Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Cabeiro Shipyards, Ceres, Sol
Drew Cavendish
Drew had lost his crown as the record holder for most time spent spacewalking years previously, but he still liked to keep his hand in. How was a man supposed to design spacesuits if he never wore them himself?
It didn’t matter that plenty of spacesuits had indeed been designed by people who’d never wear them, that wasn’t the Drew Cavendish way. Nothing went to the C&M Environment Systems assembly line unless Drew had worn it himself for at least twenty-four hours in real, working vacuum conditions.
Right now, he was testing the latest EV-CAM—ExtraVehicular Construction And Mining system. His was the prototype for the sixth-generation CAM suit, and things had come a long way from the early days wearing systems based off redesigned diving hardsuits. CAM-6 was flexible, luxuriously comfortable by spacesuit standards, packed with redundant safety features and, most importantly of all, simple.
There was no such thing as idiotproof in Drew’s experience, but that wasn’t going to stop him from trying to design an idiot proof suit. Combine it with the fierce training and constant safety measures in place and the fact that idiots didn’t get second chances when it came to EVA, and so far there hadn’t been a single incident.
Besides. It also felt good to do some honest work with his hands, and the bent, ravaged and blasted hulk of HMS Caledonia still needed a lot. They were rebuilding her almost from the keel up, and even the keel—a structural bar as thick as Drew was tall that ran right down the ship’s spine—had been reinforced with the best steel Hephaestus could get their hands on.
The alloy of the keel itself defied replication, which was why they were even bothering with the Sisyphean task of repairing her again. Even after being torn down to a wreck, Caledonia was still the most advanced ship humanity had. She’d fly again… in a few years.
There was a lot of welding to do before that day arrived. Drew enjoyed it, the simplicity of focusing on doing a job well in challenging conditions, and where other people might have sat down with incense and a singing bowl to clear their heads Drew instead forced his increasingly elderly bones into his own creations and built things.
Besides. It was a good way to hold the respect of the kids who’d come flooding out from Earth armed with engineering degrees and welding certs and heads full of the glamour of living in space and building spaceships. None of them had reckoned on the endless safety briefings, the relentless equipment checks and how little time they’d actually find between those two things to actually build ships… but they all agreed they had the coolest jobs in history.
“Drew Mike to Drew Charlie. You listenin’ you pommy cunt?”
Inside his helmet, Drew snorted. Some things would never change, and the world would be badly wrong if they did. Drew Martin becoming more and more Australian the further he got from Australia was one of those things. Whenever he was on Ceres, he was a walking stereotype to rival Mick Dundee.
“It was nice and quiet before you spoke up, Drew,” Drew replied with a grin. He stowed his welding torch away on the grounds that if his Antipodean counterpart was calling him in the middle of a ‘walk then he was probably about to be called back in.
“Believe me mate, I’d leave your wrinkly arse out there all night if I could so I can get some fuckin’ work done. But Big Jezza said get back in here for a Consortium meeting, an’ he looks a bit fuckin’ down in the mouth.”
“Oh, bloody hell…” Drew sighed to himself. Things had been going so peacefully, too. On the radio, he asked “Can it wait? If I don’t finish my scheduled job it’ll set the repairs back.”
“Nah, yeah, I told him that and he said it’s a no-can-do Drew. I even told him how much it’d cost, and he still said bring you in.” A note of concern crept into Drew M’s voice. “An’ you know what, if Big Jezza thinks the money can get stuffed then I reckon somethin’s a bit fuckin’ sketchy.”
That was putting it mildly. Drew carefully backed out of the compartment he’d been welding. “I’ll be inside in twenty,” he promised.
Twenty minutes later to the very second, the airlock was cycling around him as its in-built wash system sluiced Ceresean regolith, powdered steel and ice crystals off his suit. Getting regolith off of a suit in particular was a problem that Drew had spent years fixing. Brushing it off or vacuum-cleaning were out of the question, that stuff was worse than asbestos if it got into the air. That only left washing, and ordinary water just didn’t do the job…but whatever they did use needed to not harm the suit and wash off readily once it had carried away the dust, so oils and solvents were out too.
In the end, water-based sex lube had turned out to be the best starting point. There were 55-gallon drums of the stuff hooked up to the airlock showers to be slightly diluted, hosed all over the suit and then sluiced off. Drew had tweaked the formulation with a few particle-catching additives but at its core the decontamination process relied heavily on hypoallergenic, latex-safe, silicone-safe, easy-glide sexual lubricant.
Space was a glamorous business.
