Date Point: 12y7m3w AV
Manhattan, New York City, USA, Earth
Professor Daniel Hurt
Dan lived by the basic rule that tipping well never harmed a man’s reputation. So, the hotel’s bellhop in his traditional ritzy red uniform retreated from the room babbling promises about what to do if he, Daniel, needed anything else, and…
And Dan finally got some peace.
Book signing tours were like that. Hotel, bookshop, airport, plane, airport, bookshop, hotel. Tiring, but that was what the publishers paid him for. Staying in the good suites at the major international hotels was a perk that helped soften the wearying days.
He kicked off his shoes, laid his socks aside to be laundered, took off his tie and jacket, and sat on the edge of the bed enjoying the sensation of deep carpet under his toes for a few minutes in silence, then checked out the TV.
‘That Show With Steven Lawrence’ was starting in ten minutes. He didn’t just enjoy going on it, he was a fan and it was a welcome way to unwind on a Friday after a hard week, so he changed down into his loungewear, brushed his teeth and grabbed a whisky from the minibar while the commercials were on. He’d already ordered dinner via room service, and the promised New York strip steak with roasted vegetables arrived just as Lawrence was delivering his comedic summary of the week’s events.
He sat down to eat just as Lawrence was wrapping up and bringing on the guests.
“Well, we’ve got a hell of a show for you tonight, but I have to begin with an apology. You see, last week, I promised we’d have Mohammed Najjar, Polly Steinman, Nick Gruenbeck and Martin Østervang on and… you know me, I don’t like to go back on my promises, but I’m afraid we had to this time…”
He waved down the disappointed noises from the audience and carried on.
“…But on this occasion, something happened that we just couldn’t pass up because three, uh, simply incredible young people put the word out there that they have something important to say and were looking for a platform. Well, you know us—” A ripple of laughter. The words themselves hadn’t been funny, but the tone of voice alone had turned it into a joke. “So, instead of our scheduled guests for today, I’d like to instead welcome to the stage a trio of abductees, explorers, astronauts and pioneers, the first humans to walk on the surface of Mars—”
He had to almost shout over the enthusiastic screaming, and Dan immediately went from half-watching the show to giving it his full and undivided attention.
“Please welcome to the stage, Allison Buehler—!”
Buehler had a determination in her step that Dan judged was probably not all that artificial. She looked to him like the sort of woman who confronted her nerves and anxieties head-on, an impression only amplified by her choice of a sharp-cut, slightly conservative, graphite gray dress that accentuated her long limbs and intense demeanor.
That wasn’t a fashion commentary. Dan had learned early on that you could learn many things from the way a person dressed. Buehler struck him as his kind of forthright, no-bullshit type of woman.
“—Julian Etsicitty—!” Julian was more sanguine. He’d been coaxed into a forest green fitted shirt which he made look incredible, and which was tucked into equally well-fitted jeans with a braided brown leather belt. He offered a shy wave to the audience and ran a hand through his artfully shaggy and wild black hair in a moment of obvious nervousness. It was so well-done, Dan crassly wondered for a second if it was a rehearsed move. Probably not, it was too…real. There was a notable uptick in female cheering which got even louder when he smiled unconsciously and glanced downwards. He was a natural, knew it, and was slightly embarrassed by it all.
“And Xiù Chang!”
Dan had to immediately award Xiù several points: The other two had natural good looks and the attention of the makeup artist to fall back on, but Chang owned the stage from the moment she stepped out of the darkness. She had a one-in-a-million natural charisma and Dan sat up, paying rapt attention. Even the long, ragged scars on her arm were somehow elegant. Dan knew what was happening, understood what she was doing and how calculated and deliberate her poise really was, but that didn’t matter. He couldn’t deny the effect it had on him.
“Now that,” he muttered, “Is a formidable woman.”
‘Formidable’ seemed like a good word to describe all three of them.
“Thank you for coming, great to have you!” Lawrence pattered, as he escorted the trio to the wide couch that had been set up in place of the usual chair.
“Thank you!” Xiù answered for all of them. “And thanks for having us!”
The applause died down as Lawrence settled into his own seat. “So… wow. I mean, I have some fairly big names on this show, but I don’t know if you guys know just how huge you really are?”
Xiù looked to the other two for that one, and Dan awarded her another point. Letting her do all the talking would have been counterproductive and awkward.
“We’ve been kinda isolated,” Julian said. “And busy.”
“I bet! Months in training then Mars, and… I mean, I had chills,” Lawrence told Xiù. “‘From Mars to the Stars,’ I mean, they’re simple words but you made them beautiful.”
“Oh, I lost so many hours of sleep coming up with them…” Xiù confided. “I was just like, ‘don’t worry about it, you’ll be fine…’ but… thank you.”
