Date Point: 13y1w3d AV
Manchester, Georgia, USA, Earth
Adam Arés
Martina’s parents’ house stood out on their street for two reasons: their lawn was perfect, and her dad had a forge in the garage. Otherwise, theirs was an ordinary wood-sided pale green rambler on a cracked and neglected street of ramblers, separated by chain link fences and huge trees and haunted by a variety of elderly rusting trucks.
Adam immediately knew which of her parents Marty had taken after in the looks department: Her mom was a happy glimpse into the future, and the future was bright. She was out of the house in a blink the second they pulled up and engulfed Marty in a hug and the warm and tearful ‘Ooohhh’ universal to mothers who only got to see their child once a year at most.
Adam and John lined up by the truck and let her get it out of her system, which was long enough for Marty’s dad to emerge from the forge, cleaning his hands on a rag.
“You must be the man I’ve heard so much about.”
Adam smiled nervously. He’d spent the morning agonizing over his clothing choice for this meeting, much to Marty’s mounting frustration. In the end she’d slapped him affectionately and told him to dress like he usually did when being presentable, so he was wearing his utilikilt with a plain red polo. Other than a quick shave and a trim of his hair…
It seemed to pass muster. Marty’s mom was wearing jeans and a crew neck sweater, and her dad was wearing a carbon-stained T-shirt that was dark with sweat. Apparently, the trio had arrived early.
“I hope so, sir,” he replied, shaking the older man’s hand.
Kovač chuckled. “You don’t need to call me sir, son. I work for a living.”
He was a charmer, that was obvious. And to Adam’s infinite gratitude, his first reaction wasn’t horror, or shock, or gawping geeky excitement, nor even an overt appraisal. Just…a handshake, and a smile.
It was nice. Doubly nice, because Marty’s mom graced him with a huge hug that nearly got all the way around his waist while her husband shook John’s hand and invited them indoors.
The air conditioning was on and a pot of coffee was brewing, but the really hospitable touch was the thick MDF board that had been laid under the couch cushions to reinforce it. Marty had obviously let her folks know how to Beef-proof the house, and her dad invited them to sit as he vanished into the bedroom to change his shirt.
Adam kicked off his sandals and gingerly stepped his way over to the couch. He sat down carefully and relaxed when it just barely managed to hold up, though it did creak ominously under his weight. “I see Marty’s told you all about us…”
“She said you boys are death to furniture,” Mrs. Kovač twinkled. “It should stand up.” Adam shrugged and spread out a bit; he was so broad he took up most of the couch all by himself.
John padded over with equal care and took up a spot on the floor directly in front of Adam, who wrapped his legs around his friend affectionately. “Real kind of you, but…no sense in pushing our luck,” he explained. She tutted and snapped her fingers in a pantomime of having been foiled.
“And here I was hoping you’d smash the dang thing so I can finally get Sam to replace it.”
“Give ‘Horse a good meal and you may just get your wish!” ‘Base’s troll grin was huge.
Adam rolled his eyes and cuffed him affectionately on the back of the head. “Yeah, yeah…” he muttered. “Much appreciate the hospitality. We brought some supplies with us ‘cuz, uh, we both need to eat a lot and we don’t wanna clean you out too bad.”
Mrs. Kovač nodded as though she’d been expecting exactly that. “What’d you bring?”
“Got a big pile of chicken and a couple of really big roasts.”
“We’ll make it work. Sam’s always talkin’ about making a fire pit out back, maybe this is the kick in the pants he needs to actually build it.”
Adam just barely restrained the urge to leap to his feet and bounce into action. Instead he stood up more carefully and spared the living room. “I can help dig it out if you want!”
“Would you mind? His back ain’t as good as it was…”
Sam returned, having obviously washed himself up and found a clean shirt. “My back’s fine!” he objected. Adam could believe it—the room was dotted here and there with the evidence of his time in the Regiment, and he’d obviously kept up his fitness since those days. He filled out his shirts, and in most other company he would probably have been the strongest man in the room.
“It’ll go quicker, though. More time to eat beef!”
“And drink beer,” added ‘Base, who was heading to the kitchen. Between Adam’s sewing and both their cooking, they’d been affectionately termed the “housewives” of the SOR, a joke that usually prompted a Motivational reminder of who the top dogs in the unit really were.
Sam chuckled. “Well, with a sales pitch like that…”
“What’re you gonna do, ‘Base?”
