Date Point: 13y5m AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada, Earth
President Arthur Sartori
“I don’t care what the APA thinks!”
5-EYES wasn’t always an easy relationship. Its members, after all, were democracies with at times vividly different cultures and that meant their elected leaders could be equally different. The alliance was strong, but the personal relationships were…not, sometimes..
Which was why Sartori had sat forward, pressed his fingertips to the table and raised his voice. Not enough to give offense, just enough to shake the other four up a little.
“They are terrorists,” he snarled. “And they are idiots.”
Stephen Davies was, as usual, the voice of reconciliation and peace at the table. The British PM had won his election on the back of a promise to curtail military spending and ‘seek peaceful resolutions’ to interstellar and terrestrial crises. He’d fortunately been persuaded that the nature of the interstellar crises put peaceful resolution off the table entirely, but his attitude on matters closer to home hadn’t changed much so far as Sartori could tell. He hadn’t gone so far as to actually sympathize with the APA, but everything Sartori knew about the man said he resonated with their message.
“Obviously I’m not talking about the extremists,” he said, and got an agreeable nod from his Canadian counterpart Philippe Martel. “But it only makes sense to be worried about the ethics of interstellar colonization. The APA don’t know just how serious our situation is or why we’re doing this.”
“And they’re not gonna,” Sartori said firmly, making a cutting motion with his hand.
“Whether or not they’re in possession of all the facts really doesn’t excuse that they failed to condemn the truck bomb and shooting,” Kathy Nguyen pointed out. She was new to the table but not to the subjects it discussed, thanks to several years as Australia’s deputy prime minister before a stroke had forced her predecessor to retire.
The fourth man at the table—New Zealand’s Joel Thompson—was in the habit of fiddling a pen thoughtfully between his fingers and was almost always the last to speak on a subject, but Sartori respected that. Thompson gave off the impression of having thought things through before he opened his mouth. “Even if they did have a valid point…” he began, “which they don’t, because we won’t be settling inhabited planets…I’d still say survival comes first.”
“Survival doesn’t have to mean sacrificing our integrity,” Martel countered.
“No, it doesn’t,” Nguyen agreed. “Which is another reason why we shouldn’t let ourselves be paralyzed by indecision. We can act and act ethically.”
“Cimbrean has been a success beyond anybody’s wildest dreams,” Sartori said. “My advisors tell me that Introducing Terran species actually had the effect of slowing the mass extinction, and that some of the native species are already evolving to compete with the imports.”
“Probably because the scientists carefully imported the least disruptive critters they could find,” Nguyen sniffed. “No bloody cane toads.”
“I suppose that does demonstrate that we can properly control our environmental impact…” Davies conceded.
“And now we have New Enewetak,” Martel said.
“And others. The team at Erebor have dispatched probes to Lucent and Nightmare.”
“Not Akyawentuo?” Martel asked.
“That planet belongs to its natives and it stays that way.” Sartori sat back in his chair. “Despite what morons like the APA think, this isn’t the eighteenth century. We don’t do smallpox blankets.”
“Fine ideals,” Davies said. “I hope we live up to them.”
Thompson cleared his throat. “China, Russia and India won’t like it when we start colonizing planets without them,” he pointed out.
Davies nodded. “And that means the UN won’t like it. And by extension nor will the GRA.”
“This is our technology, we have a right to use it first,” Sartori said.
“The right, maybe,” Nguyen conceded, “but for the sake of diplomatic expediency, we need to give away some of the early planets.”
Sartori frowned at her. “Just…hand them out?”
“I know that isn’t a trivial thing, but it’s necessary,” she said. “The last thing we need for the moment is rising tensions back home. Imagine if we fell into a second Cold War right now, we’d be screwed.”
“I suggest Lucent remains in US hands,” Martel said. “The Byron Group staked it after all.”
Sartori nodded emphatically. “From what I’m told, they already found some very interesting resources on that planet. I agree, we’re keeping Lucent.”
“Giving Nightmare to a foreign power could be seen as throwing them the scraps…” Davies mused. “It has a reputation for being a frozen hellhole for four-fifths of the year and a murderous hellhole for the other fifth.”