“Well, Armstrong choked on his lines, of course…” Lawrence pointed out.
The trio looked at each other. “I mean…” Allison chimed in. “The thing is, we really don’t like being compared to the Apollo crews. They were legends for us, growing up, you know? Our parents were kids when that happened, and it just feels wrong to us when people talk about us like we’re in the same league.”
Humility. And apparently genuine humility, too. Damn, these three were good.
“How are you not?” Lawrence asked. “You’ve explored alien planets, and you worked damn hard to do it. You might not like it, but you are.”
“It just feels… I mean, maybe it’s the danger of hero worship,” Julian suggested. “I guess they were just Neil, Buzz and Michael to each other. But… we didn’t train for nearly as long or work nearly as hard as they did. We had a more advanced ship, more advanced gear, artificial gravity…”
“So you think you had it easier?”
“We know we had it easier,” Allison agreed.
“Well, easy or not you were still out there in deep space for eighteen months afterwards. What were you doing?”
“Looking for deathworlds!” Julian was obviously a geek under that buff outdoorsy exterior, and clearly the girls were expecting him to let that out for this bit. They sat back while he sat forward on the couch and took the limelight for the moment.
Dan tucked into his steak as he listened. Julian was an engaging storyteller and he knew how much was too much when it came to the technical details of their mission. The steak wasn’t even half-eaten by the time Julian had finished his summary, but even in that brief couple of minutes Dan felt much better educated about why Misfit had flown than he had before.
“So…” Lawrence turned to Allison. “The three of you were pretty quiet and private before leaving Earth, you really didn’t make many appearances.”
“No,” she agreed. “We had, y’know, our training to focus on, and the expedition, and we just wanted to focus on that.”
“You were the source of a lot of gossip, a lot of speculation…”
“About our relationship? Yeah, we’re a triple,” Allison announced, firmly. Dan arched an eyebrow, but the audience took it well: The roar of approving cheers and clapping was deafeningly loud.
Lawrence let it die down while the three of them…well, they’d clearly wanted to keep it private, but had decided that ripping off the band-aid was more painless. Dan thought he detected some surprise at the positive reception.
It didn’t take long for the applause to fade, though, and Lawrence had been given plenty of time to prepare his next question. “What’s that like? How does it work for you guys?”
Xiù chipped in with a distinct lack of poise that made Dan snort laughter. She was clearly besotted with the other two. “It…works. Really well. We’d kinda, um…”
“It works because we’ve figured out how to work it out in private,” offered Julian in a protective tone that was somehow still friendly . “I know we’re not exactly anonymous but…”
Dan knew Lawrence well enough to know that although he didn’t seem to get the hint, that was an act again. His job to tease a little more out of them after all, but he was polite about it. “You don’t get jealous at all?”
“No.”
“Not even a little?”
“Not even a little,” Julian shook his head, still in good humor even if it was clear he’d rather move on to another subject. “Hell, nothing makes me smile like… well.” He caught himself. “They make me happy. No jealousy.” He glanced to his right at Xiù and Allison, and both smiled sheepishly in return. The three of them were obviously completely smitten, and the audience absolutely ate it up.
“Hell no,” Allison agreed. She was warming up now, in fact she actually seemed to be enjoying herself. “Hell, if I’ve had a rough day, the best cure for it is when I get home to find them cuddled up asleep on the couch.”
“Gives you a warm glow?”
“Yeah, it does. But also, like… they’ll both spring up and one will cook or make me a drink and the other will cuddle me instead, and…”
The audience *‘aww’*ed at length, which got louder and full of laughter when Julian smiled bashfully at his shoes and… well, well. Xiù Chang was a blusher. That one was something of a surprise.
Allison grinned. “Best of both worlds. But…I mean, I’m sure people want to know, but that’s not why we’re here today.”
Dan gave her credit; she knew when and how to deploy blunt-force trauma and the audience applauded quietly; they agreed with the trio. Time to move on, and Lawrence did so without missing a beat.
“So what did you find out there?”
“Well,” Julian offered matter-of-factly. “A lot of boring stuff, some really interesting planets that are in the early stages of life—funny thing, did you know every single one of them has at least one giant moon? We found a planet covered in slime…”
It was an obvious setup. Xiù said with obvious glee, “And the planet of the glitterbugs!”
Julian fished out a small tablet from his rear pocket. He must have arranged a screen share in secret with the producers before the show, because when he called it up, millions of watching Americans were treated to slow-motion, high-dynamic-range state of the art video…of the most dazzling whirl of color Dan had ever seen. No special effect was that…
That…
Real.
