Date Point: 13y 1m AV
Low orbit over Planet Aru, Elder Space
Lieutenant Anthony ‘Abbott’ Costello
“Why is this called a HELLNO jump?”
Costello considered the yawning sky below him and decided that his question demanded an expansion. “…Besides the obvious.”
To his left, Rebar chuckled darkly. “Pretty sure it’s just the obvious, sir. Burgess never did come up with a good backronym.”
“Yet,” Murray commented. That single word was a show of remarkable faith, coming from him.
“We’re pretty sure it ends in No Opening. An’ I like High Exit. It’s the double L that’s the tricky bit.” Rebar added.
Costello leaned out the back of their CS-200 Weaver again and tracked the capillary squiggle of a brilliant emerald river among the brown, arid soil far below. “Long Line?” he suggested. They were so far up that the Weaver was flying in the next best thing to a vacuum, and its speed across the ground was measured in kilometers per second. The imaginary line they would draw on the ground during the drop was damn near transcontinental.
“High Exit, Long Line, No Opening…” Rebar tasted the backronym thoughtfully. “I like it.”
“Happy to contribute, Master Sergeant.”
Costello glanced back at Rebar, and was pretty sure he saw the older man was grinning behind his pressure mask.
“I dunno, bruh,” Sikes interjected. “I still prefer High Elevation Launch, Landing Not Optional.”
“Landing is always not optional,” Murray pointed out.
Firth couldn’t hold his peace any longer. “Why the fuck’s it gotta have an acronym anyhow?” he complained.
Rebar shrugged. “Hey, Burgess named it and he said it’s gonna have an acronym.”
“He’s young and dumb and he’s been corrupted by ‘yer evil Army ways,” Firth grumbled darkly. “I’ll need to apply some remedial beatings, I see…”
“The beatings will continue until Firth’s morale improves,” Sikes quipped.
Murray scoffed. “We’re fucked, then.”
Firth cracked his knuckles through his gauntlets, and there was no way he wasn’t grinning ominously behind his visor. His gauntlets were new, custom made for him, and were better described as maces rather than gloves. Anything they hit was going to stay hit in the worst way.
Everyone’s suits were showing little signs of customization like that. Some were basically cosmetic, like the layer of green rubber on the soles of Butler’s boots. Others were more of a solution to a recurring problem: for example, Murray tended to leave knives in people so he was carrying more of them than was strictly standard.
Costello left them to talk, and checked his suit’s linkage to the battle system. Everything was coming in crisp and perfect, and God was it satisfying. The data mills up on HMS Caledonia were massaging every byte that his team could generate and feeding it down in ways that had been pure videogame ten years ago. When he leaned out the back and glanced over toward the other Weaver, the system helpfully interpreted what he was looking for and put a small and unobtrusive diamond over it on his HUD.
And those were just the two on Caledonia, nicknamed ALBION and CAMBRIA. Supposedly they got an order of magnitude smarter when they could link with their fellows on other ships, and especially with the Fleet Intelligence Center on HMS Myrmidon.
The other Weaver was carrying Bravo Team: Blaczynski, Akiyama, Parata and Newman, with Regaari for their team leader. The remaining Gaoians made up Charlie Team and were led by Faarek. They had already infiltrated covertly via Exo-Atmospheric drop twenty minutes previously, and were quickly scouting the target building. Thanks to them, Costello was already working with a partial schematic for the hospital that was growing by the second as ALBION and CAMBRIA crunched their suit sensor data.
An important number blinked top-right in his field of view, and presumably in the rest of the team’s too, because they immediately quit jawing and ran their final checks. Costello trusted Rebar to handle it—he was keeping the burly Master Sergeant at his side as a safety net against his own relative inexperience after all—and raised Regaari.
“DEXTER, ABBOTT. Our loadmaster says drop in four. Alpha team’s all ready. You?”
“Copy, ABBOTT. We await your signal.”
Regaari’s composure was something else. For the first time in military history human servicemen were about to drop into an LZ with an alien squad leader, but his voice was as cool, level and calm as a frozen lake.
