Date Point: 13y2w AV
South Andros Island, Bahamas, Caribbean, Earth
Adam Arés
The job of picking their holiday destination had fallen to Marty, and as always she’d excelled. Anticipating that the Beef Bros. were going to want some privacy away from the gawking eyes and awed personal inspections of the general public, she’d found a well-reviewed chalet resort that promised the perfect balance of seclusion when needed and company when desired.
And Adam had been right—she looked stunning in a navy blue multi-string bikini with a translucent white sarong on one hip.
Of course, it was his solemn duty as her boyfriend to protect her skin from the sun and make sure she was well covered in sun cream…a duty she was only too happy to let him perform. She dozed off prone in the shaded sand under the palm trees with a tranquil smile on her face, and Adam spent the heat of noonday reading the books her father had given him.
Life, in short, was good. Good enough that he resolved that the best kind of vacations were always going to be the rare but epic ones.
He was about two chapters into ‘The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left’ by Yuval Levin when Martina woke from her nap and wandered back towards the chalet, stretching and smiling. They’d been there only two days so far, and Adam was still reveling in the novel experience of privacy, alone in a little sandy oasis of calm among the trees where nobody could see in, but he could still hear the waves.
“Where’d ‘Base get to, anyway?”
Adam smiled at her. “He’s gone to arrange a diving session.” Which was true. He’d done so at Adam’s request to give him and Marty some alone time, but the fact was that both of them were still PJs at heart and kind of missed getting any use out of the diving skills they’d learned in training. Some aspects of those skills kinda translated for EVA, sorta, but it just wasn’t the same.
“Oh, so we’re alone, huh?” Marty grinned at him. “His idea, or yours?”
Of course she saw right through him. Adam fought back on the urge to fidget nervously with the little box in his pocket and give the game away and instead put on his best game face. “My idea,” he replied.
“When’s he gonna be back?”
“Uh…we’re gonna meet him for dinner, later.”
“Awesome.” She reached behind her back, undid her top and threw it contemptuously to one side. “God, once sand gets into that thing…”
“…ow?” Adam suggested.
“Yeah,” she agreed, dusting herself off. “Ow.”
She straddled his legs and draped her arms over his shoulders. “So what did you want me all alone for?”
Adam’s hands went to her waist, then a little lower. “Take a wild guess…”
She smirked and kissed the side of his neck. “Incorrigible…”
Adam was riding on a high of confidence that had followed him all the way down from Georgia, and for the first time in a while he sensed an opportunity to be seized.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he protested, effecting an insincere air of dignified confusion. “My intentions are completely innocent.”
She snorted and trailed her finger down his pectorals. “You. Innocent. I’ll believe it when I—omigod.”
Adam managed to keep his inner whoop of triumph down to just his biggest, puppy-est grin because for once, just for once in his life, he’d finally managed to fool her.
He was proud of the ring, too. It wasn’t gaudy or flashy, but there was plenty of room on the cathedral band to show off an intricate mokume-gane in white gold and palladium, and an eye-catching ceylon sapphire..
She stared at it dumbfounded for a second and then breathed a disbelieving little half-laugh. “Wow…uh. You got me. I…wasn’t expecting you to ask now, uh…”
“You were expecting me to ask, though.”
“Yeah.” She cleared her throat, looking uncharacteristically lost for words. “Uh…yes. I do. I mean, I will.”
Adam chuckled. “I haven’t asked yet.”
“The answer’s yes.”
“Let me ask it, first!” Adam protested, though his smile was getting wider by the second. She laughed and swatted him affectionately on the head.
“Alright, you big oaf. Go ahead and ask.”
Adam grinned and kissed her. “Marty, I love you. Will you marry m-”
”Yes! Yes I will!” she repeated herself, and slipped her hand into his so that he could slide the ring onto her finger.
He buried her in a huge hug as soon as that was done. “Fooled you, huh?”
“I was convinced you were gonna take me on a sunset walk and go down on one knee and all that stuff….” she kissed his cheek, just below his ear. “This was better.”
“It was?”
She nodded against him. “Yeah. It’s good to know you can surprise me…I like it when you’re spontaneous.”
