Date Point: 13y2d AV
UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space
Vakno
“Triple reinforced, and there seems to be some kind of field-based reinforcement at work just below the surface that grossly enhances the tensile strength, shear strength and melting point. No wonder the drones could not cut through.”
“And the encryption?”
“Even at their pinnacle, the OmoAru never quite discovered some of the options we have. I should be able to crack it…with time.”
Vakno nodded and gave up on the attempt to physically penetrate the security door. If indeed a door it was, though she could think of no other reason why the hospital corridor might unceremoniously terminate in a featureless plug of what was probably Titanium that bore no resemblance to any of the walls around it.
Exploring UmOraEw-Uatun had not been a quick or easy process. While the OmoAru population had dwindled and lost interest in preserving even their basic necessities, nature had not become so lackadaisical. If their society had not been so technologically advanced, and their automated civil systems so reliable, it was doubtful if anywhere would have had power any longer.
As it was, tracing those branches of the municipal power supply had often been an exercise in clambering over collapsed buildings and exchanging meaningless pleasantries with the occasional dopey survivor who was still half-heartedly scratching out some kind of a living among the rubble.
The biggest power draw had turned out to be a faulty circuit. The second and third had both been going to the water management infrastructure.
The fourth, however, had turned out to be the hospital. They had found surgical suites on the upper floors still intact and presumably operational, ready to perform basic augmentation surgery the second any OmoAru patient was delivered to its waiting pre-assessment bay.
There were no patients. No doctors, no administrative staff, no medical technicians, nurses, computer systems operators, not one stray custodian. They had wasted a week trawling through the patient records trying to determine the date of the most recent operation, but it seemed that at some point the staff had just given up on taking notes.
Eventually, a diagnostic on the surgical robots offered the tentative guess that they had last performed surgery more than seven Aru years previously.
Vakno had been on the brink of giving up when Bedu’s drones had finally managed to excavate past a collapsed ceiling and found the ‘door.’
She ran her scanner over the surrounding structure instead, looking for some exploitable weakness. Perhaps the ’door’ would prove to be stronger than the building around it and could simply be bypassed, but the scanner returned only nonsense. Something beyond it was doing an admirable job of scrambling any kind of penetrating scan.
“…This is a hospital, yes?” she checked, testing the limits of what passed for her sense of humor.
“The surgical suites and patient wards on the upper levels suggested as much,” Bedu replied in a tone that wasn’t so much dry as parched.
“I’m quite sure my bunker on Perfection was not as secure as this,” Vakno told him, ignoring the sarcasm.
“…Didn’t your bunker have gauss cannons?”
“Indeed. Perhaps you should be cautious with that encryption.”
“Always…There.”
“There wh-?” Vakno began. She almost fell over when the door lit up, swept some kind of a scanner field over the both of them and then…opened.
“Opened” was not an adequate word to describe the actual process, which put Vakno much more in mind of a whirlpool or a pot of boiling water. The apparently solid and impenetrable surface of the door flowed like dry sand, parted, split, slid. The door didn’t so much open as reconfigure itself to temporarily permit ingress.
Corti were all but completely anosmic, but Vakno was still immediately struck by an odd chemical note on the air that gusted over them as the pressure equalized. She blinked to settle her disgust.
“What is that smell?”
Bedu stood up and padded through the hole in the ’door’ with no sign of trepidation. “Corpse.”
There was a flight of steps beyond the stairs that led down to a circular atrium. Three hallways radiated off into a series of open lab spaces, and as Vakno followed Bedu down one of those hallways he turned out to completely right.
The first corpse was lying supine right out in the open, though ’corpse’ was almost not the right word. Vakno lit a light-ball drone and followed him with the little glowing thing hovering behind her shoulder, and almost immediately its light played over the grotesquely stretched flesh of not just the one but dozens of emaciated, mummified OmoAru.
Most were just…at their desks. Slumped over as if the had worked themselves exhausted and taken a nap where they were working. Some even had their arms folded under their heads, implying they had done exactly that.
