Date Point: 15y5m4d AV Mrwrki Station, Erebor System, Uncharted Space
Lucy Campbell
“Lewis?”
“Back here!”
Lucy slid the door shut behind her and ducked under a volumetric projection. She didn’t need to, the thing was made out of lasers, dust and forcefields and she could have walked right through it, but it looked solid. It was hard to escape the feeling that she was looking at several tonnes of metal hanging impossibly in the air.
This one wasn’t a coltainer, she could see that immediately. It was… sleeker. Probably smaller. If the projection was scaled one-to-one then this was the size and shape of a blue whale, where the Coltainer had wound up much bigger than that.
Lewis was sculpting a 3d model of something on his workstation in the corner, He gave her a tired but happy grin. “Hey, Loo.”
“Hey.” She draped herself over his shoulders. “Thanks for leaving a message. Are you okay?”
“I’m probably gonna crash like Bitcoin did when I go to bed,” Lewis said. “But yeah. Feels good. I figured out what my next project is.”
Lucy looked at it. “Another probe? What’s this one for?”
“Military use.”
“Really?” She sat down on the spare chair he kept for her. “I thought you didn’t like the idea of military V-N probes?”
“I don’t. But it… kinda got pointed out to me that somebody else’ll just build them anyway. So it may as well be me. At least that way…”
“Right.” Lucy considered the probe in the middle of the room. From this side, it was exploded with one-way screens picking open the components. Mostly it was orderly, rational stuff. The product of years of work on the Coltainers by a team of dozens, copy-pasted in from the finalized version. The nanofactories, the resource acquisition drones, the power core and FTL drive, the small nuke for self-destruct purposes were all the same… where it differed, it was pure Lewis.
He was obviously going for a scout first and a weapon second. The sensor package was sophisticated, hardened, redundant and had a big chunk of the probe’s energy budget behind it. He’d sketched in weapons here and there without bothering to decide what form the weapons should take and his total ignorance in some fields was showing, but as always he’d produced a solid starting point.
Mostly. She smiled at the basic structural plan when she saw he’d made the same mistakes he always did. “You just sketched in steel struts again.”
“I was kinda throwin’ together the early Alpha.”
“Sure, but why not start as we mean to go on? Here, if I replace it with a foam lattice construction using that zero-G spider-spin technique we developed… here…” She stood up and selected the probe’s structural components by touching them. “And not steel. Here, the Brits figured out this great alloy from reverse-engineering the tech they stripped out of Caledonia…”
The design software was goddamn miraculous sometimes: In seconds she’d modified every major structural component and drastically reduced the probe’s mass while increasing its ability to bear stress loads and endure extremes of heat.
“With a few more changes, we could give the whole force-carrying structure some redundancy, so if it gets damaged…” she indicated, dropping in the proposed changes with a few gestures. “See?”
Lewis looked at it, then grinned at her. “This is why I love you.”
He didn’t say that very often. It was nice to hear and Lucy grinned back. “So…what’s that you’re making?”
He showed her. She proposed modifications, he queried material, she double-checked his math… Half a day slipped away in creative bliss.
At the end of it, Lewis sat back and arched his back to work some of the stiffness out, then dropped his arm round her waist and snuggled into her. “…We work great together.”
“Mhmm.” Lucy nodded. “Wanna marry me?”
“Yup.”
She laughed softly and hugged him. “Cool.”
“…Was that an actual proposal? Because I, uh… I did design some rings a while back…”
“You did?”
Lewis’ eartips had gone pink, but he swiped through his files and called one up from the folder marked personal projects.
An enormous ring replaced the probe. Lucy turned to look at it.
Christ. Rose gold with an inlay of palladium wire, twisted back on itself into a Möbius strip. A princess-cut moissanite stone (and here Lewis had noted: “get from asteroid, not lab-made”) adorned the twist’s apex.
She almost did a double-take when she realized that the palladium wire inlay was actually an ECG profile, looping forever over and around. It was the engagement ring she’d never known she dreamed of.
“…Holy shit.”
“You like it?”
“You know rose gold is my favorite, right?”
A small ‘gotcha’ smile spread across Lewis’ face. “You maybe mentioned that, yeah.”
“I mean… isn’t that gonna cost a lot?”