“I ain’t depriving these fine folks of my momma’s ‘Mac. And Firth talked Freya into sharing her potato salad recipe. I’m cookin’!”
Adam chuckled and made to follow Sam to the door, but he was brought up short by Marty grabbing his wrist and standing on tip-toe to kiss him.
“Have fun,” she told him.
The wish was redundant. Adam simply couldn’t not have fun when there was digging a hole and moving bricks to be done and he was already pulling his polo off in anticipation of getting dirty. It was a good bonding experience, too: Sam was a textbook Proud Dad, and seemed more than happy with his daughter’s choice of career and boyfriend.
He’d even asked about the Green Feet stomping across Adam’s chest, who’d found himself enthusiastically telling the stories behind what the different little Feet meant while they worked. It was a good way to pass the time since he had dozens of pairs to talk about.
“Martina told me you were basically a PJ.”
Adam nodded, and shoved the first cinderblock firmly into place. The soil was moister and softer than he’d expected and he’d made very quick work of digging out the pit. “Yuh.” He reached up for another brick. “I’m what we call a Protector and rescue is one of my primary missions. Though…” he paused and frowned a bit, “Sometimes it seems like I gotta kill a lot of people to get there.”
“I hear that. Everyone in the Regiment knows about Mogadishu. If it wasn’t for the PJs in that fight, I’d be dead and dismembered.”
“What happened?”
“To me? Nothing really. I’m alive ‘cuz those PJs killed themselves a big pile of cordwood to get to us. They’re goddamned angels of death when they want to be.”
Adam nodded in agreement but otherwise didn’t have much to say about that. He grunted slightly uncomfortably, and climbed out of the pit to grab another stack of bricks.
“Somethin’ eating at you, son?”
“Well…” he hesitated, then pressed on. “I dunno. I guess none of it was what I expected. I don’t regret any of it,” he was quick to say, “But, uh, you can’t undo some choices, y’know?”
Sam gave him an appraising look, a real up-and-down evaluation. “…Look, son, I don’t know what you’re doing to be like this…but you’re healthy, and you need it to do the mission, right?”
There it was. Sam wanted to have The Talk that Adam knew was eventually going to happen. But Sam was the first man outside the SOR that Adam had ever met who simply got it right off the mark. He didn’t ask some of the obvious questions people asked but which he knew from experience were off-limits. And since Adam didn’t need to explain the why of what he did…
“Yeah, I am and I do…but that ain’t it. I was always gonna be big, I was too into lifting to be little. It’s…when I decided I wanted to be a PJ? I was sixteen right? And I had Jones and Powell to help me…but years later, I come to find out they knew about, uh, what I’m doing now and had helped me with that in mind. I mean, I’m not mad, but, uh…” He seemed to struggle for words.
“Missed opportunities?”
“More like…I’d be, uh, some kind of normal meathead, I guess. Not ‘Left Beef’ and all that.”
“Guys like you tend to excel,” Sam nodded. “You sure you wouldn’t have if they didn’t help?”
Adam squirmed in place a little uncomfortably. “Well, sure. I’ve said to other people I’d have been really fuckin’ good, but…I dunno. A little five-foot-seven Mexican at like two-fifty I guess or, I dunno, maybe a lot bigger…that’d be impressive I guess, but it wouldn’t be anything like this.”
Sam nodded again. “You’d just be like any other guy with an iron hobby.”
“Yeah, prol’ly. But Jones and Stevenson showed me what to do to get big at just the right time, so even before I left Cimbrean I was the strongest man there, and I was…well, fuck. I was a lot bigger’n two-fifty when I got to Basic. You wouldn’t believe how much, I still don’t.”
Sam nodded. “Most young men can grow like a weed if they work really hard at it and eat right, and you had two years to do it. Aren’t you maybe worrying too much?”
“No.” Adam jumped lightly back into the pit carrying more bricks and expanded the thought some. “People don’t grow as fast as I did. I enlisted at seventeen so I only had a few months to prep, but once I was eating and training right I fuckin’ exploded like…well, like a freak of nature.”
Sam considered. “So you have a gift, then. You probably would have ended up using it anyway.”
“Sure, but I wasn’t, like, laser focused on gains,” Adam maintained. “I coulda done police work or whatever. Instead I just…sorta fixated, maybe? My friends egged me on and by the time I was ready for Basic I…well, I didn’t exactly look, like, bodybuilder huge, not ‘till the end anyway, but I just got stupid strong and heavy and I put that weight on so fast and easy it scares me, man.”
