Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space
Vedregnenug
The surprise, from Vedreg’s perspective, was that he largely felt… He felt well.
Not happy. Happy was an active emotion that nobody could possibly sustain indefinitely. And certainly he had felt deeply *un*happy at times over the last few years. The slaughter of his own homeworld, the genocide of the Gao, not knowing if or when the two remaining Guvnuragnaguvendrugun planets would be targeted…
And yet all of the emotions such events whipped up in him were ocean froth above deep, tranquil, warm waters. Deep in his belly, Vedreg was at peace in a way that his careers as a lawyer, a politician and later a refugee simply had never achieved.
The simplicity of his role had that effect. He was paid to think, deep and methodically and thoroughly. While the Humans bubbled away like a chemical factory on the brink of disaster and churned out clouds of ideas and rivers of insight, all of it came to Vedreg who spent his waking hours—and his waking hours were much longer than a Human’s—taking them apart and mercilessly exposing every flaw he could find.
It was a wonderful balm, knowing that Humans weren’t perfect. They were merely very, very good, and his mind was the crucible in which their flawed products were purified.
Lewis was his favorite. Lewis came up with new ideas like a growing Guvnurag shed fur, and there was usually some sense to them.
A lot of the time though, it was buried beneath a thick crust of what could only be described as Lewis.
“But why make it now?” Vedreg asked him.
SAM answered on its creator’s behalf. “No Time Like The Present!”
Lewis just shrugged. “I dunno, dude. It’s just a science fiction thing, you know? Fuckin’… Robby the Robot and Cortana and C-3PO. Lotta stories out there with talking technology in ‘em. Just seems…wrong to send somethin’ like the Coltainers out there an’ they’re just dumb machines. Faceless, y’know? These things’re gonna be findin’ an’ preppin’ planets for hundreds of years, it just don’t seem right for them to be…things.”
He trailed off. Vedreg’s usual cool stare had got him to ramble as it always did but sometimes, when he knew he was being more sentimental than logical, Lewis would talk himself out of an idea without Vedreg’s input.
“…Or because I could,” he suggested lamely.
“That seems uncharacteristic of you, Lewis,” Vedreg pointed out. “Normally you throw away nearly as many ideas as you produce.”
“Yeah, because I can see the obvious flaws. And I can see the obvious flaws in somethin’ like SAM…” Lewis cleared his throat. “I just… I got this nagging feeling like it’s important, dude.”
“By how long would it set back the Coltainer deployment?” Vedreg asked.
“…Depends.”
Vedreg’s chromatophores developed a faint impatient scarlet tinge. “On…?”
“We got three days until Zero One rolls outta the nanofac. Right now, SAM is just a really efficient stimulus-response engine. In theory, we can teach him an’ teach him an’ teach him until he’d pass the Turing test. Uh, that’s—”
“I know the Turing test.” Interruption didn’t come naturally to Vedreg, but it was the only effective way to break through Lewis’ relentless speech patterns, so he’d developed it as a skill. “How much could you populate in three days?”
“…Eh. It’d barely make a difference.”
“And what concrete, predictable benefit might be gained from delaying the release until you have a more completely populated SAM?”
Lewis sighed and developed the hunched, sulky posture he always did when one of his toy ideas was being torn apart. “…That’s just it, dude. The best I got for ya is a gut check. It don’t feel right. Like… I dunno. I keep imagining someday we might need’ta actually ask a Coltainer to stop all nice-like, y’know? Like, maybe just popping the self-destruct wouldn’t be the right thing and we’d wanna talk it down…I’m bein’ a fuckin’ mad scientist aren’t I?”
“A little.” Amused violet shone on Vedreg’s face and flanks. He’d watched a few B-movies with his old friend by now and at least felt equipped to understand Igor jokes nowadays. Lewis had something that no cackling castle-dwelling villainous doctor ever enjoyed though: A functioning sense of when he was being hopelessly irrational.
“Can’t help it. This is like… my life’s work is about to go flyin’ off the assembly line, dude. Literal change-the-fate-of-the-galaxy-forever kinda shit. An’ I just keep comin’ back to a question Kirk asked.”
“What question?”
“…What next?” Lewis gave Vedreg a slightly desperate look and shrugged. “Like…the whole point’a the Coltainer was to get our eggs way the hell outta one basket ‘cuz I figured Earth was fucked sooner or later. Only I was wrong there, they actually managed to hold the fuckin’ line. And now expansion isn’t a survival strategy, it’s a winnin’ strategy. And now the project’s done and about to fly an’ it’s like… ‘Hold the fuck up, dude. Your flight just landed but you don’t have cash for a cab.’ What am I gonna do next?”
“Why Not Take Up Yoga?” SAM asked.
“…Thanks, SAM.”
Vedreg rumbled thoughtfully to himself and examined Lewis’ disjointed, incomplete and half-hearted documentation on the SAM project again.
“…What could SAM do?” He asked. “In the long term?”
