Date Point: 13y7m AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Near 3Kpc Arm
Vemik Sky-Thinker
The Given-Men were meeting.
They did it twice every moon, as a way of keeping the peace. The tribes were not comfortable living so close together. Already there had been small raids—A killing here, a rape there—it would already have gotten out of hand without the Given-Men.
They were doing a pretty good job of holding up a difficult peace, too. Most of them.
Some were part of the problem.
“I don’t trust this ‘steel’ of yours, Yan. It feels too much like those Skithral-things.”
They were sitting around the village fire, trading news and werne meat, and listening to Tarek’s complaining. Vemik thought the young Given-Man was holding a grudge of some kind. He was showing no respect at all to Yan, who was being strangely patient with him.
Given-Men secrets. Vemik was convinced that they caused more wounds than they healed.
Yan nodded agreeably. “It is a powerful magic. A new kind of magic, too, neither giving nor taking.”
“A dark magic, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t!” Yan said it with a snarl. It was a mostly friendly face, but…not completely, not this time. He offered Tarek his water-skin, though, and the younger Given-Man seemed to accept the gesture.
It took a little while, but as the fire ate through a few logs the mood around the clearing relaxed again. Jokes were told, stories shared, and Yan was almost back to his cheery, gruff self when Tarek again decided to spoil the mood.
“Tell me again about these ‘Sky-People’ you love so much.”
Yan paused, and mulled his water over for a second before swallowing it and putting the skin away. “Love?” he asked. “No more than I love you, Tarek.”
Most of the nearby men trilled a nervous, strained kind of laughter.
“Yet you trust their magic.”
“I trust it like any magic I can make with my own hands,” Yan replied evenly. “Do you trust the magic you learned from your father?”
“Yes. He didn’t learn to hunt from imaginary Sky-People who came in floating huts!”
“Sky-Thinker. Would imaginary people have words like you learned, do you think?”
Vemik screwed up his face. “‘Arrow’ and ‘English’ are too hard to say to make up.”
“There are the rest of us too,” added Vemet. “Would we all lie? And share this freely? We have taught these things to anyone who comes and lives with us.”
“So you can grow your Tribe and bully the others.”
Yan’s eyes narrowed and he bared his fangs slightly. “Tarek, if we wanted that, we would not have taught you about ‘bows’ and ‘steel’ knives. Don’t be a bull.”
Tarek surged to his feet, and the men of Yan’s tribe grew tense. Yan had warned them before the meeting that Tarek was a young Given-Man who had only just ‘got his first Fire,’ whatever that meant. Knowing that they were dealing with a ‘hot-headed’ Given-Man who was prone to anger did nothing to put them at ease.
“Tarek,” Yan cautioned, standing carefully and calmly, “Remember your Fire, remember what you learned at the Lodge. This will pass if you let it flow around you.”
“How can I!? You are tainting our tribes with this dark magic of yours—did you learn it from an undergod? Is that who the Sky-People are?”
“They’re People,” Yan stressed. “They’re no more of a god of any kind than you are.”
“And nobody but your tribe has ever seen them!”
Yan edged away from the meeting-fire and closer to the big clearing where they had made a ‘landing pad’ for the Sky-People. It was clever, Vemik saw; he was leading an increasingly angry man away from fire, villagers, or the village.
“…Is it that you want me to be lying?” he asked. “Why? We give you magic nobody has ever seen before! We share our new Sky-Thoughts, new words, new tools. Why can’t that be for the sake of peace? Can’t I want peace?”
“Maybe your Singer will cast a spell on this ‘steel’ and we all lose our knives!”
“And maybe not. But if that is what you fear, make your knives from stone as you always did. It is a gift, Tarek Given-Man, and you are young and foolish like we all were once. Go. Calm yourself, and we will forget this.”
That was apparently an insult Tarek could not bear. He snarled long and low while staring Yan in the eye.
Then before anyone even knew he had done it, he drew his bow and shot.