He was so captivated that he just stopped thinking and watched. It was the sound that really sold the video’s veracity. The footage was taken from Xiù’s helmet cam and also recorded her voice, recorded the little awed gasp and the candid way her breath stopped. Anybody watching could hear her wonder even though she hardly made a sound.
Then, much too soon, they were back to the studio camera and Xiù was apologetically wiping a small tear from her eye.
Genuine, Dan realized. That wasn’t a show tear, that was a happy memory in liquid form.
“Planet Lucent,” Allison reported. “Habitable, the right class, right climate, right gravity, nobody else living there…there’s a small termite problem—” Julian snorted at that but Allison pressed on, “But that planet right there made the whole mission a success. We found a world that humans could live on, another Cimbrean.”
Somebody in the audience hollered a high C sharp, and that dragged everybody else into a riot of applause and congratulatory cheering that went on for nearly a full minute before Steve Lawrence finally managed to cool it back down.
“But even that isn’t what we came here for today,” Xiù said, and immediately had them all eating out of the palm of her hand, Dan included. What could possibly trump what they’d just seen? “What we really came to talk about is who we met while we were out there.”
That part was clearly a bombshell that not even Lawrence had known they were planning. H e boggled for a second, but rallied magnificently and proved why he was hosting the show when he easily rolled into the new situation.
“Who, you say? Well…we weren’t expecting a first contact situation, were we?”
“It was part of our training and mandate,” said Julian. “Though the plan had been to avoid contact if possible. It really…wasn’t, in this case.”
“Okay, back up. Who are they?”
“They call themselves the People,” said Xiù. “They live on a high-end Class Twelve Deathworld, much like ours. There are some important differences. The gravity is twenty percent higher—”
“—So no chemical rocketry,” interjected Julian. “They’d be trapped there forever, or at least longer than we were.”
“Right,” Xiù noded. “And their years are twenty-one months long and the spring and summer are almost sixteen months long. But the day is almost exactly as long as ours and the disease threat isn’t as bad. It’s a cold world overall but the tropics are a huge temperate rainforest.”
“And that forest is warm and really muggy,” added Julian with a laugh. “With huge trees! The Ketta grow over a hundred meters tall, easy!”
“And the trees are important,” Allison joined in. “The People live in them and on the ground. They’re…imagine like a chimp or gorilla sized monkey, except they’re hairless and lean and proportioned closer to us. Really long and strong arms, thick legs too but they’re not super short so they can walk just fine. Also? They’ve got a full-length tail they can swing from—”
“—a bitchin’ Mohawk—” Julian interjected.
“Oh yeah. Bright blaze orange mohawk from head to tail, leathery mottled skin, one less finger and full hands for feet, no nose but a reptile’s tongue to taste the air with—”
“And they can toss me around like nothing,” said Julian with a rueful grin. “Any of ‘em.”
“And they’re smart.” Xiù added. “Smart like us, like Gaoians. But…they’re stone-aged. And that’s the problem.”
They again let that hang in the air for a moment to let the implication sink in. They did not spoon-feed the audience; smart. Someone had trained them well.
Lawrence had done something he never did and set aside his pencil and cards entirely. “So…If they’re stone age, why did we—you—establish first contact, then?”
Allison took her turn to speak. “It was initially by accident. We…can’t get into all the details for security reasons, but the People are being hunted down and exterminated by a spacefaring civilization.”
She again let that hang in the air for effect. Dan was used to that trick losing its effect if overused, but in this case, for whatever reason—maybe the subject matter, maybe just charisma—it kept its power for her.
Lawrence lowered his hands, looking genuinely stunned. “They–? But–?…Why? And how did you find that out?”
“We have theories on the why, but…yeah. Not gonna talk about that. The People are completely harmless, they’re innocent. There’s no good reason why a spacefaring civilization would want to kill them all.” Julian was clearly a man who could get very angry for the right cause, and Dan could hear in his voice that if whatever entity was responsible for the genocide crossed his path, that entity would regret it.
“As for the how,” Allison chimed in, “Misfit is a survey ship. Her whole job is to find useful planets with useful resources. From a low orbit we can do a geophysics survey, no problem. She found the anomalies in seconds.”
“What anomalies?”
“Blast craters. Four of them. Antimatter bombs.” Julian’s voice was grim. “Just like the one in California. We think there used to be small towns or something on the coast. The bad guys showed up just as the People started to figure out civilization, and…stopped it.”
Silence. Even Lawrence didn’t have anything to fill that gap. If silence was a noise, then the silence from the audience was pounding. Dan tried to sit forward as if that might break the tension, and flinched when he nearly knocked a forgotten, half-eaten, cold steak onto the carpet.
Lawrence finally remembered himself. “…How did the contact happen?”