“Ah.” Sam nodded while Adam set the bricks down. “Let me get some beer, be right back.”
He vanished into the garage and returned with some bottles of an obvious homebrew vintage. “Try this. I’ve moved past IPAs into proper lagers and this is the first one that doesn’t suck.”
Adam took a big pull and felt his signature big, goofy grin showed up even as he was still drinking. He was no kind of a beer connoisseur but Sam was obviously in the ’keep it simple’ school of brewing, and had perfected a straightforward, crisp, malty lager. “This is really good! Can you teach me how to make it?”
“Sure,” Sam nodded benevolently. “Have another.”
“Thanks!”
Sam seemed to enjoy plying his guest and Adam downed three more in rapid succession. On his fifth, Sam decided to resume the conversation. “I think you’re still maybe worrying too much. You’re a natural physical talent, that’s pretty obvious. Ain’t anything wrong with that. And trust an old man, there’s really no point in pontificating too much about these kinds of things.”
“Yeah, yeah…” Adam finished his beer and resumed the work, while Sam moved the wheelbarrow full of mortar closer to where they were working.
Once he set it down, he sighed. “You sound like you’ve had this conversation before.”
“…Yeah. A buncha times.”
“So why ain’t it stickin’?”
Adam slapped down a brick onto the wet mortar while Sam cleaned it up. “Cuz I don’t think it’s just talent. It’s…I think this is special, what I can do. I don’t think I like that.”
Sam leaned back and said nothing. He seemed to have the same talent for drawing out his thoughts as Adam’s own dad had.
Adam sighed, slapped down another block, and thought good and hard before eventually trying at an answer. “Like… Okay. Take ‘Base, right? He had to work his ass off for years and years to get big. He’s earned every bit of what he has. Or Firth. He’s a freak too, but he’s still been training hard his whole life. But me…I dunno. One day I just started doing it for fun and, well…”
“It came easy.”
“Too easy. Way too easy. Thank God for ‘Base being so fuckin’ smart, he’s the only guy who keeps me, uh, grounded, I think? Yeah. ‘Cuz I showed up to Basic and… I just, uh, I won. It was easy, so was indoc and the pipeline ‘cept for the studying parts. Hell, my TI, Technical Sergeant Lake? He told me later he was actually afraid of me. Thank God he never let me find out.”
“And all of that was before…” Sam left it unsaid, but contrived to indicate Adam’s physique with a sweep of his hand.
“Yeah,” he sighed heavily. “That was just me without any, uh, ‘help.’ After we started our, uh, ‘special training’ I guess…it got even sillier. I never really felt like I was workin’ for it, right? Or…maybe I enjoyed working that hard. I dunno that I ever had to actually push myself, I just did it however hard I needed to. It ain’t like the others, even Firth isn’t exactly like this. It’s…”
Sam nodded, and spoke in the same way Marty did whenever she quoted something. “That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly,” he said.
“…Yeah. I like that. Where’s it from?”
“Thomas Paine.”
Adam chuckled to himself, “I really gotta read more.”
“Got the books indoors if you want ‘em,” Sam offered. “Or maybe audiobooks might be better for you. Figure your training regime’s gotta be somethin’ else.”
Adam bounced in place, happily back to his cheery mood. “Ooh! That’s a great idea, actually. I normally just turn up the heavy metal way too loud.”
Sam nodded. “May as well expand the mind at the same time, right? That’s what I did. And hell, when I had a little girl it meant I had all these good stories to read her.” He noticed the contemplative look on Adam’s face and smirked. “Hmm, thinking about children yourself are we?”
Adam didn’t respond verbally, but the way his cheeks went red and how his goofy grin slipped across his face said more than enough, especially when he looked down at his feet.
“Thought so. No pressure, you’re young, enjoy life…but don’t wait too long, y’hear?”
Adam nodded happily. “Yessir. And…” He paused for a second, then swept Sam up into a huge, crushing puppy-hug. “Thanks for listening. You’re easy to talk to.”
Sam bore it well. Adam knew he could crush the life out of anybody, but it was always nice to find somebody who could tolerate his hugs with no more than a grunt of air.
“Alright, alright…” He managed, and patted Adam’s shoulder to get him to let go.
“Sorry.”
“No you’re not,” Sam chuckled. He glanced back into the house, where Marty and her mother were having to work around Baseball in the mercifully large kitchen. He lowered his voice conspiratorially.