Others were sitting against walls or in corners. The bright mottled tones of OmoAru skin had gone bruised and dark in the decades since their deaths, fading from sandy yellows and reds to leathery browns and blacks. Flat, wide teeth gleamed in the shadows.
Vakno had heard of the heebie-jeebies, but never imagined she might experience the sensation for herself. She played her scanner across the tableau in the vain hope that doing so might help her retain her composure.
“…Causes of death appear to be dehydration and starvation,” she noted. “And…intriguing. Not a one of them has any neural implantation.”
Bedu was studying one of the mummies with the kind of apparent dispassionate analysis of which the Directorate thoroughly approved. “This one is showing signs that….he? Yes, he, did have implants, but they were removed…A last holdout?”
“Against what? This is research equipment.”
Vakno examined what her scanner was telling her. “I don’t understand. This was a civilian hospital. There’s evidence upstairs that the surgical suites were still in use as little as five Dominion years ago. But these people have been dead for ten times that long at least.”
“There was still a functioning city out there, then. They starved to death when there was still food in the shops.” Bedu stood up and stretched. “Their civilization had declined sharply, but they were still taking care of basic logistics.”
“Were they suffering from the apathy too? Did they just not see the need to go outside and find food?”
“Or were they trapped?” Bedu asked. The sound of his bare feet on the old concrete echoed eerily as he wandered off into the dark, playing his scanner over the surroundings.
Vakno allowed herself to shiver as soon as he was out of sight, and set to the task of trying to access one of the work terminals to see if she could restore power and maybe glean what the deceased OmoAru had been trying to achieve on their silent consoles.
She almost collapsed from fright when, a few minute later, his voice rang through the quiet labs. “Here!”
“…Here?”
“A test subject. Head full of implan—”
His sentence was cut off by the sudden slam of the lights coming up and a mechanical roar as the ventilation system hauled itself torturously back to life. Vakno found herself standing in a blizzard of light as long-dormant volumetric displays reignited in blue and orange. A few flickered and burned out but the general effect was to bathe the dark laboratories in unnatural, deep light.
“…Was that you?” Bedu asked, after a moment.
“No.” Vakno resisted the foolish impulse to echo the question at him. He wouldn’t have asked if he was responsible.
“An automated system?”
“…I don’t know.”
Vakno turned and swept her scanner around the lab complex, looking for an explanation. There didn’t seem to be one.
Bedu returned from the side room he’d explored, with his pulse pistol drawn. The weapon looked absurdly large in Corti hands, built to be used by a Kwmbwrw with their thick, stubby fingers. Seeing him lift it with visible effort was hardly reassuring for the moment.
The howl of the fans faded to a mere hum, underpinned by assorted sound alerts as the computers finished booting and given a rhythm by a steady solid tapping noise from the direction of the bunker door, coming down the stairs.
“…One of the locals?”
“I don’t think so. Maybe we should—” Vakno began.
A shadow stepped into view out in the atrium and paused, apparently trying to decide which of the hallways it should investigate. Even in the dark, the newcomer’s silhouette was impossible to mistake: a Human. Nothing else looked so big while being so relatively small.
“—hide,” Vakno couldn’t stop herself from finishing. ”Shit.”
The deathworlder’s head snapped round, tracking the noise, and he strode confidently towards them. Bedu and Vakno backed away, acutely aware that running would be entirely futile.
They glanced at each other, made a snap decision, and Bedu raised his pistol and fired. A lethal pulse of kinetic energy rippled out from the muzzle and lashed across the room with enough force to crush most species in the galaxy.
The human stopped mid-stride and put a hand to his face. ”Ow! …The fuck you do that for, Brother?”
Bedu lowered the gun, opening his mouth as though to speak and clearly failing for words.
“…Okay. Okay, dumb question. This place is the fuckin’ creepiest….” the human conceded, and stepped forward into the light. “Thought you little grey bastards were supposed to be chiller’n that, though.”
“I’m…sorry,” Vakno managed. “You managed to scare us.”
