Date Point: 14y AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth
President Arthur Sartori
Life as President demanded some calculated risks when it came to personal time. All work and no play made Jack not just a dull boy, but potentially a fatally over-stressed man. Sometimes, Sartori just had to stay up late to watch TV and gamble on nothing important coming up in the small hours of the morning.
So, he’d stayed up to watch HBO. That Show With Steven Lawrence and an episode of The Void before bed. A sensible balance between entertainment and responsibility, or so he’d thought before he’d been woken up at 2am and bustled underground to ‘the Tank.’ Not even a fresh-made Sunrise was going to touch that kind of sleep deprivation.
He hated the Tank. It was imposing, windowless, ultra-secure and easily his least favorite room in the whole world because sitting down in it almost invariably meant bad news and hard decisions.
More of the former than the latter, today—the news was bad, verging on being the worst, but the decisions were mostly straightforward. Terrible, but straightforward.
“Recommendations?” he asked, reviewing the assembled data in front of him. He’d committed a lot of it to memory before, but there were so many planned-for contingencies that one busy head couldn’t have prayed to retain all the details. Especially not after three hours of sleep.
Everybody in the room looked equally sleep-deprived. Stan McMurdoe, the Secretary of Defense; Homer Mayfair, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs; even his advisors Margaret White and Paul Nicholls, who both usually managed to look groomed and composed no matter the hour, were blinking and struggling not to yawn.
General Mayfair was handling it best. He was an essentially focused individual and probably more than used to moments like these at the wrong end of the night. “You need to recall the XVIII Airborne Corps now Mister President,” he advised.
Sartori nodded, and gave the order without needing any elaboration on the grounds that Mayfair wasn’t a man to stress his words like that unless he was absolutely certain.
“What’s your proposed objective?” he asked.
“Secure the Gao,” McMurdoe replied promptly. “Their homeworld at a minimum, and their other colony worlds if possible. My understanding is there is an on-the-ground agent who is helping.”
More than one, Sartori recalled. Some of which went far beyond weird. “I’m holding the details on that close to the chest for now, sorry. Strategy?”
“Obviously we need to deploy a system defence field. We have several, but they’ll be vulnerable to enemy action from the inside. To prevent their destruction and to keep the Hierarchy from moving and coordinating, we need to secure and disable the whole planet’s telecommunications network in coordination with Clan Longear and their operations staff. This was recommended by Champion Meereo under duress, and it means our secondary objective will be massive humanitarian relief.”
“How massive?”
“It’ll be the biggest humanitarian operation in US history. If we shut down all global telecommunications here on Earth right now, people would start dying in…minutes. Hours at the most,” Mayfair informed him. “And it sounds like the Gaoians might be even more reliant on theirs than we are on ours.”
Sartori exhaled slowly under the weight of that revelation. “…Understood, make plans accordingly and assume this will be an Allied operation. What’s our exit strategy?”
“Once Gao is secured against incursion, we remain for a brief period to ensure some modicum of stability. Then we leave. Ideally, the internal affairs will be left to Champion Daar, from my understanding. I…confess I do not understand their internal politics, Mister President.”
“I don’t think they do half the time…” Sartori grumbled, prompting a collection of tired, stressed half-laughs.
“There are other concerns, Mister President.”
“Such as?”
“Our combatant commanders will need nuclear weapons authority. I want permission to activate a football and send it along.”
“…Don’t we already have system shields with them?”
“…A nuclear football, Mister President.”
Of course, he was referring to the nuclear authorization briefcase. Sartori grunted softly to voice his frustration with not only his own tiredness but also the constant, overlapping acronyms, code names…just names in general. Why weren’t people more creative? And why was it always a sports analogy? He liked a good ball game as much as the next man, but…
He focused. “…Right. Who will be the senior American commander?”
“That would be Brigadier-General Stewart.”
“That’s an awfully low rank for nuclear release. Is there no one else?”
“The whole situation is too fluid. We need to keep command off the field.”