“Nah, not really.” His gotcha smile got bigger. “The hard part was finding the right asteroid. SAM? Call up Earmark Rock Lucy-One.”
A potato-shaped lump of dirty rock replaced the ring. Lucy gave him a raised eyebrow. “…Lew?”
“It’s got gold, zinc, copper, palladium and moissanite.” He grinned. “Whaddya say? Wanna use some of our private runtime on the ‘fac? I guarantee you, nobody else will ever have a ring like it.”
Lucy laughed a little. “Wow. When you do a romantic gesture…”
“Dude. Go big or go home, right?” Lewis grinned sheepishly.
She kissed him. “Let’s do it.”
“You heard the lady, SAM. Bring that rock in.”
“Roger-dodger, dude.”
And just like that, the romantic moment popped. No big sentimental gesture could survive ‘roger-dodger.’ They looked at each other, snorted, and got back to work.
But neither of them stopped smiling.
Date Point 15y5m4d AV Peake Lowlands, Northwest of Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Sergeant Ian Wilde
“Weren’t there supposed to be Gaoians and cavemonkeys up here?”
“There are!” A bloody gigantic gorilla-looking thing crawled up out of a hole they’d dug near the tree, and hastily concealed with grass. It was surprisingly well-done too.
Wilde gave the creature in front of him an appraising look up and down. This had to be Yan, from what he’d heard, but right now he looked more like the Swamp-Thing. He was covered top to toe in mud, which had picked up loose grass and extra dirt for good measure. There was a hint of red poking through what looked like a mohawk of all the things, and all that mud only emphasized the big bastard’s eyes and teeth. He was snarling in a weirdly friendly way, but…
A voice spoke from the other side of the track. “That explains why we couldn’t smell much of ‘em. All we ever got was a general hint. Did you two roll in the grass like three times?”
“Yes!”
The Whitecrests didn’t do anything so obvious as emerge from a covered hole. It was more like one of those weird optical illusions where a candlestick turned into a couple of faces and suddenly there was a whole pack of them just standing there, which was a fuck of a way to demonstrate those suits of theirs.
“Impressive.” Wilde got the sense that was a hell of a compliment coming from a Whitecrest.
Vemik emerged a few feet to Yan’s left and shook himself off some, which sent earth and plant matter showering all over the place. “Where is Julian?” he asked.
“Right here.”
He was literally just leaning against a tree. None of them had noticed him.
“—How–?”
The big bastard just grinned.
“So… who won?” Garcia asked.
“Game wasn’t about which fellas were gonna win,” Julian said. He was also heavily mud-laden. “This was just to get everyone’s head around what we’re going to be teaching each other. There’s a lot to learn, too. And some very angry farmers to appease.”
Yan and the “smaller” Ten’Gewek next to him both cringed at that.
“Ah!” Julian grinned and crossed his arms. “I take it you two ate well, at least?”
“Tasty!” Vemik burbled happily.
“Good, because that meal is going to cost AEC about sixteen thousand pounds.”
That number made everyone cringe again, especially Vemik. Yan didn’t seem to understand but he noted the general mood and grew concerned.
“Is… a lot?” he asked.
“A burger with all the fixings costs about ten pounds, Yan. Do the math.”
Yan paused, counted off on his fingers and a few of his toes, twitched his tail a few times, then wilted. “…Is a lot.”
“Yuh-huh. You guys killed their breeding stud. Don’t worry though, I’m sure we can make amends.”
Yan and Vemik nodded seriously. “We will Give for this Taking.”
“Right. We’ll deal with that later. I guess we do a hot wash?” Wilde nodded, and stepped back to give him the floor. “Right. First thing would be for Whitecrest. Excellent job going undetected. You might pay attention to…hell. Standby.”
There was the growling sound from down the hill, and an ATV came bouncing up the trail carrying the Rangemaster. That was totally unscheduled and could only mean Shenanigans of the worst kind.
Sure enough a quite unhappy warrant officer along with a tinier, angrier man rolled off as soon as the ATV puttered to a stop. They both descended on the group like a billowing cloud of doom.
Julian seemed unfazed. “Hey Hoeff, what’s up?” he asked, stepping forward to speak for the group.
