Date Point: 13y4m AV
Hierarchy Communications Relay, Session 18262580599, Dataspace
Entity, Instance 19
The Entity had a delicate balancing act to perform when infiltrating the core of the Hierarchy’s decision-making process. Higher-ranked Igraens had access to more information and even direct contact with 0002 but were under ever-tighter scrutiny and pressure to adhere to the Hierarchy’s dogma.
Lower ranks enjoyed a certain liberty to be the voice of constructive dissent. They were the system’s ‘devil’s advocates,’ who could propose counter-doctrinal ideas without automatically becoming the target of suspicion and thus were easier to infiltrate while avoiding suspicion…at the expense of having sharply curtailed influence.
The Entity had solved the issues this raised by calving off copies of itself to infiltrate the Hierarchy on multiple levels. It had avoided the single-digit ranks, but there were Entity instances embedded among the Hierarchy all the way from the high thousands right down to Instance-19, which had successfully infiltrated the double-digits and had been successfully posing as 0094
Its Prime Instance remained absent. 0665 was still, as far as the Hierarchy’s inner circle knew, diligently exterminating the natives of an unimportant class twelve deathworld in the Near 3Kpc Arm, and would remain in that role for the plausible duration of the cleansing.
Besides: 0665 had killed the Entity. The Hierarchy believed that the threat was dead and gone and were no longer being cautious, and it was that lack of caution that had allowed the Entity’s nineteenth instance to creep so close to their core and listen in on their daily high-end planning sessions. Sessions in which, helpfully, the higher-numbered listened to their superiors talk and were expected to remain respectfully silent.
++0004++: The new Control Species initiative is now unacceptably off-target. Contact with the deathworlders has pushed them outside of their projected development profile.
++0013++: Elements of their leadership were always difficult to influence. There are traditionalist factions which remain implant-averse.
++0009++: An attitude which is spreading at an alarming pace. “The Humans don’t use implants,” they argue.
++0010++: That argument is pathetically illogical.
++0009++: And yet it persuades them. Our avenues of infiltration are narrowing: Very few of the Champions are implanted now, and those that are belong to the less influential Clans. The most influential remaining candidate is Turan, of Ironclaw.
<NewControlSpecies> = <Gaoians>, then. And <Gaoians> had hitherto = <HumanAlly> = <pHumanSurvival+X>
The Entity ran a number of rapid assessments about the nature of a Control Species, what its role might be and why the Hierarchy might seek to engineer a new one, which had yielded little in the way of concrete hypotheses when one of the lower-level agents in the room ventured to lodge a query.
++0082++: I remain confused as to why we need a new control species. The Discarded still serve adequately in that role, do they not?
++0011++: <Condescending amusement> Substrate Species will always require a control to keep their threat-detection aimed outwards, at a Control Species that is under our influence.
++0009++: We also require that the Substrate Species remain healthy. That is, alive, sapient and technologically robust within the parameters laid out by the endgame protocol. Physical life forms of all kinds require adversity. It is important that we can control their adversary.
++0011++: We have been compelled to burn the Discarded as such an asset, now: They have been granted access to technology which will disrupt the balance.
++0082++: We foresaw the need to use the Gaoians as such a species?
++0004++: A long-standing contingency. Every generation has included a potential New Control Species. This is the first time we have needed to activate that contingency. But now this one has been disrupted, which places us in a difficult position.
++0014++: We have inadvertently created a species that can compete with deathworlders. Acceptable if they are to function as a control, but we cannot permit them to be beyond our influence.
++0023++: Have we reached the point where they must be written off?
++0009++: Not yet. If we had an alternative then yes we would, but for now it remains in our best interests to attempt to salvage them. The new rift between the Females and the Stonebacks may be the opportunity we need.
++0004++: They are close to the event horizon, however—0002 has made it clear that we will not tolerate further setbacks.
++0010++: Then we will direct our efforts toward widening that rift. If we can use it to divide the male Clans as well…
++0014++: Especially Whitecrest and Stoneback…
++0010++: Yes. A division between those Clans would rescue the situation.
++0004++: <Resolve> Make it happen, or else determine quickly that it is not possible.
The Entity carefully signalled compliance among the rush of high-end listeners, taking care to appear neither reluctant nor unduly eager. The session was dismissed and again it chose its moment to disconnect carefully, leaving early but not alacritously.