“It can’t be that bad if one man managed to thrive there for six years all by himself…” Martel suggested.
“Still. Giving it away and keeping the more hospitable worlds for ourselves could be seen as an injustice.”
Nguyen drummed her sharply manicured fingernails on the table in front of her, just once. “So that just leaves New Enewetak. Think that’ll do?”
Thompson shook his head and flipped his pen around his thumb. “One planet isn’t enough. We can’t even start this process until we have more planets that are ready to receive colonists.”
“What about getting more colonists off Earth?” Davies suggested. “Folctha is doing well, but there’s a lot of Cimbrean left to claim. A lot of resources. We could be colonizing it more aggressively…”
“Would you be happy with that?” Sartori asked. Folctha had come as a gargantuan boost to the UK’s economy, which was now exporting massive tonnages of food and lumber into the European market. By all accounts the colony was only about five hundred miles from a huge bed of Anthracite as well, which Hephaestus wasn’t alone in salivating over.
“The UK can’t possibly develop an entire planet or exploit all of its resources by ourselves,” Davies said. “And we certainly aren’t about to depopulate Great Britain in making the attempt. There’s really nothing to be unhappy about.”
“And the more we send to Cimbrean, the faster we can develop it,” Nguyen nodded. “The faster we develop it the more resources we have. You’re right, as it is now Cimbrean is being squandered.”
“I hope we’re not proposing to put all our eggs in one basket?” Martel asked.
“No. We’ll open up multiple colony sites on Lucent as well,” Sartori declared. “Everyone at this table, NATO members…There’s enough planet to go around. And others. We’ll keep Nightmare if the others don’t want it. We may not have many worlds to barter with right now, but as soon as we let the Coltainers off the leash…we’ll have more than we can handle before long.”
Thompson nodded. “And if even half of them turn out as well as Cimbrean did…”
“…Then the future’s looking bright,” Nguyen finished.
There was a moment of satisfied, comfortable silence around the table, which Davies broke. He leaned forward, adjusted the paper in front of him and took a deep breath.
“I suppose,” he said, “that we had better start working out the details…”
Date Point: 13y5m AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Chiune Station, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Julian Etsicitty
“Breaking news, more footage now from Sacramento where riot police have apparently clashed with protesters in the last twenty minutes. A…statement released by the Sacramento Police Department confirmed that their officers have used kinetic pulse weapons to, uh, pacify some of the more violent protesters outside the state capitol…”
It sure as shit didn’t look like a ‘protest’ to Julian. For his money, burning police cars, smashed windows and the sight of an ambulance being pummeled with thrown objects and baseball bats made for a riot, not a protest.
A freaking ambulance.
The signs were the hardest to deal with. Each one stabbed right at the heart of the insecurities he and the girls had voiced among themselves about helping the People and giving them steel. They’d gone out into space looking for worlds for humanity, and now people’s livelihoods were burning.
The signs ranged from crude sharpie scrawled on scrap cardboard through to huge printed banners, but the messages were uniformly painful to read. ‘Humanity is a plague!’ was bad, ‘We already killed two worlds!’ was worse. The worst was a huge red one that bore a stark black-and-white likeness of Xiù wearing jackboots and yanking a chained and collared Gaoian behind her on a leash.
Xiù bore it with a sad shake of her head, but Julian’s head filled with fantasies of violent retribution against that sign’s creator that were only interrupted she pulled on his sleeve to get his attention. She looked up at him, took his hand and shook her head as if to say ‘let it go.’
He couldn’t. Not when the police were wading into the mob to rescue the stricken ambulance.
“…Kinda feels like our fault, doesn’t it?” he asked.
She shook her head. “We didn’t do this,” she said, and squeezed his hand.
“I’d feel a whole lot better about it if we had,” Allison commented, bitterly. She sighed, extracted herself from the cuddle and swayed upright. Apparently her leg had gone numb from being folded underneath her, because she leaned against the wall to shake it out. “…Turn that shit off, babe.”
“Can we afford to ignore it?” Julian asked.
“Baby, if we watch much more of this I might actually lose what little faith in humanity I had left. We’re no good to anyone if we’re totally fucking depressed.”