The little man didn’t seem much concerned. He indicated the two cavemonkeys, then Julian himself. “Shit came up, and I don’t just mean the farmyard drive-thru. I need to pull you three off the range. And hose you down. With soap.”
It was almost amazing how dejected the two aliens suddenly looked. “Do we really need to?” Vemik did a remarkable show of puppy-dog eyes.
Hoeff was unyielding. “Yes. But if it’s any consolation, you still get your ham.”
Yan nodded solemnly, and resigned himself to his trials with a stoic grunt.
“What happened?” Julian asked.
“Dunno exactly. Al called and said a, quote, ‘tidal wave of bullshit’ landed on them. She sounded pissed.”
“Greeeaat.” Julian sighed to himself, then beckoned the Ten’Gewek over. “Fun’s over. Uh…I don’t know if this little ATV will be enough for these two.”
“We borrowed this one from HEAT, don’t worry. This is the version they use in rhino and elephant conservation back on Earth. Also, it’s easier to hose down.”
“You seem a little too happy about that.”
“Oh, I’m gonna have a fuckload of fun spraying you fuckers clean.” Hoeff’s grin was pure sadism.
“Hey, I can take my own goddamn shower!” Julian objected.
Hoeff shrugged. “Sure. Find one.”
“…Fuck. It’s cold water too, ain’t it?”
Hoeff’s grin got wider. “The motherfucking coldest bro. You’re gonna love it. Wake ya right up!”
“Fucking SEALs, man,” Garcia commented. “What’s on for the rest of us?”
Hoeff chuckled. “Oh the fun don’t stop! We’re gonna keep running the scenario, ‘cept this time it’ll be Gaoians versus JETS.” He turned and pointed to a hilltop that was almost invisible among the haze on the horizon. “Dinner’s at nineteen-hundred on top’a that hill. Be there and eat well. Arrive late, and you’re doin’ the dishes. Don’t go up the wrong hill. And don’t let the cadre catch you, neither.”
“Got it, Chief.”
Wilde stepped aside as the mud-brothers climbed onto their getaway vehicle, hoisted his bag and turned downhill. The Gaoians melted back into the shadows as though they’d never been and the ATV skidded away down the track again as abruptly as it came. The Warrant Officer driving it hadn’t spoken a word the whole time, but if anything he looked even less pleased now than he had on arrival, which wasn’t really surprising considering he now had three humanoid middens along for the ride.
For Wilde’s part, there was dinner waiting on top of that distant peak, and no mere intervening terrain was going to stop him.
“Well. Come on, lads. Last one in buys the first round,” he said.
They set off back down the hill.
Date Point: 15y5m4d AV HMS Sharman (HMNB Folctha), Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Senior Airman Rihanna Miller
“Hey, Jack.”
Tisdale looked up and gave her a small smile. He was half-way through changing into his work clothes in the technicians’ locker room, and they had the place pretty much to themselves. They’d agreed to meet late to go over the suit checklist together: Deacon still wanted them to have it memorized by the start of Crush Week, which was getting perilously close.
“Hey.”
“How bad was the hangover in the end?”
He shrugged. “Wasn’t so bad, really. Thurrsto got me all hydrated, gave me painkillers, I ate a Snickers, slept it off. How was Girls’ Night?”
She rolled her eyes, pulled a crocheted bright blue beanie from her pocket and threw it in his lap. “Turns out Deacon and Arés are kinda boring. We had like two drinks then went back to Deacon’s place, watched girly shit on TV and knitted.”
He inspected the hat. “That… doesn’t sound like your style.”
“Yeah, no shit,” she snorted, and headed for her locker. “But actually, I kinda enjoyed it. It’s weird, crochet actually works a lot like threading the links on the MASS’ scale layer. And hey, my favorite boy gets a free hat out of it.”
She heard Jack’s awkwardness, and turned just enough to give him a reassuring smile. “Sorry if I was kind of a jerk on Friday night.”
“Were you?” he sounded honestly confused.
“Well, y’know. I’m not used to boys turning me down.”
He sighed. “Look, it’s not that… I mean, I’m not…”
“Chill.” She turned fully around to look at him, then sat down beside him and gave him a hug. “If you don’t think of me that way, that’s fine. I promise.”
He returned the hug, a touch awkwardly but it was definitely heartfelt. “Thanks.”
