Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
HCS My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, Approaching Planet Origin, the Corti Directorate
Dog Wagner
Hephaestus—the Hephaestus Consortium, nowadays—was up to three ships in its fleet, and the younger two had inherited MOSITMF’s whimsical approach to naming. The HCS Put Back Together With Bits Left Over and the HCS Actually Three Smaller Ships In A Trenchcoat were bigger matter-movers than the original, but what My Other Spaceship… lacked in sheer bulk capacity she more than compensated for in speed. Alientech power systems hooked up to a Domain-made warp drive would do that for the old gal—Humantech was catching up fast, but there were a lot of centuries to cover.
Every so often, therefore, she doubled as the Consortium’s high-speed courier and interstellar limousine. They even had a permanent suite of business-class cabins riding where one of the dorsal cargo racks had been, with a huge viewing window. It was Dog’s favorite spot on the ship, when they were near anything worth looking at.
The corporate life was being good to him. Hell, the dental package alone had been worth coming back into the fold, but his salary and retirement package were somethin’ else. And he got to go interestin’ places and meet interestin’ people.
Best of all, though, he was the seasoned old salty sea dog all the others looked to for experience. That was good for the ol’ ego.
Of course, there was nothing inexperienced about Adele Park. Some rare women actually got easier on the eyes as they aged, and the flecks of white in her tight, professional high bun told the world that here was a seasoned, sharp, insightful queen of the boardroom.
“Have you ever been to Origin before, Dog?” she asked.
Dog nodded, and ran an eye over the marbled blue-and-yellow ball below them. Some quirk of Origin’s evolutionary history meant all the photosynthesizing plants were a rich goldenrod hue rather than the rich full green of Earth’s plant life, the slight turquoise cast of Perfection’s foliage or Cimbrean’s intriguing teal.
“Yyup. Use’ta run refined metals over here from a Locayl mining op out toward the Vgork Kingdoms. Took mining equipment back the other way. Good runs.” He sniffed. “Corti are easy. They’re up-front about what they want an’ they fold like a goddamn accordion if you catch ‘em tellin’ a lie.”
“Good to know,” she said, and adjusted her slim anachronistic wristwatch.
“Why are we here, Adele?”
A slight smile plucked at a corner of her lips. “Why else? They have tech we want.”
Dog grunted. “Not gonna tell me what kinda tech?”
“Propulsion, ideally. More efficient kinetics, better FTL…Anything to build a better Firebird, a faster destroyer…or a bigger freighter.”
“Huh. The Board want more freighters?” Dog asked. The Board of Directors had originally been intent on setting up an interstellar network of jump arrays dirtside before AEC had ‘gently’ told them to come up with a different idea. “Thought they were gonna go with orbital Arrays and tugs?”
“There was a cost-benefit analysis, the expense of buying the property and constructing our own infrastructure rather than just using the existing Dominion standard landing pads and cargo handling facilities,” Adele explained. “For now, doing it the old-fashioned way makes better business sense so…yeah. More freighters.”
“Awesome.” Dog grinned, and popped some chewing gum into his mouth. “I better get down to Flight Ops, we’ll be mooring soon.”
Adele sighed. “Yeah, I suppose I should go make sure my security detail is ready.”
“Can’t be too careful,” Dog agreed. Ever since the war on Gao had sparked off, general wisdom was that a human alone on an alien world was just asking for trouble. Deathworlder or not, nothing good came from any kind of incidents. Adele, as one of Hephaestus’ senior executives, got a whole posse of private security in serious black suits for a shadow, and every one of them had the knowledge, training and experience to whisk her out of a dangerous situation without escalating it.
Dog, whose abiding memory of being shot at was dominated by pants-filling terror, was happy to leave the job to them.
My Other Spaceship had another big advantage over her sisters—being Dominion-built meant she was scaled to handle anything up to and including Guvnurag. The drydock folks back on Ceres had trimmed down the elbow room a fuck of a lot by adding all sortsa canny internal storage racks so that the ship’s supplies—food, meds, laundry tabs, whatever—didn’t take up valuable cargo space, but she was still a roomy old gal and Dog had never felt claustrophobic aboard his ship.