Then again, so was Costello’s. Not for the first time, he reflected that Regaari had all the qualities of a damn fine officer, if only his loyalties to Clan and species didn’t prevent him from taking a commission. As it was, he was a damn fine NCO even by the superb standards of the SOR’s other enlisted men. Blaczynski had even remarked how it was ‘about damn time’ when the teams were announced, much to Regaari’s quiet, embarrassed and restrained delight.
But that was a thought for not now. Costello shut his eyes for a moment and took a single deep breath, paying special attention to the hiss of air past his ears under the helmet, the precise sensation and scent of suit air in his nose, the pressure of it as he held it in his chest, the taste of it in his mouth on the exhale.
When he opened his eyes, he was focused.
He watched the countdown end, and every system they had to let them know to jump—the HUD, the green light in the transport and the furious gesticulations of the Loadmaster in his vacuum suit—all conspired to send them charging out into the silent border between sky and space.
Sound ceased entirely. He wasn’t even getting the distant thrum of the transport through his boots any longer, just the hiss of air past his ears and the ice-calm reports of his men.
“Alpha Team in flight, Angels one-ninety.”
“Bravo Team in flight.”
The first stage of a jump from this height was to fall ass-first, curled up as small as possible so the suit’s emitters could keep the forcefield envelope nice and compact. It was a long way down, but terminal velocity in the tenuous stuff of Aru’s upper atmosphere was fast enough that Costello’s body would have been generating a bone-cracking sonic boom down in the troposphere. That speed was their weapon, but it also needed to be shed, and shed hard if they were going to land alive and fighting.
There wasn’t a white-knuckle ride like it anywhere else in the universe.
The second stage was where things got dicey. They weren’t high enough to generate a fireball—indeed, avoiding such an obvious signature was why they’d jumped below orbit in the first place—but the atmosphere’s density returned with a vengeance. Costello could feel the thrumming power of the air rushing past him even before the sound reasserted itself.
The EV-MASS helmet had smart hearing protection installed, and they needed it. There was no sense in the whole team making it to the ground with burst eardrums. The sonic cataclysm around him was having its intended effect, though: he could see his speed across the ground dropping off so sharply that the digits and tens were both a blur.
The job of reading out their altitude and speed as a backup to the HUD fell to Firth, who just couldn’t keep the swagger out of his voice, even though he was only reporting the hard numbers. “Angels Eighty. Two thousand knots.”
Eighty thousand feet. They were now ‘only’ fifteen miles up, doing ‘only’ mach three and plunging headlong through the kind of air pressures normally only achievable with high explosive.
On paper it sounded insane to perform acrobatics under those circumstances, but falling ass-first to the ground was no longer appropriate. Costello kicked his legs out, arched his back and twisted with his core and arms, flipping himself over and around in one endlessly-practiced stunt that left him falling in a more traditional skydiving posture.
At sixty thousand feet the flight fields lanced outwards, pinning him to the air. The sudden presence of lift in his life hit him like a linebacker—if he hadn’t tensed his diaphragm and braced for it, the impact might have winded him. The drop called for tensing his neck too, and the reason why became obvious when he hit Sikes’ shockwave and got bounced around. Those weighted wrestler’s bridges that Warhorse had them doing seven times a week were paying off today.
Without the suit, the air alone would have torn them all limb-from-limb: With it, they were merely enduring a full-body onslaught like being waled on by a whole baseball team while a pair of sumo wrestlers tried to bend them into bowties. Every one of them was already riding a dose of Crue-D just to handle the insertion.
That went for the Gaoians as well, though they had an easier time of it both due to their more advanced suits, but also their shorter limbs and longer torsos, which were well-suited to handle the stress. For them, it was more like dangerous swimming.
But it worked. The suits were good enough and the men wearing them were even better. After minutes of falling, from the opposite side of a continent and with a starting speed of Mach twenty, Alpha and Bravo teams didn’t just hit the right geography, not just the right city, they hit the correct building.
And they hit the ground running.
Alpha landed on the roof. There was no dicking around with breaching charges; Instead, Firth handled the roof access door by ignoring it. He plunged through it like it was a Japanese shōji and vanished into the hospital’s bowels with Murray an inch behind his elbow.
