Date Point: 15y6m2w2d AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Jack Tisdale
“…Shit.”
Jack gave his dad a sideways (and slightly upwards) glance. The problem with taking more after his mother’s side of the family was that he always wound up feeling smaller than his father. It was an awkward position to be in: some instinct always made him feel like more of a child around Mark.
“What?”
Mark nodded at the new arrivals. Jack had invited Adam and Ava along to his mum’s birthday party with an open offer to bring whoever they liked along with them. They’d been expecting Martina and Diego… but the sight of Adam’s father and stepmother was clearly what had shaken Mark.
“Something wrong?”
Mark turned away and busied himself with the firepit. “I’ve not spoken to Gabe in ten years. Not since… Sara.”
“You haven’t? Not once?”
“I, er…” Mark sighed and sat on the wall. He’d put a lot of work into the garden over the years: no sterile monotonous lawn for the Tisdales, their garden was intricate and interesting with warm yellow limestone walls and a fish pond, a fire pit, a deck… It was far nicer than the mid-terrace place they’d had back on Earth.
That was Folctha life, though. Land was cheap and the colony housing subsidies were generous. Hayley and Mark earned pretty good money for their roles in the terraforming project, too.
“Are you… going to talk to him?”
Mark glanced over his shoulder. “I suppose I’ll have to.”
Jack gave him a comforting slap on the shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go be good hosts, yeah?”
That got a smile on Mark’s face at least.
Part of the problem, Jack reckoned, was that in fact his dad had a pretty good relationship with Adam. Both were lifelong members of the Church of Gym, Mark had even helped Adam get started on his way up Mount Swole way back when…
But Gabe was an unavoidable reminder.
Gabe had been—still was—Folctha’s security chief. The police and the intelligence services both answered to him, and he reported directly to the Defence Minister. As such, on the day of Sara’s death when the Hierarchy’s existence had still been a heavily classified secret, he’d been obligated to withhold the details of what had happened and why. To a grieving family looking desperately for answers, that had been a jagged and foul-tasting pill to swallow.
Those had been bad days. Jack hadn’t even been a teenager, just a kid whose cool older sister was suddenly gone and whose parents didn’t know how to cope. There had been arguments, lost tempers, smashed furniture. For a while there, Mark and Hayley’s marriage had hung by a thread…
Probably, only Hayley’s pregnancy had saved it. There was a reason that Jack’s little sister’s name was Hope.
Sara’s death was an old wound nowadays… but one that would never fully heal for any of them. For Mark, Gabe’s mere presence had to be pulling it open again, but he did a good job of putting on a friendly face and shaking the much smaller man’s hand and making polite noises about how long it had been.
It turned out to be a pretty good party in the end. Adam and Marty left early with apologies, citing a hungry and increasingly curmudgeonly baby whose bedtime was fast approaching, and Ava left not long after, having receiving a text message that Jack noticed made her face go a shade redder.
…Jack wondered if maybe he should try and have a word with Coombes at some point. Get a few pointers.
While Hayley and Jess got giggly and conspiratorial at one end of the garden while they polished off the last of the punch, Jack found himself cleaning up while Mark and Gabe… chatted.
It was pretty obvious that Gabe hadn’t forgotten either. After all, that day had probably been… second or third place for worst days of his life. Jack had to admit, the old man had gone through a lot. He’d lived through a life-changing injury, survived the destruction of his home city not long after and yet remained generally upbeat and chipper.
…Not to mention funny.
“—says ‘It’s ten years, what difference does it make?’ To which our friend Ivan replies: ‘Well, the plumber’s coming in the morning.’”
Mark’s chuckle was long, low and genuine, and he took a long pull of his beer and the two men stood in what looked like surprisingly comfortable silence for a few seconds.
Jack was about to join them when Mark ran a hand nervously across his mouth and cleared his throat. “…Look er… Gabe.”
“Yeah?”
“There’s… something I wanted to ask you about. Probably should have done it years ago, but…”
Gabe looked up at him. “Mark, for you my door’s open. If now’s not the best time…”
“No, not… this is as good a time as any. I think. It’s… the Hierarchy.”
“Ah.”
Mark cleared his throat again and took another swig of his beer before continuing. “When I first h eard about them, I don’t think I really believed it. It’s so… big. And so utterly… I mean, a race of ancient aliens literally mind-controlling people and directing the course of human history from behind the scenes? And other species as well?”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Gabe agreed.