“…Right.”
Xiù sighed as he turned the TV off, and whatever force had been drawing her to it snapped off. She sat back, looked away and rubbed her eyes.
“…I just wish it wasn’t so…on the nose,” she said. “I mean, we’ve said that we worried about this stuff and that we don’t like the situation and…everything…”
She looked up and shrugged helplessly. “What more can we do? Don’t they trust us?”
Allison shook her head. “They want villains,” she said.
“They want us to be the villains?”
“No. They want the world to be a simple place with villains in it, so they’ll go find somebody to turn into the villain. You ever read Daniel’s book?”
“Not yet,” Julian admitted while Xiù shook her head.
“It’s helping me cope with all…that.” Allison waved a hand at the TV, then glanced at her watch as it beeped. She shrugged and moved to the middle of the floor where she stood wide and rolled her shoulders, warming up for her yoga. “He said something like, uh…” she thought as she raised her hands high above her head. “*‘When people look for evil, they look toward power. The downtrodden masses can’t possibly be the villains themselves because they aren’t powerful, and power is evil by definition.’*”
“I don’t know if I agree with…” Xiù trailed off. “I mean…do you?”
Allison looked back over her shoulder, shrugged helplessly, then stretched forward and touched her fingertips to the floor in front of her toes. “He’s more qualified to talk about that shit than I am” she said. “But if he’s right…I dunno. I don’t feel powerful.”
“Me either,” Xiù agreed.
“That makes three,” Julian nodded.
He pulled Xiù a little closer, rested his head back and got lost in thought staring at the ceiling for a while, before being dragged back to reality when Xiù’s phone hummed in her pocket.
People had tried all sorts of gimmicks over the years. Phones that were worn in the ear, hidden inside spectacles, controlled via gestures and augmented reality…but when it came down to it, a small touch-screen computer in the pocket with a camera on the back just had too much utility to dismiss. Accessories like Smart Watches, AR sunglasses and real-time in-ear translators were just that: Accessories. People still wanted to send text messages, watch videos, read articles and play games.
About the only permanent upgrade that had stuck over the years was the addition of a forcefield emitter to allow for recharging the phone from ambient sunlight. It also allowed for holographic projection, which Julian found gimmicky but Xiù loved—rather than swiping icon left or right on her screen to answer the call, she got to interact with a cute bird instead.
This time she swatted listlessly at it to answer the call. “Xiù Chang?”
Her shoulders somehow sagged even more as she listened.
“They have? …Did they say why? Oh. Well…No. No, that’s…Obviously they have to…yeah. Did they say how long…? Oh no…really? And there’s nothing you can do to—? No, I’m sure you did. Sorry. Yes, I’ll tell them. You too…Thanks.”
She groaned and put the phone in her pocket when the call ended. “Tā mā de…”
Julian sat up straighter. “I sense bad news…”
“Yeah. That was Mister Williams. He says the JETS team just sent him their schedule for when they think they’ll be ready to come with us..”
“How long?”
“…Six months.”
Allison kicked her legs backwards and swung up out of her forearm stand to kneel disbelievingly in the middle of the floor. “You’re shitting me…”
Xiù raised her hands helplessly. “And that’s assuming other stuff doesn’t come up first…” she added.
“But we’re ready!” Allison stood up and perched on the back of the couch. “We could leave tomorrow if they gave us the go-ahead, they can’t just—”
“They can,” Julian shook his head, and took her hand.
“But six months could be too late, don’t they get that?”
“You know what Firth would say, right?”
“I know, I know. Big Brother Firth…He’d say—” Allison took a deep breath and dropped her voice as low as it would go in a woefully inadequate attempt to imitate Firth’s gravel pit of a voice. “—‘It sucks, but y’gotta trust’ or some bullshit like that.”
She sighed, then lay down on the back of the couch and combed Xiù’s hair with her fingers.
“…I just hope whatever they’re gearing up for is real fuckin’ important…”
Date Point: 13y5m AV
UmOraEw-Uatun, Planet Aru, Elder Space
Lieutenant-Colonel Claude Nadeau
“…That’s terrifying.”