“Understood. Conrad, would you please?” Major Conrad was the assigned aide-de-camp who was tasked with the care of the Presidential Emergency Satchel, and who would be the one to activate Stewart’s unenviable new football. Conrad stepped forward and laid the device open for the President’s inspection.
“Weapons release is hereby delegated to Brigadier-General Stewart and to his designated Executive Officer.” The President reached into his pajama pocket, pulled out a plastic card, and snapped it open to reveal the appropriate code on a tough little slip inside. He’d entered an activation code only once before, during the scramble to the Guvnurag homeworld; Doing so a second time matched President Truman’s record, and somehow he just knew that there would be future activations.
“Confirmed, Mister President. I will see to it.”
“Good. How long is all this going to take?”
“We should be mobilized in thirty-six hours,” Mayfair assured him. “From there, if our friends in Gao come through with some beacons, we’ll be able to deploy instantly. If not…the record time from Cimbrean to Gao is four and a half days.”
“Fortunately, the intel that sparked all this suggests it’ll take the Hunters a week to fully mobilize,” McMurdoe added.
“I hear a ‘but’ hidden in there somewhere…” Sartori predicted.
“…But they don’t need to fully mobilize to still bring overwhelming mass to bear. Even a fraction of the Swarm-of-Swarms is more than we could handle. If they decide to send a vanguard…”
“How soon can we get anything on Gao?” Sartori asked. The question was answered with shaking heads.
“Thirty-six hours to start mobilizing any force of any significant mass,” Mayfair said. “The HEAT is our most rapid response, and even they won’t be able to get there instantly without a beacon. If we had one…four hours, give or take. But Mister President, the HEAT is not a sustaining force. They can get in, do one mission, and they’re done.”
“Do they already have a target?”
“Wormhole suppression. There’s an experimental Clan Longear facility. Unless we take and hold it and use it to suppress hostile wormholes inside the system defence field we put up, victory of any kind will be outright impossible.”
“…How long can they hold it?”
Mayfair straightened. The room’s overhead lighting made the lines in his forehead and around his eyes look even deeper than they already were. “Until the cavalry arrives, sir. They don’t have any choice in the matter.”
“And who will the cavalry be?” Sartori asked him.
“Us. Or if we’re lucky, friendly Gaoians. We’ll…know when we know.”
Sartori nodded grimly, and stood up. “…Everybody who can should get some rest,” he said. “Paul, Margaret, that includes you. You need to be fresh for the speech you’re going to help me write.”
“What’s going to be in it?” Margaret White asked, standing up herself.
Sartori sighed, knowing that any sleep he did snatch tonight was going to be restless and nightmare-fuelled. His next words were undoubtedly going to condemn an unthinkable number of sapient beings to death.
“I think it’s time for us stop hiding the existence of the Hierarchy,” he said.
Date Point: 14y AV
Planet Akyawentuo, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm
Vemet Stone-Tapper
“These…guns. There are many kinds.”
Jooyun nodded gently. He was sitting with his back to the trunk and the w…–the rifle across his knees, looking relaxed and limber in a way that the People never quite managed. All long legs and easy grace. He was a good bit bigger than Vemet remembered, more People-like in the way he’d scaled the tree without Vemet’s help this time…
Vemet still found that most of the Sky-People were slender to look at, and that hadn’t changed about Jooyun. He was like…like a tall and stretched out young man who had grown strong from the hunt. He was bigger than Coombes and a lot bigger than Daniel or Hoeff, but…
They probably had exactly the right word for it. Something to ask about later.
He had said something about the ‘exercises’ he did with Walsh and Daar every day in the morning and at sunset, too. That seemed very strange to Vemet, and Vemik was no doubt pestering Jooyun with all sorts of questions. It was like…doing work without actually doing any work, and he’d done a lot of that just to get stronger for his ‘mission’ with the People.
It was strange that he was willing to sweat and ache that much for them. And humbling.
Jooyun looked back over his shoulder at the other two guns. “Ayup. Those two fellas have ‘machine’ guns. They can fire—”
“Net, Tiny. Gonna fire a test burst and clear my weapon.”