Maybe he missed, or maybe Yan dodged faster than Vemik had ever seen anyone move…but that didn’t stop the arrow’s flight. Vemik’s cousin Yerak wasn’t so quick, or so lucky. The whole tribe went still, stiller than Yerak himself who blinked at the shaft in his chest as though it didn’t hurt at all and was just…surprising. Blood frothed in the corner of his mouth as he reached up to touch the arrow, but his hand never got there. He coughed, just once, looked desperately into Vemik’s eyes, and collapsed.
Tarek seemed more surprised than anyone. He dropped his bow, looked to Yan as though he wanted to take it back, but it was far too late. Yan was already rounding on him with murder crackling from him like a new fire.
With no other option but to fight for his life, Tarek ripped a stone knife from its sheath and people from all the tribes scattered away from him as he barged forward, but whatever advantage he might have had in youth, Yan had every other advantage in size, strength, speed, experience and pure god-fire hatred.
He didn’t need his bow, or his spear, or his knives. For this, all Yan needed was his hands. Tarek’s knife opened a shallow cut in the back of his forearm, but Yan’s skin was thick and tough and he didn’t seem to notice. He grabbed the younger Given-Man’s wrist and forced it back while his other hand gouged at the younger man’s eyes. He missed, barely, and suffered a kick between the legs as Tarek wrenched himself free.
Yan’s rage was up too high to notice. Tarek tried to scramble up a tree and gain better ground but Yan was much too fast for him. He surged up after him, grabbed him by the tail and tore him off the tree, smashing the younger Given-Man to the ground with so much force that Vemik felt the thud through his feet. But Given-Men were tough, and Tarek was already up before Yan could jump to the ground, limping but mobile and brandishing his knives of manhood.
Yan’s good steel knife flashed in the sun as he drew it. He crouched low and the two Given-Men circled, each daring the other’s guard with probing jabs before leaping back out of reach again.
Tarek’s nerve broke first. When one of Yan’s questing stabs glanced off his knife and chipped it he slashed wildly and retreated, trying to open up as much distance as he possibly could. Yan was on him in a heartbeat with a vicious slash that almost stuck home and which Tarek only avoided by leaping high up and backwards, fighting for any room or safety at all.
Instead, the leap cost Tarek the fight. He jumped high enough that Yan could surge under, again grab him by the tail, spin him around and slam him to the ground. This time he was on Tarek in a flash and they grappled for a moment, both desperate to get position. Yan’s strength won out and he quickly wrestled Tarek onto his back and started throwing punches, blows which he desperately and fruitlessly tried to fend off. Each fist slammed into him with enough force to break bones or maybe kill any ordinary man, but Tarek was tough and endured the powerful blows for what seemed like forever.
But nobody could stand long against Yan, not even a fellow Given-Man. In the end it was his pure strength that won the fight, when his fists finally smashed through Tarek’s guard and slammed into his jaw. Punch after brutal punch made the younger Given-Man dizzy and defenseless, and Yan finally took his chance. With one quick move he yanked Tarek up and off his back, flipped him overhead, then smashed him face-down in the dirt as hard as his strength would let him.
That move all by itself would have killed anyone but a Given-Man, Vemik decided. But Yan was only getting started. He grabbedTarek’s shoulders with his hands, his feet gripped firmly around Tarek’s waist. He grunted, screwed up his face, and heaved backwards with all the strength he could manage.
For a long moment nothing happened as Tarek struggled weakly in Yan’s terrible grip, but the bigger man never let up and poured on the effort, until his muscles were shaking, until Tarek was howling in agony and mortal terror, until—
The crunch was so loud it was sickening. Blood bubbled from Tarek’s mouth and his face went slack but Yan still wasn’t done. He picked Tarek up and slammed him to the ground so hard the thump could be felt through the ground. Then he did it again, and again, and again. By the fifth slam Tarek had stopped moving. Yan didn’t notice and kept right on slamming harder and harder. Bones crunched, blood splattered, and Tarek was long dead before his body was too broken and loose to toss around any longer.
Yan, on the other hand, looked like he would have liked to do so much more. He almost seemed disappointed that the fight was over, and Vemik knew he’d never forget the look of bored contempt on his Given-Man’s face as Yan snarled dismissively, reached down with one hand, grabbed Tarek’s head by the jaw, and ripped it right off his body with a horrific tearing sound.