Lewis’ hands never sat still if he could help it, and right now they fluttered wildly around as he answered. “What couldn’t he do? Font of knowledge, companionship, seamless organic/synthetic interfacing? I dunno. That’s kinda the point, dude. I don’t know what he could do, so I wanna find out!”
Inwardly, it sounded to Vedreg like Lewis was completely at a loose end and looking for anything to occupy his attention. Outwardly, he selected a more diplomatic phrasing.
“You have worked on the Coltainers for years,” he pointed out. “And if you will take relationship advice from a friend…”
“Right. Lucy…” Lewis went red in the face and cleared his throat. “Should… probably involve her, huh? Or do something for her or…”
“Maybe she would be a good project for you?” Vedreg suggested. “You have worked hard for your whole species. I suggest now is the time to think smaller…and perhaps seek inspiration in the more personal things.”
Lewis gave SAM’s slowly tumbling icosahedral interface a long stare, then nodded. “SAM. Save state and close application.”
“Time For Nap-Nap. Good Night, Lewis.”
The room seemed…emptier without it. Strange, that. But for the moment, Lewis seemed a little less troubled.
“Right…” he said. “…Actually, I’m just gonna go home and spend time with her.”
“Do so, my friend,” Vedreg intoned. “I will…think. Perhaps I can come up with a more permanent answer for you.”
Lewis gave him a huge hug, then left. Alone in the mad scientist’s sanctum, Vedreg waved his facial tentacles thoughtfully and a bolt of green shot down his body in the Guvnurag answer to a sniff.
He needed something better than SAM for Lewis to work on. The world did. And frankly, he had no idea where to start. But there was one person aboard the station who did.
It was time for another conversation with Vakno.
Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Planet Akyawentuo, the Ten’Gewek Protectorate, Near 3Kpc Arm
Technical Sergeant Timothy (Tiny) Walsh
Yan was a muscle-thinker, not a head-thinker, which made him Tiny’s kinda person… even if it meant enduring being tied up in pretzels by way of stress relief.
It took the big guy about twenty minutes to get all his mixed emotions over the bunker out of his system, which mostly meant short bouts of exquisitely painful wrestling interrupted by charging off, throwing rocks, uprooting trees, and generally wreaking havoc in the immediate vicinity. Then he’d charge back, tackle… He managed not to break Walsh. Just.
He did, however, effectively transform Tiny into a giant bruise, as he got increasingly carried away. Walsh was already getting worried, but the real moment when things went too far was genuinely fucking terrifying.
Yan seemed to forget who he was and where they were for just a second: He reared back, bared his fangs with an enraged howl, and sank them right into Walsh’s shoulder.
Yan’s fangs were huge, easily big enough to tear the throat out of a Werne, and they sank deep. If Walsh had panicked and jerked, they might well have torn his shoulder to ribbons. He didn’t, though. Whatever presence of mind he had that froze him up kept those four deep puncture wounds from transforming into a terrible injury. Nonetheless that was, at last, the step too far that finally made Walsh cry out in agony.
His yell snapped Yan back to the present. He let go, seemingly stunned by himself, detangled, stood and backed off. Walsh was in so much pain there were tears in his eyes.
Yan…freaked out. [“Godshit! I’m sorry fuck are you okay!? Did I—”]
“N…nngh. No. I’m okay…get my first aid pack.”
[“Okay okay where—here!”] Yan looked about wildly, spotted it, bounced over to where Walsh’s IFAK had fallen off his belt, picked it up and scrambled back. He fumbled around trying to open it but Walsh wasn’t in any mood to be patient.
“Just…gimme.” Walsh opened the kit with his working arm, grabbed the small bag of irrigating saline, attached the syringe and washed out the wounds. Then a generous glob of Betadine, and finally he attended to the bandage. One advantage of living in a jungle with gorilla-folk was that going shirtless was the rule of the day, because the Ten’Gewek found the military uniforms silly and it was too damn hot and humid for them in the first place. At the moment that meant there wasn’t any cloth to get trapped in the wound, so…that was nice.
Didn’t stop Walsh from cussing inventively under his breath as he sterilized the deep punctures though. Thank fuck his shoulders were so meaty, a smaller man mighta had something important punctured.
The next step was the Crue-D patch. He waited a minute for the throbbing to die down, realized it wasn’t going to. He pulled the patch’s foil packet apart, wormed his way out of his pants, and slapped the max-dose patch right on his inner thigh. It tingled, then burned, then felt like it was on fire before it disappeared under his skin and started doing its space magic.
Okay. Fixed. He could feel everything warming up and loosing up; brief, localized fever was a sign of Crude at work. Next he checked on Yan, who was currently pacing back and forth with a look of utter shame and worry on his face.
Good. Maybe time to set some boundaries. [“What did I do to deserve that, Yan Given-Man?”]
[“My friend, my friend…”] Yan did something Walsh never thought he’d witness and made himself as small and apologetic as he could. He was alarmingly close to grovelling, in fact. [“You did nothing! The fault was mine and I am ashamed.”]