“I know, right?”
“And they did this to themselves?”
Nadeau couldn’t resist another fascinated stare at the image coming from the microscope. He was a physicist himself, his specialties were electrostatic fields and isolated spacetime distortion. Biology, with its assorted chemical wrigglings and organic cell fission got a little uncomfortably under his skin at the best of times.
But OmoAru biology had an extra layer of creeping horror that went far beyond the usual visceral discomfort of peeking under the hood of the human body in action. And it wasn’t natural.
The samples growing under the microscope were augmenting themselves. As each cell in the culture split and contributed new cells to the lattice of tissue, those new cells were greedily enmeshed in a sticky black web of technology, until each one was completely bound up inside its own nanofibre cage.
The process was genius, of course. It spoke to a fusion of biology and technology so far in advance of human medicine that he’d likely never see real progress in that direction in his lifetime. And he was perfectly certain that he didn’t want to.
“Every cell in their bodies,” Doctor Taylor confirmed. It was weird to have him around without his permanent and inseparable colleague Doctor Cote, but modern obstetric advice was very clear – pregnant women were advised to stick to normal Earth gravity as much as possible. “To varying degrees. The filaments are densest in the grey matter and spinal cord, but it’s even present in their hair follicles and stomach lining.”
“To what end though? Why go this far? It’s not as if they were, oh…supersoldiers from science-fiction, or anything. Your average fit human still outclasses them…”
“Well, there are health benefits. The augmented cells have an astonishing resistance to ionizing radiation and we couldn’t induce any of them to become malignant at all. The filaments also provide an easy chemical channel for medication…But that’s really kind of an afterthought. Here…this slide comes from the OmoAru equivalent of a cerebral cortex.”
Taylor called up the next image and Nadeau made a disbelieving noise. He was looking at neurons, there was no doubt about that: Biology only really had one way to make a brain, it seemed. And while the cell chemistry, the tissue density, and a thousand other factors might vary significantly and thereby allow the human brain to allegedly outperform every other sapient brain in the galaxy, the basic gangly structure of axons and dendrites was universal.
In this case, however, the axons and dendrites were cocooned in dense filament sheaths, like they’d been wrapped in microscopic chickenwire.
“This is the end they were after,” Taylor said. “We’re…unclear on exactly how it works, but even having this opens up some incredible possibilities. If each of those can mimic the functionality of the neuron it attaches to then the OmoAru are essentially running a second brain in parallel with the organic one.”
“Meaning…what?” Nadeau asked. “Doubling the performance? Potentially squaring it?”
Taylor grimaced. “Brains aren’t computers,” he said. “I’d hesitate to be mathematical about these things. But…whatever this mesh of synthetic fibers can achieve, it has to be significant. Everything that Corti-made implants can achieve and then some.”
He waved a hand to indicate the collapsed civilization around them. “In theory, the OmoAru should be hyper-geniuses with perfect photographic memories and precision control over their own emotions, bodies and senses. Instead, they’re smiling idiots.”
“Why?”
“Because the implants are now functioning as a Droud.”
Nadeau frowned at the unfamiliar word and turned away from the microscope image. “A what?”
“A Droud. Larry Niven? Gil ‘The Arm’ Hamilton?” Nadeau shook his head and Taylor explained. “From an old scifi novel called ‘Death by Ecstasy.’ A Droud is a cybernetic implant that doubles as a drug. It constantly stimulates the brain’s pleasure centers, overriding all other impulses with permanent overwhelming bliss. Droud users would sit at a table full of food and starve to death because they were too blissed out to notice the hunger, or anything else for that matter.”
“Sounds more like a creative form of suicide than a drug…”
“Or a murder weapon,” Taylor nodded. “That’s what it was in the book, and that’s what this nanoscale mesh is doing. In a much less crude manner than Niven envisioned, too.”
“And on a far larger scale…” Nadeau shivered. “There’s no possibility it’s just a design flaw?” “No.” Taylor hesitated. “Well…no. No, I don’t think so. Almost certainly not. I can’t imagine the technology would have become so ubiquitous if it was obviously flawed. It must have seemed so totally safe that anybody who declined it could safely be written off.”