That was a strange radio-name, the one thing Walsh was completely not. He was very tall, thickly built and strong like Yan, and had none of Jooyun’s…stretched-out feeling, or whatever it was. He was a bit of a Sky-Thinker, too. Sky-People were strange.
But friendly. Jooyun chuckled at the radio, “Well, you’ll see pretty—”
Vemet flinched and gripped the branch with his tail and both feet at the sound that snapped across the clearing. It sounded like a strong branch breaking, as quick and as regular as a tree-striker bird knocking, as loud as a hammer on steel. Just a hand’s-number of sharp *crack*s, then again, and a third time.
A child began wailing in the village.
“…That. They can fire like that.” Jooyun looked amused.
“Yours…can’t?”
“This? Nah. This is a hunting rifle. Those are for when Sky-Tribes go to war.”
“…A Sky-People war.” Vemet sighed at the thought. “My son had silly ideas like maybe you would have made peace forever between yourselves.”
Jooyun chuckled in the back of his throat. “We’re workin’ on it,” he said. “Daniel thinks it won’t ever happen…He’s probably right, too.”
“Why?”
“Vemet my friend, if we could answer that question, we wouldn’t need to have asked it in the first place.”
“And…Awisun’s gun? The one that earned her the name Sky-Storm?”
“Hers is good for both.”
Vemet nodded, thoughtfully.
“I never got to ask, before,” he said. “But…she protects you?”
“We protect each other. I know it must seem strange to you, a woman who’s so good at taking-magic.”
“The Singer is a good hunter,” Vemet reminded him, then trilled at a happy memory. “I remember her rite of manhood. She brought back a bigger trophy than I did when I came of age…maybe we made it so a good trophy would find her, but…”
“She still Took it,” Jooyun finished for him.
“Yes. The gap isn’t so wide as some women want to believe. Men want to Give to their children too.”
Jooyun squirmed uncomfortably on his branch, stretched out his legs, re-settled himself and said nothing. It was a talkative silence that said much to Vemet’s ears.
The silence lasted a hand of hands of heartbeats before being broken by the wa—the radio again. And as Sky-Magic went, hearing a man’s voice come out of a tiny black stone was almost as hard to grasp as the thinking-stones.
“Tiny, Chimp. Good effect. Our turn.”
This time, Vemet gripped the branch and was ready for the rapid heavy crack of the ‘machine gun’ being fired. He didn’t flinch, but the baby in the village, whose long-suffering mother had only just quieted it, shrieked back into full voice again.
Jooyun snorted as the echoes died away.
“I bet Vemik is asking him questions. Actually…” he picked up his ‘radio.’ “Chimp…” he paused and sighed. From what Vemet could gather, he really didn’t like the radio-name he had been given. “…Playboy, I guess. Good effect. Don’t be spinnin’ tall tales to my favorite [cavemonkey] now.”
‘Cavemonkey’ seemed to be an affectionate tease he used for all the People. That seemed good to Vemet; gods wouldn’t tease people, and they wouldn’t grin while doing so.
“Playboy, Chimp. Copy that. Aww, can’t I have a little fun?”
“No, man. He’ll take anything you say as [Gospel].”
Vemet trilled at the sound of his own indignant son’s voice over the radio. “Will not!”
“Net, Boss. A little more radio discipline please.”
A series of clicks, which Jooyun said meant everyone was saying ‘yes.’
Jooyun scratched the back of his neck and chuckled. “Spoilsport,” he commented, for Vemet only to hear. “Too bad we don’t have noise-[cancelling headsets], that’d make this easier.”
“What…?”
“…Never mind. Anyway. I guess now, we settle in and wait for Daar to do his thing.”
“Well, then…I have questions,” Vemet said.
“I’ll answer what I can, you know that.”
“These are about you, and about Shyow and Awisun…Do you have children with them?”