“We started sweeping from orbit and the geomagnetic scanner just went nuts,” Allison said. “Okay? It was finding these huge ferrous masses dotted around the forest interior of the continent, forming a line. North of that line, we could see villages, cooking fires, cleared areas… south of that line? Nothing.”
“And you landed?”
“We had to.” Xiù explained. “Part of our mandate was to offer aid if absolutely necessary.”
Dan remembered the public debate about that one. Byron Group had published a manifesto of sorts on exploration and had sought public comment. There had been very little in the way of agreement by anyone on anything, but that item had enjoyed very broad support. The rest…had been left to the crew, explicitly, with the comments as guidance.
The GRA had weighed in heavily, as had the UN, Canada, the UK, and the US but none had directly interfered, at least not publically. Really, it was the best anyone could have hoped for.
“One of the metal masses was out of formation, ranging way ahead of the line, and we couldn’t see any villages near it,” Xiù explained. “We picked that one, and put down near it. The idea was that hopefully we could avoid making contact and still figure out what was happening…well, that metal mass turned out to be…”
“This,” Julian growled.
He swiped to the next slide on his tablet, and Dan gawked at the sight of Allison standing squarely in front of a huge, angular metal…
It was clearly some kind of a tank, the gun under its nose was evidence of that. The general shape was something like that of an earwig or a short centipede, and Dan caught himself leaning instinctively away from the screen on a little wave of entomophobia. It was slumped over on its side and black oil had stained the earth around it.
“This is where things get weird, because for some reason it was inert,” Julian continued. “Not just inert, its access panels had been opened and somebody had hacked up the insides with a stone knife.”
“The People?”
“Yeah. But they said it was ‘asleep’ when they found it.”
“They said that?” Lawrence asked. “How did you actually meet them?”
“So… after examining that… tank, crawler thing, we wandered into the woods to look around. Now at that point, it was just us out there,” Allison indicated Julian and herself. “Xiù was back on the ship, watching our suit sensors for us, and a whole bunch of heat signatures just suddenly surrounded us, quiet as a mouse. We didn’t hear anything.”
“Xiù spotted those heat signatures literally at the last second,” said Julian. “I asked Allison to turn on her tactical flashlight and…we met the People. With spears pointed right at us. Turns out their village was high up in a little valley on the mountain, which had made it impossible to see from orbit.”
“Scary moment,” Allison recalled. “I really thought it was gonna go bad.”
“Oh?”
“Oh, definitely,” Julian agreed. “I’ll be perfectly honest I’ve never been that scared in my entire life. See—everything we said about what these guys look like really doesn’t do them justice. You’ve gotta see them in person. So, this is Yan, their, uh, chieftain I guess. He’s what they call the Given-Man.”
The studio screens flickered as Julian swiped through the pics, and Dan watched rapt.
Yan was at most about the same height as Xiù, but he was built like the offspring of a silverback gorilla and a linebacker. His long arms and short legs only amplified his squat solidity and naturally muscular athleticism. The photos were mostly relaxed poses or candids, though later on Yan grew into a bit of a ham and snarled or acted for the camera in a strangely friendly and playfully aggressive way. His crest stood much taller than the others’ and was vividly red instead of the bright blaze orange of the men, the more subdued color of the women, or the ginger of the youths. He was…impressive.
The audience sure thought so. Some forms of charisma transcended species and Yan could not be ignored in any photo, no matter what else was in view.
“From what we can tell, some males of this species go through a kind of second puberty,” Julian began to explain, “round about the same time their women would go through the menopause…”
“We think,” added Xiù. “We’re not exactly sure what is going on but there’s only one Given-Man—that’s Yan—per tribe. Always, without exception. And they all look something like that. Maybe not as big, but… The little one next to him is Vemik, he’s an adolescent.”
“He’s an adolescent?”
Dan couldn’t blame Lawrence for his incredulity. Vemik may have been much smaller than Yan but he was still a well-muscled specimen who looked strong enough to rip a phonebook in half.
“He’s a young adolescent,” Julian added with some obvious fondness. “And he’s probably the most inquisitive person I’ve ever met.”
Lawrence was losing his usual professional composure and seemed to be geeking out just like anybody else now. “He looks like an olympic gymnast.”
“He is a gymnast, no question. You should see him in the trees! They’re all like that but remember, he’s their little guy and he’s strong. He’s around this tall—” Julian gestured five feet of the ground, “—but he masses at least what I do!”
“You’re not a small guy, either,” Lawrence commented. It was true. Julian wasn’t more than averagely tall, but he had a broad chest and well-developed shoulders that hinted at a lifetime of hard physical work.
“Yeah. And he’s really playful, too. Super curious, loves to talk and tussle. They’re all like that, more or less.”
“Even Yan?”