“I do have a question, though.”
“Uh, sure. Ask.”
“I’d like to hear about your sister. And not from other people, I wanna hear it in your own words.”
Jack sighed. “It’s… hard to talk about.”
“I know. But… I want to understand where you’re coming from, Jack.”
He turned the beanie over in his hands a couple of times, staring far through and past it in a way that said he wasn’t looking at it at all, it was just something to keep his hands busy. She was about to give him a pat on the shoulder and reassure him that it could wait for another day when he finally stirred himself, took a deep breath and started talking.
“…I was really… I guess I was angry at her for a long time.” He let out a sad little half-laugh. “How fucked up is that? She was… she was murdered and I was angry at her for it.” His eyes were already getting the distant, bright look of a guy who was gonna cry in the near future. “It’s only been… I only started to work it all out in the last couple of years…”
Miller put an arm around his shoulders. “Still raw, huh?”
He shrugged, and confirmed her prediction by wiping the corner of his eye. “I think it always will be.”
“Tell me about her.”
He paused for a few seconds, thought, then nodded and launched into the saddest goddamn story she’d ever heard..
It began with the words, “She was a lot like you…”
Date Point 15y5m4d AV Peake Lowlands, Northwest of Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Julian Etsicitty
Of all the things Julian had experienced over the winding weirdness that was his adult life, he was beginning to think that the next few minutes were going to qualify among the most traumatic and memory-inducing of them all. Given some of the secret details of his Rite of Manhood with the Ten’Gewek, the bits that neither Professor Hurt nor his women were allowed to witness…that was definitely saying something.
Yan and Vemik didn’t have the faintest clue what to do with soap, and so Julian was going to have to demonstrate like a parent did with their kids. Hopefully, “monkey-see” would be good enough. He shuddered briefly at the thought and snapped back to the present.
[“Hold out your hands, please.”]
They did, warily, and Julian squirted a healthy dollop into their palms. Yan poked at it dubiously with a furrowed brow. “What is this…soap? Made from what?”
Hoeff had more or less pressure-washed all the mud off the cavebros and they were standing in the middle of the parking lot, shivering next to the electric heaters that he had thoughtfully brought out. But the two idiots were so goddamned smelly there was no way on God’s green…Cimbrean…that Julian would allow them into his home.
Time to man up and scrub down.
“Traditionally it’s made from animal fat, and—”
“Really?” Yan dipped his tongue in it experimentally then gagged and spat.
“…But that doesn’t mean it’s food, Yan.”
Yan spat again. “Taste horrible!” he declared. “How you get bad air-taste off with bad soap-taste?”
“You’ll see. Now…I guess, watch me, okay?”
Demonstrating how soap worked. Somehow, that was the least dignified moment in his entire life, which had once included being strapped down naked and afraid to a metal examination table for three straight days.
He sighed, lathered up, scrubbed himself, then Hoeff applied the hose with extra sadistic glee.
Vemik got the idea pretty quickly, and of course started experimenting with it which inevitably led to the discovery of bubbles. If it distracted him enough to get through the ordeal, then who was Julian to complain?
Yan merely looked wet, miserable and grumpy. He gave his limbs a few desultory swipes in a vague imitation of what Julian had done, but mostly just stood there dripping.
Not good enough.
“You rolled in shit, Yan. I’m not going to pretend like I can tell you what to do, but I will absolutely not welcome you into my home if you don’t get clean.”
“…Fine.” This time he was a bit more diligent with his crest. Good thing they had a decent multi-purpose soap on hand. Explaining the difference between soap, shampoo, and conditioner would have been a trip into one of the lower circles of Hell. The really cold one.
Hoeff showed off his unexpectedly thoughtful side again when the towels turned out to be warm. Or maybe that was just because he’d left them next to the heaters. With him it was often hard to tell.
Yan tasted the air once they were dry. “…Flowers? And nuts?”
Hoeff shrugged. “It’s just that Doctor Bronner’s stuff. I dunno, I grabbed it off the shelf.”
“They don’t know who Doctor Bronner is, Chimp,” Julian pointed out.
“…Right, yeah. He’s a complete fucking madman, but he makes great soap.”
Yan grunted. “As you say.”