“Hey look…if you got a question you want to ask me, now would be the time…” he hinted.
“Uh…yeah. I know it’s kinda old-fashioned, but—”
Sam smiled. “Yeah, it is,” he agreed. “But I appreciate old-fashioned.”
Adam cleared his throat and took a deep breath. “I’d…May I ask for Martina’s hand in marriage?”
“You absolutely may,” Sam nodded, almost before the question was out. “‘Course, my permission don’t count for shit. If you don’t ask her she’ll ask you soon enough. She sees right through you, you know that?”
“She always does,” Adam agreed, feeling substantially liberated for just taking that one small step.
“She’ll say yes,” Sam told him. “Just gotta pick a good moment.”
“I will,” Adam promised.
Sam nodded, then lifted his beer. “You’re a fine young man. I’ll be proud to call you my son.”
Adam raised his beer too, there was a chime of glass on glass, and he felt a weight on his shoulders evaporate as he took a drink.
Sam emptied the bottle in five smooth gulps. “I do have one question…” he mused, setting it down.
“Uh…Sure?”
“I know there’s gotta be a story behind you bein’ called ’Warhorse.’ Care to share?”
“Uh…” Adam paused for a second at the thought of sharing that particular story with his girlfriend’s father, but Samuel Kovač really did have the exact same knowing smirk on his face that Martina wore. It was clear where she’d got her instinct for mischief.
He was being tested, he realized.
“Well, it’s courtesy of Technical Sergeant Lake, back in Basic…” he began, then paused. “Shit, I haven’t written to him in a while…”
“The story, ‘Horse,” Sam reminded him with his grin getting wider by the second.
“Right. So, uh, I made the mistake of picking the bunk closest to the door…”
When Marty emerged from the house a few minutes later to check on the fire pit’s progress, she found the two of them laughing together like old friends.
Date Point: 13y1w5d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Gabriel Arés
Everybody on Cimbrean exercised constantly. It wasn’t just a good idea for counteracting the planet’s low gravity and its deleterious effects on human physiology, there were tax incentives. The gym played pretty much the same role in Folctha culture as a coffee shop might elsewhere. In fact, most gyms had smoothie shops purveying drinks that almost defeated the purpose of the workout. Some of the “protein shakes” were so heavy on sugar and “mocha” flavoring it was a wonder people weren’t crowding around the bar in yoga pants and Uggs.
Of course, nobody who’d learned proper fitness from Adam went anywhere near the stuff. Ava only used ’Fitness in Motion’ because they had a row of treadmills and were happy to let her dog on them.
It was a good thing for Gabriel because it gave him a natural excuse to hang out with the daughter he rarely saw otherwise. She dutifully showed up for breakfast every Saturday but Ava treated her work like it was Oxygen, as though she’d choke and die if she wasn’t constantly laboring away in the news mines.
She was actually becoming a Cimbrean celebrity nowadays. Gabe would sometimes notice the way people spotted her and pointed her out to their friends. Somebody had even requested her autograph once, though Ava had never given any indication of noticing or caring about the attention. She just…worked.
Worked, and took her work incredibly seriously.
“You know we have people applying to join the team now who just… ugh, their whole work experience is this stupid ’churnalism’ shit,” she was complaining. She could do that for now, she was still in the long, steady jog part of her treadmill session.
Gabe’s machine was set to at best a fast walking pace and as always he was in a little too much discomfort to be a good conversationalist, but frankly that made for a good match. She had an outlet and sounding board, he had somebody to distract him from the fact that he was limping along like a much older man.
“Churnalism?”
“Yeah, you know. Churning out ’stories’ by trawling social media for some interesting video or a news piece they haven’t covered yet, running up their own spin on it in like a hundred words and then they slap on a clickbait title and…boom. A million clicks and a thousand dollars in ad revenue, thank you very much.” She took a swig from her water battle. ”God I’m glad I worked with Simon.”
“How is he?” Gabriel asked. He knew that the two kept in touch professionally and also as something verging on being friends, despite the lingering mutual hatred between Ava and Simon Harvey’s nephew Sean.
“Still doing real reporting, somehow. He managed to get himself embedded with Coalition forces in the Andaman Islands.”
“Sounds more like a vacation than work.”
She smiled. “It would be, if he wasn’t doing a piece on Indonesian pirates from the HMAS Toowoomba.”