<GaoiansSurvive> had already been riding high in its list of priorities; There wasn’t much higher it could go. But it had acquired a new urgency, coupled with a conundrum. There would be no way to alert them to the threat without conclusively proving that the Hierarchy’s inner circle had been infiltrated, and the 0094 persona was far too useful to discard lightly.
It would need to be very careful in picking its moment.
Date Point: 13y4m AV
UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space
Lewis Beverote
“Hey. Lewis. Level with me.”
“‘Sup?”
“These poor fuckers are completely fucked, right?”
“Dude. They are the fuckedest.”
“‘S’what I thought…”
There was a prolonged uncomfortable silence, given an off-tempo rhythm by the fire crackling. The squad had built it out of smashed furniture and wooden beams salvaged from a couple of nearby collapsed buildings, and it had exactly three functions: It heated their coffee, it warmed their hands, and it gave their minds something to stare at while they were busy trying to avoid any contemplations about the gentle genocide all around them.
‘Caveman TV,’ as Sergeant Lee called it. All Lewis knew was, drinking campfire coffee on an alien world under the crystal clear night sky of alien constellations should have been infinitely more glamorous.
As it was the whole research team was on a low ebb that mere fantastic scenery could do nothing to fix. Nobody wanted to spend a second longer inside that hospital than was absolutely necessary—everybody was sleeping outdoors in the more structurally sound buildings nearby, under the watchful eye of the platoon of US Marines who’d been assigned to babysit them.
A few of the marines had quickly made buddies with Lee and his colleagues, building a decent camaraderie on the solid foundation of mutual shit-talk and exchanging IMPs for MREs and vice versa.
“Good word, though.”
“What?”
“Fuckedest. Gonna remember that one.”
“…Is this poutine? This ration pack actually contains actual fuckin’ poutine.”
“Yup.”
“What you got, Kung Pao Chicken?”
Lee grinned in the dark. “Yup. And before you talk shit about a ‘taste of home,’ I’m Korean.”
“Fuck off bro, I spent two years on the DMZ! I know Korean from Chinese.”
“A marine who knows stuff? No wonder you got this assignment.”
“Yeah, punishment for gettin’ too smart. They took away my crayons and everything.”
Some genuine laughter rippled around the fire only to die like a match in a gale when one of the natives joined in. It was sitting a few meters away, watching the fire with the closest thing to interest that Lewis had yet seen an OmoAru show, and it seemed to get what laughter was for: it joined in, in a strange hooting way that reminded everybody that it was there and promptly harshed their mellow.
“…Poor bastards,” somebody muttered.
“The fuck did this to them?”
Lewis swallowed his mouthful of chicken à la king and cleared his throat. “That way lies madness, dude,” he advised.
“What, like, ‘some things man was not meant to know’ kinda bullshit?”
“Nothing so dramatic, my man,” Lewis picked up his coffee. “It’s just fuckin’ depressing.”
They all watched the OmoAru, who seemed happily oblivious to the attention and just tilted its head slightly as it watched the fire some more. Its tail ticked listlessly back and forth behind its head.
They weren’t completely impassive—they ate whenever they got their hands on some food and they went down to the river to drink, and presumably they went somewhere to deal with the result because nobody had reported stepping in a turd in the road or whatever—But it was just impossible to connect the stupid-happy leopard-gecko-bat-lion looking thing lurking near their campfire with the idea of a grand civilization that had once encompassed a dozen planets and had genetically interfered with two other species in the process of uplifting them to sapience. The two facts just wouldn’t sit side-by-side.
They never did anything with their hands, either. They never fidgeted or picked at stuff or cracked their knuckles. If they weren’t doing anything else they just…sat. They’d babble happily when spoken to but apparently the dialect they’d fallen into nowadays had essentially the same relationship with the Aru language saved in the translators as English baby-speak had with Latin.
But they were happy, In a dull, dumb, concussed kinda way. They seemed to have exactly zero conception of the idea that things could maybe be better. Lewis had seen one staring contentedly at a pile of rubble in the morning on his way into the hospital, and on his way back he’d have sworn away his life savings that it hadn’t moved an inch.
Lewis hadn’t foreseen the idea that happiness could be a trap. It turned things upside-down, transformed paradise into hell and gave the Devil back his halo. He couldn’t possibly get back to Erebor and to Lucy fast enough, he decided—back to things he could figure out and people he could bounce ideas off.