“I know a lot of people who still don’t. They’re convinced that the ‘official story’ is at best a half-truth and at worst a complete lie fabricated to paint our governments as the good guys. You know how that goes.”
“Órale. Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.”
That got a slight laugh out of Mark, who nodded. “Yeah… I realise now just how much you really told me. I… wanted to thank you. How much you risked by telling me what you did. And… I’m sorry I put you in that situation.”
“Are you kidding?” Gabe asked. He put his drink down and turned to face Mark square on. “Your daughter had just died! It absolutely broke my heart that I couldn’t tell you everything! Nobody deserved to know more than you did.”
Mark looked down at the patio for a moment, then shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “…There’s something that ate at me after it all went public, though. I couldn’t help but wonder… what were they doing? What did Sara stop?”
There was a pause.
“…She saved all our lives, Mark. I can tell you that much.”
Jack took a sharp breath, picked up some discarded plates and cups, and headed indoors. He didn’t want to hear more. He’d gone over Sara’s death with Adam. He knew how it had gone, how things had unfolded. He knew the truth… And no matter how kind it might be, he knew that Gabe had just lied.
He didn’t think he could stand the grateful look on his dad’s face any longer.
Date Point: 15y6m2w3d AV
North of Yellowstone National Park, Montana, USA, Earth
Yan Given-Man, Chief of the Lodge
Moose.
Not as muscle-big as an adult Werne but taller. Actually there was a lot of beast there.
…A lot of beast. The “deer” they’d hunted before were very different. Small and fast, but very tasty! They were too fast to make spear hunting or wrestling easy, but with a bow and some skill they would make very good prey for a tribe’s hunting ground. They were small though, and would only feed a tribe for maybe a single meal.
Moose on the other hand… Anyone could see that moose was part of the same tribe as deer, but the difference was like standing a girl next to a Given-Man. A beast like that probably had a thick hide, so without a very strong bow and arrows, spear-hunting made the most sense… but that meant getting within reach of those enormous feet and great swinging head-branches.
…Antlers. Like two hands of spears, ready to lift a man off the ground and gut him. It was easy to forget how dangerous those things must be when the animal was up to its chest in water.
Yan liked the prey in Yellow Stone! The air tasted heavy with their flavor and the hunting here was rich. But…the People probably wouldn’t like living in this forest. The trees were all ‘conifers,’ which meant a tall, thin, prickly kind of thing with crumbly, crispy bark. Yan’s fingers and toes sank deep into the wood when he tried to climb them, and the bark was often so thin it crumbled under his grip. The trees themselves swayed in the breeze and didn’t stand hard against it. Maybe that was because the wind was sometimes so strong? That seemed right.
In any case, he couldn’t climb anything here besides rocks, and that made him a bit grumpy.
Vemik had tested some of the thinner trees, maybe out of some silly hope that he could still fly through the canopy like a young child. He’d made it maybe a hand of man-heights up a ‘fir’ before the entire tree started to sway, forcing him to leap down before he accidentally hurt it.
[“No bird-spearing from up there, I guess.”]
“Nope,” Jooyun agreed. “If we want to hunt from up there, we’d have to build a hide in a much stronger tree. Not ideal.”
“Hmm…”
Vemik’s tail twitched back and forth as he considered their quarry again. Bad habit, that: a good way to startle prey, if they could see well. Yan knocked him between the shoulders to remind him of a lesson he’d shared more times than he could count, and Vemik got his tail under control with an embarrassed duck-shrug of his head.
The moose dipped its head below the water and came up with a mouthful of plants.
“…Okay. I know how I would hunt him,” Yan decided after a while. “I attack from front, Vemik jump on from rear, or spear in the side. Its ribs don’t look like werne ribs, there are long spaces.”
Jooyun nodded thoughtfully. “I’d drive it,” he said. “Or use a very good compound bow. Well, okay. Really I’d just shoot it with a rifle but we’re pretending like we don’t have those for now.”
“You can run from dawn to dusk, Jooyun,” Vemik pointed out. “Yan and me, we train hard, but can only run a hand of hours now. Driving is not so good.”
“Don’t need to run, in this case. The point is to get it stuck, or to trap it between hunters. I bet your people could get away with smaller hunting parties, but still. Moose are dangerous.”
Yan nodded. A beast that size would feed a small tribe for several days, provide jerky and pemmican, leather, fat, sinew and many strong bones. Having a whole party hunt it would not be a waste.
