Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Planet Ayma, Uncharted Space, Near 3Kpc Arm
Xiù Chang
“That’s the last crate.”
Xiù stretched her back and looked around as *Misfit*’s dumbwaiter retracted and drew the last of their exploratory camp back up.
Byron Group had reluctantly conceded that their work on Akyawentuo was vitally important and had accepted a contract from Allied Extrasolar Command to make that their primary responsibility, but the Group had held out for two planetary surveys. Misfit was an exploration ship, they had argued, and keeping her grounded on Akyawentuo was a waste of valuable resources.
So they had picked the two best possible candidates and planned two surveys, months apart. The first had been a super-Earth, as big and massive as Akyawentuo but lacking the dense forests that the Ten’Gewek would need.
It had still been earmarked as their future property on the grounds that the People would pretty quickly outstrip the agricultural potential of their homeworld far before humans did—they needed to eat *constantly*—and the new world’s rich open grassy plains would be perfect for raising livestock herds, but they’d left it unnamed. The Ten’Gewek were a long way off even considering the prospect of colonizing another world, and would probably balk at the idea of leaving their gods and ancestral lands behind.
The second planet, however, was the jackpot. It was a sturdy Class Ten with immense oil and gas reserves. If Julian was right, there were oceans of the stuff deep under its sea beds, more than the combined oil fields of all the Earth and Cimbrean combined. In fact there was so much of it down there that whole clades of oceanic microbes had evolved to metabolize the hydrocarbons leaking into the water.
It was easily the most valuable planet they’d discovered, from a purely capitalist point of view. Even the gravity matched Earth’s to within a fraction of a percentage point. As huge as their finder’s bonuses for Aphrodite, Lucent and Akyawentuo had been, this one was the world that had made them all truly wealthy beyond dreaming. In a generation’s time, it might even surpass Cimbrean in both population and prosperity.
They named it Ayma.
Allison gave her a thumbs-up from the airlock. “Last crate. EV-Ten say they’re starting descent.”
EV-10 was Creature of Habit. The moment they’d flung their preliminary report and sensor data back to the MGB offices at Chiune Station on Cimbrean, a call had gone out for oil-industry geologists who wanted a crack at surveying an alien planet. Somehow, the Group had picked out a handful of the most qualified from among the tsunami of applicants, and prepped *Misfit*’s long-term survey sister for action.
It was good to think of her flying again. And with BGEV-12 in final testing back in Omaha it really felt like there was finally somebody to pass the baton to.
Passing Misfit off to a replacement crew was going to hurt, though. She’d been more than a ship, she’d been home. Leaving her behind was going to be like rewinding the calendar by five years, to those first months back on Earth when none of them had known where they were going, what they were doing or how to fit in.
Except…somehow, this time, she was looking forward to figuring it out.
“Babe?” Allison asked, and Xiù shook herself back to the here-and-now.
“Sorry.”
Allison smiled at her, then jerked her head backwards to indicate *Misfit*’s interior. “Shower’s free if you wanna clean up before they arrive.”
Xiù blinked at her, then glanced down at herself. She was, she had to admit, pretty dirty from all the lifting and spending time in the bush. “…Do I smell?”
“Not as bad as Julian.”
There was an indignant “Hey!” from inside the ship. Allison grinned and turned back into the airlock.
“Hon, you’re a meathead who wrestles with gorillas for fun,” she said as she vanished. “It’s okay.”
Xiù giggled and climbed the ladder. Julian and Allison were kissing when she got to the top which always made her feel warm inside too, and just like that her slight attack of melancholy was dispelled.
“I guess he doesn’t smell that bad after all,” she observed drily.
“Babe, get your ass in the shower,” Allison told her.
“Yes ma’am.”
Allison’s “good girl” was slightly muffled, though she was grinning around the kiss.
Twenty minutes later, by some miracle, they’d all managed to take a quick turn through the shower and change into clean dry clothes, which was why the crew of BGEV-10 Creature of Habit found three sharply professional interstellar explorers waiting for them rather than a trio of camp-stinky goof-offs.
EV-10 was a very different machine to EV-11. She was nearly twice the size for a start, and streamlined with a bullet nose and a raked delta wing. Even though the two ships wore the same red-and-silver MBG livery it was hard to picture them being assembled in the exact same facility by the exact same people. Their landing site was a pebble beach with plenty of room for both ships side-by-side, and Creature of Habit settled onto the stones like a VTOL jumbo jet. It was a heck of a sight…but Xiù fancied that she’d have made softer work of the landing.
They lowered the ramp right away and the first down it were Lee, Sullivan and Ackermann, the trio who’d competed against them for the right to crew Misfit.
There were no hard feelings. Well, okay, there had been some hard feelings at first, with Ackermann in particular making the pointed accusation that the better team had lost…but that was all in the past. EV-10 was arguably the more important ship anyway—Misfit was only equipped to find planets. Creature of Habit was equipped to explore them. All the real discoveries on Lucent had come from EV-10.