That was his way of politely saying ‘whatever, bro’ and they knew it, so Julian decided to let the subject drop.
Vemik shook himself out, scrubbed as much water out of his crest as he could manage, shook again then turned his head sideways and thumped water out of his ear. “I don’t like showers.” He reached for his loincloth which Hoeff had hosed while nobody was looking.
“That wasn’t a shower, that was a hosing-down,” Julian corrected him. He grabbed his clean clothes from off the table and jumped into them. “For a shower, we’d have hot water. Much better.”
Hoeff chuckled. “Bah! You soft city boys and your luxuries.”
“…Excuse me?” Julian quirked an eyebrow and half-grinned.
“Oh look at the time, we gotta get going!” Hoeff’s troll-grin was its usual evil best. “Get your freshly-hosed and pampered asses in the van, y’all.”
“You’re gonna pay for that later tonight, Hoeff.”
The van rocked as Yan heaved his way up into it with Hoeff holding the door for him. “Before or after your manicure?”
“After. A man’s gotta enjoy time with his two smokin’ hot girlfriends, after all.”
“…You win this round, Etsicitty.”
The drive back to their home was a short one. Julian spent the time furiously texting Xiù to learn what was going on.
By the time they arrived, he was no longer in a good mood.
Date Point: 15y5m4d AV Hell, Hunter Space
Rachel “Ray” Wheeler
Ray had to give him credit: When Jamie Choi made a spear, he made a hell of a spear.
He’d scavenged some parts from Dauntless to make them, in the form of repurposed and straightened Titanium alloy ribs, dug out from the rigid parts of the ship’s force-carrying structure between the pressure hull and its outer skin. Each was lightweight, stiff and strong, and Jamie had added a kind of cross-shaped reinforcement behind the tip to stop an impaled Hunter from forcing its way down the shaft.
The last step had been to make them sharp enough that Ray could have shaved her legs for the first time in years.
In short, anything getting stabbed by one of those spears was going to stay stabbed, in a big way. If their enemy had been human, Ray might even have felt a frisson of sympathy.
Using those ribs had been a smart choice too—Normally they held up the exterior armor plating, which was rated against micrometeor impacts. Without anything to hold them up, they’d come away easily to form the asked-for shields.
It was a weird collision of space-age and Roman. The shields were oblong, slightly curved and surprisingly lightweight for their size. The straps had been cannibalized from the cargo bay, a few sharp edges had been made safe with seat upholstery and Choi had even worked in a jury-rigged cattle prod.
Having built the spears and shields, Jamie was now spending his afternoons shoulder-to-shoulder with Conley and Cook, drilling with the new weapons. It was a sight that would have brought a nostalgic tear to Ray’s eye if she wasn’t pretty much solid jade by now. Still, it was good to see some of the old camaraderie and teamwork revived.
This was what she’d known would happen.
The surprise was Chase. Holly Chase, who’d always eaten the bare minimum necessary to keep herself alive and no more than that. Holly Chase their tiny, quiet, mousy little mascot had turned into a goddamn lioness. She was forcing down as much Hot as her stomach could hold, hauling her sack truck with its heavy ammo cans over rough ground until she could haul no more, then resting just long enough to let her keep hauling.
Cook had advised her (or rather snapped at her) to lay off for forty-eight hours, and she’d glared at him but listened, and she was pretty obviously suffering now. Ray didn’t want to think how many of her muscles were pulled and what kind of aching agony she had endured, but she was reaching the end of her forty-eight hour break and looked eager to get back to her training.
She was bearing it in silence as Ray, Spears and Berry did a thorough check of their weaponry. The guns were now clean, oiled and ready, and the tedious job of loading ammo into the magazines was underway.
Even Berry was reaping the benefits. His nervous stammer had always been less prominent when he was slightly distracted, such as when he was working with his hands. Tonight, it was about as good as Ray had ever heard it.
“Be honest, guys. How well d-d’you think this plan is gonna work?”
Ray opened her mouth to answer, but was beaten to the punch by Chase.
“Berry… I honestly don’t care at this point,” she said. “One way or the other, I can’t stay here any longer.”
“Fuck the other way, though,” Spears said firmly. “I don’t intend to go at this half-assed.”
“Just so long as it’s not another five years of planning and scouting and making sure everything is perfect,” Ray advised.