“Yeah! But…he’s also scary as f–, uh, scary as hell.” Julian caught himself at the last second and the audience laughed knowingly. “I’ve said it many times to many people, but I’m pretty sure when we first met, Yan was ready to literally rip our heads off. Vemik saved us. This kid whose idea of cutting edge technology is a bow and arrow figured out what our guns were and jumped in front of Yan to stop him from attacking us.”
“So you were at odds with these guys at first?”
“Can you blame them?” Allison asked. “Metal demons were roaming their forest, slaughtering whole villages. They had every reason to be wary at first. But we made nice, eventually.”
“How?”
Julian chuckled. “Food and wrestling, mostly.”
“Wait, you wrestled Yan?”
“Nah,” said Allison with a teasing grin. “He got wrestled by Yan. You wanna see the video?”
Julian grinned ruefully as the audience laughed along to several clips of Yan being boisterously playful with the children, with Vemik and the men, and eventually with Julian himself. The short clips were chosen with obvious care; it was one thing to see Yan play fight with his own kind but it was quite another to see an impressive man like Julian being so hugely outsized and outmatched by a smirking gorilla that one honestly feared for his safety. In any case both men were clearly enjoying themselves.
Lawrence chuckled in slight disbelief, “You’re a braver man than I!”
The audience laughed along in agreement, which prompted another bashful reaction from Julian and more delighted sounds from the ladies.
He eventually shrugged, “Well…I trust him. Guy like that can’t lead if people can’t trust his leadership, right? You just gotta get to know him. And anyway, play is really important to them. It’s important for any intelligent life.”
“Absolutely,” Xiù agreed. “Gaoians love to play too. Play is a proxy for trust. You’re vulnerable when you’re playing with someone, or sparring, or whatever. Once Yan, um…made his point, I guess? That he trusted Julian enough to play? The village was friendlier after that.”
Lawrence again showed why he was the king of late-night. “So, they’re loyal and intelligent.”
“They are incredibly intelligent,” enthused Xiù. “Easily as intelligent as us. But…language. That’s where the first of the really big problems start.”
“Language?”
Xiù smiled cheekily—the first really good smile on that stage in minutes—and spoke something fluid and ululating. Lawrence gawped at her.
“…You learned their language?”
“Yup. And… that’s the problem. It has a tiny vocabulary,” Xiù explained. “I mean… I’m the language expert on the crew. I speak English, Mandarin, Gaori, a little French and Cortan, I can even understand Domain… picking up the few thousand words the People have was easy.”
Dan saw the problem instantly. Language defined the borders and the tools with which human beings thought. Presumably, that same pattern extended to other species—he’d need to do more research, maybe get on that new Gaoian academic exchange—but if they had a neolithic command of words…Words were tools, and just like simple stone-age tools put hard limits on what the People could build, their simple stone-age language would put similar limits on what they could think.
Lawrence was sharp. “And that means they started picking up our language, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. Just from listening to us. And… I mean, we had to explain to these guys just how big the trouble they’re in is. You can’t do that in Peoplespeak.”
“We had to give them some ability to know what the threat was and how to respond, because we had to leave. At any time, the, uh, ‘bad guy’ might have returned to finish the job, right? What could we do? If these robots woke up and killed us three, nobody on Earth would ever know about the People, and…”
“We thought long and hard about it. Days, actually, just spent crying about what we had to do,” Xiù elaborated. “But…we decided, that if we were to leave maybe never to come back, we had to at least explain some of the threat. And…we taught them how to make steel.”
“Oh, no…” Dan put his neglected steak aside and buried his face in his hands. “Oh, no. You didn’t.”
Lawrence took a long moment to gather his thoughts. “Many would consider that…unwise.”
“We consider it unwise!” Julian exploded. “It absolutely is! It’s a horrible, dangerous thing to do. Just… I mean, the whole thing from start to finish is a disaster for the People. But there was a choice: we could leave them, and not tell them about the caldera they live on—another fun little detail. We could tell them about the danger, but then what? What could they do? We did a high orbital survey. There are less than twenty thousand of their kind left, and all of them live on that active caldera. As in, had erupted within living memory. And all that with some kind of sky-enemy that wants them all dead, but is, I dunno, off doing other things?”
“If it’s a case of adapt or die,” Allison said, and Dan got the impression that she had spoken those exact words several times recently, “I say we help them adapt.”
Julian sobered up. “So, in the end, we had to make a really bad choice. We could either leave them blissfully unaware and hope we could get back in time to do something…or we could give them the tiniest possible chance to survive. That’s what it really boiled down to. Because if the bad guys decide to start up again, all we can do is give them a little bit of an edge.”
“That” Xiù said, quietly, “Is why we came here.”
“Surely we’ll go back!”