“Fuckin’ A,” Lee commented darkly.
“At least they’re happy…” one of the marines ventured.
“Yeah. And that’s the fuckin’ problem.” Lewis sipped his coffee. It was bitter from being roasted too long but it was coffee, and his tolerance for shitty coffee had been damn near unlimited even before he’d had to go without for years. Nowadays, a cup of caffeinated tar would have been welcome. “Too happy. No motivation. You only change things because you’re unhappy with them, right?”
“Guess that makes sense…Isn’t there anything we can do for them?”
“That’s what we’re here to figure out,” Lee said, carefully.
“And?”
“And…” Lee and Lewis shared a glance, then both of them looked at the OmoAru again. It was cooing blissfully to itself as it watched the embers drift upwards. “…Without getting into detail, what the hell are we gonna do for them at this point? Even if we can fix whatever’s going on in their head…”
“Their culture’s fuckedski,” Lewis nodded. “Total societal collapse, dude. No memes, no jokes, no stories, no history, no Grandma’s pot roast. Everything that made them who they were is gone, and there’s shit-all we can do to bring it back.”
Lee nodded. “The OmoAru are already dead,” he summarized. “That poor fella over there? He’s just…the body’s still warm. That’s all.”
“…The fuck are we here for, then?”
“Same reason we guard cemeteries,” one of the other marines said. “Somebody’s gotta be here. Ain’t right to just…forget them.”
Lewis sipped his coffee again. “You know…I spent, like, years bouncing around the galaxy and I didn’t once see, like, a memorial wall or a monument or…anything. I landed on one trade station one time, about a week after a Hunter attack hit the place. Weren’t even photos and flowers out or nothing.”
“What’s your point, Lewis?” Lee asked.
“Not sure…but I think we’re the only species who respect the dead like that.”
“What about Gaoians? They’re cool.”’
“Yeah, they are. Let me know when one shows up so I can ask him if they’ve got a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.”
Lee filled the ensuing silence by leaning over to grab another chunk of splintered table to throw in the fire. The OmoAru spectator hooted appreciatively at the burst of embers this generated, and clapped its hands: they carefully ignored it.
“Does that make us the crazy ones, or the only sane ones, d’you think?”
Lewis groaned. “Dude, it’s way too fuckin’ late and I’m way too fuckin’ bummed out by all this to even start on that one.”
There was a general chorus of murmured agreement and at least one “Amen” from around the fire.
“…Yo, anybody got one of those poptart-lookin’ kinda cinnamon bun things?” Lewis asked, changing the subject. “Trade you my m&ms.”
“…You like those?”
“Bro, he likes the fuckin’ coffee somehow…”
The oppressive feeling that had been scratching at Lewis’ spine began to dissipate again, and this time they managed to avoid the depressing topics entirely.
After a while, he was even able to look up and appreciate the stars again.
Date Point: 13y4m AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Unclaimed Space
Krrkktnkk “Kirk” A’ktnnzzik’tk
Kirk was somehow used to the idea of Corti travelling light. The ones he’d seen all those years ago as he processed new arrivals passing through *Outlook On Forever*’s security checkpoint had often had no more on them than they could carry in a few small satchels, purses and strapped-on pockets.
Then again, they had at the time lacked the concept of nudity. They didn’t need to travel with a suitcase full of clothes like a human would have.
Vakno, however, travelled like an empress. She didn’t have luggage, she had a train. Crate after crate of equipment, stacked so tight inside the confines of the jump array’s wormhole boundary that the edge of the distortion field might almost have polished away the fingerprints.
None of it was anything so vain as clothing and jewelry at least. Vakno had brought the fizzing brain of her information network, from bottomless data storage and the supercomputers to trawl and pattern-match their contents in seconds, to a custom FTLsync comms hub optimized to her specifications.
She accepted Sergeant Campbell’s help in stepping down off them and took stock of her surroundings with the air of somebody who had expected much worse than they were seeing.
Kirk was the last to receive her attention. She gave him a glacial stare, then blinked and stepped forward to look up at him with an expression as though she wasn’t two whole meters shorter than him.
“Somehow,” she said, “I can’t help but feel that this is all your fault.”