The two crews had finally had a chance to meet at an MBG party in the Statler Hotel in Folctha. It had been brief and a little tense, but it had opened the door to talking, familiarity and reconciliation. In time, maybe they’d even get to know each other well.
Allison certainly would. She was going to be designing the next-gen ships.
That was all for the future, though. For now, Sullivan—and here was a big difference between EV-10 and EV-11, in that Sullivan was firmly and definitely the captain, their leader and executive—shook their hands, followed by Lee and Ackermann.
“You found a good’n,” Lee commented. “The geosat data alone is a jackpot.”
“You should’ve been there when it started coming in,” Allison said. She gave Julian an affectionate tap on the arm. “This big lunk was giggling.”
“I do not giggle!”
“Yes you do, babe.”
Xiù chimed in. “And it’s adorable.”
Sullivan chuckled, then glanced back up the ramp. The specialists were finally stumbling off the ship in ones and twos, blinking around them in awe at actually standing on an actual alien world and suddenly the rationale behind putting him and his clean-cut compatriots in charge of the ship with passengers became clear. Allison, Julian and Xiù could get away with being informal and unorthodox because it was just them and they clicked. Sullivan and the guys needed to be able to take charge of untrained guests if things went wrong.
“…You’re gonna miss this,” he predicted.
“Life moves on,” Xiù said. “It’s nice that we get to choose when and how. Not everyone has that luxury.”
“You’re still gonna miss it though,” Lee pressed.
“…Yeah.”
“Well, hey…” Ackermann unslung the bag he’d been wearing over one shoulder and presented it. “I know you won’t be, like, formally retired for another month or so, but consider this a retirement gift from us to you. One crew to another.”
Xiù took it with a smile and received a bag that was much heavier than it looked. Inside was a cardboard box, and inside the box…
It was Misfit. Cast in what had to be steel from the weight and carefully painted, engraved, and recreated down to the last perfect detail, complete with the gold nanoparticle coating on the cockpit and observation window.
They cooed over and admired it for some minutes while Sullivan helped the science team navigate the endless perils of a shallow non-slip ramp and take their first awed steps on an exo-world.
“So what’s the plan after you’re happily retired?” he asked, returning to the group once the scientists were in their rhythm of unpacking.
“No rest for the wicked,” Allison said.
“Ambassador Rockefeller wants me to be his representative to the Ten’Gewek,” Julian revealed.
“I’m going to work with the Gaoians,” Xiù said firmly.
“And I’m staying in the Group,” Allison finished. “Clara wants me as technical crew consultant on the ship design team.”
Lee smirked and extended a palm sideways toward Sullivan, who grunted and slapped a couple of folded notes into his palm.
Sullivan’s curiosity couldn’t be contained. “How will you three make it work?”
“Jump portals,” Julian pointed out. “Cimbrean, Earth, Gao, Akyawentuo, they’re all linked and on a schedule now. And if the Group gets permission to build a station on Akyawentuo like they’ve been asking…”
“And eventually, some of the People will probably visit Cimbrean,” Allison added.
“We don’t know anything about that yet, though,” Xiù said.
“Yeah. There’s a lot to do.”
Lee chuckled “Can’t fault you folks on your work ethic,” he said.
“Even if we have been standin’ here shootin’ the breeze this whole time,” Sullivan pointed out.
His sweeping hand drew their attention to the five scientists whose presence was kind of the whole point of bringing EV-10 out there, and contrived to suggest that the conversation needed to come to an end.
There were selfies and autographs, quickly. A few shaken hands, a few kind words, and…that was it. Their last mission ended with kind of a fizzle…But Xiù was more than happy with fizzle. No excitement, no explosions, no killer alien robots or Hunters or interstellar wars. No choking on vacuum, no new scars, no more death.
It felt genuinely weird to think that they’d actually achieved something without it all going to Hell halfway. Ending a chapter of her life with a full stop rather than an exclamation was honestly a novelty and a luxury.
They stuck around for dinner though, or at least for sausages on skewers over the fire with campfire coffee and s’mores and a tiny toast to a successful mission, future endeavors and stuff like that. Not enough to even work up the smallest buzz…but enough to mark the occasion.
For Xiù, settling in her flight seat was a melancholy feeling. Everything about it felt special now, the precise contouring of it to make it fit her perfectly and to place all the controls in exactly the right place, the greeting card with its cartoon caricatures of herself, Allison and Julian that she’d stuck up on the wall to her right, the specific and familiar way that Misfit shook herself awake and made ready to fling herself out of the gravity well again.
To think…she might never sit here ever again. She wanted to tear up, to choke and hold on.
Instead, she selected their recall beacon codes, ran through the checklist… and left.
It was time for another adventure.
Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, The Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm
Professor Daniel Hurt
Writing was infinitely easier with a desk and keyboard. Sure, there were people in life who could scrawl out a book in a paper journal while sitting under a tree, but that just gave Daniel hand cramps. And tapping away at a touch-screen was no good at all, because whatever he was writing crammed itself into a tiny fraction of the screen and his fingers seemed to miss the letters.
A good keyboard—and Daniel had had one imported from Cimbrean for exactly this reason—was a joy. He could write for hours, given a supply line of coffee. Once upon a time, he’d have been supplied with cigarettes too, and even though he’d quit years ago he still felt the occasional twinge of craving.
He stood up and walked around to drive it off, reviewing his most recent paragraphs.
‘Inequality is mandatory. That is, it won’t go away no matter how hard we try to stamp it out, because somebody has to do the stamping, and that person will have authority that another will lack. It certainly exists in Ten’Gewek culture despite their total lack of ethnic diversity, class structure or wealth. Some men are “chosen by the gods” to be Given-Men and that’s the last word. It’s a biological function exclusive to middle-aged men, meaning there will never be a Given-Woman, or a young Given-Man.
‘A Given-Man is a genuinely alarming specimen. A full-sized man of the People is by himself a worthy challenge to a fully-grown silverback gorilla. A newly-transformed Given-Man is vastly more impressive and has many years ahead of him to gather strength. If that first-season specimen was to ever tangle with, say, a bear of the deep Alaskan frontier, my money would be on the Given-Man. They have a tremendous inequality of strength compared even to an exceptional Ten’Gewek man, and they are a people whose adolescents of either sex would certainly overwhelm adult male chimpanzees. And yet, the People aren’t generally unhappy with the inherent unfair lottery of this system.
‘Why?’
Daniel mused on that single syllable as he ambled over to the campfire. He cleared his head by setting the tablet aside and brewing up a fresh pot of coffee the old way, in a metal pot pushed into the warm ashes at the fire’s edge, and gazed meditatively into the glowing coals as it brewed. They almost had a heartbeat, he noticed. Their glow pulsed slightly as some internal quirk of air circulation drew first more then slightly less air into their midst.
He grabbed the tablet again and used the touch keyboard to sketch out the thrust of his argument.
‘Because happiness doesn’t come from wealth, but from purpose.’
He was interrupted away from writing any more by a message ping as their “mailbox” communications array took receipt of the hourly data swap from Cimbrean and passed on his emails. He opened his inbox and grinned, put the tablet in standby mode, and stood up.
His camp—and it had definitely become his camp, now that Misfit had flown off to Gods-knew-where and the JETS team were busy setting up their training facility—reminded him of playing Dungeons and Dragons in university. His friend Paul had described a crooked wizard’s tower perched high on a crag overlooking a dirt-poor pig-farming village, whose lone occupant was surrounded in arcane paraphernalia that the local peasants didn’t understand and whom the peasants treated with a curious blend of awe, fear, dismissal and confusion.
It wasn’t a tower, but Daniel’s camp certainly had that same otherworldly nature to it. Here he was, brewing a potion and weaving a spell of light. His beard had certainly grown over the last year, so really all he needed now was a pointy hat and a raven.
He chuckled to himself and strolled to the edge of the camp which was, yes, a little way from the Ten’Gewek village and high on a bare spot where the curve of the land kept the prevailing wind at bay and also gave him a breathtaking view every morning.
He’d honestly never been happier in his life.
He’d certainly never been fitter—living in supergravity had been aching, agonizing hell for several months, but he’d adapted, grown, firmed up under Playboy and Tiny’s cheery, painful coaching. He’d probably pay for it in later years but right now whenever he took a quick jaunt back through the Array to visit Earth or Cimbrean, he found himself walking down the street like there were springs in his toes.
Oh, sure, Civilization had its comforts. Hot water, lattes, jazz…But there was definitely something more fulfilling about those things when they were rare. And he’d been astonished during his last trip to Earth when a young woman had actually checked him out, a hitherto unheard-of event.
Good for the ego, good for the soul. All the more reason to keep coming back here to live in the dirt with a bunch of cave-monkeys who still hadn’t quite obsoleted their flint-knapping skills.
In fact…
He checked his boots for any pesky critters that might have decided to overnight in them, pulled them on and ambled down into the valley toward the forge with his hands wrapped around the steaming mug of campfire coffee to warm them against the morning chill.
Vemik’s forge was easily the biggest structure the Ten’Gewek had ever built, especially if one included the fenced compound out the back where the charcoal-burning and smelting happened. It was mostly just a roof of foliage thatch on a large scaffold to keep the rain out of the flames and off the tools, plus a windbreak, but it was warm, dry and rank with the smells of smoke, hot metal and sweat.