“…*’Toowoomba?’*”
“It’s Australian. Anyway, meanwhile we’ve got kids coming into the ESNN office like ’oh yeah, I’ve got three years experience in journalism’ and really they spent those three years glued to Facebook or whatever playing a huge game of Telephone.” She sighed. “I mean, this stuff was a problem when I was twelve, you’d think we’da figured out how to fix it by now.”
Gabe chuckled despite a stab of pain in his leg. “Some problems can’t be fixed,” he said. “Not without screwing up something else.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Freedom of speech, independence of the press…” Ava sounded less than enthusiastic about the cornerstone of her own career. She glanced sideways at Hannah, who was loping along with her tongue lolling happily out of her mouth on the adjacent treadmill. “There’s no such thing as an independent press, Dad. Everyone keeps trying to buy us. Sooner or later we’ll be just another mouthpiece for one of, like, five billionaires.”
“Why? Does everything have to be owned by somebody?” he asked.
“Pretty much, yeah. Most news organizations run at a loss. The only reason anybody takes them on is to spread their—” Ava grunted as her treadmill beeped and sped up, leaving her to run up an incline. “—Their agenda,” she m anaged.
Gabe limped along in silence while she ran, reflecting ruefully that he was still young and fit enough himself that he could ordinarily have outrun her no problem. He’d recovered a lot of strength and mobility during his short course of Cruezzir-D, but half his leg was permanently asleep from the nerve injury.
Which reminded him.
He hobbled and grimaced along until her machine slowed and flattened out again and she returned to a sustainable jog with a grateful expression, then to a walking pace, and finally stopped. She leaned heavily on the rail until her breathing slowed, and Gabriel stopped his own machine when she reached for her water bottle and drained it.
“…So I’ve been thinking,” he said, as she stopped Hannah’s treadmill and let the dog off. Hannah promptly trotted away and plopped herself down in front of the air conditioning unit, panting.
“About?”
“You remember Nofl, right?”
“Yyyes—?” She asked, slowly, then jumped to an accurate conclusion. “Oh, Dad, you’re not thinking of letting him—?”
“Fix my leg?” Gabe finished for her. “Yeah, I am. I’m always in pain, I spend half my time in that maldita wheelchair, and when I finally have grandkids I won’t be able to hold them in case my leg gives out.”
Ava at least gave his words some thought, though he obviously hadn’t persuaded her. “I can see why you’d want to…but I don’t know dad, I mean, he’s a smuggler.”
“And a Corti. I know. I have a handle on him though.”
“You mean like… leverage? Or—?”
“I know how he thinks.” Gabe grimaced at a stab of pain in his side as he limped over to the ‘smoothie’ bar. “He takes pride in his work.”
“I…” She sighed and glanced at Hannah, who sensed her uncertainty to and immediately got up and trotted to her side. “…I guess.”
“Come on, mija, speak your mind.”
“I don’t even trust my mind on this stuff any longer…” Ava said. Hannah whined and licked her hand, which always picked her up. “No, okay. You’re just…reminding me of Adam right now. Doing whatever it was he did to himself to get that big? That never sat right with me but…there was no point in arguing with him about it.”
She wiped her wristband across her forehead to mop up the lingering glow of her workout and gave him a complicated look. “You know? I mean…I trust that you don’t do stuff lightly or without thinking about it, but the thought is kinda freaking me out.”
Gabe didn’t know quite what to say to that, but Hannah as always came to the rescue…this time by suddenly looking up towards the door and whining. Ava immediately gave the dog her full attention.
“Hey, what’s up girl? Is…oh, no. It’s your boyfriend.”
Everybody in Folctha knew Bozo. It wasn’t that the SOR’s canine mascot was allowed to roam the town completely free, but…He was as big as a small pony. A well-trained, obedient, perfectly behaved puppy-pony with access to a secret dimension full of tennis balls.
He was sitting outside the gym’s front door with three of them stuffed in his mouth at once and his tail thumping on the sidewalk. The mental image of a young man holding a bouquet of flowers completely distracted Gabriel from the conversation and made him laugh to himself.
“That dog’s almost as smart as me,” he commented instead.
“He won’t leave until he gets to play with Hannah,” Ava sighed. “And he won’t hound us, either. He’ll just sit there. Wagging.”
“So he’s a polite date, then.”
Ava sighed, then giggled. “Oh, he’s a perfect gentleman…Come on, Han. You wanna play?”