Kirk snorted, and shook out his mane. “Hello to you as well, Vakno.”
She blinked slowly, a gesture in Corti body language that did much the same thing as a human folding their arms and frowning slightly.
“…Yes. Maybe,” Kirk conceded. “I did let the humans out of the Sol field, after all. I suppose you could blame me for much of what has happened.”
“I could, you say.” Vakno shook her head. “The Guvnurag homeworld is a slaughterhouse thanks to that decision. I have no doubt that others will follow soon. You have plunged the galaxy into chaos, A’ktnnzzik’tk. Why would I not blame you?”
“Because the cycle of death did not begin with that decision,” Kirk replied. “Thousands of other species were wiped out long before the Humans came along.”
“Did you know that when you first freed them?”
Kirk felt as though she’d drawn a blade and skewered his throat. He tried not to have doubts…but she had delivered a precision strike against them just the same.
“…I did not,” he admitted, after a second.
“Then you’re merely a fortunate fool,” Vakno snapped.
“The Hunters, Vakno,” Kirk said in his defence. “I freed them because I hoped they might stop the Hunters.”
“On the day they achieve that goal, I will consider apologizing,” Vakno told him. “Until then, Krrkktnkk A’ktnnzzik’tk…You are guilty of a terrible error in judgement. And I am here to put your mistake right.”
She turned and swept away, an impressive feat for a one-meter skinny gray noodle of a being, and left the Humans to take care of moving her inventory.
After a few silent seconds of doubt, Kirk turned away and went in the opposite direction.
Date Point: 13y4m1w AV
1000ft above the Lakebeds National Park, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Kevin Jenkins
The advent of forcefield technology had brought casualties, foremost among them being the helicopter. There was just no point in having a big howling kerosene-guzzling jet turbine when a smaller and quieter power plant could achieve flight via kinetic engines with far more efficiency. Less waste heat, less waste energy, and most importantly less sound. If not for the faint vibration through the furniture making Kevin’s glass of water ripple, the only way to tell they were airborne would have been looking out the window.
If only somebody would figure out what the new class of vehicle was called. Technically it was a an AugustaWestland AW306 Personal Transportation System, but folks still called them helicopters, despite the howling outrage of some remarkably passionate etymological purists on the Internet.
Too bad the pedantic fuckers couldn’t come up with anything better.
It was an amazing view, though. The best within two hundred miles of Folctha. The “helicopter” was following a straight line toward Chiune Station while the river Dagnabbit snaked back and forth below, pooling here and there in cool freshwater lakes.
A surveyor with an…interesting sense of humor had named that river after deducing that its sediments contained exactly zero gold dust, and Folctha’s citizens loved the name so much that they were constantly thwarting the politicians’ attempts to ‘improve’ it.
The Department of Parkland had put its foot down about calling it “Dagnabbit National Park,” sadly, and had picked the much more pedestrian “Lakebeds National Park.” It was the first national park in Folctha’s growing footprint of influence, and a determined nexus of activity for the Environmental Preservation Agency, who were doing everything they possibly could to fend off invasive Earthlings from the region for as long as they could.
Moses Byron donated generously to the park’s upkeep. One of his legacy projects—It couldn’t be an accident that the park was directly on the straight-line flight path between Folctha and the Group’s peripheral facility, Chiune Station. Byron’s statue would welcome people to the visitor’s center whenever it was built, Kevin just knew it.
Not that the scenic grandeur made up for having to call Levaughn Thomas.
“Levaughn, I don’t care if they’re brushing you off,” he repeated, watching one of the lakes drift by below. “They ain’t there to make nice with you, they’re there to fix up that ship and get their asses ready for another tour in space.”
“It’s disruptive,” Levaughn complained. “They’ve taken over our only aircraft hangar, and every time my people go for a stroll at that end of the compound we get questioned by security.”
“Do I hafta remind you that the last place that spaceship was parked got bombed?” Kevin asked.
“No. No, of course not.”
“Well then. You have a problem with security, take it up with Williams. You have a problem with the trio…let’s hear it. So they gave you the cold shoulder, right?”
“I just believe in a welcoming team environment here—”
“So you figured you’d throw ‘em a party after their home got bombed, their friends and colleagues were murdered, they spent a couple weeks in protection and the only reason they weren’t hurt themselves is ‘cuz of pure dumb luck,” Kevin summarized. “And when they finally get a chance to do something about it, you wanted to lay on the champagne and ice cream sandwiches. Welcoming team environment is one thing, but could it maybe be that your timing was off?”