Rebar heaved the Wormhole Suppressor off Butler’s back and slammed it into place, and thank fuck one Protector had been on hand to carry the damn thing: Nobody wanted a repeat of San Diego. They were dealing with a potential Hierarchy safe house here, which meant that getting the wormhole suppressor in place while they still had the element of surprise was right at the top of the list.
Costello followed the two Aggressors down, keeping a weather-eye on the progress of Bravo and Charlie teams as they blitzed the building from two different ground-floor entrances. There was no danger of them blundering into each other or a blue-on-blue. Thanks to ALBION and CAMBRIA, everybody knew where everybody else was.
Just keeping up with the pair was a challenge. Of the entire HEAT, Murray and Firth were the most seasoned in close quarters and their combat experience in Egypt had left them perfectly in tune. It was almost a shame that there was nothing for them to kill. Room after room was secured and declared clear in a flash-flood of precision aggression, all laser-focused on the bunker in the basement.
Rebar and Snapfire caught up with Costello on the third storey, having left Butler to protect the Suppressor.
“Place ain’t been maintained in a long time,” Rebar commented immediately.
Costello nodded, noting the decrepit state of the concrete tiles and the film of condensation on the walls. If this had been Earth, the place would have been slick with black mold. “Any danger of a collapse?”
“Probably not,” Sikes shook his head. “Neglected steelwork buildings on Earth stand up for decades before they fall.”
“We’ll keep an eye on it,” Rebar promised, “But it looks solid enough.”
Costello nodded, keeping an eye on the other teams as they worked. “No signs of habitation,” he noted. “Lots of dust on the floor. If there’s anything here, I doubt it lives on the upper floo—”
“Contact!”
There was a muffled rattle of distant gunfire from elsewhere in the building, and Costello immediately dropped to one knee behind the cover of a discarded OmoAru gurney of some kind to give the situation his full attention. Blaczynski’s icon was blinking.
“STARFALL, report.”
“Some kinda drones with an optical cloak. Hit us from both sides at an intersection. Threat neutralized, no casualties.”
“Stay sharp.”
Blaczynski’s icon double-blinked by way of acknowledgement, and Costello took a second to make a tactical reassessment in light of the attack. He communicated a few minor changes to Charlie team, then hustled to catch up with his Aggressors.
The second clash with the drones happened two minutes later, on a stairwell. Firth and Murray were heading down, the drones were heading up. There was a flash and hiss of fusion blades igniting, a shouted warning from Murray, and a bullet hurricane. By the time Rebar and Costello burst through the door behind the Aggressors, the fight was already over. The walls were pockmarked and scored, and the steps were strewn with smashed drone.
“Musta been headin’ to the roof,” Sikes commented, kicking one of the larger remaining chunks.
“Guess the wormhole suppressor pissed them off…”
“Keep it defended, then. Rebar?”
The big NCO nodded at Sikes, who took off at speed back towards the suppressor.
Costello gestured down the stairs. “Let’s keep it going.”
The second storey was their first sign of any habitation: a dry room that had probably been a staff lounge at some point had been cleared out, the furniture just dumped in the corridor, and a basic bed had been set up inside. It was surrounded by a drift of foil packets that had once contained Dominion-made travel rations, the infamous tasteless gray food spheres.
They didn’t investigate any further than confirming the room was empty. They didn’t have time—the Suppressor was well defended, but one lucky hit might well result in instant antimatter-based obliteration for all of them and everybody knew it. The last of the building was swept and cleared in record time, and when the three teams linked up on the ground floor at the top of the ramp leading down into the basement levels, everyone was breathing heavily. The lights were out down there, and the suit LIDAR wasn’t showing a lot either. ALBION and CAMBRIA didn’t have enough to work with. They had only the informants’ rough sketch from memory to go on.
It would have to be enough, and Costello didn’t waste time. There was exactly one way to go, there were no alternative routes, and presumably there would be a hostile waiting for them. Finesse was not an option here.
On his word, they stormed into the dark.