There was no honor-mark for a kill like that. Instead he swaggered over the village fire and dumped the pitiful lump that had once been a man into the flames with a grunt of contempt. He stood and watched for a long and terribly quiet interval, breathing heavily and covered in blood.
Vemik looked around. The men of Tarek’s tribe had all fled for their lives, but all the others had readied their knives, bows and spears, Given-Man, adult and boy alike from every tribe. The peace was threatened, and that meant…
He became aware of a weight in his hand, and glanced down to find that he was holding his own steel knife; just like everyone else watching silently from the trees, he’d drawn it without thinking.
A fight between Given-Men was…He’d never seen one. They play-wrestled all the time, maybe traded insults now and then, but there was always a sense of happy friendship between them. A fight like that…
“Vemik! Come.” Yan turned away from the flames and was storming towards Tarek’s village with undiminished murder in his eyes and his knife in his hand. In the trees around him, the men of his own tribe and all the allied tribes took up their weapons and joined him.
Vemik swarmed down his tree and loped desperately along the ground at Yan’s heel. “What now?”
Yan spat in the dirt. “Something awful,” he said with flint in his voice. “I go to their Singer and claim her tribe’s women. If we’re lucky, she’s wise.”
“A—and if she isn’t?” Vemik knew the answer already, in his gut, but he had to ask.
“Then we Take their women instead.”
“…And the men?”
Yan indicated the armed, solemn men swinging through the branches around them. “If they live through the night, and once I say they can, maybe another tribe will take them. That’s the price of Taking-Magic, Vemik. Tarek did a very, very stupid thing and the men of his tribe must pay for it.”
“And…The children?”
Yan didn’t look at him. “…Pray to the gods their Singer is wise, Sky-Thinker.”
Dry-mouthed, Vemik glanced back at the sorry, flat thing that just moments before had been a lively, fighting man.
He prayed like he’d never prayed before.
Date Point: 13y8m AV
Dataspace adjacent to Hierarchy Relay Irujzen-4942
Entity, Instance 4
Hierarchy systems took no notice of the physical world, except with regard to problems like potential discovery. They had watched the damaged mercenary ship in the outer system like a hawk, on a hair-trigger to annihilate it should it stray too far in-system. But the instant it turned around and limped away at a slow warp having finished its repairs, they lost interest.
They ignored the comet entirely. Comets were a natural phenomenon, only worthy of the Hierarchy’s interest if they endangered critical hardware. The fact that this one left a particularly spectacular blue-white tail across the heavens was of zero interest to them.
The Entity, on the other hand, was enthralled. Ava Ríos had never seen a comet, nor had any of the other sapient beings whose assorted consciousnesses had contributed to its core. Hers were the most complete memories, but her memories of night-time involved artificial lights: street lights, headlights, Christmas. She had never strayed out from the dome of light pollution that obscured her vision of the sky before moving to Cimbrean.
The Entity remembered lying between Adam and Sara on the sand, listening to their impromptu campfire crackle as it struggled to warm her feet but oblivious to the cold as she’d stared up and out into the bedazzled infinity she’d never seen before.
The Entity didn’t have feet, and digital environments didn’t generate sensory analogues to hot and cold. But through the Hierarchy infrastructure protecting Relay Irujzen-4942 it had much better eyes: sensors that didn’t just watch the comet, but could <Taste> and <Smell> its chemical composition as it plunged fatally toward the star.
The chemistry mapped strangely to the ghosts of sensory experience it retained: Sodium was <Salty>, Ammonia had a sharp and toxic scent that raised a whole memory: <WatchingRosaCleaningTheWindowsWhileHomeSickFromSchool>.
Methane, unexpectedly, was sweet and nutty, while guanine added a surprising fruity touch that evoked the concept <OatmealRaisinCookie>, and…
…Guanine?
It reviewed the sensor logs and quickly discovered the full spectrum of DNA components: Adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine plus phosphate and deoxyribose. The traces were beyond faint, each well below the sensor’s statistical false positive threshold…but they were all there.
Which wasn’t conclusive…but it did provoke <Suspicion>.