Vemik was there, of course, hammering away at a batch of wrought iron. The work had done much to fill him out, especially across the shoulders, though the constant smoke and heat had also colored his hide—apparently it made him look slightly older to the Ten’Gewek woman, in all the good ways. Outside of the occasional village party, though…he only had eyes for his Singer.
He looked up and gave Daniel a nod of welcome, before gesturing with his hand. His apprentice—a boy who hadn’t yet taken his Rite of Manhood—promptly flipped the sullen glowing lump of iron over on the anvil with a deft heave of two poles.
“Sky-Thinker,” Daniel greeted him, and took a close look at the iron. Ten’Gewek steelwork was getting more and more competent by the month, and this latest project had all the hallmarks of late-night ‘tinkering’ and mad inspiration.
If only the People would live closer to running water. They would have had water wheel-powered trip hammers by now. That seemed to go against their ethos in several ways, though—they preferred using their own strength where they could, and they hated bodies of water of any kind to the point where even small, shallow ponds drew their suspicion. They got their drinking water from Ketta trees, from tiny mountain streams, and from collecting rainwater as it poured off their thatched huts.
“Professor Daniel!” Vemik beamed toothily at him. He’d grown up considerably in the past year, including finally managing to lose his dogged w-lisp. His sideburns would have been longer too except that he’d managed to sizzle them short a few weeks previously, not that he seemed to care.
His English, meanwhile, was approaching full fluency. “Good morning. It’s good to see you!”
“Good morning,” Daniel replied. He knew Vemik had been up all night nursing the smelt and would probably crash hard once this project was finished. Then he’d sleep, eat a large meal, hunt a large meal during which some more inspiration would smite him and he’d come crashing back into the forge to make it live. “It’s a big day.”
“Is it?” Vemik’s tail twitched as he laid into the iron with his hammer again. “What day?”
“I just got a message from Allison, Julian and Xiù. They should be returning today.”
Vemik uttered a delighted hooting sound and gave the iron a gleeful blow. “Good news! Did they find anything good?”
“Oh yes. Very much so.”
He settled against a workbench—Vemik had invented the wedge technique for splitting wood into flat planks all by himself a few months ago—and watched the process of smithing.
“Found what?” Vemik asked, as his apprentice flipped the bloom again.
“A planet with no People, but lots of useful things. Not far from here, in interstellar terms.”
“Hmm. In-ter-stell-lar,” Vemik mulled the word over, then translated it into Peoplespeak with a compound word. [all-the-steps-between-stars]. Difficult word in any language.”
“Only for you, Sky-Thinker,” Daniel grinned at him. Vemik huffed the very specific almost-trill that said he was amused by the tease, but was certainly going to be re-exerting his physical superiority over the old man when his hands weren’t full. The People were like that, intrinsically kinetic.
Which…Daniel had found over the last year, to his surprise, that he didn’t really mind their very physical nature. It wasn’t like being trapped with a whole civilization of locker-room jocks at all, instead he’d learned how to enjoy pretty much constant bodily contact of some kind.
“What useful things?” Vemik asked.
“Metal ores, interesting plants and animals… something called oil. Lots of that.”
“Oil means…what does oil mean?”
“That is a word that means many things, Vemik. It can mean the liquid you get at the top when you boil werne bones. It can also mean something that’s black and sticky, like burned sap. What it means here is closer to that, but there are many, many things you can do with oil. Like, you can make the stuff that Julian’s foot is made from.”
“We have oil here?”
“You do. But it’s yours. My people want more, and we aren’t going to Take yours.”
Vemik have Daniel a complicated look. It was the look the People often used when they were utterly uncomprehending of why the humans were doing what they did, but were thankful anyway.
“You could,” he pointed out again. “We would, if a neighbor tribe had it.”
“And so would some humans. But we won’t. We have rules.”
“I know. We are…very lucky we met you. [Gods-many-blessed], I think.”
A new voice joined the conversation. “More than we know.”
The two men and the boy turned. The Singer and her apprentice Dancer were waiting at the forge’s threshold. It was very much a male space, and while the Singer was empowered to go wherever she wanted into the worlds of women and men alike, her Dancer hadn’t yet taken a Rite of Manhood. She wouldn’t enter the forge without invitation any more than a man would enter a birthing-hut.
Vemik waved them easily inside, slipped his tail around the Singer’s waist and tickled the baby she was carrying under its chin.
“More than you know?” Daniel asked.
“…Word come from Hoeff,” the Singer told him. “They found…he called it ‘Core-tie bunker.’ Also said ‘tell the fucking egghead to turn his radio on’.”
She trilled as Daniel scrambled for the radio in his pocket. Sure enough, it was turned off. He couldn’t remember when he’d done that.
“Uh…Chimp, this is, uh, ‘Nutty’. I guess. Uh…sorry. Got your message. Something about a Corti bunker?”
“Nutty, Chimp. Thank you for joining us on this outstanding morning. I can’t fucking stand how goddamned pleased I am today. Can you tell?”