Suit-off had become far easier thanks to Drew’s years of hard work and innovation. Finding an airtight, secure seal that allowed the operator to enter and exit their suit quickly and conveniently in particular had involved three years of prototyping.
Normally, Drew would have spent twenty minutes performing a post-EVA inspection of his suit ahead of the relentlessly thorough one that would follow next time he came to wear it, but this time he stuck a huge red NOT INSPECTED label to the helmet, rinsed off the inevitable grime and BO of extravehicular work, grabbed a coffee and a snack bar from the vending machine, and ducked through the doorway toward Executive Operations.
Years on from its first construction, Ceres Base was easily the crown jewel of human achievement. Never mind Cabeiro Shipyards, that was just an ancillary facility—Ceres Base itself was a town, buried in the rock and ice and its standing population dwarfed the total number of people who had ever served aboard the ISS, Mir, Skylab and all the other space stations combined.
The old modules were still up there on the surface, under the domes. But all the important stuff had been moved deep underground years ago, backups made, redundancies added, compartmentalization written into the structure’s every line.
Given another ten years, it might even be able to permanently support a small population on a self-sustaining basis. And after that… who knew? The Hephaestus Consortium’s motto was “The Sky Isn’t The Limit” for a reason.
Thank fuck they’d finally ditched the elevator music. There would have been murders sooner or later.
“Something came up?” he asked as he entered Executive Ops. It wasn’t that he wanted to be rude, but in Drew’s experience ExOps was the kinda place he had to bull his way into and rule the conversation from the second he arrived or else people carried on their conversations without bringing him up to speed.
Fortunately, he had Drew Martin to watch his back. “It’s Adele, mate.”
Concern blanched Drew’s face immediately. He liked Adele. He’d worked with a lot of powerful executives in his life and some of them got high on the smell of their own shit. Adele Park meanwhile had all the confidence, authority and ferocity of a career woman who’d made it into the biggest of the big leagues and none of the character flaws.
“What happened?!” He sprang forward to the round table in the middle of ExOps through which flowed the accumulated data of their little interstellar empire. The report from My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon was in pride of place.
“Some kind of stasis fuckery,” Drew M summarized. “They snatched her right out from in front’a her security detail.”
“Jerry?”
Jeremy Carlson—”Big Jezza” to Drew M— shrugged grimly. “The Corti say they had nothing to do with it. They deplore her abduction, apologize profusely and blah blah blah.” He grunted. “I don’t really care. One of ours went missing on their turf. They are gonna need to get their noses very brown to make it up to us, and if we find even a hint that they’re lying to us about their innocence… well. All deals are off.”
“Bit bloody late for Adele,” Drew opined. “Have we called AEC yet?”
“That’s why you’re here.” Carlson gestured to Drew. “You work closest with them thanks to the EV-MASS contract. I figure you’re our strongest man to send to them.”
“We really don’t need the strongman act,” Drew protested. “AEC think of themselves as the sheepdogs keeping the wolves at bay. They wouldn’t ignore us.”
“Fair enough, but I don’t want to half-ass this,” Carlson said. “This is Adele we’re talking about. She’d pull out all the stops for any of us.”
“I’ll get on it immediately,” Drew promised.
“And I’ll lean on a couple of US Senators,” Carlson promised. “We’ll bring her home.”
Drew M grunted. “Strewth, I wish I had your confidence…” he muttered.
“Or that it was warranted,” somebody else added.
“What are we supposed to do? Just write her off?”
“Screw that! She’s one of ours—!”
Carlson raised his hand and his voice. “We’ll do… whatever we can,” he said lamely. “Thanks everyone. Let’s… let’s get to work.”
People drifted away in twos and threes, muttering amongst themselves with a generally hopeless air. The two Drews were among the last to leave, once Cavendish had finished his message to his friends in AEC and the SOR.
“…You still got that stash?” he asked of his counterpart once they’d escaped from ExOps. Ceres base had relaxed the rules on alcohol a lot since the early days, but Drew M had kept some beer right from the word go.
“Yep. ‘Bout time to crack open a coldie, you reckon?”
“Yyyup.” Drew sighed. “‘Cause something tells me about the best we can do for Adele now is raise a glass.”
Drew M nodded grimly, “…Bloody right it is,” he agreed.
Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space
Lt. Col. Claude Nadeau
People who didn’t know Lewis Beverote very well and just went off their first impressions of him were inevitably surprised by the orderliness of his private little kingdom.
It was an old and unusual arrangement. Lewis was the longest-serving human on Mrwrki after all, and had claimed a suite of rooms near the main nanofactory processors early in his tenure, giving him significantly more living space than anybody else on the station.