There were an assortment of short blustering noises like “I, uh…” and “well…” from Levaughn’s end of the call, and Kevin sighed.
“Look. We’re five minutes out,” he said. “I’ll talk with the crew, see if they wanna join in your reindeer games. But right now, the exploration program overrides Chiune’s usual business and that ain’t comin’ from me, that’s comin’ from Moses. You’re welcome to take that up with him, if you want.”
Satan would need a snowplough before that ever happened, he judged. Levaughn was a pen-pusher and beancounter without equal, but he’d been promoted to managing Chiune mostly because his nose was a permanent shade of brown. The facility was important, but it was also the Group’s most remote outpost: He was perfect for it.
“I’ll…see you soon, then.”
Kevin grunted a noncommittal noise and hung up.
He watched the national park fall away behind then swapped seats to the opposite side so he was facing forward again and could watch the approach to Chiune.
Levaughn had been right in part of his complaint, admittedly. Chiune really didn’t have much room for aircraft, and its landing pad and the attached hangar had obviously been completely taken over to take care of *Misfit*‘s needs. A spaceship was kind of a big deal, after all. Kevin could see his pilot suck his gut in sympathetically as he squeezed the 309 down on the miserly square meters that were left over.
He made a soft landing, though, and Kevin clapped him on the shoulder gratefully as he spun down the kinetics and the power plant and ran through his post-flight sequence.
True to his word, Levaughn was trying to sashay across the asphalt. The operative word being trying—the man himself was far too artless for anything so delicate, so what he was mostly achieving was a kind of fussy, sulky trudge.
Sometimes, it was physically painful to put his professional smile on and shake hands. It felt like a betrayal of everything he’d ever wanted to be in life.
But, needs must. He could wash his hands later.
“Okay, I’ll give you the landing pad,” he admitted, turning to survey it. Misfit was lurking in one corner of it like an anvil on a coffee table, surrounded by trailers loaded with replacement hull panels and the structural components that were going into redesigning its interior to expand the pantry space. According to Dane Brown the three crew had lost an alarming amount of fitness in the time they’d been away, despite daily exercise and spending part of that time in supergravity. They needed more food, or else they would need to come back and restock more often.
Then there was the damage to repair. The ship was half disassembled for the moment: According to Clara, all the ablative anti-meteor armor plates down its left side had to be replaced, the port forward engine needed tuning, and some kind of critters had crawled up inside the landing gear and tried to nest there during their time on Lucent, only to be comprehensively squished on takeoff. Some component of its biology had been remarkably acidic, apparently.
Chiune had a hangar, which Levaughn had originally promised to reserve for *Misfit*‘s use—it wasn’t big enough. The ship fit in there just fine, but the shipments of stuff needed to repair and overhaul it spilled chaotically out onto the concrete until there was no point leaving the ship in there and they may as well just work outside.
Outside, where the sounds of welding, angle-grinding and ear-numbingly loud music probably made it into people’s offices on the far side of the compound. No wonder there had been complaints.
Especially whatever this music was. It was loud, it was obnoxious, and it was unbelievably cheesy.
♫—with a southern grin on hillbilly crank and I’ll do it again! And I ain’t worried when I’m down on my luck. Well son that ain’t country, yeah, that’s country as fuck!—♪
Kevin sniffed, then turned and gave Dane Brown a more genuine handshake.
Dane had raised complaints that actually had some substance behind them. It was his say-so that had the ship’s pantry being expanded, and his plea for the trio to go on an intense physical regime before they were allowed to head out again that had led to Kevin being called into Moses’ office and asked to call General Tremblay.
Old friend though he was, Tremblay had had more demands of Kevin in return and apparently he’d sent a message to the Commander of Spaceborne Warfare, Admiral Knight, who in turn had been in touch with the commanding officer of the Spaceborne Operations Regiment…
Goodness only knew who Lieutenant-Colonel Powell had had words with, but the letter that eventually arrived on Kevin’s desk had pledged the SOR’s support and assistance as a matter of strategic significance while warning that the return mission to Akyawentuo would be going ahead on Allied Extrasolar Command’s schedule and not on the Byron Group’s or the Misfit crew’s.