“Guess I’ll practice my spontaneousness then.”
She laughed softly and kissed him. “That’s spontaneity, ‘Horse. And you can’t practice being spontaneous.”
“Sure I can. I just have to be spontaneous more often. Practice!”
“Hah.” She grinned at him and rubbed her nose against his. “You only got me this time because I let my guard down.”
“You should let your guard down more often.”
She laughed, kissed him again and then stood up. “Maybe I will.”
Adam cocked his head curiously at her. “So, what happens now?”
“Now…” she picked up her top and put it on again. “We go for a walk, we spend time together, we chill out and just…enjoy ourselves.”
Adam grinned, and sprang to his feet. “Sounds good to me.”
He darted inside to leave the ring’s box on the table while she finished tying her top, then took her hand and let her lead him out from under the shady palms toward the beach, smiling like a happy lunatic.
The one big thing that had been weighing on his mind was out of the way. There was nothing more to worry about, nothing more to do. Just a solid month of sun, sand and relaxing.
Things couldn’t possibly be more perfect.
Date Point: 13y2w AV
Light Bulk Transport My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches.
Vakno
There were…lights. Some human myths said there were lights when a being was dead. Vakno had never quite figured out if she was supposed to go toward them, or avoid them.
The fabled heavenly chorus was a disappointment, however. She felt instinctively like it should sound a little more inspiring than Dog’s voice saying “Eaaasy sister. Fuckin’ miracle you’re still alive…Come on, wake up!”
Reality reasserted itself. It was not pleasant: There was smoke, and deep amber lighting, and the mournful whooping sound of a shipwide alarm. There was pain, and a recording of Dog’s voice on loop.
”Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is Hephaestus Lima Bravo Foxtrot One, at Cimbrean-Six-stellar Lagrange One. Sustained heavy damage and casualties. Emergency recall activated. We have nine aboard, two dead, six wounded. Over. Message repeats in ten seconds—”
Dog himself was covered in blood but to Corti eyes human blood was a kind of waxy dark green, so full of haemoglobin that it was almost black. The stuff smearing Dog’s face was too pale to be his own. He gave Vakno a weak smile from behind the film of gore. “Shit, you’re tougher than you look. Thought fer sure you were fucked.”
Vakno rolled over and tried to stand, gaining a new appreciation for the word ’fucked’. It summarized what her body was telling her with an apt animalistic bluntness. The world became wobbly and she was forced to sit down again.
“Careful there,” Dog cautioned. “Big brains, fragile bodies, not a good combo. You stay there until the medics get here…”
“We…escaped, then,” Vakno managed.
“Close run thing. Krzzvk got the recall jumper charged just in time…That ship woulda ripped us in two on the fourth pass.”
Thinking was abnormally difficult. Thoughts seemed to bump slowly around inside Vakno’s skull rather than flowing neatly together like a thousand silver tributaries, but she noticed that there was an alarmingly large hole torn in the hull where something had ripped through the flight deck, through one of the crew and out the other side. An emergency pressure shield shimmered over the tear.
“Those shrapnel guns,” she commented. “…Deadly.”
“Hell yeah. Won’t do shit to anythin’ with armor, but they tear shields down like that!” Dog snapped his fingers for emphasis.
Vakno frowned at him. “How…do you know?”
Dog offered something that looked like a smile, vaguely. At least, his teeth were showing. His eyes weren’t joining in. “Hephaestus maybe made me remove mine.”
“Why?”
“Somethin’ about maritime law this an’ treaty that, an’ Dominion the other…” Dog snorted. “Load’a ass. Nearly got us killed.”
A new voice interrupted the looping distress call, and Dog sprang up to reply.
”Lima Bravo Foxtrot One, HMS Caledonia. Roger your distress call captain, do you need to abandon ship, over?”
Dog grabbed his microphone. “Uh, no Caledonia we do not. I have…zero pressure in three sections, emergency power only. Dead in the water, but she’ll hold together, over.”
”Roger. We have your beacon, ETA five minutes. Caledonia out.”