“Says who?” said Julian candidly. “The thing is, there are a lot of people here who have a lot of interests at play, and they’re probably all mad at us.”
“Especially for coming here, and saying this,” Allison agreed. “We might never go back out into space again, that’s the consequence we’re accepting here. But again, this was also part of our mandate. We have no right to keep this to ourselves.”
Julian nodded with her. “We’ve protected everyone’s equities as best we can—”
Dan understood that to mean they were leaving some big details out.
“—But we can’t let anyone have the final say on this. We all need the final say. Because we explored, and we found a people about to be snuffed out. They’re good people, too, and they’re so much like us it’s honestly a little scary. So…what do we do?”
“…Jesus.” Lawrence managed at last. “I…”
Dan had never dreamed he’d see the day when Steve Lawrence was rendered speechless.
“We would be remiss if we didn’t give credit where it was due,” said Xiù, going into what Dan saw immediately was damage control mode, unruffling some powerful feathers. “Byron Group has been remarkably understanding about all of this. Moses Byron himself was, uh…not happy at first. But he understands what’s at stake. I think we all do.”
“…You said those antimatter blast craters were like… do you think there’s a connection?” Lawrence asked.
Julian raised a hand. “We’re only reporting on the facts as best we can.”
He didn’t fool Dan. Julian knew they were connected. And Dan would bet a million dollars Julian didn’t fool half the viewing audience, either.
He grabbed his phone and got Diana Wimmer on speed dial.
On screen, Lawrence was getting something like his usual interview style back. “But…steel! Couldn’t you have started at, what, copper? Bronze?”
“No, that would’ve been—”
Dan stopped paying attention as Julian launched into his rationale, because Diana picked up on the second ring.
”You’re watching?” she asked.
“I am. Holy shit.”
”I know. God, this is either going to go nuclear, or…”
“It sounds like it already did. And… you were hinting about those rumours on what Sartori was saying at the GRA meeting after the Ambassador was killed…”
”Yeah. Christ, Dan, I don’t even know how to start reporting this. I’m gonna be called in for an emergency editor’s meeting any second now, what the hell do I take to that table?”
“Back them,” Dan said, instantly and with uncharacteristic passion. “Back them to the fucking hilt. I will and so will every motherfucker I’ve ever done business with.”
Diana’s pause on the line was long enough for them to overhear some more of the conversation.
“So…we took the long way ‘round to steel?” Lawrence was asking.
“Yup! But…that’s the thing, that means they have an opportunity to…not make a lot of the same mistakes we did. And…yeah. This kinda thing almost never goes well in our history. If we’re gonna do this, as a *species*…we really gotta take the time and think about how we’re gonna save them. I don’t want them to die because we meant well.”
He was talking past the sale, Dan realized. Julian was a natural. Either that, or it was a case of competence brought on by the high stakes. Or both.
Whatever the reason, it sure as hell worked on Diana. “Okay. Okay, I’m with you. Shit, I never imagined that…”
“Yeah. Me either.”
Another long silence. Xiù Chang was speaking again. “…need to think about everything here, but we can’t nanny them. They’ve got to make their own path, we just need to be there to offer advice while they do.”
Allison nodded. “Like the old saying goes, we can’t just give ‘em a fish, we gotta teach ‘em how to fish.”
Dan realised that his mouth had gone dry. Because Allison was wrong, the problem was so much more than that. They had to teach an alien people the concept of fishing. The concept of concepts. And it needed to be done so that the People figured it out for themselves, and hopefully kept their identity without becoming humanity’s pets.
Holy fuck.
“Hey,” He asked slowly. “You remember that question you asked me in the green room after the show the other week?”
He could almost hear Diana arching an eyebrow over the phone. “Which one?”
“You asked me if I was considering a change of career…”
Date Point: 12y7m3w AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth
President Arthur Sartori
“You beautiful, beautiful kids. God bless you!”
“The security council is not going to like that.”
“Margaret, I don’t even care… I think it’s about time I had a talk with Moses Byron again, don’t you?”
Date Point: 12y7m3w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Daar
“Remember, it’s a live fire exercise but the simulation uses low-power kinetic pulse so you’ll still feel it.” Daar fiddled with Brother Tyal’s MILES equipment, making sure it was perfectly seated. “And you play dead if your gear tells ‘ya you’ve been shot.”
“Yes, my Champion…we understood the brief.”
Daar was doing his best not to be overbearing, or to fuss over the Brothers of First Fang like a particularly anxious Mother, but this was important. Tyal was doing an admirable job of keeping his composure, but right now that composure didn’t feel appropriate. Daar would have much preferred to see a small crack in his Brother’s calm, just so he knew that Tyal had properly grasped the gravity of the occasion.