Flight Ops was a heck of a lot tighter than the old bridge had been, too. It was buried deep in the ship’s forward structure, reinforced to hell and gone against contingencies like, say, space pirates. Any ETs boarding a human ship were in for a nasty surprise, but My Other Spaceship still had a few scars on her from her one run-in with an ornery human pilot. The new design emphasized protecting vital systems over creature comforts.
The crew liked it, on the whole. On a quiet day with nothing else to do, Flight Ops was a hum of conversation, jokes, music and folks working on whatever personal projects they used to occupy their time.
Right now though it was quiet, which meant folks were working. There was a lot to do on final approach to a Dominion cradle world.
“So serious,” Dog teased after taking a second to be certain nothing was out of the ordinary. His crew variously smirked, chuckled and rolled their eyes. They were an earnest lot—all of them were huge nerds who’d leapt at the chance to be part of a starship crew and honestly didn’t give a shit that the starship in question was basically a glorified Big Rig.
“You’re the one always says approach is when things go wrong, Dog,” Webber spoke up. He was the A-shift communications operator, a former air traffic controller from some backwater airfield in Ass-End County, the state of Nowhere. Operating the radio on an interstellar freighter was probably no more exciting, but he seemed to enjoy it.
“Only if somebody’s bein’ an idiot and Corti don’t let idiots fly ships.” Dog squeezed between the workstations over to the helm, not to check the pilot’s work—Sam Jordan was a dab hand—but because it had the best view.
“They’ve got us on a tight course,” Jordan complained. “Almost down to the inch.”
“Just go with it,” Dog sighed. “Corti have a tight sphincter anyway, right now I bet they could crush beer cans. You see those light system pickets?”
Jordan nodded. There were three of them loitering around their approach path, barely a thousand klicks away—kissing distance, in interplanetary terms. “Yeah.”
“There’ll be ten more, cloaked. An’ don’t let the size fool you, those things could rip us open like a—”
He went sprawling across the deck as a sudden and massive jolt made the whole ship ring with the sound of tortured steel. Whatever the cause, it had to have been huge to overwhelm MOSITMF’s inertial compensation system. The fall knocked the wind out of him a little, but adrenaline got him creaking and swearing back up onto his feet in seconds as the ship’s collision siren warbled solemnly before shutting off.
“What hit us?!” he demanded. It hadn’t been weapons fire, whatever it was, but the odds against hitting anything that wasn’t targeted at them were unbelievable.
“Uh…nothing. We’re…we’ve just…” Jordan cleared their throat and swiped at the helm controls with a bewildered frown. “…Stopped.”
“That’s impossible,” Webber commented, unnecessarily. Dog gave the helm a glance and scratched the back of his head.
“Ain’t impossible, brother. We’ve done exactly that…Total relative stop.”
“Okay…” Catherine Price, their navigator spoke up. “How is that possible?”
“Beats the fuck outta me,” Dog grunted. He hit the shipwide intercom. “All hands, this is Dog. Somethin’ screwy’s goin’ on here. Everyone report to stations. Security, we’re goin’ to code amber.”
Code amber meant a lot of things, but for the security detail it meant ‘Stuff the VIP in an escape pod and be ready to hit the button on a hair trigger.’
“…Tractor beam? Forcefield?” Webber asked.
“Nah. If we hit a field ol’ Mossy woulda crumpled up like a tinfoil hat” Dog told him. “Helm, full astern.”
Jordan swiped down on the thrust slider, and the instruments certainly said the kinetic thrusters were pouring everything they had into reverse. As far as navigation was concerned, however, they didn’t so much as twitch.
“No activity on local comms, Dog,” Webber piped up, sounding grim and looking pale. “Not even traffic control.”
Dog grimaced and shot a suspicious glare at the Corti homeworld below them. “…I got a real bad feel—-” he began.
The planet vanished. The stars changed. Webber actually yelped and Price blinked at her instruments for a second before swiping her hands across them, desperately trying to figure out where a whole solar system had gone.
“…ling…” Dog finished, with infinitely more cool in his voice than in his hammering heart. “What th’—where the fuck are we?”
“…We’re…two hundred light years from Origin,” Price declared after a moment. “Widdershins by topside, two degrees. Facing away from it.”
Dog got on the intercom again. “…Adele, somethin’ really fuckin’ weird just happened. You better come down here.”