Vemet’s guess had been right—Jooyun shifted uncomfortably again. “No…not yet. Some day though…”
“Do all Sky-People wait so long to have children? You aren’t a young man, Jooyun.”
“Nah, some start pretty young. That…I’ll tell you the story of how we all met, later. But I’m not old. We can have children for many years. Our…Giving-magic is very strong.”
“How many?”
“I could be as old as Yan and still father children, and raise them to adults before I die.”
“And…after that?”
Jooyun smiled fondly. “My grandfather was…” He frowned up at the sky. “Uh, lessee, [ninety-two…nine point two times six]…uh…nearly [sixty] years old when he died. That’s this many.” He set the rifle down for a moment, then opened and closed both his hands six times to show. “But…I’m very healthy, and the, uh, the Sky-Thinkers who do a kind of giving-magic called ‘Medicine’ say I could live to be even older, as long as I don’t fall into bad habits. And the girls should live even longer.”
Vemet’s head reeled. Yan was already old by the People’s reckoning. Fit, strong and seemingly unstoppable, but nobody had ever heard of a Given-Man who had lived much past two hands of hands of winters. The thought of living nearly twice that long—!
“You didn’t answer my question,” he said, rather than speak his astonishment. “What about them? Do they want children?” He couldn’t imagine a woman who didn’t, but he knew better than to assume anything about Sky-People.
“Yes. Soon, I think. Or in a few years…We all do. Just…we have this right now. If we were gonna have kids, we couldn’t be here, and I don’t think leaving you to die from this would make us very happy. But then there’s…”
“Net, Tigger. Splash one [Abrogator]!”
“Tigger, Tiny. Keep the [HUD footage], we can get you some nose art when we get back.”
“Fuck yeah!”
The ‘radio’ went quiet again.
“Tigger?”
“That’s Daar. Big fella’s havin’ fun by the sound of it.”
Vemet nodded, and peeled over a couple of branches to form a sitting-nest for himself.
“I wish I was,” he said.
Date Point: 14y AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Akyawentuo moon 1, Unclaimed Space, Near 3Kpc Arm
Xiù Chang
Allison was going a little stir-crazy back in engineering, and Xiù really couldn’t blame her. There was nothing to do except wait, listen to the men bantering on the radio far below and a light-second delayed, and try not to worry.
Allison was filling it by going through as much of her full weekly maintenance checklist as didn’t involve actually turning anything off or unplugging it. Xiù was filling it by watching her work over the internal camera feed. The spectacular view of planet-rise over dark gray mountains of lunar regolith hadn’t paled, but there wasn’t much more to see of it now, and she really wasn’t in much of a mood for it anyway.
Eventually, Allison flopped down in her workstation chair and sighed, before getting on the internal line. She looked up into the camera as she pushed the talk button. “You bored, babe?”
“I feel bored, stressed, worried…” Xiù confessed. “…Sidelined…”
”That’s about right, yeah, Allison agreed. “Ship just feels…I dunno.”
“Empty,” Xiù agreed.
Allison didn’t reply at first. Instead she sat back in her chair and laughed softly. “Ugh, this is pathetic. He’s fine, they’re fine…I just wish I was down there too. I’d feel more useful.”
“We’re fine,” Xiù reassured her. “Come on, it isn’t pathetic to worry.”
Allison just sighed over the line, but nodded. Xiù smiled to herself, then hit her other talk button. She’d been watching the clouds down below anyway, getting the lay of the continents and weather. It was nice to have an excuse to say something.
“Net, Sister. I can see a nasty weather front headed your way from up here.”
She counted off the light-lag in her head, one mississippi, two mississippi, three…
“Sister, Tiny. Yan wants you to know he hates the rain.”
“He’d better get his cloak then, because you’re in for a soaking…” Now that she turned the ship’s sensors on it, that front was looking meaner by the second. The Doppler radar was showing an evil pink and purple scrawl across half the land.
“Sister, Boss. Anything we need to worry about?”
“I don’t think so, Boss. You’re on the other side of a mountain range.”