This had inevitably led to friction. How come the skinny middle-aged geek who talked like a terminal pothead got to lord it up in the penthouse while everybody else was crammed into single-room cabins barely larger than a college dorm room?
Complainers inevitably got the Tour, and there they learned that Lewis in fact lived in even more spartan conditions than the rest of them. His bedroom in particular was just that: a room with a bed in it. There were drawers and a hanging rail for storing his clothes, a tiny walk-in ablution room that combined the functions of a shower, toilet and wash basin, and that was it. Everything else was working space.
He never actually slept there, of course. He slept with his long-term partner, Sergeant Lucy Campbell in her perfectly standard cabin. But the tour definitely drove home the point that Lewis had never claimed that space for luxury. He’d claimed it to build miracles.
In ages past a renaissance man’s workshop like his would have been cluttered with drawings, prototypes, half-finished sketches and drifts of raw material. Lewis’ prototyping room on the other hand was kept meticulously tidy by the drones he’d invented partly as working prototypes for the Coltainer program’s control software, and partly because he knew his own mind and was absolutely certain he’d be neck-deep in mouldering unfinished pizzas if he didn’t take special effort.
Nadeau had a lot of respect for him. Even if the lighting in there did make him look a bit mad scientist-y.
“Good morning, Lewis.”
“Dude.” Lewis turned away from the pool of holographic light he was bending over and gave Nadeau the grin that said there’d been a Eureka moment in the recent past.
“I know that grin,” Nadeau said. “I take it you had a breakthrough on the Coltainer software?”
Lewis’ grin got wider. “You could say that. Say hello, SAM.”
“Hello Colonel Nadeau. It Has Been Approximately Sixty-Seven Hours And Twelve Minutes Since Your Last Visit. Are You Well?”
Nadeau almost fell over at the sound of a pleasant tenor voice greeting him. Lewis had always loved putting a scifi movie spin on his projects, but this one had all the special effects right down to an abstract holographic object—a friendly green icosahedron—that shimmered into life over the console and gave him something to look at, pulsing and twisting in time with the rhythms of its own speech.
“…You didn’t!” he exclaimed and took a cautious step forward.
Lewis waved a reassuring hand and shook his head. “Relax, the name stands for Sophisticated Algorithm Matrix. It’s basically just a fuckhuge flow chart of preprogrammed responses. ‘S’not alive, my man. True AIs are a fuckin’ crapshoot.”
“I heard they mostly just get depressed and delete themselves,” Nadeau hazarded.
“Yeah, but dude: Do you wanna take the chance that one of ‘em maybe one day gets mad at its creators for bringing it into this cold, uncaring, pointless universe and decides to take us down with it?” Lewis put on the same slightly manic smile he always did when he was discussing apocalyptic scenarios. “Nah, SAM here is nice an’ dumb, ain’tcha SAM?”
“I Know I Am But What Are You?”
“See? Nothing intelligent ever used that retort.”
Nadeau chuckled despite himself, and sat down. “…I have to ask. What’s the point of this, exactly? I thought you already said the Coltainers are as smart as they need to be. In fact I’m pretty sure you said we should keep them as stupid as possible because, quote ’that way there’s less shit can go wrong’.”
“Dude.”
“Fine, fine. Knock yourself out.”
Lewis chuckled and turned away from SAM’s console. “So, like, it’s always good to see you my man, but if this is a social call you coulda at least brung some beers.”
“No, it’s professional,” Nadeau said. “I have bad news and good news. Bad first.”
“Best way round!” Lewis nodded, and leaned against his console. “Lay it on me.”
“Bad news is, Kolbeinn says we aren’t going public with the Coltainers yet. For Opsec reasons. Don’t want Big Hotel getting ahead of us and planting beacons on every likely deathworld they can find…”
Lewis sighed. “Makes sense, but man. That’s gonna way slow down the colony sign-ups, and the whole point is rapid expansion. But whatever, he’s the big hat. What’s the good?”
Nadeau grinned. “He’s given us permission to launch.”
Lewis gawped at him. “…We’re go?”
Nadeau nodded. “We’re go.”
“My babies actually get to fly at last?”
“That they do.”
“Holy shit, SAM, you hear that? It only took five fuckin’ years, but we’re finally there!”
“Yaaaay.”
Nadeau eyed the holographic interface warily. “…You really programmed it to go ‘Yaaaay’?”
“Dude, I di’n’t program shit. SAM here’s flung together outta bits of other bots, some Watson tech, some Kwmbwrw universal interface, and a random number generator called Bob. Sharp as a rolling pin, but he’ll surprise ya. And he learns.”