There was a pause. The voice that eventually answered him wasn’t Adele Park, but instead belonged to the security team leader.
“Uh…Skipper, this is Frank Newman. Adele’s…gone.”
Dog let that sink in for a second. He’d never heard the former SWAT officer sound so completely bamboozled.
“…Define… ‘gone’,” he suggested.
“She was standing right in front of me and now she’s…not! Like she just blinked out of existence! What the hell just happened?”
Dog looked around flight ops and saw his own total confusion mirrored back in every face.
“…I don’t know,” he confessed. “But I think the Corti have some major explaining to do.”
Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Master Sergeant Derek (Boss) Coombes
As Coombes understood it, transplanting plants from one planet to another came with a few…hiccups. Earth plants could apparently be weirdly finicky about the conditions they would grow in, and with alien seasons under alien suns and in alien soil their chemical cues could get all kinds of messed up.
All of which was, apparently, the reason why the cherry trees in Waterside Park bloomed in the winter, and powerfully redder than usual too. No delicate pretty whitish-pink for Folctha, the blossoms of Waterside Park were a full-bodied Valentine’s Day, Barbie-doll kinda pink.
It made for an interesting morning jog when they started raining off the trees, like running through a goddamn perfume commercial in the brisk morning air. Folctha never got properly, skin-tightening cold, but it did drop low enough to make Coombes’ breath fog and leave him feeling pleasantly cool as he ran.
He was starting to feel good about his career decision, at long last.
He’d never doubted the choice to leave Akyawentuo in Hoeff’s capable hands. The JETS were gonna need a senior NCO in a high place, and Coombes was the man for that job in a way that Hoeff and Walsh would never be. Walsh was too cerebral for all his slabbiness, and Hoeff was too…intense. Subtle was a foreign concept to him, as were politeness and tact.
But he had felt uncomfortable about it. Going from getting shot at and fuckin’ nuked in the bush of an alien jungle to a cushy desk job on Cimbrean was a turnaround harsh enough to give a man whiplash.
But there was the fulcrum of it. He’d got actually honest-to-god nuked. Sure, okay, he’d come out of it with nothing worse than a minor case of radiation sickness, but two Purple Hearts were enough for one career. He didn’t want to push his luck: After the battle on Akyawentuo, he’d had a vision of a folded flag arriving at his ex-wife’s house and solemnly presented to his daughter, and promptly decided that he wasn’t gonna let that happen.
Besides. The homesteading money for SOR-committed servicemen on Cimbrean was damn good. He could build a life out here, maybe find the second Mrs. Derek Coombes, give Taniya a little half-sibling or two to love…
He moved to the side of the path as a pair of jogging figures—a short middle-aged man who was definitely starting to suffer in the hair department and a much younger woman anonymous behind a baseball cap and shades—emerged from the blossom blizzard in the company of a pair of dogs. He nodded a greeting, and was nearly ten paces on when he was brought up short by the young woman asking “Wait…Coombes?”
He stopped and turned. She took her hat and shades off and smiled at him. “Hey. Didn’t recognize me, huh?”
Coombes chuckled and relaxed. Without the disguise, hers was a face he’d never forget. She had, after all, literally saved his life. “Sorry Ava. Good to see you.”
Ava Ríos scratched her dog’s head, and it parked its butt on the path and started sweeping blossoms aside with its tail. Behind her, the older guy was leaning on his knees to recover his breath. “Good to see you too!” she said. “How’s your chest?”
“Healed up perfectly, years ago. Got a hell of a scar, though.”
“I bet,” she grimaced. “Adam said you were living here now.”
“Yeah, took a desk job. Figured I’d had enough excitement and adventure for one lifetime.”
“Good to know there’s at least one SOR guy out there who knows when to stop pushing his luck.”
“Eh…” Coombes scratched the back of his neck. “…More like I’m gonna be pushin’ different sortsa luck…Thought you were on Gao?”
“I got back last night. I can’t stay on that planet, it’s…” she trailed off, then snapped back when the dog licked her hand. She smiled at it and scratched its head. “…It hits a little close to home. Also, Hannah here doesn’t have an interstellar passport or the disease control stuff and…uh, this is my dad. Gabriel Arés.”