“And they made them universal.”
“Not just universal, unavoidable. Every OmoAru is born with these implants already grown around their cells. Hell, the female gamete is probably laced with them. And there’s no way to prevent that, not with human technology.”
He sighed, and stepped over Sergeant Lee’s legs to grab his office chair. Lee was flat on his back on the floor under an OmoAru computer desk, applying the brute-force approach to taking it apart. Apparently the OmoAru hadn’t been big believers in user-serviceable parts…or possibly these OmoAru had been paranoid of having their equipment tampered with.
Either way, what Lee and Lewis Beverote had discovered so far between them suggested that despite being millennia in advance of human technology, OmoAru computers weren’t that far different to human ones. A transistor was a transistor, a chip was a chip, and the realities of voltage, heat and signalling rates meant that the computers were the only tech in the ancient lab that might yield fruit when returned to Scotch Creek. For now.
He sat down on it backwards, straddling the back. “This was a calculated act of genocide that would have required generations to plan and implement,” he said.
“That’s the nature of our enemy,” Nadeau sighed, sitting on the edge of the desk. “They think on geological time scales. I tell you, I’ll never be one hundred percent happy that Earth is clean.”
“…Can we even win against that?” Taylor asked candidly.
“Maybe, maybe not. But if we can’t we still go down swinging.”
“Well, the OmoAru certainly did,” Taylor agreed. He reached over and picked up a Huh. The lab had turned out to be littered with the weird metallic spheres, one on every desk, work surface and more besides. It was like the OmoAru scientists who had worked and died in the lab had wanted to keep one in arm’s reach at all times.
“You figured those out?”
“We have a pretty good theory on what they are now, yes.” Taylor nodded. “They’re…kind of an anti-droud. We know what they did to the crew on Sanctuary and, piecing together the evidence…hell. Even holding it right now I feel motivated, powerfully so.”
He put it down with conscious effort.
“It’s an aggression inducer.” Nadeau summarized.
“Exactly. Or…We should probably test it in a proper double-blind trial, but that’s my hypothesis. Don’t ask me how it does what it does, but I’m pretty sure we at last know the what and the why.”
Nadeau sighed and looked around the ruined lab. The mummified scientists had all been respectfully moved to a refrigerated, sanitized area behind layers of plastic sheeting for autopsy. “Do you think they were getting close to a cure?”
“Probably. Why else would they have been targeted by the droud function so aggressively?”
“Well then. Maybe we can honor their legacy.”
“Translating all of this is going to take years.”
“Then it’ll take years. But we have to neuter this weapon, Rufus.”
“No argument here. And if anything, this is further reason to ban neuro tech in the first place.”
“That won’t hold forever. People will get up in arms over the medical potential, the personal convenience…hell, just my body, my rules’ stuff.”
“If you tell them, as the government, that it facilitates alien invasion of your mind…”
“I don’t have that authority.”
“No. But that argument is going to be needed, and soon. Information wants to be free just like water wants to leak.”
“I know. We know. These secrets can’t be kept forever…but we haven’t passed the tipping point yet. We aren’t ready.”
Sergeant Lee heaved himself out from under an OmoAru computer desk, shaking his head. “Sir, that time is coming, and it will be upon us whether we’re ready for it or not…”
Date Point: 13y6m AV
Chiune Station, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Christian Firth
“So. Baguazhang, huh?”
Firth had to admit, he was impressed. Xiù Chang was facing off against Blaczynski on the sparring mat as part of her combatives training, and she wasn’t showing the slightest nerves over it—tying her hair back and wrapping her fists had put her in a calm, focused mode. She jumped on the spot a few times, and he’d already seen her stretch out and limber up. The girl had flexibility and strength, no doubt.
But she wasn’t a HEAT operator.
She nodded. “Yup.”
Her focus changed how she spoke. Firth’s impression of her was that she was quiet until she got to know you, and talkative when she relaxed. When she got tense, she got terse.
“Think you’ll win?” He asked her.
She shook her head. “No.”
Blaczynski glanced up and gave an approving nod. He didn’t know Kung Fu—He knew how to kill people and keep himself from getting killed. One of the most basic elements of that was knowing when you could win and when you couldn’t.