Daniel grimaced even as every Ten’Gewek grin in the room got wider and more amused. The People got sarcasm, and Hoeff was…honestly? The ‘Hans’ and ‘Franz’ act that Walsh and Julian did could be intimidating, sure. But when Hoeff was angry, everyone was on-edge. Even Yan gave him deference. Something about the intense little man just screamed intent.
“…And yes, confirmed Corti research expedition. Old vault full’a tech, probably predating the Big Hotel presence. Tiny picked up a radio emission three hours ago. Weak as shit ‘cuz the power’s almost gone, but we tripped over it. Grab your tools and meet us up here.”
“Can I sleep first?” Vemik wanted to come. He desperately wanted to, but there was a certain tired slack to his muscles that spoke volumes.
“How long?”
“Maybe…four hours? That’s a finger of sun, I think?”
Daniel nodded and keyed his radio again. “Chimp, Sky-Thinker wants to come, but he’s been beating steel all night. He’s asking for four hours.”
“He can come later, this won’t be over quick. Find Yan and ask if he’ll carry your stuff. And your radio, too. He’s better with it.”
Hoeff was being extra salty today, and it couldn’t all be the radio. Normally, he’d have taken that with, yes, some salt but this was full-blown anger. That wasn’t a good sign.
At that moment Yan ambled over and crowded Vemik’s apprentice out of the small space. “I heard my name on [magic-voice-stone].”
“Radio,” corrected Vemik.
Yan gave him a tusky grin. Here in the forge was Vemik’s kingdom, and he tolerated a little more back-talk. [“I like our words better!”]
“I was showing Hoeff and the others where some of the medicine-herbs grow and we found…a thing. Like a stone hut underground, full of sky-devices,” the Singer told him.
“A vault full of tech,” Yan corrected. [“I know the words too. I just like ours better.”]
[“…They want] Professor Daniel.” the Singer finished.
Yan switched back to English for reasons only he understood. “That is good. How far away?”
“Flat-top mountain.”
Yan sighed. “So, half the day. Okay. You go get things, Professor. I help Vemik beat last of steel, so he can go sleep. Then he come meet us later, yes?”
Somehow, Daniel knew that Vemik wouldn’t be taking the full four hours he’d asked for. But the Sky-Thinker nodded and accepted the suggestion by gesturing for his apprentice to pull the bloom back out of the coals where it had been staying warm. With Yan’s help it went much quicker. He had his own hammer in the corner which Vemik could barely lift, let alone wield, and with it he was able to do in literally a minute what took Vemik about twenty, or his apprentice an hour. It wasn’t well-formed, but it didn’t need to be—they just needed the carbon beat out of it before it cooled and for that task, power was everything.
Daniel meanwhile ran back up to his camp. Ran! A year ago, he’d have been winded and gasping from just walking up the hill. Now, he whirled around the camp grabbing his field research kit, dry socks, some rations and his water filter bottle, then jogged back down to the village.
Yan had finished with the stack just as Daniel returned with his backpack of things and Yan’s biggest water-skin, which he’d filled up on the way back to the forge by tapping a Ketta tree.
It was the little things, really, and Yan grunted his thanks. “Ready?”
Dan shouldered his pack and made sure the straps were tightened properly so that its weight wasn’t hanging painfully on his shoulders. He stamped his boots to check they weren’t rubbing, then unrolled the hat he kept in one pocket and jammed it on his head. “Ready.”
Yan trilled in his contrabass voice, then patted his knives, and grabbed the little travel bag he carried with him everywhere. “You humans carry too many things I think. We go now.”
Without a further word, he swaggered out of the forge. Daniel sketched a little wave of parting to Vemik, the Singer, the Dancer and the apprentice and followed after him. Yan wasn’t difficult to follow—humans had longer, straighter legs and could outpace any Ten’Gewek on the ground no problem, even if they knuckle-walked.
It was still going to be a long walk, though.
In his head, he kept writing his book.
‘Happiness doesn’t come from wealth, but from purpose. Give somebody money, and what do they do with it? They want to spend it on something meaningful…’ he began.
Date Point 15y4m2w AV
HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Sergeant Ian Wilde
“Alright lads. Last one in buys the first round.”
Wilde had always had an ambitious streak, in a weird way. He wasn’t really interested in being rich or famous, but whatever he did he wanted to do at his absolute best. That was what had attracted him to serving in the first place: the Royal Marines had run a recruitment campaign challenging him to go beyond his own limits, and that had just… sung to him. Lured him in, and when those ads had turned out to be the honest truth, he’d stuck and stayed. Passing the notorious “Hell Week,” commando training, making the cut for spaceship service…
It all scratched the same itch, and JETS was just the next step up that endless hill. He wasn’t sure what was at the top or if he’d ever make it, but he was bloody well going to go as high as he could.