“Copy. Keep us posted if that changes.”
“Will do. Utah and I will keep an eye on it.”
Allison nodded, and Xiù saw her grab one of her monitors and switch it over the meteorological sensor feed. “Somethin’ to do, I guess…” she commented. “Thanks, babe.”
“Net, Tigger. Splash a second Abrogator.”
Xiù sighed, and keyed the internal line again. “Take one down, pass it around…”
“Twenty-four alien death ‘bots on the wall…”
Date Point: 14y AV
Hierarchy Dataspace, deployment buffer
0722
In retrospect, the fact that more immediate access to the Cull wasn’t available should have aroused 0722’s suspicions from the off. 0665 had followed none of the handoff protocols, and 0722 had already been complaining about the senior agent’s apparent dereliction of his duties even before the first Abrogator’s standby signal went dark.
That alone was suspicious. When a second Abrogator went offline minutes later…
Direct intervention was impossible. No local host meant no direct control. But the Abrogators could still be activated and set to autonomous assess-protect-retaliate.
All of the surviving units immediately fired their drone fleets from the launch canisters on their backs, flinging them high and wide in seconds before their wings snapped out, their flight fields came online and a detailed sensor network began to grow around the Abrogator line.
Not a one of them had moved from their last recorded position.
Frustration and mounting suspicion promptly crystallized into outright certainty. A negligent handoff was one thing, but this? Zero progress made in pursuit of a routine neolithic cull? Over such a time interval?
That went beyond negligence. That was clear dereliction, and it would have been fatal to 0665’s career all by itself.
The most damning factor, however, was the alien strike ship doing mach five on a planet supposedly inhabited only by stone-age primitives.
Its coilguns spat, and a third Abrogator went dark.
0722 did not have much in the way of options. Drones would be ineffective and the Abrogators themselves were too slow and ground-oriented to defend themselves.
But the command post had a single battery of long-range multi-role missiles. 0722 targeted the ship, and fired.
Date Point: 14y AV
High Mountain Fortress, Planet Gao
Grandfather Kureya
“Why are we doing this?”
Kureya gave an apologetic duck-nod. He rather liked the earnest Whitecrest father who had delivered Genshi’s message so dutifully, but if Kureya had learned anything about himself over the years, it was that he was prone to liking people a little too easily. The late Grandfather Talo had warned him away from unfounded trust in his final days.
“My friend,” he said, “I think you’re more than smart enough to figure it out for yourself.”
Father Eyun duck-nodded. His ears were set at an anxious angle, backwards along his head. It was a rare show of emotion from a Father of the usually composed and inscrutable Clan Whitecrest.
He had all the details he needed, Kureya knew. Quite aside from the urgent tone of the message he’d delivered, he was standing in the deepest underbelly of High Mountain Fortress and watching with interest as Clan Highmountain’s technicians prepared a contingency that had existed in some form or another for four hundred years.
The archives—or at least, as much of them as could be copied or which were utterly irreplaceable—had been sealed in stasis containers and sunk to the bottom of a sixteen-kilometer shaft in the thickest, most stable part of Gao’s tectonic crust, right under the Yamyu-An mountain range. Now, a descendant of the robot that had first bored that hole centuries ago was heaving itself back up out of it as uncountable tonnes of rubble were fed into its intake, to be melted and layered back onto the shaft’s walls.
The seam would be visible on close inspection, but by the time the Clan’s engineers were done the shaft would be buried under mud, gravel and reinforced concrete. The fortress’ lowest basement would look, to all but the most paranoid eye, like a mere sturdy foundation rather than the plug on the toughest bunker ever built.
Thus would the accumulated records of Gao, its people and its civilization endure practically anything. Only deep time, grinding geology or the eventual expansion of Gao’s sun would harm them unless they were deliberately excavated.
Retrieving them, of course, would be a matter for the future, but so long as the archives survived and there were Gaoians survived to retrieve them…it was a gesture of hope for the future.