Date Point: 13y 1m AV
South Andros Island, Bahamas, Caribbean, Earth
Adam Arés
Nude beaches were the best, especially when they were private. Adam could just lie on the sand with a nice palm tree shading the sun out of his eyes, he could read, he could bake in the sun and relax…
It was a strange feeling. Just doing nothing had been…well, it had been a struggle for both of the Bros. Neither were completely lazing about, that just wasn’t their nature. Volleyball, beach wrestling and roughhousing in the surf helped them burn off some of their daily frenetic need to move and play. But in the late afternoon, with the perfect warmth of everything lulling him into rest, he could feel himself recharging in a way he couldn’t put into words. It was…
…He couldn’t put it into words.
Also, Marty was asleep on his chest, looking so totally peaceful that it made him ache.
He couldn’t help himself. He reached up and brushed the hair from her face, and the gentle gesture was enough to wake her. She blinked, smiled, murmured something incomprehensible and wriggled against him as though trying to burrow into him for a second before giving up and sitting up slightly.
“…I fell asleep.”
“Yup.”
“How long?”
“Not long…You looked like you were dreaming.”
Marty nodded and sat up a little more. “…Yeah. I was dreaming about the Lads, and they were on a mission of some kind…” she shrugged. “Workaholic, I know.”
Adam chuckled. “Makes two of us…What do you think they’re doing right now?”
Marty smiled lazily. “Eh…eating, sleeping, training, shenanigans. What else?”
“Fuckin’.”
She snorted. “Incorrigible.”
“Oh please, who woke me up with a BJ this morning?”
“Sure as shit wasn’t John,” Marty grinned at him.
He rolled his eyes and echoed her. “Incorrigible.”
“That’s me!” Her grin got wider and she pushed herself upright and stood. “Speaking of John, where is he?”
“He’s got a girl on the other side of the beach. If we listen real close, I bet we can hear them…”
“No thanks.”
Adam grinned. “Now she gets shy.”
“Nuh-uh,” she shook her head vigorously. “I’ve just heard it before. Come on, the walls in the barracks aren’t exactly thick.” She grinned as Adam stood up. “Actually, you remember the first week after the Whitecrests arrived? They all showed up for breakfast looking half-dead from lack of sleep.”
“Eh, they got over it.”
“Amazing what you can adapt to.”
Adam knew the smile she was wearing. It said there was an innuendo buried somewhere in her comment, but she wasn’t about to make it obvious. Instead, he took her hand and they strolled along the beach, soaking up the sun, surf and general sensation of having nothing much to do except be together.
“…Seriously though. What d’you think they’re up to right now?” Adam asked.
She leaned her head against his arm.
“Whatever it is? I bet it’s not as much fun as being here.”
Date Point: 13y 1m AV
UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space
Lieutenant Anthony ‘Abbott’ Costello
Firth was obviously having the time of his life. Costello didn’t know which frightened him more about the enormous Aggressor: The depth of naked revelry he was taking in his own endless savagery, or that he was otherwise so totally in control of himself.
Either way, right now he was smashing his way through a wave of Hierarchy drones in a blaze of motion that had all the trappings of a berserk rage except for precision: he didn’t waste a spare twitch. Even behind his mask and visor it was obvious that he was grinning like a madman.
With Blaczynski and Murray at his side and the Defenders at his back, the human contingent were driving a spearhead deep into the Hierarchy bunker practically without slowing.
Costello for his part was hanging back, keeping his wits about him, staying detached. He formed the rearguard along with two of the Gaoians so he could maintain perspective on the engagement without undue harassment. Let Rebar handle the command up at the speartip—nothing did that better than an experienced sergeant.
Firth’s disappointment when his wrecking derby came to an end was audible.
”ABBOTT, RIGHTEOUS. Run outta bad guys up here.”
Costello called up Firth’s helmet cam on his tablet, then Blaczynski’s. The speartip were advancing down a flight of stairs, tracking for the first hint of a hostile. As it was, there was nothing, not even the reported mummified OmoAru.
“Secure our position,” he ordered. “REBAR, what’s going on here?”