And any JETS team he led was bloody well going to be the best, too. There were four, and Wilde’s Team Two prided themselves on setting the standard for the other three to aim at. So the fact that Team Four had beaten their time in the tactical course obviously wasn’t going to stand.
The new time to beat was fifty-seven point oh-six seconds.
His teammates were all Americans, sadly. One SEAL in the form of Petty Officer Third Class Jason Hobbs, one Ranger as embodied by Sergeant Travis Wright, and their engineer, Specialist Nicolás Garcia. Good guys, a little short on appreciation for anything British, but brothers nonetheless.
They’d worked pretty hard on Garcia, on the grounds that he’d been the one holding them up a little in the last few runs. No blame attached, his training just hadn’t focused on that stuff before, but now there was team pride on the line.
“How’s that meant to be motivating anyhow?” Wright asked. “We all pay fer a round anyway, so what’s it matter who goes first?”
Wilde snorted. “Just get your arse on the line.”
Wright chuckled. “Assing the line, sergeant.”
They lined their toes up on the starting line, checked their MILES systems were online, then gave the nod to today’s supervisor.
Wilde liked Colour Sergeant Murray. Once you understood his ways, the guy was actually amazingly talkative: he just didn’t use words much. Right now he ran an eye over the four of them, nodded subtly, and started the course up.
“Time starts when you breach,” he told them, and stepped back to watch the show.
Wilde took a deep breath, rolled his neck to release a click in it, then dropped into business mode. “Alright… Go!”
Garcia had the most universal skeleton key in the world, a shotgun. The poor lock didn’t stand a chance, and the four holographic foes in the room beyond were serviced before they’d even finished turning round. Lines, motion, angles. Wilde knew his place in the pattern and slotted into it neatly, felt the flow click, felt his team move with the kind of precision they’d practiced for literal months to achieve. Whenever Wilde put himself where he needed to be, the others were there too, nobody late, nobody early, everybody fast.
Breach, in, movement, service, circle, service, clear, next…
Three rooms. Four rooms. Beep.
“TIME!”
He let a breath out, and the four of them grinned at each other. They didn’t know if they’d beaten the course time yet, but they did know that they’d just set a personal best. They could feel it.
Murray for his part took his sweet time in sauntering over to give them the final score.
“No’ bad,” he commented, and the twinkle in his eyes said ‘bloody excellent in fact.’ “…by JETS standards.”
“Yeah, yeah. We ain’t interested in ‘yer big hero HEAT times,” Hobbs said. “How’d we do?”
Murray’s smile got a little wider. “…fifty-six point seven four.”
Garcia whooped. “Back on top!”
“Fuckin’ A!”
Wilde grinned. “Nice one.”
“You know Team Four’ll want another go, aye?” Murray pointed out.
“Bring it on,” Wright said. “Best team’ll…” he trailed off. “…Win. Heads up, captain’s comin’.”
The five of them turned. Captain Costello never managed to not look like he was on his way from something to something else with fifty plates spinning around him. His permanent expression was that of a perpetually busy man, but that probably came with the territory. There were other officers finally coming through the JETS and HEAT training pipelines so maybe he’d start getting a moment’s peace here and there in the near future, but for now he was about the busiest man on the base.
“Afternoon, sir,” Murray greeted him.
“New record?” Costello asked warmly. Wilde would say that for him, even under endless demands on his time, the captain was a nice chap.
“Aye.”
“Good! But I should note that we need to start preparing for your offworld survival training. I’m told Chief Petty Officer Hoeff along with a Mister Etsicitty will be here to explain the program next week.”
“That can’t come soon enough,” Wilde agreed.
“…Along with a special envoy, from what I’m told.” Costello grinned like he was enjoying the rare opportunity to be mysterious.
“…Sir?”
“All I will say, is that I doubt you will ever forget him. Anyway. You’re the only team cleared for operations on Class nine and below and we have a… situation. Might turn into a mission, might not. I wanted to give you a heads-up so you can be ready if it does.” Costello consulted some notes as a reminder. “…Hephaestus sent one of their ships to the Origin system, the Corti homeworld. Some big business deal they were hoping to negotiate with the Directorate, I gather. And instead the executive director they sent along to start the negotiations was abducted this morning, right off the ship. Either the Corti are being uncharacteristically stupid, or Big Hotel are up to something.”
“That…doesn’t sound very good, sir. You want we should rest up and recover?”
“Yeah. Get your gear, be ready to move on short notice.”
Wilde nodded his obedience but grumbled internally. “Right. Let’s go get cleaned up lads. Consider yourselves on-call starting now.” It would be good to be deployed and be useful. Every team needed that to really come together.
But he had really been looking forward to that beer, too.
Oh well. There was always later.
Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, The Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm
Professor Daniel Hurt
“My God, look at this! They had boats! And wheeled carts! And writing, mathematics…”
The Corti bunker was quite a small affair, in fact. How they’d built it unobserved and undetected, Daniel didn’t know but it consisted of little more than a pair of sturdy metal doors, and behind that a room full of computer equipment with a living annex fit for three pint-sized gray researchers. There was a basic quantum power stack buried in the floor, which Walsh had managed to successfully jump-start with his own portable solar power collector and an alarming moment involving sparks and smoke.
Nobody human had the first idea how quantum power stacks worked or what fuelled them, but they were pretty damn convenient. They produced power from…somewhere. Not a lot, but enough to run a facility for some time, and apparently they lasted well. That little stack had been doggedly keeping the bunker running on emergency minimum for decades.
Once things were fully up and running again, logging into the Corti computers had been easy. They weren’t even password-protected, and their memory banks were replete with a treasure trove the virtual equal of the one that made Howard Carter so famous. Hundreds of hours of high-definition 3D video, millions of still images, tens of thousands of scanned samples, untold libraries of sound recordings…
The ceremonial armor was particularly impressive. One of the high-definition images Daniel had successfully recovered showed off an impressive cohort of Given-Men, each clad neck to knees in riveted steel and leather and armed with long-handled straight swords that looked like they could just about bisect a bear.
And they in turn answered to a king. A real king, wearing bronze and gold and dispatching wisdom from a throne of wood and copper, with his long crimson crest intricately braided and woven with decorative jeweled fabric.
There were Singers and Dancers, a whole parade of them raising their voices as one to greet the morning sun and weaving a tapestry of sound the likes of which Daniel hadn’t ever heard in church. Not worse or better, but very different.
There was a market draped with dyed cloths and the photography was so excellent that Daniel could almost smell the spices. There was a gymnasium of sorts, full of grappling fun. There was a school, with eager, bald young Ten’Gewek children listening rapt as a teacher read them stories and young adults with extremely Vemik-like expressions debating furiously over some philosophical, mechanical or mathematical point of interest.
There was civilization. And from the map data, it was unquestionably the same one that had vanished in nuclear fire when the Hierarchy came. It was like watching real video footage from Pompeii.
Yan was very, very quiet. The kind of quiet he only managed when he was truly angry.
“This…we did this?” He asked eventually, as Daniel was reviewing the Corti zoologist’s notes on Ten’Gewek mathematics. Their approach had revolved around geometry, and they had devised a remarkably elegant proof of Pythagoras’ Theorem considering their working medium had been damp sand. “They…The Big Enemy Took this from us?”
“Yes,” Daniel said softly.
“When?”
Daniel checked the Corti dates, and compared them to a mental conversion table. “About…Let’s see, two hundred and twelve Origin years, seventy Earth years for every hundred Origin years…sixteen Earth years for every ten Akyawentuo years…Fuck, is that divide or multiply by one point six, or…?”
Walsh cleared his throat. “A hunnerd an’ twenty-one local years, Professor.”
‘Tiny’ had a truly unsettling propensity for understated genius. And Yan these days had a better understanding of base-ten numbers; he could write them out, too, which he did in mid-air with his finger and his lips moving.
“That is…old,” he declared after thinking about it. “But not gods old.”
“Yeah, well. Best guess on the population…” Walsh waved a hand at another screen. The Corti, inconveniently, used a base-twelve number system, “They figger between the inland sea civilization here, the river valley civilization up north, the forest tribes an’ the mountain Clans there were about two, two-an’-a-half million.”
Yan scratched at his crest. “Two…million,” He said, carefully. Reasonably fluent in English or not, lateral consonants were still tricky for him. “How many…circles? Circle-things. How many in number?” Daniel made note of that question; Yan didn’t just understand the numbers, he understood the theory of the numbering system, and had asked for an order of magnitude to compare. The Ten’Gewek really did have an exceptionally rational way of thinking, sometimes.
“…Six.”
They watched as Yan traced out such a number in the air with his finger, then…
“So many.” There was a long, awkward pause. “We are… four circles left. Yes? For every [one-person] now, we were a whole tribe then?”
“…Yes. Just under twenty thousand today, as best as we can figure.”
“…three circles. [Anger-killed].”
“Murdered. There was no anger, this wasn’t…” Daniel gritted his teeth. He was getting angry too, deep in his anthropologist’s soul. “…They weren’t angry at you. They just saw you as a…pest.”
“Pest,” Yan repeated hollowly. Daniel found he couldn’t muster the courage to look at the Given-Man’s expression.
After a silent moment, Yan stood up and headed for the exit. Hoeff and Tiny got the hell out of his way as he grabbed one of the massive vault doors, rusted by time, foliage and weather into a pretty solid unit, and wrenched it aside, slamming it back into its slot with an agonized squeal of elderly metal and the crunch of decrepit hydraulics finally giving up their ghost.
The sunlight cast his shadow on the wall, and he was gone.