Hanna spun around Ava’s legs and whined excitedly. Ava giggled again, stuffed her gear into her bag and tagged her gym time with the Folctha fitness tracking app on her phone.
She was right, Bozo was a perfect gentleman. The moment they emerged from the gym there was no sudden explosion of barking, he just dropped a tennis ball on the ground for Hannah and sat back expectantly. The two dogs sniffed noses, made friends and then the frenzy of running around and unbridled canine happiness started, only to end in a mutual posture of poised watchfulness when Ava picked up the ball and a blur of legs and paws when she threw it.
“Should we take him back up to the base?” Gabe asked.
“Nah. Rebar sends one of the guys out to track him down as Motivation,” Ava revealed. “Wouldn’t wanna spoil his fun.”
Bozo was allowing Hannah to ‘win,’ Gabe noticed. He gave chase and played as if he wanted to steal the ball, but he never did more than that. Boys were the same regardless of species.
“Uh…what about if those two…?” he asked.
“Have pups? People on this planet are really crying out for pets, you know? Didn’t you read the piece I did on it?”
“You did a piece on pets?”
“Sure. A little something to make the Gaoians happy, they’re sick of people treating them like they’re cute,” Ava told him. “And…y’know, we have zero cats on this planet, only a handful of dogs…So there was a story there.”
“He’s really good with the ETs…”
“So’s Hannah. And she’s from a long line of therapy dogs. They’re both really smart, really trainable…I figure, Cimbrean could do worse than some puppies. Could be a new breed.”
“Been thinking about Bozo, actually. You know what I saw the other day?”
“Was he doing the turkey thing again?”
The turkey thing, ah yes. The woods around Cimbrean were thick with big, surly birds that had been introduced as part of the biosphere exchange. They would strut around the place making a dignified nuisance of themselves, and every so often Bozo would trot through town with his tail up and a live turkey hanging in a limp, futile posture from his mouth.
The worst the birds apparently suffered for it was wounded pride, usually. Nobody was quite sure why he did it, though Adam was of the opinion that Bozo was hinting at more turkey dinners around the base.
“…Besides that,” he said. “I actually managed to stumble onto two Gaoians about to fight. Iron-Claw and Firefang, I think? I can’t always tell. Anyway, Bozo appeared out of nowhere and stopped the fight dead in its tracks. They tried to get around him but, well…he’s scarier than they are, and eventually they slinked away. I gave him my burger and a scratch on his head.”
“I bet he liked that. Maybe you should make him an honorary member of the PD? He’s pretty much the town mascot anyway. Even the Kwmbwrw seem to…well, they don’t sneer at him quite so much.”
“How can you tell when a Kwmbwrw is sneering?” Gabe asked, curiously.
“They look at you with all three eyes at once.”
“Hmm…” Gabe was struck by a mischievous thought, and nudged Ava in her ribs. “Okay, so pups are on the cards, eh? What about you? Is there a Bozo in your life that you haven’t told me about?”
Ava pulled a face as she picked up the returned and slightly damper ball. Hannah had tired of keepaway and was keen to have it thrown again, and Bozo was keeping an eye on her while also wagging at a small pack of gaoian cubs that had entered the park along with a couple of their human friends under the fussing attention of a Mother.
“My dog has a better love life than me,” she replied.
“That’s a no, then.”
“Ergh…” she made an awkward, thoughtful noise and then threw the ball. A couple of the younger Gaoians, newcomers to the colony, made awed sounds as they watched it sail fifty feet with the dogs in hot pursuit. Naturally, the attending Mother immediately pounced on the opportunity to remind them about how strong Humans were and how to stay safe around them.
Ava didn’t seem to notice. “It’s easier for dogs. They don’t do relationship drama. Like… I ran into Coombes the other day.”
“Coombes?”
“You know. From Egypt?”
Gabe’s memory finally put a face to the name. “…Isn’t he a fair bit older than you?” He asked.
“Yeah. And also there’s the whole thing with me being Adam’s ex, so…” she sighed. “I mean, he was real nice about it, but…”
“Struck out, huh?”
“Dogs don’t care about age or exes. Humans do.” Ava shrugged, though not as despondently as Gabe would have guessed. “For the best, I guess. I think I know better than to date a military man, now.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“Well, he’s really hot.” Ava gave him a rare teasing grin. She didn’t smile often enough, Gabe reflected. When she did it was angelic, but then again perhaps that was just the pronounced contrast against her usual resting expression of mild melancholy.