Without needing any details, the Aggressors and most of the Gaoians billowed outward to re-form their perimeter, while Sikes, Faarek and Akiyama reinforced their line of communication back to the roof. Regaari joined Rebar and Costello to ponder their situation, for which Costello admitted to some gratitude. When it came down to it, Regaari had more knowledge about nonhuman technologies and cultures than anybody else on the HEAT, his fellow Whitecrests included.
“No bodies,” the Gaoian commented. “They’ve been cleaned up. And some of these consoles look like they were taken apart recently…”
Costello followed his pointing paw and nodded. One of the consoles was open, its front panel leaning neatly against its side and four small screws were lined up neatly on top.
“There’s a bedroom of sorts upstairs,” Rebar noted. “At least one human biodrone, I reckon.”
“Right,” Costello agreed. “Where is—?”
The sound of nearby shots bashed off the metal walls, amplified and given strange buzzing harmonics in the dark.
Blaczynski got on the radio before anyone could speak. “Target secured. Need a medic.”
Costello prompted his Protector. “IRISH.”
Butler tapped his radio by way of acknowledging the command, and when Costello looked up through the ceiling he saw the Protector’s blue diamond break away from Sikes’ and make for the stairs.
The contact had happened three rooms over, and had involved the target popping up to try and ambush Blaczynski only to catch two rounds in the chest and another in the gut before he could even aim. He should have been writhing and choking on all the blood, but protocol when dealing with suspected Hierarchy was to slap a stick-n-sleep patch on them ASAP, and he was limp and unconscious.
Thurrsto was doing his damnedest to keep the target from expiring, at least for long enough to bundle him into a stasis box. Costello arrived just in time to watch the Gaoian drill an intraosseous cannula into him.
The calls were coming in: Clear all around. Costello’s only problem in evacuating the target was that the wormhole suppressor couldn’t come down until they were absolutely certain that deactivating it wouldn’t dump five kilos of antimatter in their lap.
That certainty wasn’t likely to come, either. Not until a team of specialists had swept the facility top to bottom. Their best option therefore was a hot evac via Weaver dropship, and that meant time and further risk. He had to make the call with incomplete information: drop the suppressor simultaneous to a wormhole jump and take the risk to the mission? Or call down their airlift, possibly endangering an aircrew and a high value asset?
Not a choice at all, really: The mission came first, always. And Costello was painfully aware that, all other things being equal, his Lads were a much more valuable asset than any air crew. So…
“STARFALL, call for CASEVAC.”
“Make a HOLE!”
Costello got out of the way as Butler came crashing through with his medical kit and joined Thurrsto in tending to the wounded biodrone.
That drone had a storied history already, he could tell. At some point, somebody had severed most of his arm, and the replacement was a shiny black composite prosthetic that looked the part, possibly even an improvement on the original.
“Dexter? Do we have a positive ID?”
“We do,” Regaari nodded. “This is Zane Reid.”
Costello sighed and looked down at their new capture.
“…Poor bastard.”
Date Point: 13y2m AV
Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Vincent Weis
Vince was dying. It hadn’t been a great life. For a start, it had been far too short. Dying of a sophisticated lung cancer at the age of thirty-one despite never smoking a damn thing in his life just seemed…’unfair’ didn’t even start to do it justice. It seemed like a twisted cosmic prank, dreamt up by an omnipotent sadistic joker with the opposite of a sense of humor.
He’d shot through denial pretty quickly, got stuck on anger. No, not stuck: hooked. Vince was permanently high on rage these days. It felt like heat behind his eyes and lightning in his nerves, threatening to burst out of him as he looked around at the world he would shortly be leaving and realized that there were more injustices there than a single man could fix even if his lifetime wasn’t so cruelly truncated.
Poverty. War. Corruption. The obstinate viciousness of all the world’s bitter phobics, too full of their own stench to tolerate the smell of anybody different from their idea of a norm. The choking web of power and privilege that kept the poor tied down and the wealthy free to jerk off all over them.