Daniel dared to breath again. “…Gods and spirits.”
“Even they’re prolly stayin’ outta Yan’s way right now,” Hoeff remarked. “Tiny, go keep an eye on him. Let him get it outta his system.”
“Go be his wrasslin’ dummy. Got it, Chief.” Walsh sighed, resigned to his fate, and followed the distant sound of Yan taking out his anger on anything in the vicinity.
Hoeff slumped down in a Corti-sized chair next to Daniel, and managed to make it look almost normal-sized. He wasn’t a large man at all. “About where were they at, in our terms?”
“…Ancient Greece?” Daniel hazarded. “Their mathematics was certainly there. But there’s a lot the Corti didn’t record.”
“Like what?”
“Size of the slave population, if there was one. How the king became the king, what role other Given-Men filled in their society…I see fruits and roots being sold in this marketplace image, but there’s no data on their agriculture.”
“Maybe they didn’t raise crops?” Hoeff suggested. “They seem pretty meat-oriented. Hell, they’ve even managed to get me to gain ten pounds.”
“Maybe. But what I take from it is that these researchers weren’t here for very long. Their data covers only a few weeks of observations.”
“Didn’t take Hotel long to notice, huh?” Hoeff sat back in the chair and swung his boots up onto an unimportant surface. He fished a foil pack of blueberries from a pocket and tore it open. How he could be so small and so ravenous was a constant source of amazement.
“I suspect we’ll never know exactly what happened,” Daniel said. “The last entry in the log is routine, cataloguing samples. Maybe there’s something hidden in the facility’s security systems but I wouldn’t know how to begin accessing those…Goddammit.”
“What?”
“Just…look at this. Authentic pre-Contact Ten’Gewek alphabet. A fully encoded translation matrix for both written and verbal media.” Daniel waved a hand at an image he’d found. “They wove their family histories into blankets. Weaving! The People we know wear hide, and not much of it either. Weaving means they were either cultivating a plant like linen or cotton, or they were rearing woolly livestock.”
Hoeff bounced up and ambled over to the screen, intuited its controls and started flicking through photos. “Hey prof, you notice anything ‘bout these folks?”
“I noticed a lot of things. What did you notice?”
Hoeff looked like his fun had been spoiled, but he pressed forward. “They’re small. All of ‘em, ‘cept the Given-Men. And even they’re—”
“Yes. Next to the Given-Men that we know, they’re an unimpressive bunch… Hmm.” Daniel stood up and paced as he thought. Julian had said something about a conversation he had with Yan once. Something about Den Given-Man’s tribe, and how they had had once traded with People near the river delta, deep in the time of so many grandfathers.
He found a crowd shot and scrutinized it. The People on his screen were undeniably more…gracile. Their legs were straighter, their tails shorter and slimmer. A few obviously grown men were walking around with crests that were pale to the point of being straw blond. The faces were different, too. Narrower. Smaller teeth, bigger eyes. The fingers were slimmer with less pronounced clawlike fingernails, better suited for delicate work. Interestingly, the skulls seemed proportionately smaller too.
“…Hell. Julian’s hypothesis was right.”
Hoeff looked up from studying an interesting example of a native sword. “Hey?”
“Julian once suggested to me that maybe our People are the Ten’Gewek equivalent of Neanderthals. They’re…very close to what we think we knew about them. Physically robust, rational, intensely tribal and individualistic. He’d noticed their relative cranial capacity was a little greater than the skulls we found, too.”
Hoeff swiped on to another image. At a glance it looked like some kind of animal sacrifice ceremony. “So what does this mean for our guys?” he asked.
“I’m not sure. Arguably, it means that this isn’t their heritage. But at the same time it is.” Daniel sighed and shut off the screen he’d been flipping through. “Reviewing all this would take a team of post-grads a whole semester, and they could all write their doctorates on the implications.”
“Well, we’ve got you and however long it takes for Yan to cool off,” Hoeff told him. “In the meantime, since Playboy is off at his mansion or whatever the fuck, that leaves you the head of our little mission, here. So says the Ambassador, anyway.”
“They’re coming back today.”
“That’s nice. Here and now, this is your job.” Hoeff stood up. “I’ma go check on ‘em. You… think.”
Daniel sighed. Hoeff was possibly the most unsubtle little hairy troglodyte he’d ever known, for all his oddball charm. He was right, though. There was no time for nuanced academia here, now was a time to parse the new information into something the People could pick up and build on.
So. Write a book. Daniel sprang to his feet and retrieved his pack, opened his word processor and started sketching out thoughts.
Of course, there was still the echo of the book he was already writing bouncing around in there, so the first theme that sprang to mind was purpose. What purpose could he extract from his data which might contribute to Ten’Gewek well-being?
And, going forward, what insights could he extract which might be relevant to the human condition?
He pondered the questions for a moment, and then began to write.