He laughed, happy that she was able to relax, and decided to get back onto the subject of his scheme with Nofl.
“Anyway…about this therapy I’m planning to have…”
Ava’s smile faltered, but after a thoughtful second she gave him a hug. “I don’t want you to be in pain, and I know Jess would like it if you were more mobile…” she conceded. “I just… are you sure you trust Nofl?”
“I can predict him,” Gabe promised. “And when it comes to his work…yeah. I do.”
“Then…it’s your choice, isn’t it? I don’t have a right to tell you.”
“Besides, somebody has to be the first patient for new treatments,” Gabe pointed out. “This could really help a lot of people.”
“I hope it does. I hope it helps you,” Ava said. “I just…I’m allowed to worry, Dad.”
Gabe hugged her back. “Just don’t let the worry get in the way, yeah?” he pleaded. “Worst that could happen is I’m stuck in my wheelchair. Best thing would be I get my mobility back. That’s gotta be worth a shot.”
“Okay, okay…” she sighed and let go. “But I’m still gonna worry.
“That’s okay.”
There was a thunderous barking from nearby, and Bozo went tearing past with a chittering Gaoian cub riding his back while the Mother desperately gave chase.
“…Guess those puppies are gonna have to wait, huh?”
“For today.” Ava whistled for Hannah and jogged off in Bozo’s wake. “There’s always mañana.”
For the first time in a long while, she sounded like she meant it.
Date Point 13y2w AV
Light Bulk Transport My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, Deep Space
Vakno
Several uneventful days of what Dog poetically called ’hauling ass’ out of Elder Space had finally permitted Vakno to relax, but the human still seemed to be on edge. He had used the ship’s fabrication shop to help convert an empty cargo bay into a firing range and was giving himself a so-called ’crash course’ in the proper use of his weapon.
All of the practice was paying off: He was now consistently able to hit the same wall every time.
Vakno had been surprised to discover that Dog’s crew were universally non-human and mostly treated their deathworlder shipmaster with a certain friendly wariness, as if they were never entirely convinced he wouldn’t suddenly forget himself and accidentally maim them. Vakno, being well aware that a natural expression of friendliness among humans was a hearty slap on the back with enough force to potentially shatter a low-Class species’ spine, couldn’t blame them.
She mostly stuck to her lab aboard the Negotiable Curiosity. Legally, the ship’s ownership had a question mark hanging over it: Vakno had been a business associate and passenger aboard it at the time of its master’s death, rather than a crewman. This meant that if Dog wanted to he potentially had a legitimate claim on the ship as salvage.
Fortunately, he seemed to have no interest in staking that claim. His own ship was interesting enough—It was a heavily modified Yrvrk Shipyards Model Seven, riddled end-to-end with structural reinforcements that the nonhuman crew complained about constantly as they had to wrestle with heavy steel pressure doors that were clearly designed with a deathworlder’s strength in mind.
All too often, in fact, they would just leave the pressure doors open. Dog was constantly chastising them whenever he toured the ship and found them open. Vakno honestly didn’t see why, as My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon was equipped with a standard internal forcefield array designed to do the exact same job, and Dog seemed to have forgotten about his half-hearted threats an hour later.
Then there were the cargo bays. A stock Model Seven was little more than sixteen cargo bays arranged radially around a central spine, with a total capacity of nearly five thousand cubic meters. Somebody had permanently sealed the exterior doors on two of the rearmost bays after filling them with energy storage modules and running thick power busses back to the ship’s reactors, which had been replaced with a high-output fusion plant fed by deuterium tanks in two more of the rear holds.
The net effect was to reduce the ship’s haulage capacity by nearly a tenth, but she had a power output more normally associated with military pickets.
In other words, just like her captain, the ship was full of quirks and deathworlder lateral thinking. Dog’s seat on the flight deck was lined with a deep-pile shaggy brown carpet and he’d installed a seatbelt that crossed his chest diagonally, strung with metal boxes that had no apparent function. When Vakno had commented on this, Dog had simply laughed and made a strange roaring or growling noise.
“I just wish I remembered to buy those plastic ’dinosaurs’ last time I was home,” he’d added.
All in all, Dog was very strange…but his ship was fast. The journey out of Elder Space had taken far less time than the trip inwards aboard Negotiable Curiosity. Still, it was plenty of time for Vakno to decide what she was going to do.