The Whitecrests, after all, had already won Human trust and respect. But Whitecrest was a very different creature to Stoneback, and Daar would not allow his Clan to be the ‘sidekick.’
And there was still that belligerent Naxas shitting in the room; Regaari and Genshi had both dropped their hints. Something desperately important was going on, and while Daar had his own theories about what the specifics were, there was no denying the violence on the horizon.
If there was to be a fight, First Fang would be there. And to ‘Hell’ with unimportant reasons like pride or the honor of the Clan, they would be there because First Fang was the best and a fight that scoured away cities and got deathworlders worried required nothing less than that.
…Well. The best the Gao had, anyway. The humans were better and it was humbling. Daar was proud to have taught his battle-brothers of the SOR a few things, but the fact was that he had learned rather more from them. He was bigger and fitter now than ever before, sharper in mind and body, quicker in claw and reason…and all of that in a very short time, too. The humans had earned his respect in more than just the jovial, friendly way he liked basically everybody.
But despite all that, none of them had actually seen how a Stoneback really fought, not even from him. He was nervous about it. It wouldn’t be the cold, precise violence the HEAT were so good at. It would be a bloodbath, though Stoneback were far from mindless animals when they fought. They fought with heart and head, with tooth and gun. They were good…. He just wasn’t sure if the Humans would agree?
He was almost desperate to impress them and it showed. Tyal flicked an ear, and unwound slightly. “…And we understand the stakes, my Champion,” he added, for Daar’s ears only.
“…I know. I’m sorry.” Daar reined it in. While he was especially eager to impress Stainless—he hadn’t craved another male’s approval so strongly since he took his First Rite at the hands of then-Father Garl, all those many years ago—that was no excuse for disrespecting Tyal’s competence.
“It’s fine. I feel almost like a First Ring initiate again myself.”
Daar lowered his voice to almost a whisper. “They do that. I remember my first tussle with ‘Highland.’ It was…humbling. Took a month before I could fight back at all.”
“Isn’t he smaller than you?”
Daar was sufficiently self-aware to know when his ego was being pricked, but not quite controlled enough to not care. “Size isn’t everything,” he grumbled. “Besides. They have an advantage with their shoulders. Never wrestle them!”
“Champion.” Tyal’s tone was amused and patient. “You have been training with these humans for a long time. We’ve read your reports and we haven’t sat on our tails. Trust me—First Fang is as good as it ever was. Better, probably.”
Daar flattened his ears, a bit stung. “I trust you, you know that. It’s…maybe I’m more nervous for myself. I gotta perform on the ‘HEAT’ when they do their scenario.”
“Oh?”
Daar shrugged, “I got a lot to prove, Brother.”
“Gentlemen?”
Technical Sergeant Kovač was slightly impenetrable as far as Daar was concerned. He was certain that she knew more Gaori than she let on, but that enigmatic smile of hers was apparently confounding even for the humans who knew her best.
“The scenario’s ready,” she announced.
Daar pulled Brother Tyal to himself and they touched noses quickly. He used the ancient Stoneback battle cant, which he knew for a fact that Kovač didn’t speak. [“Protect and provide, Brother.] I’ll take care of the rest.”
She raised her eyebrow, too. Now Daar was certain.
“Daar, you’ve been invited to watch from the observation room,” she told him.
Which meant it was time for him to regain and show his confidence. A Champion could never afford to do otherwise, especially him. He clapped Tyal firmly on the shoulder and left the room before the temptation to give some last-minute advice could overtake him.
The observation room was four floors up, and Kovač trotted lightly up the stairs humming to herself as she tapped on her tablet. “I’m looking forward to seeing this,” she said conversationally, on the third flight.
“They’ll be a lot different to the Whitecrests,” Daar warned her.
“Yeah-huh. That’s why I’m looking forward to it. Those suits the Whitecrests use are incredible, but I wanna see what a Gaoian can do without.”
“Oh, you will. And I suspect,” he grumbled, “You won’t ever forget it, either.”
“I hope not!” Kovač opened the door at the top. Admiral Knight, Rear Admiral Caruthers and soon-to-be Lieutenant-Colonel Powell were already there, and waiting. “We’re all eager to see what they can teach us.”
Daar found there was genuine pleasure in his grin, rather than pure bravado. For all his worries, somehow that simple display of human humility was enough to make his worries about First Fang’s performance evaporate.
“They won’t disappoint,” he promised.
They didn’t.
Date Point: 12y7m3w AV
Test Site Liana, New Enewetak System, Deep Space
Lt. Col. Claude Nadeau
At long, long last the opportunity had arisen to fly and land somewhere using a human-made vehicle rather than a standard-issue Dominion civilian shuttle, and it was everything the designers had promised. Hephaestus LLC, stung by Byron Group’s recent history of surging ahead in small spacecraft development, had turned out their best work in producing the CS-200 Weaver-class transport.