He wasn’t actually grovelling, Walsh noticed; this was still Yan after all. But by Yan standards an apology didn’t get more abject.
“Lost control, huh?”
Yan gave him a penitent look. “It is still Lodge season…and I am old.” He gestured to the glossy black tips of his crest. “Every year the gods make me stronger, the Fire gets hotter…” he said in English before returning to his native tongue. [“But that is no excuse.”]
Walsh nodded along. He’d pretty much got his head around *Ten’gewet’kaitä*—‘The Words Of The People’—from daily use over the last year, enough that code-switching between it and English was honestly pretty easy by now. [“I know, big guy. But Yan, you could squash almost any human like a little black buzzer, including me. That is a dangerous thing and it’s only going to get worse the longer you live, isn’t it?”]
Yan didn’t answer at first. Instead he pulled his tail around his body and ran his thumb through the rich crimson-and-black tuft where his crest ended, then cleared his throat. Playing with their tail like that was a deeply insecure gesture among the People—Walsh had never seen Yan do it.
[“…The Fire makes Given-Men what they are. It is a gift from the gods to protect the People and lead the tribes. But every Giving has a Taking. It will make me head-broken in the end,”] He revealed. [“I have at least a few seasons yet, I hope. But someday, my crest will only be black and I will forget names, will forget memories, forget…everything. When that starts, I will go on my Last Hunt and the gods will take me home. Better to die with my dignity, not drooling into my soup.”]
The lingering pain in Walsh’s shoulder was forgotten. “Fuck, man…I don’t know what to say.”
Hoeff’s voice interrupted them. “I do.”
Yan turned and gave the much smaller man a quizzical look. Hoeff had emerged from the bunker and his eyes flicked between Yan and the bandage on Walsh’ shoulder in a calculating way.
“…Lost my gramps that way,” he explained. “Nasty sickness called Alzheimer’s. By the end of it, he didn’t even know who my gramma was.”
“You…[your Sky-Tribe has this, too?]”
“Not the same. But somethin’ like it. Anyway. Took me a few years to figger out what I wish I’d told the old man, before his marbles went. ‘Cuz he hurt people pretty bad as his mind was goin’, Made my gramma cry pretty much erryday… Weren’t his fault.”
Yan didn’t look like he bought it, entirely. He gave Walsh a guilty look. [“…I should still cling tighter to my branch,”] he said, using a Ten’Gewek aphorism about restraint and control. [“There should be pain for pain. For the balance.”]
“…So one free hit, huh?” Walsh felt a grin building, “You sure? I’m a hell of a boxer.”
“I’ll take it. Last time I saw a man take pain for pain, he got hit in sack.”
Walsh managed to chuckle. “Face it is, then. I ain’t gonna kick a bro in the nuts. Good thing you didn’t bite my dominant arm…”
Yan nodded and stood up straight. The Ten’Gewek were way physical sometimes, and Walsh knew them well enough to know that half-assing his repayment would just be taken as an insult.
So, before he could change his mind, he bounced up, shook out his left arm, and decked the Given-Man right across the jaw. Yan staggered, turned and slumped into the dirt. He was maybe even out cold there for a second—he was certainly still enough for a few seconds before he got a hand underneath him and picked himself up shakily.
“…Good… Good hit,” he managed. “…Ver’ good hit. Ow.”
Walsh also probably earned some hairline fractures in his fist, but whatever. Crude. And being honest, scoring a one-hit TKO on a bro like Yan was fuckin’ good for the ego. He couldn’t help but tease, just a little. “Maybe don’t bite me again and I’ll teach you how to do that…”
Yan was still massaging his jaw, but he huffed in both amusement and warning. [“Don’t push your luck.”]
Hoeff snorted. “Shit, Tiny. An’ I thought the time you killed the doom-noodle with a rock was fuckin’ hardcore.”
“I don’t train to be useless, you know that.” Walsh sighed, ready to move on. “We good, Yan?”
Yan sat down on his tail, blinking as he recovered. “I am if you am. Are.”
Walsh sighed again, wrapped an arm almost halfway around Yan’s shoulders, and chuckled quietly. “We’re good. Maybe time to head back in there?”
“Give the Professor a few minutes,” Hoeff decided. “Man’s havin’ to write up a whole comparative whateverology paper on short notice. And Yan, I don’t think we saw even a finger of what’s in there. There’s a lot to think about.”
Walsh nodded. “…Yeah. There’s writing. Math, the basic technologies. I won’t lie bro, what we found in there is at least a few thousand years ahead of where you guys were when the love boat found you.”
Hoeff sat down and broke out his Dip. “You make ‘em sound like some hippy road trip.”
“Have you met Julian? He’s the most straight-laced hippy there is, man.”
“Have you met Allison?” Hoeff retorted. “Girl’s pricklier’n a saguaro.”
“Nah, she’s a fuckin’ kitten behind those claws. Reminds me of my cousin Anita.”