“Well. We thought we’d run up ten Coltainers and hold a launch ceremony, probably a party, get very drunk…” Nadeau beamed. “I haven’t told Kirk and Vedreg yet, would you like the honors? I’ll even handle Vakno for you.”
“Dude.”
“Have fun, then.”
As it happened, Nadeau ran into Kirk not five minutes after leaving Lewis to his tinkering. Their permanent resident Rrrrtk almost bumped into him as he stepped out of Mrwrki’s sickbay. Thank goodness for ET medical databases, or their doctor wouldn’t have had the first idea what he was doing with three aliens on board.
Kirk and Vedreg had an…interesting role on board. Both were prisoners of circumstance, known enemies of the Hierarchy and thus unable to return to galactic society for fear of assassination or worse. Of course, there was nothing stopping them from moving to Cimbrean but considering that the Guvnurag population of Cimbrean was nil Vedreg would have been just as lonely there as on Mrwrki. Kirk, meanwhile, refused to abandon his friends. Nadeau had no idea what their slender and valuable ally wanted from life any longer, and Kirk wasn’t saying.
As it was, he avoided disaster by stooping and stepping under Kirk’s belly rather than accidentally scything his middle legs out from under him. Kirk reflexively reared away and hit his head on the ceiling.
“Shit! Sorry, sorry…” Nadeau spluttered but Kirk waved him off.
“It is nothing,” he promised.
“Good. Don’t want land you straight back in there…” Nadeau cleared his throat. “Everything okay?”
“I just needed a dose of antihistamines,” Kirk sighed. “I am sorry to say that I seem to have become quite allergic to Human dander in the last few months.”
“Huh. Really? A new allergy?” Nadeau asked.
“Inevitable, I am afraid.” Kirk shook his mane. “Incompatible biology. And while my immune system is sluggish and pathetic next to yours, with enough exposure even it will become quite aggressive…You seem in a good mood today, Colonel.”
“I was gonna let Lewis tell you, but we were just authorized to move on to full Coltainer deployment,” Nadeau revealed. Kirk’s ears flapped—Rrrrtk body language for a pleased expression.
“Outstanding!” he declared, without a trace of sarcasm. “It’s been a long road.”
“It’ll be a little longer yet,” Nadeau reminded him. “We still have to build some final-generation ‘tainers.”
“I suppose there will be a fitting send-off for the prototypes?” Kirk asked. He waved one of his four arms in the vague direction of the outer hull and through it the graveyard cloud of spent prototype Coltainers, hundreds of them, drifting in interplanetary space having given their best and only work to the conception of their replacements.
“Of course!”
“Good, then.” Kirk turned to go, then a thought seemed to strike him and he turned back. “A question though, Colonel.”
“Shoot.”
Kirk rocked back onto his hindmost four legs, a posture of thoughtfulness. “We have worked on the Coltainers now for five years. I myself have been here since before they were even conceived. And now, here we are on the doorstep of letting them out into the galaxy to pave the way for a wave of expansion without parallel in galactic history. And they will be a wave, oh yes.”
He sniffed, which was an impressive gesture when done by somebody with a sixteen inch nose. “But they self-replicate, do they not? After the first few production runs, our own contributions to their population will be negligible… but we shall still have a nanofactory, and a small army of the finest creative minds. I find myself wondering…What will we make next?”
He flapped his ears again when Nadeau’s face fell into a thoughtful expression, rocked back onto his forward feet and turned to walk away again.
“Something to ponder,” he said.
Date Point 15y4m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Lt. Col. Owen Powell
Everybody needed the occasional lazy day. A man would go bloody crazy if he didn’t take some time off to, as the case may be, slob around in his underwear all day and do nothing constructive. It made the constructive days mean more.
So, Powell was taking a long weekend to relax around his rambling single-story home wearing a pair of loose cotton pajama bottoms, drinking beers that weren’t doing a damn thing to him, and allegedly reading. Mostly, he was falling asleep with a book in his hand. He hadn’t shaved in two days and, given that he was the kind of man who had a five o’clock shadow by noon, a scratchy briar patch of coarse ginger-and-white hairs had already colonized his face.
He was jolted awake by the sound of his doorbell, and set aside the copy of Raising Steam he’d fallen asleep under to scratch and quietly cuss his way toward the door as he tried to remember if he was expecting a package or something.
There was definitely a package on the doorstep. She was five foot three inches with her hair up in cornrows and one of the most famous faces in the world, and she short-circuited his brain with a brilliant smile before reaching up on tiptoe to kiss him.