“No harm, no foul,” the human offered breezily. “That weak-ass raygun don’t do shit to a grown man anyway. Name’s Dog. Dog Wagner. Captain of HLLCS My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon.”
“You followed us,” Bedu challenged. “Why?”
Dog shook his head. “Brother, I didn’t follow you. I came here after some other fella. Dude called Zane. He ain’t with you?”
“Zane? I know him. We did business, before the Hunter attack on Perfection,” Vakno replied. “He is not with us.”
“That’s his ship parked on the roof…”
“Indeed it is.”
Wagner flinched, Vakno jumped and Bedu twisted around to aim his pulse pistol blindly into the shadows. The new voice had apparently come from everywhere at once, with no apparent single origin.
It was Zane’s voice. Vakno could hear it instantly. She had never met anybody else who spoke so deep in the bass that their voice actually crackled with it. But the words were no match at all.
“…Okay, brother. Nice an’ chill, hear?” Dog offered. “I din’t come here lookin’ for trouble. Some folks in Cimbrean just wanna have a word with you about some Cruezzir that managed to make it through customs.”
“Intriguing. The human customs screen isn’t impenetrable then…”
The three of them paused. “Oh, that ain’t a good sign…” Wagner muttered. His hand flashed inside his baggy green jacket and came out with a square black human-made weapon both smaller and much deadlier than the one in Bedu’s hands.
He lived on pure luck. There was a flash and an echoing explosive sound from the darkness and Wagner flung himself to the floor cursing while a console behind him caught fire and shut down. There was a snarl in the shadows and another shot which whined as it skipped off the concrete next to him as he rolled desperately into cover.
Bedu had the presence of mind to drag Vakno behind something solid.
Dog let out a slightly hysterical laugh that was probably fuelled by adrenaline and bravado rather than actual amusement. “Damn, brother. You lined up that shot for how long and you still missed?”
There was no reply. Wagner shifted warily, scooted along behind his cover then glanced upwards as he got up into a crouch.
“…There any way to turn off these fuckin’ lights?” he hissed.
Vakno shook her head. “Not from here.”
“Fuck….shitdammit I swore I’d never use one’a these fuckin’ things…” He fished in a pocket and pulled out a dispenser tube of nervejam grenades.
“Okay,” he murmured, popping one of the coin-sized weapons out and fingering it nervously. “When I throw this thing, you two haul ass for the exit. Got it?”
“What about you?” Vakno asked.
“I’ll be haulin’ ass too. Now ain’t the time for thrillin’ heroics.”
He pressed the button, counted two red lights, then tucked his thumb under the grenade and launched it across the room with a sharp ping! There was the sound of desperate movement, but Vakno was in no mood to argue with a human when it came to matters of violence. She got up and ran, exerting her body in ways it had never been exerted before. Somehow, she was halfway to the stairs before the grenade went off and bathed the labs in momentary white light.
Dog cursed and fired a series of sharp shots behind her as she scrambled up the steps. There was another ping and another flash of light, and more cursing but she didn’t pay attention.
She would have fled in a stupid panic by herself. Humans, fortunately, seemed to have a better instinct in this situation. Dog’s cursing translated into a coherent question that carried the weight of an order as he backed through the bunker ’door.’ “Can you close this damn thing?”
Bedu seemed to regain his wits. “Yes! Yes I can—” he pounced for his tablet, picked it up—
Blue blood and gray flesh sprayed everywhere as his head burst. More bullets sparked and punched off the door as their unseen attacker fired up from below.
“Fuck!” Dog recoiled sideways and fired blindly around the corner, causing a brief pause in the shooting.
Vakno saw only one chance to live, and took it. She dove for Bedu’s datapad and ran the decryption algorithm he’d used to open the bunker while Dog threw a third grenade down the stairs.
The metal flowed and distorted itself back into the configuration of a solid block, and Dog staggered backwards away from it. Something dropped out of his gun and clattered on the tiles, but he pulled a replacement from inside his jacket and his shaking hands managed to ram it home on the second attempt.
Bedu was dead. Living people had more skull, and more brain inside that skull.