[“Different breaths come together,”] Yan intoned wisely.
“Dude, if they come together I’m gonna need to study at Julian’s feet.”
Yan gave him a blank look. [“…What?”]
Walsh was saved from having to explain the joke by Professor Hurt, who emerged from the bunker holding a tablet and wearing an expression of concentration.
“…Nutty? ‘Sup?”
Hurt emerged back into the here-and now. “…They were… definitely a different species,” he said. “I just found a genome comparison.”
“Genome means what?” Yan asked.
[“It’s… if I told you there are words that are a part of you and that make you you then that’s the very, very simple version,“] Daniel explained. In third place after Xiù and Julian he was one of the most fluent humans alive in the Ten’gewek language, and seemed to prefer using it when speaking to the People, especially Yan.
The explanation seemed to suffice for Yan, who nodded. [“The people we saw in that room…didn’t have the same words.”] Hurt continued. [“They were more like the People than any sky-tribe could ever be, but they were still very different.”]
Yan nodded. [“I knew as soon as I saw them. Scrawny pale-crests. But they were…what? Cousins to us?”]
Daniel nodded. [“That is a good way to say it. We had cousins too, even one tribe that was something like you. They were strong and hardy, we were clever with tools…but that’s a long story for later.”]
[“So the Enemy didn’t Take our makings, they Took our family.”] Yan sighed. [“…That is worse, I think. A making can be made again…But when a tribe dies…”]
He stood up and considered the bunker. “These…Core-Tie. Are Takers?” he asked in English.
Daniel nodded. “They carry people far away and learn about them so that they can come back with the fruits of their learning. And they Take more than they Give back. Whether that’s just who they are or because the Enemy made them that way… I don’t know.”
“They’re the reason Julian spent six years trapped on Nightmare, Yan.” Walsh decided to connect the dots. “They’re why he’s so…sad, when Allison and Xiù aren’t around.”
Yan snarled. “I do not like these Core-Tie,” he declared. “But. They have maybe Given us a good thing, without meaning to.”
“An accident I doubt they will ever repeat.”
“Mhmm.” Hoeff spit a massive load of noxious tobacco juice into a nearby bush and pressed Daniel on the point. “Right. So. What do we do? No offense, big guy,” He nodded solemnly at Yan, “But even if this stuff rightly belongs to you, letting Vemik in there to tear it apart might be ‘bout the stupidest thing I could imagine doing ‘cept maybe hittin’ on Singer.”
Yan just grunted a grunt that said ‘you’re completely right but I don’t want to say it out loud.’
Daniel cleared his throat, checked his notes and then put the tablet away in his inside jacket pocket. “Well… we did say we were going to found an Academy…” he began.
Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Allied Extrasolar Command, Scotch Creek, British Columbia, Canada
General Gregory Kolbeinn
Kolbeinn had entered the tiny, square office of the Supreme Allied Extrasolar Commander with big ambitions to streamline…well, everything. The whole interstellar defense effort was a series of square pegs that had been brutally hammered into an assortment of hastily-drilled round holes and on the rare occasion it actually aligned with established procedure, law, treaties or doctrine it did so more by chance than by design.
Over the last year, he’d rapidly learned just how much of a genius plate-spinner Tremblay had been to keep the whole thing functioning at all. Hell, some features of the whole shebang actually relied on people doing what would, in any other situation, be exactly the wrong thing. It was, in short, an unhealthy heterodox mess that worked mostly due to the pure willpower and hard work of a legion of unsung passionate heroes.
Hammering it into a shape that resembled the existing Allied military structure was going to be his life’s work. And he wouldn’t have been able to do it at all if Tremblay and Knight—both now retired—hadn’t been eager to offer their services as consultants.
How Knight found the time around caring for his injured daughter, Kolbeinn couldn’t fathom. Commander Ellen McDaniel had suffered permanent impairment from her brain injury: There was nothing wrong with her personality or intelligence, but the battle of Gao had robbed her of her short-term memory and her mobility, leaving her wheelchair-bound with only one good arm—her non-dominant one—a blinded eye and chronic pain that not even Cruezzir could fix. Not a happy burden to saddle on an old man.
Maybe that was why the old Brit seemed to enjoy returning to AEC every so often to provide assistance and advice. It was a break of sorts, and maybe a chance to lash back at the things who’d hurt his daughter. All women, even middle-aged naval officers, would forever be little girls in their fathers’ eyes.
Tremblay, meanwhile, was probably just lonely and bored. He’d retired to Folctha amid lavish thanks from a multitude of Ministers, a plethora of Presidents and one Great Father, but all it took was an email and he would hop straight back through the Jump Array on the next scheduled transfer. His presence on the planet had been well-calculated: thanks to his display of confidence in its long-term security, the little wobble in colonist sign-ups had stabilized nicely.