“…I think the Swarm-of-Swarms is coming,” Eyun predicted, gloomily. “It’s the only thing I can think of that would warrant…this.”
Kureya didn’t answer. The heat rising out of the hole as the shaft-sealing robot did its work was creating a strong thermal now that ruffled his fur, tickled his ears with a distant igneous rumbling and filled his nose with the scent of toasting metal, rock and oil.
“…Aren’t we going to do anything?” Eyun asked, after a solemn moment. “Evacuate the females and cubs? Form a militia? Prepare our defences? Anything?“
“Why do you think your Champion sent you here?” Kureya asked him. “This is preparation, young Father. One preparation among many. But use your thinker for a minute and examine the consequences. What intelligence would we grant the enemy if we evacuated the Clan of Females?”
Eyun growled the growl of a man who was disappointed in himself and hung his head. “They would know we know they’re coming, and send assets as they were ready rather than waiting for the whole of their invasion force to be prepared. And…if we have a plan…?”
“If your Champion didn’t see fit to involve you in the details, I would not overrule him,” Kureya told him. “Even if I knew the details myself. All we can do, young Father, is follow some deathworld advice.”
“Which is?”
Kureya looked down into the hole again, and found himself fervently wishing there were any Starminds on Gao.
“Plan for the worst,” he said, “and hope for the best.”
Date Point: 14y AV
HMS Caledonia, Cimbrean System, The Far Reaches
Technical Sergeant Martina Kovač
HEAT mission prep was a ballet of sorts. The Operators themselves had one job—limber up and absorb whatever knowledge they needed while the techs got on with making them mission-ready. Last-minute suit adjustments, pre-mission bloodworks, systems configuration, field calibration…
It was a long list, broken down into a hundred short lists and spread across a platoon of technicians who all reported to Kovač…who had to sign off on every last item. Human or Gaoian, it didn’t matter—she was responsible for ensuring that the checklists had been completed down to the last minutia.
Fortunately, she was good at multitasking.
Right now, things weren’t helped by the fact that the mission details were still being finalized and that only the most basic basics had filtered down to the Operators.
Or as Master Sergeant Vandenberg summarized it, “We don’t know exactly what we’re hittin’ on Gao or why. We’re just gonna smash whatever we’re told to smash. Got it?”
Firth snorted. “Real inspirin’ there, Rebar. I’m feelin’ all kindsa informed and motivated.”
Baseball chuckled darkly. “What, you want an actual proper briefing full’a all the shit we need to know? When’d you acquire a taste for luxuries?”
“This outfit musta spoiled me,” Firth grumbled, raising his arm so Specialist Deacon could take a blood sample. He couldn’t resist being his usual caveman-jocular self, though. He flexed his arm hugely and smirked, “Like it, lil’ lady? It’s bigger.”
Deacon had been Firth’s tech from the start, and she was entirely used to his ways. Anybody who understood how Firth’s mind worked could see the enormous—and totally platonic—respect he had for her. “Somehow I doubt Freya would approve,” she commented, wiping his arm with antiseptic. He twisted his wrist with a quiet grunt and flexed harder.
“Says who? Just ‘cuz we’re steady don’t mean nothin’ these days.”
“Please, you’re a secret gentleman and we all know it. Also, I don’t fuck the meat I work on every day. Bad for hygiene, y’know. Now don’t cry at the big scary needle…”
She got a rumbling chuckle for that, and the blood sample, too. The Lads may have been incorrigibly flirtatious but they never let it get in the way of business.
“Anything I should know about before we run your bloodworks, Righteous?”
“Uh…nothin’ much different. I’ve been hittin’ it a lot harder lately, though, now that ‘Horse has some extra free time and can work out with me longer. Seeing some crazy results, too!”
“Mhmm.” Adam, of course, couldn’t countenance the idea of any actual free time, so once he’d poured as much of it as she could stand into *Marty*’s life, he’s naturally focused his laser-like attention on his “most biggest” friends. Daar was definitely rubbing off on him.
It seemed to be paying off for them, too…which was honestly about the scariest thing about the whole affair. Good thing she adored them all.