Dog was breathing heavily and muttering to himself. “Motherfucker those grenades hurt…What the actual fuckin’ fuck was that all about?”
“I don’t know. But we….should leave. In case he can open the door,” Vakno managed. There was safety in the simple facts.
“If he can’t?”
“Then he’ll die of thirst in there.”
Dog’s breathing slowed. He glanced at Bedu’s crumpled remains, then spat on the floor in front of the giant, gnomic slab of metal. “Good fuckin’ riddance, then. Get us outta here, sister.”
“…This way.”
Date Point: 13y2d AV
Byron Group Headquarters, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Xiù Chang
Xiù didn’t quite know what to make of Daniel Hurt. He seemed like the kind of guy who had a hard time keeping his opinions to himself, much like Kevin Jenkins but with an intellectual sheen that was very different from Kevin’s raw and often unfocused passion.
She wasn’t sure she liked him much. Like a lot of the people working for Byron he was more concerned with facts and hard truths than with what people thought of those facts and hard truths, or what they might mean for people. And he seemed to have a knack for dragging people into the kind of conversations he wanted to have, which sounded a heck of a lot like arguments.
Kevin seemed to find him invigorating.
“Well, sure, of course men and women have different brains and different psychology,” he was saying. “I mean, uh, that’s like saying we have different genitals, it’s obvious. What I’m sayin’ is there’s no good reason why, uh, why children’s clothing should be tighter and covered in pink ponies for girls, and baggier and covered in superheroes for boys when they’re aimed at the same age group. It’s like, I think of myself as a masculine kinda dude but what the fuck is masculinity when you get down to it? ‘Cuz I can’t think of a single thing I’d teach to a boy that it wouldn’t be good idea to teach it to a girl, too.”
“That’s one I wrestle with too,” Hurt agreed. He spoke slower than Kevin, used his hands less, and he had the disarming ability to actually listen to what somebody else was saying and to really think about it before he replied.
“…Put it this way,” he decided. “I agree in principle that there’s no one single characteristic that belongs exclusively to one sex but not the other. But by the same token, it’s clear that we expect certain characteristics more strongly in men and women based solely on their presumed gender roles. And you said yourself, you think of yourself as masculine, and…Miss Chang, do you think of yourself as feminine?”
Xiù blinked, feeling suddenly put on the spot, and obeyed the first instinctive reply that came into her head: She duck-nodded like a Gaoian.
If Hurt noticed, he diplomatically ignored it. “See? So we have at least three people in this room who agree that masculine and feminine are real enough to feel and identify with. And it says a few things about the two of you and the virtues you aspire to, and the role you want to fill for your Tribe.”
“That’s true of a lotta shit, though,” Kevin pointed out. “Just feelin’ that something’s real and meaningful don’t make it so.” He gestured to the tattoo on his forearm to illustrate the point.
“No, of course not,” Hurt agreed. “But it points to something going on in our heads, something that’s probably valuable and necessary to the survival and success of a social species. Did you ever read your old friend Kirk’s memoirs?”
“Shyeah. All that ’tortured genius’ stuff?”
“Exactly. Now, we actually have a word for the concept he was wrestling with, and the Domain language doesn’t have an equivalent: Apophenia. It means the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns within random data-”
“Which is where gods and spirits and stuff come from, yeah,” Kevin nodded. “And that’s a useful thing for surviving on a deathworld, ‘cuz you wanna detect patterns early. I see what you’re saying.”
“Do you?” Hurt asked.
“Yeah. You’re sayin’ that a strong sense of gender and of manly traits and feminine traits is good for human survival, right?”
Hurt visibly replayed that sentence in his head before replying. “Has so far been good for human survival,” he clarified, “sure. As evidenced by the fact that we’re here, we’re successful, we’re the apex species of what I’m told might actually be the toughest cradle world in the galaxy. So if somebody’s going to claim that trying to indoctrinate our brains out of thinking that way is a good thing for our species then they need to bring a good argument to the table, agreed?”
“Burden of proof,” Kevin nodded.