Colonization. It was going to be the foundation for everything, now that WERBS had been fired. WERBS had needed firing, nobody disputed that, but the established wisdom among the intelligence services was that now it had been seen, it would sooner or later be duplicated. And if it was duplicated, then it might be improved upon. WERBS as it was now couldn’t penetrate a system defence field—there still needed to be an unimpeded line-of-sight between the beacon and Volume Zero, without an intervening excess of matter or electromagnetic distortion—but the Hierarchy especially were known to have single-end wormhole technology that was at least good enough to land a starship in the correct galaxy.
Humanity needed to spread out, and quickly. The Chinese were already establishing foothold settlements on Lucent—or Fāguāng de as they were calling it—Cimbrean’s land masses and natural resources had been parcelled out among the Anglophonic nations as fairly as possible with jump array stations built at the future settlement sites of Franklin, New Botany, Nouveau Acadia and Abeltown.
The Russians weren’t happy at all. A long-standing negotiation between them and the Celzi Alliance to take ownership of a couple of unused deathworlds in the Ilrayen Band had fallen through completely, and dumped them at the back of the queue for new worlds—no way were the Allies letting them get their hands on the newly-scouted Planet Ayma—but after the shit they’d pulled in the early days with the spetsnaz teams, not to mention Kolbeinn’s own memories of the “dispute” over Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, frankly the Russians could go to Hell.
Though, they had voted with the ayes on the UN resolution that the attack on Gao constituted an act of genocide and on invoking the 2005 Responsibility to Protect. As ornery and contrary as Moscow usually was, in their own way they were playing ball. They knew just as well as anybody that the midst of a literal interstellar war wasn’t a good time to fuck around.
Then of course there was the question over whether the EU would accept a colony world between them or if separate ones would be needed for the French, Germans, Dutch and so on… In short, interstellar colonization was a mess, and destined to get messier, as the briefing he was reading proved.
“…God Almighty, 946th Operations Support again? Seems like every time I pull on that thread the whole of Spaceborne Operations unravels.”
Tremblay smiled sympathetically. “Sorry about that. If it’s any consolation, I’m pretty sure negotiating an international service treaty that achieves what the 946th allows to happen organically would take twenty years.”
Kolbeinn sighed. “Every day dashes my hopes of ever gettin’ this sorted out.”
“Yyyup.” Tremblay’s sympathetic smile got a little warmer and he sat back in his seat. “Why d’you think I’m so comfortable on this side of the desk? At the end of the day it’s your problem now. I’m sleeping much better nowadays.”
Kolbeinn snorted. “Gee, thanks.”
“Ah, don’t be hard on yourself,” Tremblay relented. “Considering you stepped into the job while we were still dealing with the aftershock of the Israeli declaration and you managed to work them in just fine, I’d say you’re on top of things. Just don’t let your subordinates hear you stressing about it. I was a little too relatable sometimes.”
“I’ll bear that in mind. I—Yes?”
One of Kolbeinn’s aides had knocked and entered, and she stepped smartly to his desk to deposit a folder. “Urgent matter, sir.”
“I’ll go grab a coffee and a panini at Jenkins’ Bar,” Tremblay said, standing to leave. The bar had kept its name despite its owner entering MBG’s employ years before, and by all accounts did the best coffee in Scotch Creek. “Or should I head home?”
Kolbeinn skimmed the report summary and grimaced. “…Might wanna head home,” he suggested.
Tremblay’s expression said he understood perfectly. “Good luck,” he said and was gone.
Kolbeinn waited for the door to close before grumbling. “I told Hephaestus they were asking for trouble sending one of their directors out there. The ship’s green?”
“Scanned and swept by a Royal Navy crew.”
Kolbeinn nodded, finished reading the report and then sat back to think about it. “…Put JETS Team Two on alert and get us a beacon near Origin to jump them out there on short notice. And tell our intelligence assets on Origin to watch out for any humans showing up outta nowhere. I’ll hold a full meeting about this in three hours in which we’ll discuss whatever potentially damaging intelligence Director Park is likely to have.”
“Yessir.”
“And in the meantime, get me somebody from Hephaestus on the line.”
“Yessir.”
With no other orders forthcoming, Kolbeinn’s aide departed again, leaving him alone with his thoughts.
He genuinely had warned Hephaestus, but the Consortium were determined to carve out a market niche very different from that occupied by Moses Byron Group. Both corporations viewed the chaos of interstellar politics right now as a forest of opportunities just waiting for some intrepid pioneers to go plunging into the bush, and both were fighting to open the gap between them and their Indian, Chinese and Russian competitors as wide as they possibly could.
And of course they were just the first. SpaceX were recovering quite nicely from the punch in the bank account they’d suffered when all the tech they’d invested so much in developing was rendered obsolete overnight by the Dominion’s complimentary New Contact technology package, and were beginning to take that tech in new directions, without the fatal corner-cutting that Moses Byron’s lawyers were still defending in court.
Other companies were already getting fat on the Cimbrean investments and preparing themselves for a second wave of colonial expansion, and some little Canadian technology firm called TTTA Prototyping was raking in the cash by solving problems the big players didn’t even know they had yet.