It was quite obvious that humanity had no right to hold the power it in fact held. Homo Sapiens was officially and definitely the least qualified organism in the galaxy to handle the responsibility that nature had thrust upon it. Cimbrean was already a playground for rich old white men, and now…
Now one of the wealthiest men in the world was about to interfere with the development of a stone-age species, and the world was applauding. Like they couldn’t see that behind all of Moses Byron’s platitudes and niceties was just another oil baron, just another slave owner.
Thank God there were other people out there who saw the toxin for what it was. Who knew what needed to be done; Who’d given Vince a purpose. A purpose in the form of a cargo van full of ANFO. A van that had just turned the corner and was now aiming right down the straight stretch to the front gates of the Advanced Aerospace Assembly Facility, home of the starship Misfit.
Vincent’s life had been worthless. But as his knuckles whitened on the steering wheel and his foot pressed to the floor until his ankle ached, as the bullets punched through his windshield and his last defiant battle cry tore out of him, he knew without any doubt at all that his death was going to mean something.
Date Point: 13y2m AV
Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Xiù Chang
“—And the director glares at him and says ’You idiot! They’re laughing because you forgot the rose!’”
Allison groaned and then broke into her filthiest laugh, and Xiù awarded herself a point. Her mission to put a real smile on Allison’s face at least once a day since Salt Lake City had sometimes been an arduous one, but it was working.
Besides, she’d been saving that joke for a rainy day ever since Dan Hurt had shared it with her. A party at Kevin’s place seemed about right. He had a nice sprawling rambler not even half a mile from the Byron Group’s Advanced Aircraft Assembly Facility, and had invited them all round for a barbecue, poker…mostly the men had vanished into the back yard where they were playing a vigorously physical game of Calvinball which seemed to consist mostly of Julian and Dane wrestling each other for control of the ball long enough to throw it for either Kevin or Dan to score a try-slam-touch-dunk-down or whatever.
For a woman with so much metal in her face and ears, Clara Brown took a second or two longer to get the joke, and when she did she just threw her head back and groaned.
“That’s…ugh.” She shook her head. “You disappoint me, Xiù.”
“That’s a surprisingly dirty joke, coming from you!” Allison observed.
“I’m as pure and innocent as a baby fawn,” Xiù retorted, hamming it up as she feigned dignity.
“Nuh-uh. I’m your girlfriend babe, I know exactly how innocent you aren’t.” Allison winked at her, and won whatever little game they were playing. Xiù immediately felt the tips of her ears warm up.
“And there’s the blush!” Clara had politely declined anything alcoholic and had shown off a small black X tattoo behind her ear, and its tiny twin on the fleshy part of her right palm below the thumb. She chimed a Coca-Cola against Allison’s beer bottle instead and joined in the affectionate laughing that always arose when Xiù tried to fight back a blush and only made it worse.
“No, okay, if it’s dirty jokes time then I know a one about a woman who—she’d been married ten times before but the new husband’s a lawyer. So she—”
Xiù and Allison both glanced out of the window in response to…something. Some anomalous movement that screamed for attention out of the corner of the eye rather than being consciously seen. Clara yelped in surprise then shrieked in terror when, running on pure survival instinct, they both grabbed her and yanked her forward off the couch couch trailing cushions for protection in the instant before the window blew in and filled Kevin’s front room with a blizzard of glass shards and the indescribable gut-punch of an explosive shock wave.
A detached and manic part of Xiù’s mind really needed to get its priorities straight because it was fretting over the stupid details. There should have been echoes in the shocked aftermath, she thought. Instead there were car alarms, screams, shouting…and the pop, pop…pop of somebody shooting.
Also her ears were ringing. It’d be nice if that could stop, please. Xièxiè.
She dared to peek over the couch. A huge column of smoke and dust was boiling violently up into the air over the AAAF where Misfit was parked, towering high above the trees that ran around the Group compound’s perimeter to disguise the walls. She’d seen smaller high-rise buildings.
“…Fuck—!”
“…Amen,” Allison agreed. “You okay, Clara?”
Clara was curled up in a trembling ball with her hands over her head, but she unwound and looked up at them with an ashen expression that said she wasn’t going to say anything coherent just yet.
“Wh—-?” she managed, in a panicky squeak. Allison shook her head and waved her down.