Deacon was an old hand at taking bloods. She slapped a minimum-dose Crude patch over the needle site—a necessity, or else every one of the Operators would be tracked up and down like a terminal junky—and handed the vial to Kovač. The Operators excused themselves and, now with Crude in their systems, attended to their “warmups.”
That made a complete set. The “lab” was little more than a horseshoe of desks in the aft corner of the flight bay, tucked inside some plastic sheeting and a low-power force field that filtered the air and kept the environment tolerably clean. Running the bloods was as simple as slotting each vial into the analyzer. The results were logged and any anomalies flagged automatically, and as always Marty had to override the system’s alert message. Despite her repeated requests, the software had never been updated to tolerate the massively raised baselines of a HEAT operator.
She really did need to get that scientific paper published one day.
Nothing stood out as unusual by the Lads’ standards, which was welcome. The last thing they needed right now was to juggle with anomalous blood chemistry just before an op. Some days, depending on how aggressively someone might have been training, or…anything, really, it became a genuine risk to permit a suit-up and attachment to the built-in regulation system. Murray had once suffered an alarming spike in his serum creatinine levels after eating a burger with extra pickles, they’d never got to the bottom of that one.
And the less said about the Trio, the better.
“Sergeant?”
Lieutenant Costello was waiting outside the lab tent, already dressed in his EV-MASS undersuit which meant that he was the next best thing to naked. The plumbing to handle fluid recycling in particular was both intimate and weirdly intestinal in its design, and because the undersuit was better than skin-tight the effect was honestly quite grotesque. H.R. Geiger met Plastination.
“Good timing, sir. I need your blood.”
Costello chuckled, and presented his arm. “You should say that more like a mad scientist,” he suggested.
“Let me know if we ever hire a guy called Igor…”
Humor made the blood sample go quickly and easily. Costello handed over his Operator’s Preflight Checklist and lowered his voice. “You maybe want to give my Protectors some extra attention? I’m pretty sure this mission is going to kick their ass hard. Especially Irish.”
“…What do you know, sir? If you don’t mind me asking?”
“Nothing concrete. It’s just an itch in my head.”
“…Will do, then.”
“Much appreciated. The old man should be down in about twenty minutes.”
Marty ran the Lieutenant’s bloods, which were easily the closest to baseline of any man who was EV-MASS certified, and ticked that item off her list before stepping back out of the lab and into the thick of the flight deck’s bustle.
The Protectors were just getting sewn into their undersuits, having taken care of their “sustainment” plumbing the moment before to the usual bathroom humor such a sans-dignity activity required. She took a moment for herself and watched. Maybe she was biased, but in her opinion, Adam was the only human being that made the undersuit look good.
Costello was right now that she looked—while Adam was, as always, a bouncing, smiling force of relentless optimism, there was an edge there this time, and on closer inspection she saw the same edge on ‘Base and Irish. ‘Base was being even more grunt-manly than usual rather than letting his intellectual side show, and Butler had that ‘fightin’ Irish’ look on.
They were being brave for her, she realized. Fuck.
Maybe some levity would help. “Got your bloodwork in, Ponyslab. I’m pretty sure we had a quiet evening, right?”
“…yeah?” His big ‘ol bushy eyebrows furrowed in the most adorably handsome way. They had had a quiet evening, too—just cuddles and a movie.
“Then why did your test count come in like a bull on hormone therapy?”
He let out a big, surprised laugh, and just like that the tension seemed to drain from all three.
“I dunno. Maybe it’s the Cimbrean turkey I ate last night!”
“Mhmm. Try not to spray your musk everywhere, Chunk. These suits are expensive to clean.”
Butler snorted and gave Adam a huge friendly blow on the back that barely rocked him but might have hospitalized a normal man. “Yeah yeah…I bet I won, though.”
“Won what?”
“Y’know. Who had the best bloodwork.”
“…Christ. Everything with you motherfuckers is like this!”