It was a Brave New World. And of course, bravery was only done in the face of danger. Hephaestus, it seemed, had been too brave this time. Privately, Kolbeinn was quite certain that there was no point in doing more than writing Director Park off for dead or ‘droned… But there was always politics. Hope too, but mostly politics. And it’d be a good exercise for JETS Team Two at least.
He returned his attention to the organizational tangle he remai ned determined to comb into something more sensible.
Maybe, just maybe, they’d luck out.
Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Deep Space
Vedregnenug
Vedreg didn’t like Vakno at all.
The problem wasn’t that she was noticeably more acerbic than most Corti, who in turn were practically the galactic champions of chilly brusqueness. Nor was it her total absence of empathy, which was by and large not her fault. After all she was one of the Silver Banner caste, a genetic exemplar of the Corti’s millennia-long eugenics program. Her social instincts had been tuned by centuries of selective breeding for manipulation rather than commiseration, with the result that she could be really quite charming when she thought it was in her best interests.
Relentlessly antisocial and yet socially adept. A paradox like that would have plucked at any Guvnurag’s instincts and scraped them raw.
What bothered Vedreg is that he had no idea what she wanted from life. So long as she was juggling secrets and privileged information, Vakno seemed content: She had achieved her ambitions and seemed to have no new ones. There were a few slights left to avenge, a few wrongs to correct… but those were just business. Aspirations, it seemed, were for lesser beings.
Her greeting was, as always, totally terse. “Vedregnenug.”
“Vakno.”
She laid down her tablet and turned her wide black eyes to give him her full attention for just a second before she picked up a different tablet. Corti could multitask effortlessly, but it still felt rude.
“Something is bothering you.”
It wasn’t a question. Vakno’s office was small, spartan and full of nothing but her own design of communications equipment, most of which was devoted to trawling the assorted species’ dataspheres and the intervening dataspace for anything remotely interesting. How one head could contain it all, even one as disproportionately bulbous as Vakno’s, was a mystery.
“I am concerned for Lewis Beverote,” Vedreg explained. “Now that the Coltainers are being built to fly, it seems his driving concern has abandoned him. He is at what the Humans call a loose end.”
Vakno swiped down whatever text she was absorbing. “And?”
Vedreg suppressed his unimpressed swell of ochre pigmentation. “I would have thought you would be keen to see an asset like him used effectively.”
He awarded himself some small satisfaction as she paused, set the tablet down and gave the matter her full attention for a few thoughtful moments.
“…Astute.” She sat back in her chair and fidgeted the bulbous tips of her fingers thoughtfully along the edge of her desk as she thought. “Don’t the Humans have their own ideas?”
Vedreg affected a shrug. “I’m sure they will. I would like to have some non-Human input into that conversation.”
“Ah?” A slim tightening of Vakno’s lipless slit of a mouth was about as close as a high-Caste Corti ever got to smiling. She waved her hands through an interface only she could see then pushed a tablet across the desk to Vedreg. “In that case… there is a mystery I believe Mister Beverote should be encouraged to take an interest in. And I am sure the Humans will agree that it is a matter of strategic importance…”
Vedreg picked the tablet up and squinted at it. Curious cyan speckled his flanks, along with the usual sickly tinge of green nauseation that any mention of one particular species always brought out in him “…Hunter space?”
“Quite. An imprecisely mapped volume, as I’m sure you know. Without a distinct and hard border, just a fuzzy zone that only the suicidally intrepid dare to brave. And the Dominion’s best efforts have really only mapped its flank facing the Kwmbwrw Great Houses.” Vakno inclined her head slightly. “In other words, we know almost nothing about where our other enemy lives, in what fashion, how much territory they control, what resources they really possess…”
“They must be spectacular if they can assemble a million warships in only a few years,” Vedreg pointed out.
“All the more reason to map them, no?” Vakno almost-smiled again. “If we intend to set our friendly Deathworlders against them then we should at least know where to aim them.”
“I don’t know if even the Humans can realistically expect to fight the Hunters…” Vedreg cautioned.
“Not directly,” Vakno agreed. “But Vedreg, you old plodder, that fight was never going to be about brawn versus brawn. It was always going to involve guile.”
“…And for guile to apply, we must have knowledge,” Vedreg finished. “…Thank you, Vakno. I will drop this problem in Lewis’ lap. I think with a little persuading, he may well find a new obsession in it.”
“Good. I hate not knowing things.” Vakno picked up a third tablet and resumed reading.
“After all,” she added, “There could be anything in there…”
Date Point: 15y4m2w AV
Hell.
Rachel Wheeler
“Morning Ray. Quiet watch?”
Rachael—‘Ray’ to her colleagues—accepted her morning cup of Hot with, if not pleasure, then at least the appreciation that only somebody who had gone without food for a whole fortnight could really feel. Experiencing that kind of raw, aching hunger had really taught her to value getting something inside her, even… Hot.