They were still surveying the apocalyptic view when Julian charged into the room with Dane, Kevin and Daniel in his wake. He skidded to a halt on the carpet of broken glass and breathed a sigh of relief at finding them essentially unharmed.
“Are you okay?” Xiù asked him.
“I’m fine but you’re bleeding, bǎobèi.” He indicated her leg.
Xiù glanced down. She’d elected to wear denim shorts for her day off, and the result was a shallow crescent slice in her outer thigh that she’d been too high on adrenaline and surprise to notice. That same manic part of her jabbered angrily about how if she’d just worn her cut-proof working clothes she’d have been fine.
She directed the thought to worry about more important stuff, like Clara, and forgave herself. It wasn’t like they’d expected a bomb to go off.
“Huh.” She pressed on the wound and asked Julian for help with her expression. ”Saya man i….” She paused, realizing she’d lapsed into Gaori. “Um…Sorry. Could you get me a bandage or a towel or something?”
“I’ll get it,” Daniel promised, but didn’t make it four steps before Kevin cut him off by putting a hand in front of his chest. He was on his phone, listening intently.
“Guys. My tornado shelter in the backyard,” he said. “Williams says there’s an active shooter at the Facility.”
Dane picked his wife up and Clara’s habitual huge New Rocks crunched in the glass. Allison had gone barefoot, so Julian hoisted her up in a fireman’s carry, and Xiù limped along with her hand pressed to the cut on her leg.
“Dane…Honey, my dad’s up there…” Clara protested.
“He’ll want you safe,” Dane replied.
“But—”
“We’re gonna stay in the shelter until we get an all clear,” Kevin replied firmly, ushering them through his kitchen and out into the back yard.
His tornado shelter was surprisingly roomy, well-lit and dry with a clean concrete floor and plenty of storage space. He obviously kept his lawnmower and other bulky items down there as well, and the “other items” included a couple of folding camp beds, which he retrieved after closing and bolting the steel doors behind them.
Julian looked around appreciatively. “Hey. Nice!”
Kevin was digging through a box of LED storm lamps. “Deathworld,” he grunted by way of an explanation.
“Hmn. Yeah.”
Clara parked herself nervously on one of the camp beds. “How long are we gonna be here?”
“Williams said get somewhere safe and stay put until Hammond shows up to fetch us in person.”
“But my dad—!” Clara began again. That seemed to be all she could say on the subject.
Kevin squatted down in front of her and put a hand on her shoulder. “Clara. I’m scared for him too, but ain’t nothin’ we can do right now.”
Dane sat down next to her and put an arm around her, and Clara curled miserably into his chest and went quiet.
Allison was picking a sliver of glass out of her foot. “Fuckin’…ahh…fuck! An actual fuckin’ bomb though? Had to be a fuckin’ cargo van from the size of that blast, too…”
“Yeah…” Kevin grimaced and leaned against a wall. “I maybe insulated y’all from some of the full details about just how strong some folks feel about this whole business with the People.”
“I don’t fucking—ow—get it,” Allison commented, setting her foot down gingerly. “I can understand Alex being mad at me personally, kinda. But we’re literally trying to save their lives and…shit, people are gonna be dead over there.”
Kevin nodded solemnly.
“Well, you have to look at it through their lens,” Daniel chimed in. “I’ve read some of the death threats and messages. What they see here is a powerful species conquering a weak one. Imperialism, colonialism, maybe slavery…”
“But that’s not what we’re doing!” Julian complained.
“Doesn’t matter,” Xiù sighed. “That’s what they think we’re doing, so that’s what we’re doing.”
“Right.” Daniel nodded emphatically. “Everybody in the world works by building a simulation, a model of what the people around them are thinking and doing. Reality is something that happens inside your head.”
“An’ for a lot of people, it doesn’t have shit to do with what’s goin’ on in the actual universe,” Kevin finished.
There was a long pause, punctuated only by the sound of Dane rubbing Clara’s back, and Clara fighting to hold herself together.
Eventually, Xiù ventured to inspect her leg. The cut was only a shallow one, far less than some of the wounds she’d suffered in her life. It might leave a small white line, maybe.