“Cool.” Firth stepped off the mat and gestured for them to begin. “Take it away.”
Chang stepped back, and touched her right fist to her left palm in a Baoquan before adopting a Stance. Feet balanced, arms toward her opponent ready to deflect incoming blows, posture loose and ready to move in any direction at an instant’s notice. Nothing stupid.
Blaczynski crouched like a wrestler, edged closer and closer, then pounced.
Mass and aggression were everything in combatives. The Gaoians had summed it up beautifully in a rhyming triplet: *‘Sha ko yim, Sha ko yuin, Sha ko imim.’*—”Strike First, Strike Last, Strike Once.”
The HEAT practiced swift and overwhelming violence. The only way to survive it was to get the fuck out of the way, which was exactly what Chang did. Blaczynski wasn’t dumb enough to leave an opening for her to counterattack, but Firth had to give her a lot of points for the way she zipped economically aside without turning her back on him or wasting energy. In fact, her feet did all the work—her body remained still and composed on a stable platform.
Too bad for her, she didn’t dare actually strike back. Blaczynski spun around on a dime and faced her head on. It was a lightning quick maneuver and it positioned him to immediately pounce again, and while that burned a lot of energy he had much more to spare.
She evaded attack after swiping attack, because if Blaczynski got his hands on her it was Game Over and she clearly knew it. But each one cost her: She was agile, lightning-quick and slippery…but she just didn’t have the strength or endurance to keep it up for as long, nor counter Blac’s mounting irritation.
Eventually, his competitive instincts won out over his chivalry. He got good and mad, went for the legs and between her fatigue and sheer intimidation factor she was just a fraction of a second too late.
His takedown was so fast and violent that Xiù could barely track his motion, but despite that he did it gently. Almost apologetically so, in fact, with a sheepish smirk on his face just inches above her. It was still enough to leave her groaning on the mat and struggling to breathe.
Firth stepped back onto the mat and squatted next to her. “Well shit. I’ve seen worse.”
Blaczynski detangled himself and sat on his haunches opposite Firth while she propped herself up on her elbows and shook her head at him, panting. “He’s babying me,” she said.
Blac rolled his eyes. “Xiù, I’m literally six times your mass. I’m trying not to kill you.”
“How hard did I lose?”
“I coulda broke you every time I attacked,” he said honestly. “It’s hard holdin’ back.”
She sighed, nodded, then did a kip-up to her feet. “Still, it is good practice…how’s Julian doing?”
“We’ll worry about him after the lesson, I got a few things to teach ya. ‘Cuz Blac? He’s a dumbshit. I ain’t concerned about your feelings. I wanna make sure you’re a goddamned killer.” He ignored the way she blanched at that word and pressed on.
“There’s three things ‘bout being a killer.” He extended a huge finger and counted off. “First, you gotta be willing to fuckin’ break your enemy. There ain’t no such thing as honor when it’s about ‘yer life. Do what it takes to live ‘cuz you only get to lose once.”
He grabbed at his middle finger. “Two, your enemy might have some stupid notions about honor and decency and all that, or he might be some white knight like Blac.” That earned Firth some rolled eyes and a scoff, which were ignored. “You need to punish the idiot and don’t let him ever make that mistake again. And three, you won’t be able to do the previous two things if you’re afraid t’do what’s needed. And that means…you gotta enjoy winning. You can worry about it all later. In the moment, you need to be a fuckin’ bloodthirsty animal.”
“I…I don’t know if—”
“Where’d you get them scars?”
She glanced at her arm.
“Those fuckin’ Lamprey teeth of theirs, right? Fuckin’ shoved your arm down an Alpha’s throat holding a grenade. Musta hurt. What made you do that?”
Her left hand crept over and she brushed her fingers uncomfortably along the scar lines “I…it was going to kill me.”
“Okay. Let’s take me and Blac for a moment.” He pulled the relatively smaller giant into himself and they nuzzled happily for a moment in an intensely affectionate hug. “I fuckin’ love this man, right? He’s…like the little bro I never had, even though I have six little bros. He knows everything about me. But when we fight?”