It was only called Hot, on the grounds that exactly what it was that was hot changed on a daily basis depending on what they had available, and frankly if she thought about some of the things it had contained in the past she’d just get depressed. They’d run out of Earthly things like coffee, tea, beans and lentils a long, long time ago.
“We’re still here,” she said. Those words had become her mantra over the years, her signature phrase at once both bleak and darkly optimistic. On the one hand they were still stuck on a diseased pile in the Devil’s own asshole…but on the other hand they were still alive. At least while they still had beating hearts and working limbs there was the hope—slim, but non-zero—of perhaps someday working an escape.
“Hunt came down last night. Took out the Domain herd over near three peaks,” she reported properly, and took a sip. This morning’s Hot was, unfortunately, actually quite tasty. That usually meant she really didn’t want to know what—or, on the worst days, *who*—was in it.
Naming the world they were stuck on ‘Hell’ had been a kind of dark joke at first. A way of confronting the relentless awfulness they saw there on a daily basis. Over the years, though…Rachel was beginning to think that maybe the actual biblical hell couldn’t be even half as bad. At least Satan’s kingdom probably wouldn’t lie to folks with pretty sunrises, birdsong and the scent of wildflowers on the dawn breeze. At least it wouldn’t have painted on a thin varnish of pleasantries over all the misery.
At least Hades, however awful it might be, probably wasn’t a Hunter livestock world.
God fucking damn the Byron Group. It wasn’t fair to blame them, Rachel knew. It had been their fault, the crew of EV-03 Dauntless, they’d been the ones who chose to head out this way. Nobody at the Group had known that their planned exploration vector plunged them right into the heart of Hunter territory…But still: God damn them.
Maybe that was why they’d survived. What little they’d been able to glean—carefully but still at enormous risk—suggested that the Hunters expected ships approaching their space to advance cautiously and quietly while being ready to rabbit at a moment’s notice if things went wrong. The Hunters had become so specialized at snaring such careful interlopers that a prototype human exploration ship blundering right through the sensor cordon and plunging into their heartlands had been completely missed…until the crew had realized just how incredibly unlucky they’d got and promptly fled for the meagre safety of the first temperate world they could find.
That had been…years ago. More years than Rachel wanted to even consider, and frankly she’d lost track anyway. By an assortment of miracles, heroic effort and equal parts cowardice and daring they had somehow made a kind of hidden home for themselves on Hell’s surface, and somehow nobody had died. Yet.
Berry grunted and took a look through Ray’s telescope at where the Domain herd had been, even though the Hunters and the prey were both long gone in the night. The poor fuckers were—had been—however-many-great-grandchildren of whichever hapless slaves had first been brought here, and they had totally regressed to being little more than a smarter-than-average animal. The same went for the other herds, tribes, clans, bands and gangs roaming the land and grazing, some of which were from species Ray had never heard of before.
Being sapient didn’t mean shit if the last guy who knew how to read and write was eaten five hundred years ago. There were all kinds of technically intelligent technically people out there, but the only kind of civilization and the only persons on Hell were squatting in *Dauntless*’s camouflaged hull, brewing up Hot from whatever ingredients became available and keeping their heads down. A lot of effort had gone into ensuring that however the Hunters looked down on this world they’d never find the prized morsel of Human meat figuratively lost in the back of the fridge.
And Ray was sick of it. Sick past the point of caring. Sick of barely clinging on, sick of watching butchery on a weekly basis while they hid safe in their bunker, sick of not knowing and not wanting to know where her calories had come from. She had no idea how Cook—and boy what an appropriate surname he had—was still sane. There was definitely meat in her Hot today, heavily disguised but present… and they’d got their meat from some terrible places over the years. Even if the meat in today’s Hot was something innocent like a couple of birds, all Hot was forever tainted by the knowledge of its past ingredients.
“That’s c-c…” Berry’s nervous stammer had been almost completely compensated for when he joined the crew riding high on confidence. Nowadays, on bad days, it silenced him. “Cccclose,” he managed at last.
“Yeah.”
“That’s g-good, right? It means they d-ddidn’t nn-notice us? If they wuh, wuh… were that close and d-didn’t see us, that means wwwwe’re still hidden… uh… r-right?”
Ray shrugged. It was either that or the Hunters had elected to tribute their prize discovery to a more important Hunter or something and any second now an assault ship full of the biggest and meanest that Hunterdom had to offer would land on their heads. But Berry was a wreck held together by neuroses and fear anyway: There was no point in telling him that his hope could be disastrously misplaced.
She settled for saying “We’re still here,” again and stood up. She handed Berry the binoculars and the rifle (diligently maintained but never fired), patted him on the shoulder and retreated back into the canyons to finish her Hot in peace.
For the thousandth time she contemplated how things might be if she was in charge and not Damian goddamn Spears, and for the thousandth time she reluctantly concluded that they’d probably all be dead.