The Entity watched for three weeks as the comet skidded through a hairpin bend around the star and out into a futile orbit that would carry it to within a few light-seconds of the Irujzen Relay world, the third planet. It had just enough impetus, but that comet was doomed to plunge into the star’s photosphere and detonate somewhere among the seething plasma.
As its tail swept over the third planet, a chunk broke off.
It wasn’t a big chunk. In fact it was only about the size of a compact car, which compared to the immense mass of the comet itself was nothing. If the Entity hadn’t been watching the comet suspiciously it would have gone completely unnoticed.
But the physics were just a fraction wrong—that chunk accelerated.
It did so by only the tiniest amount, a sharp puff that lasted barely three seconds. Conceivably it might even be the product of a gas pocket escaping confinement, or something like that….but the Entity put that fact together with the suspicious organic chemistry and did the metaphysical equivalent of sitting back in its seat and giving a satisfied nod.
It performed some delicate surgery on the relay’s sensor logs, erasing the evidence. It doubted whether the Hierarchy would have noticed, but it couldn’t take the risk. Not when it seemed somebody was finally acting on Six’s tip about the Irujzen Relay.
Then it watched as the chunk lanced down into the upper atmosphere, shot over the relay facility high in the ionosphere, and detonated somewhere above a forest hundreds of miles to the east. It gave the architects of that flyby a personal round of applause—the explosion looked completely natural, even more so thanks to the Entity’s own careful intervention. A neatly convincing Tunguska impact, right on its doorstep.
It peeled off an instance-copy of itself and dispatched itself to go update <SelfPrimeInstance>
At last, things were moving in the right direction.
Date Point: 13y8m AV
The Dog House gym, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Julian Etsicitty
“I told you you’d be amazed.”
Warhorse’s training plan had, right from the outset, promised exactly two things: pain, and results. It had delivered both in ample measure: The first two weeks were torture but Adam had asked for trust and delivered a firm warning against quitting.
The trust was easy; no matter what they did, no matter how absurdly heavy the weight or how dangerously weak Julian felt, he knew beyond any doubt that ‘Horse wouldn’t let him get hurt. He felt safe under the barbell even though he’d never really lifted with free weights before. Machines, sure. Kettlebells and dumbbells, absolutely. But a straight squat under a barbell?
‘Horse was nothing but beaming, cheery confidence, and it was infectious.
But the pain. ‘Horse hadn’t been joking about it, and quitting seemed more and more like a great idea with every aching morning. Every single day was filled with the kind of endless, throbbing hurt that left Julian too exhausted to do anything when he got back to Misfit at night. Staying awake long enough to give Xiù the cuddles she’d demanded after one particularly harrowing combatives session with Firth had been almost impossible.
Then there was the food, and the vitamins, and the supplements. Both Dane and Adam were practically stuffing him to the gills. Sometimes it hurt even thinking about food. Especially the rice!
He’d come damn close to giving up. But he hadn’t: He’d tried his best to trust, to push doggedly on and bear the pain of the training, of Adam’s merciless stretching sessions, and the crushing agony of his therapeutic massages ironing out his burning and knotted muscles. It was…awful.
But about two weeks in his trust was finally rewarded. The stiffness faded away, the pain dulled to something like an old friend, and Julian started feeling…
Fantastic.
The payoff that made it all worthwhile was a dramatic and rapidly compounding improvement in basically everything. He was much stronger, he could run faster and farther, and the flexibility issues that had plagued him for years were gone. It boggled the mind that he’d come so far so quickly.
And while he tried not to be vain, Julian had to admit…he was looking good on it. His clothing was tighter in all the right ways, he felt good, he was leaner, more limber, and could finally scratch the middle of his own back.
He was still himself, still rangy, long-limbed and loose, but…sharper. Bigger and more defined. Better. It was a heady feeling.
“…Is that really me?”
“Yup!” Adam’s irrepressible cheer really was infectious. “You’re stronger than you look, too.”
He really was. A lifetime of splitting firewood, building shelters and hiking cross-country was one thing, but all that work hadn’t ever given him the strength to do weighted pull-ups until he got bored, and he’d never even heard of a peg climb before. Now he could swarm all over the damn thing.
