraction of high-value targets during what Master Sergeant Vandenberg had eloquently summed up as ‘the biggest case of a dynamic FUBAR in all galactic history.’
A lot of their scenarios had been like that since Capitol Station—all training scenarios involving Hunters now assumed that the enemy could and would bring catastrophic mass to bear. The HEAT, it turned out, was training hard to bring all the aggressive impact of raiders to bear in salvaging whatever valuable resources could be snatched out from under the Hunters’ collective noses.
Which was a potential good match; if intelligence was to be believed, absolute unmitigated savagery was First Fang’s stock in trade.
The lingering question was whether they could bring as much savagery. Knight personally doubted it. He didn’t doubt a Gaoian’s spirit, not for a second, but not even the success of the Whitecrests quite counterbalanced the fact that their Clans and other institutions had been under Hierarchy influence for some time by now.
Besides, it was impossible to be familiar with Master Sergeant Firth’s work and not have an extremely high standard for the word ‘savage.’
“Good thinking, that man,” he acknowledged Costello’s idea with a nod. “I think putting the fear of God into our elected leader might be just the ticket.”
Costello smiled handsomely and drank some of his tea. “I think we can deliver there.”
“Good. Now, seeing as Folctha is about to host its first ever official state visit and we are the focus, I think we need to talk about getting the place absolutely ship-shape…”