“Rylee?” he asked, as his wits finally stopped grinding gears and started moving again. “Fookin’ ‘ell, you didn’t—at least, I don’t remember—?”
She grinned at him. “Surprise!”
“Uh…come in!”
She slid past him in a dazing perfumed whisper and placed her bag neatly next to the little table in the hallway. It wasn’t the first time she’d visited his house, but the last time had been far too long ago.
“Hm. You make lazy look good,” she said as she took her shoes off while Powell inwardly cursed himself for not at least showering and brushing his teeth. “Miss me?”
“Don’t be daft, o’ course I did!” Powell folded his arms around her and kissed the back of her neck. “I’m just half addled ‘cuz you woke me up an’ I wasn’t expectin’ yer. Coffee?”
“What am I, a house guest?” Rylee hooked a finger in the front waistband of his pajamas and dragged him toward the bedroom. “The coffee can goddamn well wait…”
It was almost sunset when Owen woke up feeling a little on the cold side. Rylee was wrapped in blankets under his arm and completely dead to the world, having left him only just enough to cover his hips. He chuckled softly to himself, ran a finger along her eyebrow just to be sure she was really there, then ghosted out of the bedroom and into the kitchen where he ran a couple of coffee pods through the machine.
The second one was bubbling and frothing into its cup when Rylee yawned and scratched her way out of the bedroom wearing an impromptu bedsheet toga and a satisfied smile. She accepted the mug like it was pure divine Ambrosia.
“It’s gotta be like four in the morning back home,” she groaned. “Damn twenty-eight hour day jetlag…”
“Lemme guess—Business trip? Not like you to make little flyin’ visits.”
“Nope. This one’s all little flying visit…I uh, I woke up real lonely a couple days back and…I just wanted to be here.” She gave him a faint smile. “Dumb, right? How long have we been doing this?”
“Aye, an’ it’s bloody tough.” Powell sat down on one of the bar stools around the breakfast bar. His were specially made so that the Lads could use them when they came around, making them wider and far sturdier than any ordinary bar stool. “Fook, I’ve wanted to do the same more’n a few times.”
She nodded and sat down opposite him. “…Can we keep doing this?” she asked. It was a query, not a request. “I mean… we aren’t getting any younger…”
Owen gave her a curious look through the steam off his drink. “…Are you gettin’ all maternal as well?” he asked.
“Come on, intelligent people second-guess themselves sometime.” Rylee attempted a smile, but her heart wasn’t in it.
“Christ. Warhorse and Jockey, I’m pretty sure Firth an’ his missus are thinkin’ on it…”
“I know. The Misfits too. It just… got me thinking.” Rylee cleared her throat. “About us. I’m… still pretty sure I don’t want kids. But then I started worrying because if you do then…”
She put on that almost-smile again and looked apologetic. “…I dunno. I figured it was time we sorted our relationship out. I… fuck it, I love you. And if you want kids and I don’t… If we’re always gonna be long-distance…” She sighed. “I just had to come over here, talk it out.”
Owen put his cup down and took her hand. “About the only thing I know about bein’ a dad is that I couldn’t possibly fook it up as much as my old man did,” he said, and earned a laugh. “But… I don’t know. What’re kids for, right? The future? A legacy? Owt like that?”
“Something like that, I guess…” Rylee agreed. “…You think we’re building enough of one anyay? Without kids?”
Owen nodded. “Rylee, trust me. If it were a deal-breaker, I’d ‘ave said as much before now,” he promised. “…Besides, you can’t tell me the Lads won’t breed a bloody tribe between ‘em. You an’ I’ll be godparents or some such, no doubt.”
She grinned at the mental image, nodded, and finished her coffee. “It’s almost a shame, though. You and I would make some damn pretty kids.”
“Only if they inherited your hair,” Owen replied, running a hand over his own scalp which was more bald spot than not nowadays. She laughed his favorite laugh, a kind of husky bubbling one that started in her stomach, leaned over the breakfast bar and kissed him again.
“I happen to think your hair is perfect,” she said. “Not sure about the beard, though. It scratches.”
“I’ll shave it off now,” Owen promised. “Too bad: It were growin’ on me.”
She groaned, laughed his favorite laugh again and gave him a playful clout on the chest, and he stood up to clear things away with a smile that only she could bring out. The future could take care of itself.
Right now, he was just going to enjoy her company for as long as he had it.
Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
The Grand Commune, Tiritya Island, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Mother-Supreme Yulna
The future, amazingly, was looking bright.