The moment that really hit him in the head, however, was when he racked the bar in the squat rack, looked again at the plate count, and finally did the math. Even in Earth gravity it was more than he’d have ever foreseen himself lifting, but ‘Horse had cranked up the gravity past 1.2G to prepare him for Akyawentuo.
He had to do the math three times in his head before finally deciding that no, he wasn’t deluding himself.
“…Jesus.”
‘Horse beamed that puppy smile of his and bounced on his toes. “See? Look at you! A few months more and you’ll be the best damn working-man athlete on Cimbrean!”
Julian had always been blessed with a naturally rugged build, both from his mixed heritage and a lifetime of outdoor pursuits, but he’d never been much for pure exercise. He’d never seen the point before. Now, there was an addicted tickle in the back of his mind that was hungry to find out just how far he could really go.
“So…what now? Do I keep growing?”
“If you want, yeah. It’ll be harder but you could do it.”
“…How much more are we talking about here?”
Adam stepped back and looked him up and down with his head slightly on one side. “Honestly? You’re naturally a big guy. Broad chest, long arms…just the right frame. You could pack on a lot of muscle if you really wanted it, and you’ve got at least a year of solid growth left before you’d need to get super serious, too. Also,” he added, “You have a lot more strength gains left in you. Keep it up and you’ll be a big dude, hard as oak, and fuckin’ scary.”
‘Scary’ by Adam’s definition had to be something impressive. Julian looked at the barbell again; it was sagging noticeably under the weight, making it difficult to imagine how ‘stronger’ was still an option. “Really?”
“Oh yeah, you’re made for it, bro. Trust me, you and I are lot alike.” Adam fished his phone out of his pocket, “Lemme show you.”
He tapped through his photos, turned bright red and zipped past some…flattering…pics of Kovač on a beach that Julian pretended not to see, then got to an old album of himself.
“These are me at fifteen when I started lifting. My stats are at the bottom.”
Julian flicked through them. It was hard to connect the human wall standing next to him with the healthy, lanky, robust boy in the photos, but the face was definitely the same right down to the smile and the wide, square cheekbones. And, sure enough, he had the same long arms and broad chest not unlike a shorter version of Julian himself. Under the muscles, he and Adam were actually much the same shape.
The pictures were like watching a time lapse video. Each one was only a week apart from its neighbors, sometimes less, but in every single one he could see the way that young man had transformed himself into Warhorse.
“Holy hell, man.”
Adam nodded. “So you see what I mean, right? You’ve got the right work ethic and the right genetics, too. When I say you’ve got it in you, I know what I’m talkin’ about.”
Julian turned back toward the mirror and flexed his arm experimentally. His sleeves stretched and rolled back a little to accommodate his biceps, which had never happened before.
“How do you know this is right for me, though? I mean, you’re sort of a one-track fella.”
Adam wasn’t the least bit offended and grinned cheesily. “Dude. I’m, like, the Alpha of Meatheads. Of course I want everyone all huge! But the human body is amazing, Bro. Newbies never believe what they can do until they do it for themselves.”
“…Huh.”
To Julian’s faint surprise, the idea had more appeal than he’d first thought: the training was actually kinda fun now that he wasn’t wallowing in pain all day long, and he’d come a long way, fast. Part of him was honestly curious to see just how much he truly had in him.
But everything came with a catch.
“Say I wanted to really push it. What would it take?”
“Well…” Adam considered. “Gettin’ you big and strong is pretty much in the bag. You’re done with the worst. Gettin’ you as big as you could possibly ever be? Different story entirely.”
“A whole lotta food and time?”
“Hell yeah, man. You’ve seen how I eat.”
…And there was the catch.
“I’m pretty sure the three of us plan to keep exploring and keep flying as long as we’re needed,” Julian said. “We have to take our food with us and, uh, Misfit is not a big ship.”
“Yup, I get that. We ain’t gonna be pushing you when you’re deployed, you won’t have the resources. But frankly you’ve been under-eating for years and it’s cost you big time, so now we’re playing catch up. We’ll scale back before you go but right now you better be packin’ it away.”