“Right. And so far, what we’ve been given is…inadequate. Now, when it comes to the question of things like children’s clothing, the question I’d ask is-” Hurt was interrupted when the door opened and Moses Byron entered the room, escorted by Doctor Ericson, Doctor Brown, and other seniors of the Byron Group Exploration Program. “…Guess we’ll finish this later,” he suggested.
“Look forward to it,” Kevin said, and stood up to shake Byron’s hand.
Xiù glanced to her left, where Allison offered her a wry roll of the eyes and Julian came back from whatever meditative place he’d drifted off to in his head.
Byron settled into his seat and beamed at everyone. The company was boasting record profits on the back of a new wave of contracts for forcefield generators, and his own personal wealth was creeping towards surpassing its all-time high. He apparently tended to get generous when things were going well, so everybody at the table was expecting something big from him.
“So, big news. I’ve told Ericson and Brown to start building BGEV Twelve,” he said. “Partly that’s because we need more ships out scouting, partly that’s because Misfit is now working on a government contract.”
Kevin smirked at that one.
“So…we have government backing to return to Akyawentuo?” Julian asked.
“Ohhh yes. Not just the White House, but NATO, AEC, the GRA…” Byron’s smug grin was identical to Kevin’s. “Heck of a thing.”
“What’s the catch?” Allison asked, causing him to snort.
“This is a gift horse, Miss Buehler. As someone once said to me, don’t try your hand at equine dentistry.”
“There’s always a catch, Mister Byron.”
Moses gave Allison the calculating look he gave people who didn’t automatically and immediately defer to him. “…Take your pick,” he said eventually. “You work to the job, not the clock. That means you might be out there on that planet for years. You’ll be working under military supervision, and you’ll be under the microscope. You’d better be ready for every last little thing you do and say to need signing off in triplicate.”
“Doesn’t sound that different to what we were doing already,” Allison nodded and sat back.
“Most of the catches fall on us, anyway,” Kevin said. “AEC want all of those giant death robots you found for study, as well as any other alien technology. Group ain’t gonna see a cent for those discoveries.”
“Which means we’re basically doin’ this pro bono.” Moses pointed out.
“Okay. Really. What’s the catch?” Allison demanded. “I know your reputation’s important to you Mister Byron, but-”
“Trade,” Byron said, simply. “It might be that I won’t live to see it, but the Group is going to outlive me, and sooner or later the…Akyawentans?”
“The People,” Xiù said. “It’s…tough to use their word.”
“Every species call themselves ’The People’,” Hurt opined. “What’s their way of saying it?”
“Um…Ten’gewek,” Xiù told him. “But that includes their version of the word the baked in, so-”
“Sooner or later the Tengewek, then,” Moses interrupted, making Xiù wince, “are gonna want to trade. From what Dan here tells me, ain’t no way they can’t get up to our level pretty quick from this point.”
Dan nodded. “Now that they know what’s possible, they’ll work toward it. The hard part will be encouraging them to explore other possibilities as well. If they become fixated on steel then other metals and alloys might pass them by. But the really hard part will be encouraging them to pursue their own social and political theories rather than just mimicking ours.”
“But trade is a universal,” Byron expanded. “Economics are the same for everyone. They’ll have things we want, we’ll have things they want. It won’t be exploitation—” he raised a hand to cut off the concern Julian was about to voice. “We’re honest dealers, we’ll treat ‘em with integrity and fairness. I promise.”
Xiù glanced to her lovers and saw her own skepticism mirrored in their eyes, but she also saw the same resignation there.
She nodded, and turned to Daniel Hurt. “Social and political theories?”
Hurt nodded. “It’s gonna be tricky, and it’ll involve a lot of asking them what they think and not arguing with them. We’re not even talking about the Socratic method here, I mean their conclusions need to be theirs.”
“There’s a lot we don’t understand,” Julian said. “I still…their ideas about magic and what it is and what it does, we really need to record that in their words.”
“Among other things,” Dan agreed. “We need to record their thoughts on every facet of life that we can before their society inevitably tears itself apart under the barrage of new ideas.”