“It won’t be. We have motivation and initiative on our side right now. We won’t waste that, I promise.”
“So… b-back to my question, then…” Berry set down a full magazine and picked up one of the empties.
Ray thought about it. “For the fight on the ground to capture that ship… I think we have a solid idea what we’re doing. We storm the ramp while the Hunters are feasting, seize the ship… if we can just lock them out and take off, great, if we have to kill them all first then I think we have everything we need to do that…”
“Ideally, we should just steal the ship and go,” Spears said. “The less fighting we do, the less risk we take. And I don’t care what Cook says.”
“Cook’s on board,” Ray assured him. “We aren’t gonna have a problem with him.”
Berry lowered his magazine and watched the three legionaries training at the other side of their camp. “…You sure? He looks ready t-… to murder everything.”
“You would be too, if you’d had to do his job this whole time,” Ray muttered. “Trust me. He won’t fuck things up. I don’t think anyone will.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“Come on, Berry, we were a team once. We can be a team again for this,” Spears encouraged him.
“And afterwards?” Chase asked.
“I think we’re all gonna go deal with this shit in our own way,” Spears said. “Me, I’m gonna retire to someplace with beaches and clear water and go snorkeling every day.”
“Sounds idyllic…” Ray sighed. “I dunno. It’ll probably involve… I dunno. Somewhere I’m surrounded by people and life and noise and… and a good shower. Or a bath big enough for three.”
“Snowboarding,” Chase said. Suddenly she was a long way away. “I’m gonna go snowboarding. I wanna feel snow on my face again.”
They all looked at Berry, who froze up, tried to say something, gave up and simply shrugged with an apologetic smile.
“Don’t really know, huh?” Spears asked. He smiled when Berry nodded. “Can’t say I blame… you hear that?”
They all went quiet, including the three spearmen. There was definitely the sound of engines on the wind.
They killed the lights immediately. There was no fire to put out—Cook made the Hot in a large metal basin he’d hammered out of deck plating and immersed in a boiling spring—and sprang to their positions.
“Herds?” Spears whispered.
Conley was at his side in moments. “They’re avoiding the area. Four or five hunts in the last month.”
“Shit… Okay, with me.”
They grabbed their weapons, Chase grabbed her truck, and the seven of them slipped away from their camp, out into the maze of canyons that hopefully disguised their presence.
“We’ve been here years, they wouldn’t have found us now of all times, right?” Choi asked. “That’s just…”
“Don’t say it,” Ray advised. Their luck was already apocalyptically bad as evidenced by the mere fact of where they were. She didn’t need an extra jinx on top of that.
They scurried in pairs up the steep steps they’d hand-carved into the sandstone and up to the watch hide. The last up was Cook, helping Chase with the ammo.
One of the big ships was out over the grasslands, patrolling low while greenish-white fans of light strobed across the terrain from its belly. From where Ray was sitting, it looked like a sickly, lazy, dome-backed evil beetle of some kind.
“Spears, if one of those scans comes our way…” Conley hissed.
Spears’ reply was whispered through gritted teeth. “Shut. Up.”
They shrank down instinctively as one of the wandering lights strayed close to their hiding spot. “Close” was relative—it probably passed hundreds of yards away—but the ship was truly immense, as big as an oil tanker or larger. Its sheer mass meant that whatever scientific secrets kept it aloft were shaking the world, deep in Ray’s guts. Something that big just shouldn’t float, so whatever it did seemed immediately on top of them.
There was nothing to do except hold their breath and pray.
There was a resonant change in the air, not a noise but a force felt in the bones, and the ship settled onto a relatively flat patch of land with a devastating seismic THUMP. The sense of immense forces being casually tied in knots around them faded, and a kind of shocked silence replaced it as if the whole planet couldn’t quite believe what it had just witnessed.
Very, very slowly, Ray crept to the front of the hide and used her rifle’s scope to get a better view of the action.
Massive doors were opening along the ship’s flanks, accompanied by the unfurling of ramps as wide as highways….Down which came people.
Not humans, but still definitely people. Ray could hear the panicked shouting, see clothes and capes and satchels and jewelry. There were Domain critters, Vgork, Kwmbwrw, a dozen more she didn’t recognize.