“Won’t I just lose it all again, though?”
“Nah. You’ll keep it just fine now we know what changes your diet needs. Take advantage, man. Not many guys have your abilities and most never learn to use ‘em ”
Julian scratched the back of his neck, spurred by a twinge of embarrassment. “I was never into sports…”
“Neither was I, not until I came here. I got lucky and made friends with the right guys when I was a kid, y’know? They helped me sort my head out, taught me how to wrestle and lift…thank fuck for them, I’d have never figgered any of this out without ‘em.”
“And now you’re paying it forward.” Things were starting to make sense.
Adam grinned sheepishly. “I won’t lie! You said ‘no meatslab’ and I get it…here, lemme ask you this.” Adam flexed his forearms, which were bigger around than Julian’s thighs and looked like a pit of writhing snakes. “Does this look like it’s just for show?”
“…No, not really.”
“Exactly, you can tell just by looking. I’m a functional athlete first and I’m a meathead second. Big don’t gotta mean useless, and you don’t necessarily gotta be a hulk to be strong. Trust me, I know what you’re after and I won’t let you fuck it up. And down the road, if you wanna really push yourself and make a linebacker feel like a little bitch? You’ll be strong and healthy enough to do it properly. I promise you that.”
That was…a hell of an offer. And if Julian was honest with himself, Adam had done a lot for him already: he really would benefit from his newfound strength since he was gonna live with Ten’Gewek. They valued strength. Hell they needed it just to survive, and so would he. If he was going on this mission for maybe years on end he had to be respectable and useful.
Plus, honestly, he got off on being Xiù and Allison’s ‘boy candy.’ There was no point pretending otherwise…But would they like it if he pushed himself even harder? Would he?
Probably not. Somehow that felt like it would stop being fun, and start being work. Or that he wouldn’t have time for anything else he enjoyed doing, or for the girls…And that reminded him of the meatheads he’d known growing up. Lifting seemed like it was all they ever did or cared about, and Julian just didn’t see the point in a life like that.
In the end, life had to win over ego…but he just couldn’t resist one last macho caveman question. “You said if I wanted to ‘push myself.’ …think I could ever match with Walsh?”
The big shaggy Californian wasn’t on the HEAT but he was far and away the single biggest and strongest man Julian had ever seen outside of them, and easily the most athletic, too. If Julian had a shot at that kind of ability, then maybe—
“Nope!”
‘Horse said it completely in good cheer without any malice at all, and still managed to not pull any punches.
Julian grimaced. “Damn. Shot me down nice and hard,” he grumbled. “Why not?”
“His frame’s even better for it than yours. He’s been training since he was five, he’s got a two-hundred pound head start, and he’s still young and growing. And he’s part of the SOR, so he’s got all his food and time paid for. And honestly, you wanna push yourself at his level? You’d need some prescriptions from the sport doc. It’s legal on Cimbrean and they’re perfectly safe if you follow the goddamned protocol like ‘yer told, but…” Adam let the thought drop off with a matter-of-fact shrug.
And there was the final deal-breaker.
“I kinda figured you and the, uh, ‘Lads’ were on a…special regime,” Julian nodded. “And…no offense big fella, but that kinda thing ain’t my style.”
Adam nodded amiably. “S’cool. You gotta do what’s right for you, bro. Anyway…enough talk. You’ve got one more superset to finish!”
That was another half-hour of full-body torture, and by the time they were finished Julian was as soaking wet as if he’d been hosed down, every single muscle was trembling, and he could barely walk.
When Adam gave him an arm to lean on, it felt like a reward for a job well done.
“It’s my turn now. Think you can stand up in 3G and spot me?”
“Do I get to say no?”
Adam handed him one of his evil recovery drinks and chuckled. “Nuh-uh. I got girl questions.”
That settled it. Julian didn’t know if he was really the most qualified guy to give girl advice, but it seemed to be gospel among the HEAT that any dude with two girlfriends must be some kind of relationship Buddha.
He wasn’t about to disavow them of that—the whole pack of them were so far ahead of basically everyone else that it was nice to have something they didn’t.
“…So what’d you do this time?” he asked.
It was good to give something back.