Dog nodded to himself and breathed what sounded to Vakno like a sigh of relief as he stepped away from the communications console. He gently patted one of the injured Vzk’tk crew on the shoulder in a comforting way. “Help’s on the way.”
Vakno settled back and focused on the view outside the front windows as an alternative to the pain. She was quite sure that her leg was broken, and was trying to decide if that was more or less worrying than the fuzzy, disjointed quality of her thoughts. She tried to count the time until the rescue ship arrived, but the numbers slipped away and she found herself counting the three minute mark twice.
Shortly after she gave up there was a barely perceptible shimmer in the light from the Cimbrean star, and the bridge was thrown into darkness as a ship plunged out of warp and back into the world of sublight travel barely a kilometer away. If it hadn’t eclipsed the star, the newcomer’s black hull would have been perfectly invisible against the stellar background.
Dog grinned and nodded, and spoke into the comm again. ”Caledonia, you’re beautiful. Just puttin’ that out there.”
There was a groan from one of the crew. “You are very strange, Dog.”
“Brother, look at that thing!”
Vakno scrutinized it as well as she could. There was a seam of light along the newcomer’s flank which lengthened, split and widened as huge physical doors opened to allow a pair of tiny human silhouettes in EVA suits.
”My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, REBAR. You alright in there, Captain Wagner?”
Dog nodded at nothing. “I’m fine. Bunch’a messed up ETs in here, though. Lotta broken bones.”
“Gotcha. Our ingress is through your shuttle bay. How’s the pressure down there?”
Dog checked his console. “Vacuum. The atmo containment field blew out. All the sections next to it have pressure.”
“Okay. Sit tight.”
The two spacewalkers angled down toward the shuttle bay and vanished from sight. Vakno rested her head on the deck and wondered if the calm, conversational tone the two humans had used was meant to be reassuring.
If so, it seemed to be working on Dog. He smiled reassuringly at his crew, promising an imminent end to their woes.
Some minutes later, there was a banging knock on the flight deck’s pressure door, and Dog rushed to open it. Two of the biggest humans Vakno had ever seen squeezed themselves through it and carefully shut it behind them. They were hauling a huge roll of fabric between them, and when they lowered it to the deck it made the kind of solid noise she normally associated with industrial equipment.
The smaller of them immediately set to triaging the wounded, beginning with Vakno.
“Well, lass? What’s the craic?”
Vakno just blinked at him. “I…hit my head,” she told him, after deciding that he probably intended to make sense.
“Oof. Savage.” He shone a light in her eyes and moved it around, then pulled out a more standard medical diagnostic scanner and played it over her cranium. “Grand. Just a wee knock, like. You hold on, okay?” He unpeeled a yellow tab from his medkit, pressed it to her arm and moved on to the next patient.
The larger one meanwhile had opened the equipment roll and was setting up a frame of some kind in the middle of the flight deck. Dog greeted him like an old friend.
“Hey Rebar. Who’s your buddy?”
‘Rebar’ paused long enough to knock fists with him. “He’s Irish.”
Dog snorted. “No shit? An’ here I thought he was a fuckin’ German.”
Somehow, Vakno could see the way ’Irish’ was grinning even through his helmet, even as he worked. “Feckin’ original like, isn’t it?” he asked, applying a similar yellow patch to one of the Vzk’tk.
Rebar finished slotting the frame together and stepped back to fire it up, touching the side of his helmet.
”Caledonia CIC, REBAR. Jump Array deployed, area pressurised. You’re clear to send over medics.”
Vakno didn’t hear the reply, but Rebar nodded at whatever he heard and shepherded Dog away from the Jump Array. Seconds later it pulsed, and a black cube materialized within it that dissolved to reveal a team of four humans, who fanned out across the flight deck to work with ’Irish.’
“That looked like Bedu’s ship down in the shuttle bay…” he commented.
“It is, yeah. You know Bedu?”
“Met him once, yeah. Is he on board?”
“Shit, well… sorry to tell you this brother, but he’s dead.”
Rebar went still, and looked around the ship slowly. His hand moved as though he had aborted a gesture halfway through making it, and instead he settled for pacing away for a second before turning back to Dog.
“…Just what in the shit happened to you guys?” he asked.