As a silver banner, she had influence and credibility that Bedu had lacked. Green banners were known for chasing wild improbabilities like abducting deathworlders in the hopes that they would stumble into some amazing discovery that might launch them higher in the Directorate’s echelons. A few had even succeeded, sometimes posthumously.
Silver banners were more conservative. They had the privilege of the Directorate’s favor from the moment their gestation cells decanted them into the tender mercies of the education system, they didn’t need to fight for it. Instead, they had learned not to squander it, and their reticence lent weight to any hypothesis they did choose to back.
That didn’t mean automatic belief, however. She devoted most of her time to digging through all the things that Bedu hadn’t told her, and gaining a growing respect for his competence as she did so. He had been expertly leading her to a conclusion the whole time, drip-feeding the next datum as and when she needed it.
A manipulation, yes, but a skilled and above all necessary one. His loss was now increasingly painful—his assistance would have been invaluable in persuading skeptics.
She was in a low mood, therefore, when Dog called her ship with a worried expression behind those silver whiskers of his.
”I think our friend from Aru knew how to open the door,” he began, without preamble. ”There’s a ship comin’ up behind us and ho-wee! is it a mover!”
“The Creation Stepper. Dread had it built to some exceedingly strange specifications,” Vakno stood up.
“It armed?”
“Not legally.”
“I wasn’t askin’ if it was legal. I was askin’ if it has guns.”
“It…I don’t know,” Vakno conceded. “I know he didn’t order anything ship-grade but there were a lot of pulse rifles—”
“It’s armed,” Dog decided. “Better get your skinny grey ass up here.”
Vakno blinked both layers of her eyelids at being so summarily ordered around, but then decided that right now it wasn’t worth the outrage. She grabbed her tablet, backed up all the ship’s files—or at least, all the important ones—and took the elevator up from the *My Other Spaceship*’s small shuttle bay to her command deck.
Its command deck, she reminded herself. The ship was an object, there was no point in falling into a silly human superstition.
Dog was berating his Vzk’tk first officer when she arrived.
“-Wanna hear a damn good reason why our fuckin’ emergency recall jump ain’t charged!” he snarled.
Krzzvk was having commendable success in not cowering, but an angry deathworlder was an angry deathworlder. They had a way of inspiring mortal terror without really meaning to.
“B-but we never use the recall jump, captain!” he protested.
Dog took an enraged step forward with far more than his customary soft-footed force. The deck rattled. “Lemme tell ya why we never use it, Krizzy,” he snarled. “We never use it ‘cuz it’s fer fuckin’ emergencies! High-tail it back there and charge the fuckin’ thing!”
Vakno let herself into the room, stepping aside to let the hapless Krzzvk flee.
“Problems?” she asked.
“Our boy Dread’s catchin’ up,” Dog reported. “He’s got a big-ass power plant for a ship that size, even bigger than ours.”
“You are certain that he’s armed?”
“Yyyup. Lots of pulse rifles? Guarantee he made himself a shrapnel gun.”
“A what?”
“Simplest bit of wreck-tech in the galaxy. Strip all the worky bits outta a load of pulse rifles, hook ‘em up to the ship’s power core, stick ‘em in the end of a metal tube. You can load whatever you like in that tube: Garbage, gravel, metal scraps, water ice…don’t matter. Whatever it is, it’ll come outta that thing goin’ fast enough to put a lotta holes in my ship.”
“…That cannot be accurate,” Vakno surmised.
“Won’t fuckin’ need to be,” Dog growled, then barked at one of the Vzk’tk crew. “Izzy! Switch the power over from engines to the shields. We can’t outrun this asshole, but I bet we can tank him.”
“Yes captain!”
“And fer God’s sake, somebody go check the pressure doors are all closed!”
Nobody moved, and Dog sighed. “Ricky! ’Somebody’ means you!”
Another Vzk’tk bolted from the room.
Dog sank into his chair with his teeth gritted so hard that Vakno imagined she could hear them grinding.
”…Can we ‘tank’ him?” she asked quietly, so the others would not hear.
Dog glanced at her, checked they were not overheard, then muttered his reply. “Sister, I fuckin’ doubt it.”
Ten seconds later, the ship lurched gently as the *Creation Stepper*’s warp field merged with its own. Dog put on his seatbelt.
“…Good luck, everyone.”
There was a slam, the deck became the wall, alarms howled, and Vakno had just enough time to realize that she was going to hit her head on the—