This was not a thought that seemed natural in the mind of a Mother-Supreme who had witnessed the wholesale slaughter of her sisters and the sickening reduction of the Clan to a fraction of its former population… But knowing beyond doubt that the alternative had been extinction did a lot to bring out the positive side.
Too many young Sisters had become Mothers instead, before they were really ready. Too many young ones had grown up too quickly. But there was a relentless streak in the Gaoian psyche, one now bolstered by the efforts of Clan Starmind. No matter what, they were still standing, they were still there. They had lost a lot…But they hadn’t lost everything. It was meagre soil, but seeds grew in worse, and some of those seeds grew mighty indeed.
For example: The Females were now freer and more secure than ever before in the history of Gao.
They had teetered on the edge of returning to the gilded slavery of long ago for their own protection, and many Sisters and Mothers had argued for exactly that. It was a dangerous galaxy out there, nobody knew that better than the Gao nowadays. Why wouldn’t they surround themselves with solid Stoneback walls and the devoted attention of Male guardians?
Yulna would skin herself alive rather than be so weak.
In that, for once, she and the Great Father were of an aligned mode of thought. Daar respected the Females, in a way that Yulna hadn’t understood at first. He genuinely thought the Females were strong, were capable, could tread new ground without needing a male to break it for them first. And he was right.
His contribution had been invaluable, but Daar was just one man. The Humans on the other hand were a better friend than anybody deserved, and endlessly generous with their land, their resources, their time and their emotions.
But the Grand Commune was a creation of the Clan of Females. It was their sanctuary, their fortress, their demesne and their beacon, and they’d built it themselves.
Yulna like to stand on its balcony and watch the whales.
Importing whole species to Cimbrean was one thing. Importing a breeding population of titanic oceanic filter-feeders was quite another, but they were essential to the terraforming effort. Without the whales, squid and fish, the seas would long since have been choked pink by a tiny Terran species called Krill. And without the Krill the oceans would be a horrific bacterial and algal soup from where the Earthling floral that infested the Microbial Action Zone drained down river channels and into the seas.
There were enormous troubles. These whales were called “humpbacks”, whose migratory instincts were tuned to the waters of Earth and thus were totally worthless on Cimbrean. Their confused songs were mysterious, slow and sad to Yulna’s ears but apparently to Human scientists they were ripe with information. The whales knew they weren’t in Kansas any longer so to speak.
One quirky behaviour they’d begun showing since their transplant was that they hung out near land more often, as though the uncharted Cimbrean deep worried them. Now, in late winter, Yulna could watch them about a kilometer offshore, count the plumes of steamy breath they shot into the air and wonder whether they were breeding as fervently and enthusiastically as the Gao were.
She hoped so. They looked so small, so lost, so…displaced. Out of their natural waters and fashioning a new life for themselves in unfamiliar places and times.
It was hard not to draw a parallel.
There was a scratch on her door that pulled her from her thoughts and back to her unending, inescapable work. Mother-Supreme was a job for life, and not even the Great Father got to say otherwise.
Her scientific advisor, Mother Deven, swished into the room in a rush of silky russet fur and impeccable grooming. She gave Yulna a respectful bow.
“Is it four o’clock already?” Yulna asked. She moved to her desk and sat down.
“Whale-watching again, Mother?” Deven asked. “Fascinating species. Some of the largest things alive.”
“So I understand. What’s today’s news?”
Deven sat and handed over her daily report. “The statistical survey on cub gender is back. We’re definitely having more males.” she indicated the tablet. “That’s graph one.”
Yulna duck-nodded as she examined it. The birth rates were measured as a number per thousand births so the…curtailment…of the female population (she was still far too raw and reeling to brave the more accurate but less euphemistic words) wasn’t accompanied by a cliff on the graph, but the war on Gao still shone out. Less than a month after the biodrones had first been changed, the ratio of males to females had swung out of its historically stable seven-to-one ratio and peaked at ten-to-one. It was coming back down toward equilibrium now, but managing the long-term crisis such an imbalance would inevitably cause in about fifteen years’ time was going to have to start in the present.
“Why?” she asked for the time being.
“Our working hypothesis is that it’s a hormonal stress response to the war. Difficult times require expendable males,” Deven said. “If I’m right, we’ll probably see a surge in female births in a few years as the war stress fades and we enter a regrowth phase.”
“Interesting, but not my first focus for now,” Yulna said and swiped to the next item, which she was pleased to see was the epidemiology assessment she’d requested. They were sharing a planet with Humans now, and Humans were notorious disease factories. The fact that Folctha had successfully ticked over for so long without a serious cross-species pandemic was a minor miracle all by itself.