“He legit tries to kill me,” Blac nodded. “And I try to kill him back.”
“And I love every second of it. S’what I am. I feel bad about that after we’re done. We’ve had some close calls, too. But there’s no escaping that. We’re killers, and we gotta practice killing.”
Xiù tried to cover her expression by going over her kit bag and picking up her water bottle. She didn’t fool either of them, but Firth gave her a second before inviting her to speak her mind.
“Hey. No judgment here. Say what you wanna.”
She turned and looked him in the eye with her water bottle in hand, and shook her head. “…I don’t want to be the kind of person who enjoys killing.”
“You mean like me?”
It wasn’t a malicious question. It could be taken as one, Firth knew, but that wasn’t the intent, and she seemed to get that.
“No. I don’t want to be like you.” She shrugged helplessly. “Sorry.”
Firth gave her a smile. A genuine, warm smile from the depths of his heart. “I know. And…shit, don’t apologize. You’re right that you don’t wanna be like me. But you need to know how t’be a killer because fer all we know, some of these Tengy-wek won’t be so nice as the ones you met the first time.”
Xiù took a long swig from her water bottle, then capped it and tossed it back into her bag.
“…I don’t have to like it, do I?” She asked. “I don’t have to…to relish it. Just so long as I don’t flinch when I have to.”
It was kind of a shame to have to break that kind of naivety. But needs must.
“Look…we ain’t worried about the other two,” Firth told her, and handed her a towel. “Allison and Julian? They’re killers. That’s why they’re off doin’ other stuff right now.”
“…Really?”
“Trust me. It takes one to know one, and that’s a big part of why Julian and I get along. Even if he don’t know that about himself, it’s there. He knows what he’s gotta do. You? I ain’t convinced.”
“I…”
“I read your file, courtesy of Regaari. You hesitate, repeatedly and to your cost. The other two don’t. You need to knock that shit off right the fuck now, or—”
She interrupted him. “But if I don’t have to—!”
“—Or you’re gonna get them killed!”
She shut up like he’d slapped her.
“Empathy is great.” Firth told her. “It’s very human, and it’s why I do what I do. That’s something beautiful and it’s worth protecting.” Blaczynski nodded along vigorously. “It’s why any of us do this awful shit. But feelings and regret? Those come after you survive. Fuck the other guy. The only people who matter are you and your own, you idjit.”
“But…” she touched a hand to her forehead for a second, framing her words. “Don’t we have a responsibility to—”
“To who? To the fucker who’s tryin’a kill you? Why the fuck do you owe him anything? Your responsibility is always to yourself first. That’s even true of guys like us. Big hero stuff? It ain’t like the movies and we ain’t superheroes. In the real world, if you fuck around with pullin’ your punches then you just endanger the people you’re protectin’. *‘Sha ko yim, Sha ko yuin, Sha ko imim.’*“
Xiù blinked at the Gaori phrase, but it had the desired effect—Firth saw her defences lower, saw her start to doubt.
He nodded, and decided to mix it up. “This ain’t about skill or technique,” he said. “You’re pretty good, really. Maybe better than Blac in fact, and he’s ‘bout the best wrassler I ever met besides ‘Base or ‘Horse. This is about your head. ‘Know thyself,’ yeah? The whole Zen thing, if you don’t mind my rampant cultural appropriation.”
Blaczynski snorted. “Zen is Japanese, bro,” he pointed out.
“Eh.” Firth waved a hand vaguely. “I’m from Kentucky, what do I know?”
The self-deprecating humor brought some warmth back to Xiù’s face at least, though she said nothing.
“…But seriously,” he pressed. “You don’t know yourself, and this here might be a matter of life or death. It ain’t about what you want, or about likin’ it. It’s about whether you will kill when you need to.”
He folded his arms and gave her his best Dare Face. “Will you?”
Xiù glanced at her arm a second time, then nodded and returned to her corner of the mat, ready for another bout.
She took a deep breath, and focused again. This time a little sharper, a little colder, a little deadlier. “…Yes.”
Blaczynski grunted, and stepped into his corner, and assumed an aggressive crouch.
“Prove it,” he said.