“Oh!” Coombes inwardly kicked himself for not spotting the family resemblance. Ignoring the vast mass difference and the sparser, grayer hair, that was definitely Adam’s face smiling at him. He stuck out a hand. “Uh, Buenos días.”
Yeah, that was definitely Adam’s dad. He had old-man-strength in that handshake and then some.
“Good to meet you,” Arés senior told him. “So, you know Ava? You never mentioned him, Ava…” He gave her the sly sideways grin of a natural Dad.
“Uh…” Ava gave Coombes a look that said ‘help,’ which was a shame because Coombes was feeling the need for some help himself. He was twice her age for fuck sake, but the old man was definitely in an eyebrow-waggling, rib-nudging mode.
“Uh…She wouldn’t be able to, sir. We met in a professional context.”
“Ahhh!” Gabe nodded sagely. “Her top secret whatever-it-was in Egypt, then.”
He laughed as they both gave him the same carefully blank look, albeit with a weary highlight to it in Ava’s case. “Say no more.”
Ava sighed. “Dad…”
Gabe’s grin got even wider. “I tease!” He beamed, then nodded over his shoulder. “I’ll leave you two to catch up. Come on, Hugo.”
The much larger dog who’d been sniffing around waiting for them to finish—and a dog that big could only be one of Bozo’s puppies, even if he was nowhere near as big as his sire—gave an excited Wuff! and practically dragged him down the path. Gabe hit his stride, waved jauntily over his shoulder and was gone into the river mist.
Ava sighed again. “…Sorry about him.”
“Did he just—?” Coombes began, and faltered when it occurred to him he didn’t know how to phrase the question.
“Don’t ask. I’m pretty sure he’d act the same if you were a ninety-year-old Gaoian right now,” Ava sighed a third time. “He’s always like this when I’m single, especially now Adam and Marty are expecting and I think sometimes he forgets I’m not actually his flesh and blood…” She paused, then cleared her throat. “Sorry. You don’t need to hear all this. And it’s all so petty next to Gao and everything…”
Coombes chuckled. “Hey, sweat the little stuff, it’s cool. Keeps you sane.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. Nobody can solve a big problem all in one go. But anybody can solve a bunch’a small problems. And then you look back and see it all adds up to a big problem solved.”
“Hmm.” She gave his words some thought. “…Thanks!”
“I ain’t just a pretty face!”
That drew an honest-to-God laugh out of her, along with a brilliant smile which faded into something more thoughtful. “Ummm… so.”
With her Dad’s behaviour still keeping him off-balance, the slightly panicky thought ‘Oh God, here we go…” flitted across Coombes’ mind. Outwardly, he took a sip from his CamelBak and kept a straight face. “So?”
“Uh, look. You know I work for ESNN…”
Amazingly, the notion that she just wanted to press him for information was actually a relief. Coombes nodded and tried not to visibly relax.
“…I mean, I’m guessing PR isn’t one of your duties, but, uh… I know from some sources of mine at MBG that there was a team on Akyawentuo, and I know it wasn’t the HEAT, and the only other guys who’d be qualified would be JETS…”
“You want…what? An interview? Statement?” Coombes asked. “I can’t comment.”
“I know,” she assured him quickly. “I’m just saying, with the war on Gao the Ten’Gewek haven’t been in the news much since…well, since the Misfits made them news. I mean, you’re here and okay so I’m guessing things worked out okay with them…?”
Coombes nodded thoughtfully, getting what she was saying. She took it as confirmation and smiled. “Awesome! I was just thinking, seeing you, it’d be nice to run a piece on them. Especially if you guys scored a win over there. Good PR, you know?”
“That makes sense,” Coombes agreed. “Obviously I need to go through—”
“—Proper channels,” she said, nodding vigorously. “But look, if I… I always carry my business card nowadays…” she rummaged in her waist pack. “It’s got my business phone number and email address, and…” she produced a card and a pen, and scrawled something on the back. “And that’s my personal number. I mean, the PR guys at Sharman probably have all that stuff on file anyway, but y’know…”
“I got you,” Coombes took the card and pocketed it. “It’s a good idea, the People deserve more awareness. I’ll make it happen, if I can.”
She beamed at him again. “Thanks, Coombes.”