Xiù winced at the word ’inevitably’ but didn’t argue it. She knew better than anyone just how much the People had changed in the few short weeks she had spent with them so far. She doubted even Julian had noticed how the syntax and cadences of their language had shifted and realigned themselves around the alien words of English.
Part of her was wrestling with knowing that something similar had happened to the Gaoians. And the Gaoians were a mature spacefaring civilization…
“…I just had a thought,” she said, slowly. It was falling into place in her brain just an inch ahead of saying it.
Dan gave her an expectant look.
“I was just thinking…maybe we should ask the Gaoians about this?” Xiù told him. “They’ve…already started to experience the same kind of, um, cultural contamination. From us. Maybe they might have some insight?”
Dan and Kevin shared a glance, then looked to Moses, then back to her. “…Actually, yeah,” Kevin agreed. “And…hell, Kirk. Vedreg too. I hear he took up baking. Maybe if we get some ET perspective on this shit…”
“Well, you’re supposed to be a Sister, right?” Byron pointed out. “Ain’t you got some kinda pull with the Gaoians?”
“I, um…maybe?” Xiù looked desperately to Allison for help, but it was immediately obvious that Allison was agreeing with Byron for once.
“It makes sense, babe,” she offered apologetically. “I mean…that’s why we came hunting you down on Aru was because the Gaoians were saying all these amazing things about you. They really respect you.”
“Alright. So you fly Misfit on over to Gao as soon as she’s ready, talk with…who?” Byron asked. Xiù blanched.
“Gao? But-!”
“This is too big and important for emails,” Dan told her. “Mister Byron’s right, some face-to-face diplomacy is what’s needed here.”
“I left that planet to protect it!” Xiù objected, half-rising in her seat. “I didn’t—you think I wanted to spend years on the run dressed up as a Gaoian? I ran away because the Hunters—”
“That was then,” Kevin pointed out. “It’s been ten years. They’re open allies of ours now. Joint military ops, the works. If the Swarm was gonna hit ‘em—”
“It already hit the Guvnurag,” Dan added.
“Exactly! Why would I want to provoke that?”
Julian cleared his throat. “Well…why not invite them to Cimbrean?” he asked. “Like…an official state visit from the Mother-Supreme or something.”
Dan nodded along. “It’s been done before on a smaller scale. With your friends Ayma and Regaari and, uh, those big bodyguards of theirs.”
“Warhorse and Baseball,” Julian told him. “Great guys. Baseball’s mac and cheese is a goddamn epiphany.”
“…You know them personally?” Dan asked.
“He nearly got squished playing soccer with ‘em,” Allison explained, giving Julian a wry, patient half-smile.
“Now there’s a missed marketing opportunity,” Byron grumbled in the tone he used when he was mostly joking.
“It would be good to get alien buy-in as well,” said Dan as he carefully pressed on. “Beyond perspective, having their resources available would be valuable. Then there’s the Galactic stage…”
Kevin shook his head at that. “The Dominion couldn’t pull their heads outta their asses if they spent four years doin’ the paperwork first,” he scoffed. “Y‘ever hear of the Office for the Preservation of Indigenous Species?”
“…Wait, the Dominion has the Prime Directive?” Dan asked.
“Nah, they’ve got a shitpit full’a bureaucratic fuck-knuckles who wouldn’t recognize a sapient being if one donkey-punched ‘em. And yeah, if this sounds fuckin’ personal that’s because it is.”
Xiù gave him a nonplussed look. “The who?”
“Shit, yeah. You never had to deal with those assholes ‘cause legally you’re a Gaoian,” Kevin nodded. “Well, legally, according to the Office, I was non-sapient indigenous fauna. Care to guess how much fun that was?”
Allison nodded sympathetically. “Oh yeah. I remember that shit.”
“…So…” Dan summarized carefully. “The Dominion has an office which is dedicated to doing exactly what we’re trying to do, except they don’t acknowledge pre-contact species as being sapient?”
“That’s about the shape of it,” Allison nodded.