“Gotta beat your man on somethin’!” Butler declared, cheerily.
“Yeah, well…you didn’t. Not even close.” In fairness, Butler’s had been the closest among the Protectors to human normalcy, but he didn’t need to know that. “But don’t worry, you’ll grow up all big and strong one day.”
She was of course talking to a man who would have breezed to the top of the podium at any weightlifting competition, but really…everything was relative. In any case, Adam pounced on Butler, ‘Base pounced on Adam, and her distraction became a success as a two-on-one struggle got underway that Adam was in little danger of losing. They seemed genuinely relaxed now rather than deliberately nonchalant, which made all the difference in the world.
What they really needed, though, was something to look forward to after this. Marty knew her boys well, and when they were about to jump into the fire, the fire was all they saw. Giving them something to focus on past it was…
It wouldn’t be useful in the moment. In the moment, they’d give themselves to the fire completely and think of nothing else. But here and now, before that threshold, they needed something to keep them grounded and human until it was time.
“Y’know, I’m gonna let you three in on a little secret,” she said. The three paused mid-dogpile and gave her their undivided attention.
“I have, like…two girl friends on Cimbrean, so my hen party was always gonna be kind of a non-starter. So I thought…fuck it. Why not just throw a huge party for everyone?”
Adam stopped breathing for a moment. It was always easy to tell when he did because it was about the only time he wasn’t moving in some way.
“I’m still working out a few details,” Marty admitted, which was a white lie. She hadn’t actually worked out any of it, it had just been an idle idea…but idle ideas always worked best when under pressure. “So if there’re any requests…”
“Strippers?” Butler suggested cheekily. He was immediately crushed by Adam while Marty laughed and shrugged.
“Are there any strippers in Folctha?” she asked.
“There’re, uh…escorts.” ‘Base revealed. “Three girls.”
“How d’you know that?” Adam asked him, while Butler writhed in a futile effort to escape the steel trap of his armpit. “Ain’t like you’d ever need to pay…”
“Ain’t a big town, brother.”
Marty laughed again and shook her head. “No strippers,” she said. “To save Pony’s blushes.“
Her grin got wider at Butler’s muffled “aww” and the way Adam rolled his eyes and bore down even harder. ‘Base came back with a serious suggestion.
“Make it all comers? Throw a street party?” he suggested. “Maybe out on the lake.”
“I’d like that,” Adam agreed. Butler’s head was going an alarming shade of purple and he was flailing at Adam’s body without much success.
“Done and done…Better let him go, Chunk.”
Adam looked down at Butler for a second, shrugged, and released him. The (relatively) smaller man staggered away coughing, heaving air and uttering assorted vigorously Irish curses.
“Okay!” Marty smiled at them, then made a show of checking her tablet. “Just one last thing to take care of. ‘Horse, I’m gonna need you for this.”
Grinning knowingly, Baseball ushered Butler away, and Marty led her fiancé to a corner of the deck that was as secluded as they were ever gonna get. There was no such thing as privacy aboard Caledonia, but there was just enough for his arms to go round her waist and for them to kiss. Not strictly an authorized use of their time, but damn good for morale.
Adam always knew how to end a kiss. Forehead-to-forehead, nose-to-nose, smile, scratch her back in exactly the right place…“You made that up about the party,” he accused fondly.
He really wasn’t as dumb as he acted, sometimes. “…Maybe some of it,” Marty admitted. “But there’ll be one, baby. I promise. You’ll be there?”
“Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“Good enough…” Too many things to say, not enough time to say them, and so many little rituals and tokens of good luck. No matter what, she wouldn’t voice her real fears or risk cursing him, so she made do with a simple “…I love you.”
He understood. “I love you too.”
Marty nodded, swallowed, and steeled herself with a breath. “…We’d better get back to work.”
He nodded, and let her go. She ducked back into the lab tent to grab her pH balance probe for the environmental suit system, and restored her working mindset.
Thirty-two hours. That was the minimum deployment time before their backup would arrive.
They were going to be a long thirty-two hours.