Coombes had to admit, getting smiled at was a pretty damn good start to his day. “You better go catch up,” he prompted.
“Yeah, probably should,” she agreed and put her hat back on. “See you around?”
“Count on it.”
She beamed at him one last time, called her dog into motion and was gone, leaving Coombes to clear his throat to himself alone in the mist for a second. He shook himself, realized he was beginning to get chilly in the morning air, and resumed his own jog.
Yeah. Maybe the desk job wasn’t so bad after all…
Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Air Engineering Technician Jack Tisdale
Jack spent a week on leave in Folctha before reporting for his first day at HMS Sharman. He visited his family, left some flowers up on Memorial Hill for Sara, revisited a few haunts around town, went to the gym with his dad for the first time in years and got to relish watching his old man’s jaw drop.
Things were kinda awkward around the dinner table, sadly. Jack’s mum had never really approved of the military, being convinced that violence had no place in a civilized society. Jack had gently suggested that a society was only civilized because it knew when and how to properly apply violence in its own defence, pointed to Gao as an example of how civilization could be brought crashing down if the wrong people used violence unopposed, and generally succeeded in making her look small and uncertain, which in turn made him feel awful.
They’d agreed to avoid politics. She was proud of him regardless, and Hope seemed to love having him around the house for a few days. She was the spitting image of the big sister she’d never met, and Jack loved her dearly, but he did worry sometimes that his parents were wrapping her in cotton wool and not letting her breathe.
It was almost a wrench when the day came to report to Sharman for his orientation and introduction day.
He met most of his fellow Technician graduates in the corridor by the Jump Array which doubled as the base’s memorial wall. Everybody in extrasolar defence who’d fallen in the line of duty was memorialized there, meaning that it remembered not only the four fallen HEAT operators, but also a handful of Firebird crews, and a sickening proportion of the crew of HMS Caledonia…
Captain Costello made it absolutely clear that they were to pay respect to every single one before they were permitted to get to work. Read every name, touch every picture, acknowledge every life. It took Jack two minutes just to reach “Chief Petty Officer Andow, M. HMS Caledonia.“
All told, inspecting the wall and studying every face on it took a big chunk out of the morning but it also drove home how hugely serious this all was.
Once that was finally done they were finally escorted to a briefing room for their introduction to the unit, and it was all Jack could do not to aim a huge congratulatory smile at the woman waiting for them. Back when she’d been giving him lessons and instruction to prepare him for this, she’d been Sergeant Kovač. Now, her maternity uniform’s breast bore a different name.
She still favored Jack with a small smile as they fell in to listen, though.
“Welcome to Spaceborne Operations,” she greeted them. “My name is Sergeant Martina Arés, I’m the NCO in charge of Hazardous Environment equipment maintenance and readiness and it’s my job, in part, to ensure that you guys—” she indicated the the technicians “—get along with your assigned HEAT operators. And you’d better, because without each other all that hardcore training you did counts for exactly dick. They’re getting a similar talk right now.
“But let’s get the awkward stuff out of the way first: This job is not dignified. The human body is a marvel, capable of doing things that literally nothing else in the galaxy can match…and you are going to get profoundly familiar with its unglamorous plumbing. Over the coming weeks, you’re going to learn more than you wanted to about blood, urine and feces, you’re going to become intimately familiar with the scent of stale sweat, and yes, you are going to be up close and personal with literal swinging dicks. Get used to it, because they have to get used to being on the receiving end.
“On the other hand, after this last leg of training you will be a world-class armorer qualified to maintain and modify the most sophisticated and effective personal protection system ever devised by man or Gaoian, each one of which costs as much as a strike fighter. More than that, however, you will be the shaft behind the speartip. Without technicians, HEAT operations don’t happen.”
She grinned, and there was definitely a slight note of schadenfreude in that grin. “But before all that can happen, there’s some bonding to do. A little team-building. ‘Cuz I know HEAT operators, and if they have a flaw it’s that they think with their muscles. Which means if you want them to respect you, you have to earn it. That means showing them you have the kind of game, spirit and tenacity they respect. So here’s what’s gonna happen: You’re gonna change into your PT gear. We’re gonna go out there to the Pit and do a session with your operators, and they’re gonna effortlessly kick your asses into the dirt. Your job is to give it your absolute best. I just want to apologize for not joining in: I’d be out there getting my ass kicked alongside you if I could.” She rested a hand on her belly. “Afterwards you’ll meet your assigned operator—two techs per operator—and you’ll be excused for the day to get to know each other.