“…How in the heck does—?” Dan began then gave up. “That can’t be right, can it?”
“Welcome to the Interspecies Dominion, man,” Kevin snorted.
“Long story short, the Dominion are no help and the Alliance would exploit the hell out of the People if they could,” Allison summed up. “We can turn to the Gaoians because they’ve helped out a pre-contact species before…”
“But that was before they signed up to the Dominion,” Xiù reminded them, with a sigh. “On my advice, too…”
“Don’t beat yourself up over that,” Byron advised her. “It was the right call for them at the time, based on what you knew.”
He met Xiù’s surprised expression with a warm smile. “So we have the beginnings of a plan?”
Dan paused and considered. “I think so? We still need to work out exactly—”
“I have every faith you lovely people will accomplish that marvelously,” Byron told him airily. “Kevin, you and I have our next meeting.”
“Right,” Kevin stood up. “The shareholders. Sure we can’t keep them waitin’?”
“Not wise.”
Dan stood up too. “Right. I’ll, uh…go do some more research, I guess.”
Kevin opened the door for Byron, revealing the unprecedented sight of the company’s chief security officer, Mister Williams, hanging around in the hallway outside in jeans and a T-shirt.
Byron greeted him with a handshake on the way past. “Ain’t it your day off, Williams?”
Williams shrugged, as though spare time to himself was completely unimportant. “It is, yeah. But I got the phone call while I was on the golf course.” He looked directly at Allison. “We found one of the arsonists,” he said.
Xiù felt Julian stiffen beside her. Kevin and Byron frowned at each other.
“…I’ll see you in the shareholder meeting, Kevin. Don’t be long,” Byron said and ambled off. Dan edged out of the room with the torn expression of a man who wanted to know more but couldn’t justify staying, and vanished.
Williams watched him go, then stepped into the meeting room and closed the door behind him. Kevin leaned against it, listening.
“…And?” Allison prompted after a second.
“Only got the one so far. A…young man. Teenager, really. The SLCPD are questioning him.”
“Salt Lake City?” Allison folded her arms. “That’s…a long way from Minnesota. I should know, I was born there.”
“Yeah. So was this guy. Apparently his grandparents raised him ‘cause his daddy was kinda young.” He looked Allison dead in the eye. “The name Hamlin sound familiar to you?”
“…Taylor?!”
“Taylor Hamlin? Shit, I know that name’s familiar, uh…” Julian scowled in concentration until Xiù tapped his arm.
“Allison’s, um…” she trailed off, not knowing how to finish the description.
“My baby-daddy.” Allison finished for her, with her typical unflinching bluntness. “God, don’t tell me Taylor did this, I-”
“No. His son Alex did.”
Allison blinked at him. “I thought…He was given away for adoption, I never even knew his name-”
“Taylor’s parents took it to court. Said the baby was Taylor’s child just as much as yours and they had a right to raise their grandson,” Williams summarized. “Of course, by then you’d moved to Massachusetts and become a missing persons case.”
“God.” Allison ran both hands backwards from her forehead and massaged the back of her own neck. “Seriously? My son? Seriously?”
“Yeah. I thought you’d want to know.” Williams’ whole face was apologetic.
“I, uh…” Allison had the dumbfounded look of a woman who was too shocked and shaken to know what to do next. Xiù had a confident prediction: Anger, then tears, then firm resolve.
Williams stood up. “Sorry to lay it on you now, but I dunno if there is a good time for somethin’ like this…”
Still looking a little dazed, Allison shook her head to agree with him. “No. Probably not.”
“Tell ya what,” Kevin said, and went from leaning to upright in one flowing motion. “Williams, why don’t we go over the rest of what you found in my office?”
“…You have an office?” Williams asked. It had the air of a running joke that he was reverting to for the sake of everybody’s composure. It worked, as even Allison managed a small smile.
“Sure. Got one of those fancy seats with the water and a handy roll of writing paper on the wall,” Kevin smirked.
“That so?” Williams had a perfect deadpan.