She was growing blasé about scars and wounds, she noticed. But after shoving a nervejam grenade down a Hunter’s throat and practically flensing her arm on its horrible lamprey teeth, what was a bomb going off half a mile away and a little scratch?
Oddly enough, it was that thought that toppled her off the calm and focused place she’d been occupying. The full reality that an actual bomb had just gone off nearby and that people were dead caught up with her.
Very, very slowly she sank down to the floor next to Julian and willed herself not to shake or fall apart. It wasn’t very effective—her brain wanted to run off in a thousand different directions and dwell on every possible worst-case scenario.
Fortunately, Julian either had a flawless instinct for these situations, or he needed exactly what she did right now. He wrapped her up in a close hug and if there was even such a thing as ’safe’ anywhere in the universe, then just for that moment she had found it.
She sighed, concentrated on breathing slowly and deliberately, and watched the growing feeling of pressure in the back of her mind as it eased off and dissipated.
And she waited.
Date Point: 13y2m AV
Byron Group Advanced Aerospace Assembly Facility, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Doctor Michael Ericson
People were here to kill them, and in the aftermath of the bomb that tore open the AAAF’s security checkpoint, a second van had swept in. Men in balaclavas with rifles and sticks of dynamite were swaggering across the concrete apron in front of the hangar, pausing to shoot the wounded.
Panic was everywhere, and it was death. Michael saw one man—Carter, maybe—who had possibly been safely hidden where he was until he lost his nerve and stood up to run. He made it ten paces before he died coughing on blood as a couple of accurate shots tore into his back.
Michael ducked his head back through the door and thought furiously. The gunmen were coming their way.
“…Into *MIsfit*” he urged. “Hurry!”
“But—!” That was June Liddle, the accounts manager who’d been inspecting the upgrade and maintenance work to budget it. She was clutching her tablet and her purse and trembling. “It’s a spaceship, is it safe?”
“It’s armored,” Ericson took her hand and dragged her. They were eight in total—engineers, technicians, a custodian, himself and June. None of them knew how to fight back even if any of them had been armed. The only safe place available was inside *Misfit*’s skin, which was layered in ablative panels that could handle space debris strikes.
Getting the message, they ran for *Misfit*’s ladder, June unsteady and slow on her office high heels until Michael snarled at her to take them off. She leaned heavily on his shoulder as she desperately pawed and kicked at them, wasting time and whimpering as she tried to force them off without undoing the buckle strap.
Michael stooped and undid them for her. Freed of the ungainly footwear she ran the rest of the way to the ladder like an olympic sprinter, and the technicians helped her up it.
Michael was the last to the bottom, limping and cursing his aging bones. The door at the far end of the hangar opened just as he reached the top, and there were shouts. A rifle round made June yelp as it sparked off the airlock’s inner surface. Another struck Singh in the thigh as he tried to hit the lock’s emergency override.
Michael scrambled inside as they all ducked. They were sitting ducks, fish in a barrel, stuck in a cage with no way to escape their murderers.
He turned and stood full and exposed in the airlock—it was the only way to reach the close handle above the outer doors.
Something happened to him. It wasn’t actually painful, he felt—more like being punched. Shock moved the fact that he’d just been shot, and shot again into the background, held the pain at bay. He blinked, stared at the man who’d shot him, and yanked down on the handle.
*Misfit’*s outer doors and the protective armored shutter closed, sealing them inside. He heard rounds slam fruitlessly into the old girl’s hull like nothing worse than heavy rain, and the shock wore off.
He collapsed.
“Ericson!”
Things were going monochrome, around the edges of his vision. Their clothes, the blood, the lights and panels on the airlock’s walls…the color was bleaching out of it all. The pain was fading too.
“…Where’s Clara?” he asked. There wasn’t anything he could do about the fact that he was dying, he knew…but he had to know that his daughter was safe, before he went.
Barnes took his hand. “She’s with the crew. At a barbecue. Her day off….God, Mike, I—”
“…That’s okay then…”
Michael Ericson shut his eyes, took the deepest breath he could, and let go.
He dreamed of the sea, and was gone.