There were some conspicuous absences, though. No Guvnurag, and no Gao that she could see. Very few Corti, no Qinis.
The Hunters seemed to be enjoying themselves, tormenting their new releases. Pulse cannon fire hammered down from all over the ship, carefully aimed to deliberately miss the stampede but hit just close enough to shower them in mud and gravel. Each shot made the panicking mass squeal and try to get away, only to be driven back in the opposite direction by another detonation.
There were an awful lot of them. A football stadiums’ worth at least, maybe two. And Ray could only see the near side of the ship.
“Shit, if any of them head into the canyons…” Conley muttered.
“They’ll find Dauntless,” Choi agreed.
“Shhh!” Chase reminded them. Perhaps unnecessarily considering the immense noise outside, but why take risks?
Ray watched the flood of fleeing aliens turn into a mere river, then a stream, a trickle, a few stragglers whom the Hunters amused themselves by needlessly obliterating. Several hundred definitely had been heading toward the canyons when they left her field of view, but right now that wasn’t important.
The Hunter ship closed its doors. That same basso profundo feeling in the nerves and sinews returned, cranked up until Ray’s teeth were humming with it no matter how hard she clenched them, and it swaggered back into the air. It accelerated in a way that sneered at concepts like gravity, air resistance and mass, and vanished into the night sky almost too quick for her to follow.
In its wake, it left only the panicked, desperate, hopeless moaning of thousands of new damned souls taking their first steps in Hell.
Ray backed away from the front of the hide and turned away.
“Well… Shit,” she said.
Chase had gone pale. “Does this change the plan?” she asked.
“No fuckin’ way, we’re still getting off’a here,” Cook said.
“The hell it doesn’t!” Conley retorted. “I could maybe rationalize throwing one of the old herds under the bus, they aren’t really people any longer. But those out there are—”
“—Are just fresh meat to the Hunters,” Ray interrupted him levelly. “But Conley, what do you think we’re gonna do? Those people out there are unarmed, panicking and desperate. What can we do for them? Lead an insurgency?”
Cook scoffed. “Le French Resistance!”
“That’s La Résistance Française,” Choi corrected him nervously. He shrugged sheepishly when everybody gave him the same ‘is-that-really-important-right-now?’ stare. “…Sorry.”
Spears nodded. “Ray’s right. Those poor bastards have no hope at all.”
“They have one hope,” Ray disagreed. “If we get off this shitheap, maybe we can get some kind of help.”
“Right, like the Dominion or humanity or anyone stand a hope in hell of riding in like the fucking cavalry and saving those people,” Cook said. “Hell of a long shot, Ray.”
“A long shot’s better than no hope.”
Cook shrugged. “Hey. So long as we’re still getting outta here, I’m on board with whatever.”
“There’s still a big difference between sacrificing a few… I dunno. A few animals who could be people versus sacrificing actual people…” Conley said.
Unusually, Berry spoke up. “Needs must.” He shrugged when they all glanced at him. “Omelettes, eggs,” he added.
Ray nodded at him to acknowledge his point. “They’re all dead anyway, Conley. Maybe if we sacrifice a few now, that’ll change. Or maybe, God help me, I’m still willing to do it. If it means anybody gets out of this mess…”
Conley gave her an uncomfortable look. “Ray…”
She shrugged. “Maybe that’s fucking cowardly, I don’t know. And I don’t care. The plan’s unchanged. Right, Spears?”
Spears nodded. “Right.”
They sat and said nothing for a minute. The screaming, braying, hooting and hollering outside had faded to terrified silence.
Chase finally broke the silence. “We should… get back to Dauntless,” she suggested. “Before any of them find it.”
“Good call,” Spears agreed. “Berry, help her get the truck back down.”
Berry nodded.
“And what if some of the newbies have found our camp?” Conley asked.
Cook was already heading back down. “Then I guess we eat well tonight.”
“Cook-!” Chase looked like she was about to throw up.
“Ignore him,” Ray advised.
“But-”
“We all cope with this in our own way, Holly.”
Chase watched him go, then heaved her truck over for Berry to help her. “Are we coping?” she asked.
Ray shrugged.
“We’re still here,” she said, and that at last ended the conversation.
They descended the steps in silence.