“Yup. Lotta people in that department, but the only one doin’ any actual work is a real asshole.”
Xiù groaned, but a laugh forced its way out of Allison’s nose and Julian chuckled. Having successfully dispelled some of the negative emotion in the room, Kevin grinned and touched Allison on the shoulder by way of offering friendly comfort, then let Williams take the lead out of the room.
The three of them were left alone.
Julian was the first to say anything. “…You okay?”
Allison planted her elbows on table in front of her and leaned her forehead into her palms, massaging her scalp. “I’m just like…Really? You know?”
Right on schedule, her anger kicked in. “And the worst part is,” she began, surging to her feet, “It’s making me second-guess the past, you know? I hate doing that!”
Xiù inclined her head. “Second-guess how?”
“Ugh, you know. Just, like…if my parents had done what Taylor’s did and if I’d actually been there for him, or if maybe I’d ever tried to get back in touch, then maybe… but then I think about you two.”
She sighed. “…You know? I’d never have met you if I hadn’t run away to Boston.”
Julian rubbed her shoulders from behind and cuddled up close. “Al. Don’t beat yourself up over this. It’s not your fault.”
“I know that,” Allison reassured him, “I just don’t feel it right now. Also, it’s just the fucking…” She raised a hand and wiped away the predicted tears. “…Never mind. It’s done. Let’s just…deal with it. I guess I’d better meet him.”
Xiù took her hand. “Al, you don’t have to if-”
“I know. But I think it’s for the best.”
“Kevin and Moses will probably want us to,” Julian agreed. “Sooner or later some news site will find out about this and then you’re the deadbeat mom who ran away. You know how the media are.”
“True…” Xiù agreed, sighing. “If you go meet him then we can put a positive spin on it…”
Allison sighed, shook Julian off and made a frustrated noise as she paced the room again. “God, are you listening to yourselves?” she asked. “Is this who we are now? Do we really give a shit about what the media has to say, or about spin? You’ve both always been so real and now here you are telling me how to bend things and play around with-”
“We’re still real!” Xiù objected.
“But for the People’s sake-” Julian began.
“I know!”
Her snap plunged the room into silence. Xiù felt herself cross her right arm across her body and scratch her left elbow uncomfortably, and Julian took a step back.
Nobody moved for a second before Allison sighed, stepped forward and hugged him. “I’m sorry,” she said, then turned and hugged Xiù as well. “But I said it myself, I should go see him, didn’t I? I know why, I know…I understand. I get it, lovers, I do. But I don’t have to like it, do I?”
Xiù kissed her. “…You know we don’t like it either, don’t you?” she asked softly.
“Hell no,” Julian agreed. He wrapped his arms around Allison’s waist from behind and the two of them held her together for a second.
She relaxed, and heaved an enormous cleansing sigh. “…Shit, I really needed to hear you say that…”
“We’re still ourselves, dummy,” Julian promised. She laughed softly.
She made a soft sound and relaxed, but she grumbled into Xiù’s shoulder. “You’re the dummy, you ass.”
He chuckled. “You’re the ass, you butt.”
“You’re the butt, dummy.”
“Guys, you’re both dummies,” Xiù promised them fondly. “…Wǒ ài nǐmen, shǎguā.”
“Wǒmen yě ài nǐ, bǎobèi,” Julian answered for them both, testing the limits of all the Chinese he knew.
“Mmm…” Allison made an agreeable noise but didn’t actually say anything. She let herself be held for several second and then finally straightened up. “Okay, so we need to go to Salt Lake City…What’s the plan?”
Xiù thought about it. “Um…Lots of planning, I guess?”
“Why does every plan we come up with start with that?”
“Better than not planning at all,” Julian suggested. “Let’s…go get something to eat and we’ll figure it out.”
Allison kissed his cheek. “…Yeah,” she agreed. “My choice?”
“That’s fair.”
“Cool.” She led the way to the door, then paused with her hand on it.
“….This is gonna fuckin’ suck, isn’t it?”
“Yup.”
“Oh yeah.”
“…That’s what I thought.”
She opened the door.