“Fortunately,” she added, “That bit should be easy. There’s four things in the entire world a HEAT operator likes the most. Eating, sleeping, and training…and I’d strongly advise you to avoid the fourth, no matter how flirty they get.”
A few years ago, Jack wouldn’t have been able to resist the cheeky comment that shot into the back of his head about how she was obviously speaking from experience there. He had Chief Donoghue’s “tender” management to thank for ridding him of that particular impulse, but he still couldn’t quite restrain a small smirk.
Arés noticed. She made eye contact until he’d got his face to behave itself, then allowed a smirk of her own. “Not that I’m necessarily following my own advice,” she added and let a chuckle do a lap around the room. “…Don’t be overwhelmed by them, that’s all. The thing you as techs need to understand better than anyone, even their girlfriends or whoever, is this: those men overwhelm themselves. They’re in awe of what they can do, and even scared by it. They’re also…extremely passionate. That’s both hormonal and just the nature of what they are. What they need from the techs almost more than your skills is your empathy. So…go make friends.”
Five minutes later, PT gear on and nervous energy jumping around between them like static, Jack and the rest of the tech graduates found their way towards ‘the Pit’ mostly by the sounds of boisterous team bonding and the sound of the other Technical Sergeant Arés’ raised voice.
“Pit” was an entirely accurate descriptor. Sharman was squeezed into a tight footprint, with the main admin building and the living quarters practically on top of each other. The gaps between them, in fact, were narrow enough that two men could only barely squeeze past each other.
But the admin building was square and the living quarters were U-shaped, meaning that in the middle was an oblong of open space hemmed in by concrete walls and floored with well-drained soft sand….And, right now, full of HEAT graduates who were lounging around knocking back post-workout supplements and listening as one of their number—an Army staff sergeant of some kind—reached the punchline of a well-delivered joke about a Colonel’s wife.
“…and the PFC hands him his coffee and says ‘well sir, I figure if there was any work involved then I’d be doing it for you.’“
Several of them had obviously heard it before, but a round of deep-chested guffaws said it was well-received. Adam’s snickering Muttley impression was always a treat to witness, and he gave Jack in particular a wide grin as they filed through the narrow gap and into the Pit.
“Ah, now here come the folks who give your lives meaning,” he said. “Be nice to ‘em. They’ve literally got your nuts in the palm of their hand!”
He strolled through the sand—and on him, it was knee-deep though he apparently didn’t notice—while Jack took a step onto the surface and…barely sunk an inch.
“Able Seaman Tisdale,” he said, slowly and with a congratulatory tone. “You took your sweet time gettin’ here!”
“Book learnin’ takes a while, Technical Sergeant Slab,” Jack retorted, aware that his own grin was the exact mirror of Adam’s. He was promptly hoisted off the sand and flattened by a trademark Arés hug. And then slammed onto the sand in a pin. His view, once he recovered his senses, was completely filled by Adam’s cheshire grin hovering a few inches from his face.
“I’ve been waitin’!”
Jack sensed that his best bet with these guys was to not let on that even at his gentlest Adam could still wind a guy pretty badly. He forced down the reflex to gasp for air and nodded. “Good to see you too. Weren’t you gonna…” he couldn’t resist a cough “…introduce us before you started kicking our arses?”
“Nah. Up!” In one fluid move Adam somehow sprang backwards and practically tossed Jack upward, who found himself suddenly a few meters above the sand and falling.
He stuck the landing, at least.
Adam gave him a high five, then turned to review the other techs. “Guess I better get y’all introduced to your partners,” he declared. “Moho! You’re partnered with Tisdale here and…which one’a y’all is Miller?”
Moho was an immense black guy with a voice so deep that it excavated new caverns of bass possibility. He was also, to judge from the tattoo he’d managed to somehow find blank room for on his pecs, a Defender. That tattoo had a new, crisp look while all the others looked smeared and faded.
“Yo. Name’s Coyers. Callsign’s ‘Moho’…don’t ask.”