Newborn cubs and postpartum Mothers were at their most vulnerable. She needed to be certain that the Grand Commune was equipped to handle the worst Earth could throw at them through its children.
She was still reading the summary when there was another scratch at her door. She recognized the heavy paw behind it instinctively.
“Myun?”
“There’s a priority message from Sister Niral, Mother!”
“Come in!”
Myun had learned physical grace as a little cub training with Sister Shoo, and carried it into her adulthood where it interacted strangely with her sheer physical presence and naturally boisterous personality. She could flow, even if she insisted on going four-pawed far too often. Deven flicked an ear at the vulgar show but Myun had strongly-held convictions about what was and was not worth her time, and a mere senior Mother’s displeasure was firmly not worth her time.
Yulna took the message with a duck-nod of thanks and scrutinized it.
“…Thank you, Mother Deven,” she said after re-reading it. “I think we’ll have to continue this later on.”
“As you say, Mother-Supreme.” Deven stood, sketched deference in the air and departed without objections.
Yulna waited for the door to close. “This woman is important?”
“Hephaestus built the V-class destroyers, the EV-MASS suits and Armstrong Station,” Myun explained. Her claws tickled her belly as she considered the implications. Even she was pregnant right now: nobody could afford not to be. Yulna had to admit, Thurrsto was a lot more charming than he looked and if Myun had a thing for Whitecrests… well, there were worse and less needy Clans. “Niral thinks the Humans aren’t going to like that she went missing. At all.”
“…Leaping to Gao’s defense is one thing, but does she think they’ll take on the Directorate?” Yulna asked. Myun just shrugged.
“…Thank you, Myun. Please let Niral know that she can call me at any time,” Yulna said. That shrug had been exactly the right gesture—Whenever Yulna thought she had Humans figured out, they managed to go beyond what she thought of them. “In fact, the sooner the better.”
Myun chittered and returned to the door. “Yes, Mother. Anything else?”
“Hmm…” Yulna thought for a moment. “…Please alert Mother Naydra as well. I’m sure she’ll want to discuss it on Daar’s behalf.”
There was a complex and evolving knot that felt like it was grounded in a complex bedrock of tradition while in fact being less than a year old. Daar—Great Father Daar, as she always referred to him in public—had taken a mate. Naydra had suffered inconceivably during the worst days on Gao before her liberation, and had apparently won Daar’s big, soft, soppy heart without really meaning to. Certainly, his affections were more than reciprocated. It was a love story in a very classic way and totally at odds with what the Clan of Females stood for: An exclusive relationship? Two years ago, the very idea would have been scandalous. Now, Naydra was what the Humans might call a princess, maybe a queen-consort. Either way she was a towering figure who wielded soft power that matched or perhaps even exceeded Yulna’s.
There were only two options when faced with somebody like that: Jealousy or friendship. Yulna had chosen friendship. Quite aside from the fact that it was impossible to hate Naydra, Yulna needed a sympathetic line to Daar’s ear. She hadn’t spoken to the Great Father in seasons, on the grounds that he honestly loathed her, but she spoke to Naydra on a daily basis.
Thus were bridges…built? Mended? It didn’t matter, really. The point was, there was a functioning diplomacy between the Females and the Great Father again. It maybe robbed Yulna of some of her own authority, but she’d take it. She was a servant after all.
Myun duck-nodded to acknowledge the request and was gone, which left Yulna alone again. She sighed and returned to the balcony as she calculated what, if anything, she could do about the incident in Origin.
The truth was, there probably wasn’t much she could do. This was a matter between the Corti and the Humans. Gao would stand on the Human side of course, but…
But somehow, she got the feeling that whatever transpired on Origin would happen without Gaoian input.
Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Central University, City 1, Origin, The Corti Directorate
Lor
A Professor—a Faculty member at that—never hurried anywhere, especially if they were a Silver Banner. It was a matter of principle, and so Lor was not hurrying, nor was he being hasty. He was merely proceeding with emphatic efficiency.
At least his emphatically efficient process didn’t involve anything so crass as actual physical activity. He was standing on a drone platform, which zipped through the campus corridors of the oldest and most important hall of learning and decision-making the Corti had ever built and if any oblivious students or staff members were unceremoniously thrust out of the way by the platform’s field then that was a valuable lesson in attentiveness.
That same field kept the wind from plucking at the printout he was re-reading as he zipped across the circular main courtyard and past the ancient, pitted concrete statue of Chancellor Varos brandishing the ancient Corti icon of learnedness and authority, a scrolled parchment. The scroll itself was a copy of Varos’ personal banner, fifty meters long and heavy with metallic threads depicting his many achievements but—thanks to some cunning mass boson field manipulation—still flapping in the light breeze as though it weighed little more than smoke.