She didn’t disrespect Spears at all—His instincts on where to land and hide Dauntless had literally saved their lives. Somehow, while fleeing headlong from an unseen, unknown and possibly imagined pursuit he had kept his wits about him enough to find a dense canyon system full of hot springs and volcanic formations, as though the best bits of Colorado had collided with Yellowstone.
Sure, the canyons stank of sulphur and they kept a number of chirrupy little local “birds” around to serve as their mine canaries in case the volcanic vents ever spat out something more noxious than bad egg smell…but the geological heat and the confused mineral medley those vents had vomited up over the aeons hopefully disguised the ship’s presence. With dirty tarpaulins stretched over the ship, about the only way the Hunters would ever find Dauntless and her crew was if they blundered down the right fork in the right canyon…and there was a lot of landscape out there.
He’d proved he was in charge for a reason, that day. And the fact was, she mostly liked that he was in charge. He bore the relentless pressure of command in their hopeless situation with a grace that Ray knew she’d never have emulated. There was a profound difference of opinion between them on the matter of their escape, and it was difficult not to feel a little resentment…but it was impossible to hate him. As much as she disagreed with his cautious approach to their escape, she trusted him with her life. All their lives.
Back among the nest of rocks, makeshift shelters and survival equipment among the canyons that the crew called home, he shot her a genuine smile, which was a rare and precious thing in Ray’s life right now. “Morning. How’re we doing?”
She gave him her best tired attempt at smiling back, which was little more than a grim tightening of the lips. “We’re still here.”
As it always did, that dragged a little amused grunt out of him and a lift of his expression. Every morning the same ritual but he still seemed to find it just as funny as the first time.
“Hunters took out that Domain herd we saw over near Three Peaks,” she told him. “Let the young escape, as always. Couple of adults maybe got away too.”
Spears cleared his throat and shuffled around so he wasn’t facing the Hot Pot. “…Yeah. At least one.”
Ray carefully filed his implication away in the mental folder marked ‘shit I’ll need counselling for FOREVER after we’re done here’ and finished her Hot. She’d become pretty good at that, over the years: If she died on Hell, she sure as shit wasn’t going to do it by starving to death.
It kicked the conversation in the crotch and knocked the wind out though. Neither of them had any idea what to say…which was pretty standard. What was there to say that they hadn’t said a thousand times already? Nothing constructive.
But today in fact held a surprise in the form of Holly Chase, their tiny, squeaky-voiced, timid little field mouse of a geologist. Chase liked interesting rock formations and whatever fossilized critters might be lurking within them, and had the fighting instincts of a baby rabbit.
Today, she sat down next to Ray while staring morosely into her Hot. That was always a bad idea.
“…You’d better eat that,” Ray prompted. Chase didn’t respond. “…Holly. You should eat.”
Chase snapped out of her reverie long enough to meet Ray’s eye. There was a faintly manic gleam in her expression that Ray hadn’t seen before. “…I want to be a vegan.”
“…Beg pardon?”
“Vegan. I want to be a vegan. I want to go back to Earth and be a vegan for the rest of my life.”
If Spears had a flaw, it was not having a soft touch in emotional moments like this. He cleared his throat awkwardly, gave Ray a look that begged her to handle this, and found something else to occupy his attention. Ray carefully took Chase’s Hot out of her hands, put it down on their boulder “table”, then folded the smaller woman up in a hug.
For a few minutes, the only sounds in the canyon were the hiss and belch of the boiling spring that warmed the Hot Pot, and sobs echoing among the rocks in diligently awkward silence as the other four gave Chase what paltry privacy they could.
It took a while and the tears had soaked right through Ray’s much-patched sleeve by the time Chase finished letting it all out, but when she finally let go and ran her sleeve messily across her nose it looked like a Rubicon had been crossed in her head.
“…I want to go home,” she said plaintively.
“Me too,” Ray told her. She caught Spears’ eye. He held eye contact, to his credit, and came to sit at Holly’s other side.
“Me three,” he said. Somehow, that oldest and most cliched joke broke through Holly’s pain and dragged a laugh out of her. She drew her own fraying sleeve across her nose with a pathetic wet sniffle.
“…You have a plan? You two and Cook? You’ve been saying for years we should try to get out of here, but do you actually have a plan?”
“Oh, Holly…” Before Ray could figure out what to say, Spears interjected.
“We’ve talked about it. Ray’s plan is… plausible,” he said. “But I don’t want us to take our best shot and then go down fighting. I intend to get us all outta here, guaranteed.”
“…When, Spears?” Ray asked him. “‘Cuz I know I’ve said this before but if we sit around waiting for the perfect moment then I think we’ll be here a long, long time.”
She saw the gears in his head turn the question over, analyze its implications, play out a hundred future conversations and accept what she already knew: that after what had to be the best part of a decade in Hell they were all approaching their breaking point. He’d held them together this long… how long could he keep holding them?
Not long, in Ray’s opinion.
Eventually he finished his own Hot with a determined swig, grimaced as he gulped it down, then nodded. “…Okay,” he said. “We start tonight.”