“…Moho as in the bottom of the Earth’s crust, or…?” Jack asked.
“Yes. I’ll tell you how I earned it the day you bench three-fifteen for reps.”
Jack snorted. He was a long way from his pasty scrawny tuna-paste-sandwich self these days, but three-fifteen was…asking a lot.
“I might need time to work up to that,” he said with snarky bravado. “But, uh, I did manage two-seventy…once.”
Moho seemed, for his part, legitimately impressed. “Wait, really? Shit, check out this guy! Where’d you lift that?”
Jack aimed a thumb at Warhorse. “His gym. Adam has a way with coaching. I’m pretty sure he could give a butterfly a set of bulging pecs.”
Moho’s chuckle could have triggered an earthquake. “He sure does.”
The correct Miller finally joined them. What quirk of fate had landed two Millers in the same group, Jack didn’t want to speculate but at least they were easy to tell apart.
Their Miller was…stunning. Wisdom among the techs was to pair them off with one solid chunk-slab of a person who could push hard and one strong-yet-slender type who could handle fiddly work, and that latter role was Jack’s. He was always going to be a tall, thin one with pianist’s hands no matter what he did, while Miller was short and built like a…well, Jack didn’t know. She probably looked amazing in more flattering clothes but as far as Jack was concerned her most attractive feature was easily her face, which was square and strong and framed by short dark hair.
Jack shook his head to clear his thoughts. Miller seemed to notice and smiled. Suddenly his thoughts weren’t so clear anymore.
Moho noticed too. “N’aww! Imma like you two, I can tell.”
Miller’s amused expression got a little wider, and she shook his hand. “Staff sergeant Miller, US Air Force. Former ammo troop for the Bone. Decided I wanted something less…grunty, so of course my airhead self goes and finds this!”
“Coyers. I was an 18C.”
Jack completed the introductions. “Tisdale. This is my first gig, it’s what I signed up for.”
Further getting-to-know-each-other time was going to have to wait, because Adam finally finished assigning Techs to Operators and got their attention with an effortless lift of his voice. “Okay! Everyone in the middle! Time ta’ train!”
They did their PT. Or, rather, they tried and mostly succeeded at surviving the HEAT’s daily warm-up routine. How the operators managed any of it Jack would never understand, since all of them were so massive they sunk into the sand and had their tiniest movement resisted at every turn. It didn’t seem to even remotely bother them even though it had to be much, much more difficult.
It did what they’d been told it would do, however. The fact that Jack made it to the end without giving up and sinking into the sand moaning in pain or throwing up seemed to impress Moho no end. He wanted to do both, and from the look on her face Miller had been an inch away from her breaking point too…but they were both still standing when ‘Horse finally called time.
A couple of the other Techs hadn’t quite managed to go the distance. Hopefully, that wouldn’t put a damper on their working relationship.
“Alright! That’s it for today, folks!” Adam announced, checking on the two that had collapsed while their operators hovered, already concerned. “Techs are authorized a short dose of Crue-D if you need it, but you’re all dismissed to go get acquainted.”
Miller had sunk to her knees gulping down cold air like it was in short supply but on those words she heaved herself to her feet and mopped a few soaking strands of loose hair out of her face. “Whew! …Good training,” she declared, drawing a tectonic chuckle out of Coyers.
“Hungry?” Jack asked her. He certainly was and he’d taken Adam’s imprecations about protein to heart over the years. There was no point in asking Coyers—HEAT were always eating. He’d either be on a special meal plan in which case he’d bring it with him, or he’d be free to join in whatever they did.
Miller nodded emphatically. “Fuck yes. I wonder where’s good to eat in this town?”
“Best Brioche on North Water Street,” Jack said promptly. “They do the best burgers ever, they’re called the Red, White and Blue—”
“I like them already!” Miller said. “…You sound like you know Folctha.”
“I grew up here.”
Moho grunted, and coming from him that was a heck of a noise. “No shit?”
“Yeah. Moved here when I was nine.”
Miller paused in getting her hair back into its bun. “…Wait. Tisdale as in—?”
“As in Sara,” Jack nodded and contrived to ask her with his face not to press any further. “Yeah.”
Coyers got the message too. He laid a huge, calloused hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Story for another time,” he said. Jack shot him a grateful look. They knew, of course. Everybody in Folctha knew the story, especially the SOR. So there was no point scratching that wound again today. “Showers first.”