Lor’s own banner was a hefty three meters, but it was a point of pride that the heraldry, text and icons were all quite small. Discretion, after all, was a virtue.
He bowled aside a particularly slow-witted Vgork exchange student as his platform swept through the space between the Faculty Building’s wings and deposited him at his destination. It wasn’t the biggest or most important of the Directorate’s many Colleges, but its prestige had grown substantially over the last two orbits ever since the humans had officially accused that there was a conspiracy lurking in neural cybernetics.
Lor had gone from being a cantankerous purist, isolated and sidelined by his titanium conviction that neural enhancements were a form of cheating and that real Corti ought to rely on their own native brainpower, to somebody of genuine importance. His ideas were gaining traction in a way they had never quite managed before. Students were flocking to his college, which inevitably led to wealth, prestige, influence…and authority.
He stepped off his drone platform and his feet patted and tapped their way across stone flooring and into the Cognition Theatre.
Other species would have called it a Forum, or a House, a Chamber or a Senate. To the Corti, it was an operating theatre where ailing or imperfect propositions were dissected, inspected and either euthanized or else improved upon and discha rged in the form of legislation or executive decisions, destined for a higher authority to scrutinize.
He stopped at the door and announced himself. “Lor. Dean of the Varos College.”
The doors—huge, heavy things—swept aside for him and several of the most powerful Corti in the directorate looked up at him. Technically, Lor was among peers as fellow Silver Banners, fellow College Deans, fellow academics. But the fifteen Corti in the Cognition Theatre each held more power in a quiet conversation than Lor had achieved in his career so far.
The First Director blinked at him, a gesture of welcome. “Dean Lor. Your punctuality is commendable,” she said. This was, by Corti standards, a positively glowing reception and Lor bowed shallowly.
“I came directly, First Director Shanl,” he said. Forthright and uninflected, not obsequious. The Directors hadn’t earned their positions through false flattery and wouldn’t respect it in those they summoned to report. “Your message only mentioned a missing human…”
Shanl nodded and returned her attention to the data in front of her. “You are the most influential advocate for deimplantation,” she observed without immediately answering the question. “A heterodox attitude, until recently.”
“How did you rise so high when you endorse such a move?” One of the Second Directors asked. Larfu, Lor remembered. “Cybernetics are the backbone of our export economy. Surely advocating for it was an impediment to your career?”
“I cleave to the truth,” Lor said, and stepped into the middle of the room to join them. “…So far as I can discern it.”
The Directors nodded, and made room for him at the table. Test passed.
“This morning, an incoming Human starship, the…” Shanl scrutinized a note with a distasteful expression as though handling something unhygienic “…’My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon’ was subject to unauthorized interference while on approach. Several research vessels which were supposed to be out cataloging samples simultaneously wove a temporal dilation field around it. From the complaints the Humans registered, a senior and potent member of their largest interstellar industrial consortium was abducted, while the ship itself was dumped in interstellar space.”
Larfu indicated a second screen above the table. “We factored the new incident into our probability calculations concerning the Igraen claim. While the diplomatic corps handle the Humans, we have a more pressing concern—the fact that it now seems certain that their claims are correct, and that Corti society is infiltrated at the highest level by this Hierarchy.”
“To be clear, we assigned the claim a high probability as soon as it was first made. Every member of the Directorate was promptly deimplanted as a precaution,” Shanl elaborated. “Our objective now is to sanitize the species, preferable before the Igraens decide to do to us what they did to the Gao.”
“Hence, you,” commented the other Second Director, Morln. The three Third Directors, four Fourth Directors and all the Fifth Directors nodded solemnly.
Lor inwardly congratulated himself on a successful prediction. Outwardly, he gave the data a moment’s intense study and fixed it all in his memory. The Corti had bred eidetic memory into themselves thousands of Orbits ago, so memorizing every detail in front of him involved little more than a glance.
“…I have drawn up possible courses of action,” he said. “We will need to be extremely careful. The abduction of this Human may complicate matters.”
“How so?”
“The plan… relies on their goodwill toward us.”
Shanl inclined her head slightly for a second, then blinked her nictitating membranes and summoned a small stool to sit on, delivered by drone. The remaining Directors followed her example.
“Brief us,” she said.
Lor didn’t sit. Instead he loaded some files from his personal devices into the display and opened them.
“Allow me to introduce you,” he began, “to a colleague of mine by the name of Nofl…”