Functionally, it felt no different than flying in a C-130, or a Chinook. In fact the only noticeable difference was that it was quieter, with no jet engines or turboshaft rotors. Kinetic thrusters produced a kind of high electronic whine at most, like an old CRT television, and from inside the Weaver’s hull that sound was inaudible.
Every specification Nadeau had seen for it was thrilling, too. It could move like a bat out of hell thanks to its capacitor banks, and for short bursts it even had an acceleration profile almost as good as that of a Firebird. It had a range of several hundred lightyears and was perfectly capable of instant re-use Ground-Orbit-Ground flight.
It achieved all that while being as well-armored as a light tank and layered in dozens of “speed bump” shields designed to dissipate and deflect incoming fire rather than stop it outright. And of course it had those essential safety features that every spaceship needed but surprisingly many lacked…like seatbelts.
Those seatbelts weren’t needed for this descent, though: The ride was smooth and uneventful. With nothing worse to deal with than a gentle weather front, the Weaver dropped comfortably down into the atmosphere in a dazzling halo of plasma, shifted its flight fields into a fixed-wing configuration and glided to the landing site on a whisper and silence. Nadeau knew the pilot was grinning, even though all he could see of the man was the back of his head.
“LZ in sight, positions for touchdown…”
VTOL from ground to orbit to ground again. Ten years ago, the idea would have been pure fantasy. Now it was cutting edge technology. Soon, it would be routine.
Along with Von Neumann probes, apparently. Nadeau could see the “colony” site that the probe had built up ahead, and while its lines had seemed straight, clean and solid enough from orbit, they looked even better up close.
The Weaver’s pilot set them down on a flat spot of ground some ways north of the actual designated landing pad, and a respectful distance from any of the robots the Coltainer probe had sent down. Those at first glance looked crude and half-made, but the impression was probably a lifetime of experience throwing a false positive at him. He was used to industrial equipment being painted and having corporate logos and safety instructions all over them, whereas these were designed to be built and to work without human supervision. They were gunmetal sketches, practical and solid but… unfinished, somehow.
The same was emphatically not true of the colony structures themselves.
A lot of planning had gone into creating the basic compound. The idea was that it would serve as a basic base of operations with all the essential amenities that the first wave of colonists might need. Not just lighting and water, but everything right down to a small nanofactory, and that was the bit that made the whole program workable: In theory, the colonists would land and be assembling upgrades and expansions to their colony pretty much as soon as they’d unpacked their possessions.
Nadeau’s Weaver was actually the second to touch down. The first had been full of engineers from every allied nation, who were going over the printed concrete buildings in teams, checking the walls, the wiring, the plumbing, the flooring…everything.
Sergeant Lee was among them, accepting feedback on the quality of the construction while waiting for the transports to land. He saw Nadeau step down the ramp and saluted. “Welcome to test site Liana, sir.”
Nadeau returned the gesture. “It looks good from above.”
“Looks even better from down here,” Lee told him, and handed over his tablet. “The construction robots might look janky, but they build well. This whole site is better-made than Scotch Creek.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. We threw Scotch Creek together in a hurry…” Nadeau looked around. “So it’s fit for human habitation?”
“Yeah-huh. Heck, with a bit of tweaking this technology is going to revolutionize construction on Cimbrean and Earth, too. You have to give the Locayl credit, these things are great.”
Nadeau nodded. Like so many things in the Coltainer, the construction ‘bots were a human redesign of alien technology and it was common galactic knowledge that the Locayl knew construction better than anybody. By all accounts, their cities were breathtaking. Some of their more advanced construction techniques were still beyond human grasp for now, but not by much: Once the principle was out of the way, all that was left were the programming and the materials science.
“Okay,” he looked around again. “Before you start showing me the details, let’s break it down to a big yes-or-no question. Could people live here long-term, even without support from Earth?”
Lee took a moment before replying. He stared thoughtfully around at the construction work, tapping his pen thoughtfully against his lips, then nodded.
“…Yeah. Hell, they’d be pretty comfortable. Might be a few teething issues we haven’t found yet but the buildings are solid, the plumbing works, the wiring’s good…if they came here with plenty of food and enough crop seed, they’d be good. It’ll take some expansion work before there’s enough housing for a sustainable population, but with this foothold alone…”
“It was supposed to shave years off the colony-building process,” Nadeau reminded him.
“And it probably does. Of course, we won’t know for certain until some people come here to live in it.”
Nadeau smiled and rubbed his hands together with a clap. “That,” he said, “would be the next step…give me the tour.”
“Gladly…”