Sharman had good showers. Jack turned the pressure right up and made incoherent sounds of pleasure as the pounding water ironed out some of the soreness, then changed into his street clothes once he was done. He found Miller and Coyers waiting for him at the front gates and greeted them both with a smile and a wave.
“Slow ass buys the burgers,” Coyers said. Jack laughed.
“You might have to spot me the cash,” he said.
“So where’s this burger place at, Local Guide?” Miller asked.
“North Water Street. It’s a straight shot about a mile that-a-way.” Jack pointed. “But that’s the boring way. The scenic route is over the road, past the courthouse, through New Worlds Plaza, over the bridge, along the river, back across the bridge by Rooney’s then through Quarterside park.”
“Sounds good, my legs are gonna get stiff if I don’t move them,” Miller agreed. Moho just nodded amiably. “Besides, I didn’t get to see the town much. It’d be nice to check it out if I’m gonna stay here.”
“It’s way different to what it used to be,” Jack confided, leading them out of the gate. “When we first moved here it was all prefabricated temporary housing and dirt streets.”
“I bet. Look at all the cranes,” Moho waved an arm at the skyline, and Jack nodded. Folctha didn’t have an iconic silhouette yet, it just had construction. Acres and acres of construction. “Who’s footin’ the bill for all this?”
“MBG invested a lot. They run the jump arrays and spaceport, and they have Chiune Station out west past the Lakebeds. Hephaestus own the trade station up around Cimbrean-Five and the metalworks down in the Skidmark… most of the money’s from agriculture, though. The farms out east are huge and the livestock herds out west are even bigger,” Jack said, counting points off on his fingers. “Then there’s tourism, the academic investment, logging, oil drilling…and all of it’s taxed pretty heavily. Then there’s the Gaoians.”
Sure enough, there was a duckling-line of cubs following a Mother on the other side of the road, heading for the lake. “The Females brought a lotta stuff with them when they first set up a Commune in the Alien Quarter,” Jack explained. “After the war on Gao started and the Israelis weighed in and all that stuff… I think a lot of things were built at a loss, actually. Or at least, they aren’t going to pay back for years and years. Anyway, that’s the courthouse.”
“…Pretty, I guess,” Miller conceded. “I dunno. I kinda feel like courthouses should be all white marble and columns and stuff, and a big dark wooden door.” She gestured to the glass and limestone fronting of Folctha’s offering. “This one looks like an airport terminal.”
“Is that what the courthouse is like where you’re from?” Jack asked.
“Denver. And yeah. Heck, it’s almost nothing but marble columns.”
“What about you, Moho?”
“Fuck if I know. Ain’t never seen a courthouse before.”
“I meant where are you from?” Jack clarified.
“Oh. Florida. Lil’ place about twenny miles outta Jacksonville…”
Thus began an afternoon which later went down in Jack’s memory as one of the best of his life. Taking the scenic walk around town helped loosen up his muscles, they earned a greasy, calorie-laden treat with an armed services discount at Best Brioche, they grabbed an afternoon beer at Rooney’s and that turned into several evening beers and a long, long conversation.
God only knew how Adam or whoever had matched them had figured they’d click, but they did. Moho was generous with his praise and his cash, and Miller could make anything sound interesting. Jack, who’d been worried he’d end up as the team baby or maybe that he’d be getting pity-respect for his sister, was instead astonished at how…naturally they slotted together. By sunset the three of them were like old best friends reunited.
Or maybe that was just the beer. Jack honestly didn’t remember most of it in the morning, though he did remember how he and Miller had wound up riding Moho’s shoulders back to the base at dead-o’clock in the morning, trying to outdo one another at who could sing their respective service song louder and in different keys because pride was at stake and ‘Heart of Oak’ was obviously superior to ‘Wild Blue Yonder’ and…
…And all in all, it was an excellent night. Worth the hangover, even. And the hoarse voice. The upshot, however, was that it achieved the intended result—when their first day of real work began in the morning it wasn’t as awkward new acquaintances tiptoeing around each other, but as teammates solving problems togeth er… and for the first time in his life Jack really felt like he belonged somewhere.
He’d made it.