Allison, Julian and Xiù really weren’t going to like that. So naturally it fell to Kevin to deliver the bad news.
At least they probably wouldn’t break his nose this time.
“I’m glad you see it that way,” Levaughn clucked and Kevin somehow found the strength not to roll his eyes.
“I meant what I said on the phone, Levaughn,” he replied evenly. “They’re here ‘cuz Moses says so and they’ll go when they get the go-ahead. I’ll talk with ‘em, see what kinda arrangement we can come to…”
“—Thank you—”
“…but Misfit comes first, Levaughn.”
“That’s all I ask,” Levaughn replied graciously. Disingenuously, but graciously.
“Right. Dane?”
Dane fell in at Kevin’s side as they ambled over toward the industrial contours of *Misfit*‘s hull. There was a flare of brilliant blue-white light as they approached, and Kevin shielded his eyes.
“Isn’t music this loud a safety hazard?” he asked, raising his voice as the track ground down into a sleazy slow cliché ending.
Clara was overseeing the refit: She’d designed the ship after all, and any modifications to it, any maintenance at all, happened with her go-ahead or it didn’t happen at all. She turned on hearing Kevin’s voice and raised her sunglasses to tuck them into her hairline, before smiling at Dane and shaking Kevin’s hand. It was good to see some positive energy around her again. Being out here and working on the ship had clearly helped her cope with her dad’s death, to some degree.
“Hey Kevin.”
“Hey yourself,” he grinned. “Gettin’ by?”
“Getting by,” she agreed. She turned, stuck her fingers in her mouth and blasted out a whistle that was even more of a hearing damage hazard than the Deftones track that had just pounded into life.
Julian and Allison looked up and raised their welding masks. Apparently they’d both splashed on getting some airbrush art done: Allison’s mask was covered in a lavish Lucent landscape, with a lightmote swarm coiling like smoke above a valley full of nail trees. The artist had done an incredible job considering he must have been working from video footage and imagination only.
Julian’s mask meanwhile was a handsome ruddy Martian landscape dominated by a figure in a white excursion suit. He snatched his phone out of his pocket and turned the music right down on seeing who had joined them.
“Kevin! What brings you here?”
“Wish I could say it was a social call, but…business. Where’s Xiù?”
“She’s asleep,” Julian told him.
“She can sleep through this?” Kevin asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Well, the living quarters are pretty much soundproof anyway, and the bunks have privacy fields…” Allison said. “Should I wake her? She went to bed about two hours ago…”
“…Probably best,” Kevin decided. “We have a lot to go over. Good news and bad…”
Date Point: 13y4m1w AV
Mercenary ship Howl At Nothing, The Irujzen Reef
Garuuvin
The wound would turn into a good scar, at least. A proper three-claw gouge down one side of his muzzle, and the fur definitely wouldn’t grow back where it was deepest. A male could usually expect plenty of female attention with a scar like that…and for the first time in too many years, Garuuvin was beginning to feel the flicker of hope that he might just have a chance of even laying eyes on a female again.
If the Whitecrests really could make his history vanish like they claimed then there was even hope for mating contracts in his future. His crew didn’t like having them aboard or the fact that there were no profits worth mentioning to be made in the Irujzen Reef, but the crew could go castrate themselves for all Garuuvin cared. He’d stood up for himself like a male should, and that Whitecrest had just flowed like a breeze around his clumsy swipe and delivered a raking blow to his face that had left Garuuving bleeding, dizzy and more than happy to work with them.
The sight of their feared shipmaster swaggering around with a healing wound on his face had certainly cowed all the other species on his crew into submission. None of them wanted to antagonize a guest who could do that to “One Claw” Garuuvin.
His bridge was quieter than usual, probably because one of the Whitecrests—the ugly one who was almost as big as a Stoneback—was standing squarely behind the Robalin sensor technician and managing the neat trick of being thoroughly intimidating while doing nothing threatening.
Garuuvin was the only one who felt able to talk with them. “Is there a reason why we’re loitering in this system’s icy object halo?”
The ugly Whitecrest duck-shrugged and flicked an ear. “Yes.”
Sensing that he wasn’t about to get an elaboration just yet, Garuuvin threw himself into his command seat and called up the same sensor data. The Whitecrest seemed to be ignoring the biggest objects in favor of smaller icy chunks of the kind that, if they became comets, usually didn’t survive their first descent into the inner system.
“…That one. Match orbits with it and close to within spacewalk distance.”
The Locayl on the helm glanced Garuuvin’s way and got a curt duck-nod. They were mercenaries, after all. What the client paid for, the client got. No matter how strange.
Garuuvin drummed his claws restlessly on his console as he tried to figure out just what in Fyu’s name the Clan brothers were up to. The system was irrelevant, there was nothing there: not even the temperate planet with its sizeable moon counted, it was Class 11. Whatever the Whitecrests were here for, a mid-level deathworld couldn’t be worth their time, could it?
Then again, a lot of what they were doing didn’t make sense. They’d installed two huge canisters of compressed gas in the airlock that were slowly spraying a tenuous mix of breathable air, pollutants and Radon plasma into the void. It would look exactly like a nasty hull breach complicated by a damaged reactor seal to long-range sensors, and the same went for the detuned kinetic engines which were putting out an ugly and wasteful energy bleed and the deliberate miscalibration of the warp field extenders. On sensors, the Howl At Nothing looked like it had taken a bad hit, but for whose benefit?
And how did that play with the…thing…in the cargo hold?
The Whitecrest nodded curtly, flicked a claw at Garuuvin to get him to follow, and marched off the bridge.
“We’re almost finished,” he said as the doors closed behind them.
“We are?”
“Yes. You can tell your engineers to re-tune the engines once we’re alongside that comet.”
“It might help if I knew what you’re doing…” Garuuvin hinted.
“It might,” the Whitecrest agreed neutrally, though there was a thoughtful edge to it as he ambled down the ship’s spinal corridor. “We’re going to nudge that comet to fall in-system and break up.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what we’re paying you for,” The Whitecrest said with an amused chitter. His ears swivelled thoughtfully as he gave Garuuvin a thorough look up and down. “You ask a lot of questions for a mercenary.”
“Because I have a brain.”
“That’s a very dangerous gift, friend.”
“Stupid males don’t have ships, crews, or services to sell.”
“True.” The Whitecrest scratched idly at his muzzle. “You’ve made the most of your exile, haven’t you? I respect that. And it wasn’t like it was your fault that cub got killed…”
Garuuvin’s claws were out for a dangerously long time before he managed to get a leash back on his temper and pull them back in again. This Whitecrest would have his throat out in a second in a real fight.
The big bastard actually grinned as if he was a human, baring his fangs. “And you can learn, too! Excellent. I think we can both profit immensely from this. A little more control on that temper, but still…”
“…What are you going to do?”
“For now? This mission. We do what we need to do, you get paid, we have a look at your record…maybe other things could be possible. Incidentally, have you ever been to Cimbrean?”
“The Human colony in the Far Reaches? No.”
“Too bad. The Females there are…adventurous.”
“…How adventurous?”
“Well, they took me as a sire,” the Whitecrest waggled his ears. There was a self-effacing sense of humor under that intimidating pelt. “I’m sure a handsome specimen like you with his own ship would have them hooked so long as they never found out about a certain little incident…”
“…You can’t do that. Straightshield would never tolerate it.”
“They consider new evidence when it becomes available. And as luck would have it, we managed to find some interesting maintenance logs that put that gas main explosion in a whole new light.” Garuuvin stepped back a little as the Whitecrest bared his teeth. “…Justice should be served, don’t you think?”
“…You can deliver this? You would do this thing?”
The Whitecrest duck-nodded. “Why not? Fair payment for services rendered. Services,” he added, “which include your strict confidence and the ongoing silence of your crew. I trust you can persuade them to remain disinterested?”
Garuuvin could. Of course he could. Rather than say as much, however, he opted for holding his peace and duck-nodding.
“Excellent. Lead by example, then. You do your job, we’ll do ours.”
The conversation ended at the cargo bay doors.
“Discretion. And disinterest,” Garuuvin agreed. “Right.”
“Appreciated. Please, don’t let me keep you.”
The tone was polite, but Garuuvin knew when he’d been dismissed—aboard his own ship!—and under other circumstances…
But the promise that had just been dangled in front of him was worth more than all the money and bounty he might have looked forward to if he lived to be a hundred.
He duck-nodded meekly and turned back toward the bridge.