“Clever, are they?”
“Not really. But they’re unpredictable and aggressive.”
Yan watched the beast sniff the wind then haul itself out of the shallow pool it had been wading and feeding in. It was an odd-looking beast, all legs and nose, but he could see all the qualities of worthy prey in it.
“What other beasts hunt it?”
“Wolves and bears. Takes a lot of wolves, though, and it’s a risk. They generally only go after moose if they’re desperate. Even bears will prefer a young or sick one, but they can take down a bull if they have to.”
“This bear is why you have that…thing?”
Jooyun tapped the metal can on his hip. “Bear spray. It’s also why Hoeff’s got a high-powered rifle, ‘cuz bears may straight ignore the spray if they’re angry.”
“What does this ‘bear spray’ do?”
“It’s like the most super-spicy food ever, except literally a million times worse. And I spray it in the bear’s eyes and face.”
“…Maybe less cruel to just kill it.” Yan had finally got his head around a counting as big as million, and shuddered in ghost-pain from the thought of something that spicy.
“Hey, he’ll shrug it off eventually. Doesn’t permanently hurt him, and like I said: if he’s real pissed he’ll just ignore it anyway.”
Heff chimed in with an evil grin. “Hey Yan, you know what ‘bear’ means? It means ‘the brown one.’”
“Jooyun already said. He also said ours is still worse.”
Heff grumped softly in disappointment, which made Yan trill very quietly.
“No no,” Jooyun corrected. “I said yours was bigger. I didn’t say worse.”
“…There is difference?”
“Might be. Let’s hope we don’t find out.”
Yan met Vemik’s eye and they both glanced upwards at the sun for a moment. Hopefully whatever Earth-gods lived there would be kind today.
Down in the valley below, the moose vanished between the trees.
“Guess we scared it off,” Heff muttered.
“Could be. Their eyesight ain’t too good so they spook easy. It’s pretty important we don’t do that.”
“Like werne, then.”
“Yeah, except a werne’s sense of smell is awful next to a moose.”
“We’re downwind.”
“Yup. Let’s stay that way. And keep quiet.”
They spread out into a trailing line, staying just close enough to see each other. Jooyun and Heff were wearing bright orange jackets even brighter than Vemik’s crest, and much brighter than Yan’s which was beginning to blacken at the tips.
The moose wasn’t difficult to track. Its taste on the air was potent, and something so big couldn’t not make noise as it pushed through the bush up ahead.
There was something else, too. A different taste, and when Yan caught Jooyun’s attention with a gesture and flicked his tongue, the human sniffed the air then raised his hand. They all stopped.
Jooyun swapped his spear over to his left hand and retrieved the spray from his belt. He gave Heff a significant look, and the smaller man thumbed something on his rifle that made a soft, quiet click.
Jooyun could move across the ground without making any noise when he wanted. He stayed low and stalked over to Yan’s side.
“Bear,” he whispered.
Godshit. “Close?” Yan whispered back.
“Yeah. Strong scent. Smells like a grizzly, too.”
Yan looked around. The woods revealed nothing, and it occurred to him that even if the Brown Ones of home were bigger and stronger, they never ever came under the trees. They never hid. Suddenly, he understood what Jooyun had meant when he’d said that they weren’t necessarily worse than Bears.
“What now?”
“We give the moose some room.”
Yan nodded, and gestured with a flick of his tail for Vemik to back off a little. They returned to their silent hunt, keeping a closer and more wary eye on the bush around them.
A shrill scream through the trees made Yan hunker down and grip his spear, ready to meet a charging mass of brown fur. He’d never heard a sound like that in all his life, and it was honestly terrifying, though he’d sooner die than admit it. To judge from Vemik’s tight-knuckled grip on his spear, the piercing shriek had rattled him too.
The two humans chuckled quietly as the sound echoed off the hills around them. “That’s an elk, Yan,” Jooyun whispered. “It’s between a deer and a moose. Same, uh, ‘tribe’ I guess. That’s a male somewhere off calling for love.”
“…How close?”
“Not close. Several good throws away at least.”
Yan shook himself as the cry went up again. He nodded. Now that he’d heard it once, he listened and agreed with Jooyun that the beast making it was far away… but it must have mighty lungs to make a sound that loud which carried so strongly.
He pointed in the direction the moose had gone. At least that hadn’t been full of surprises… yet.
They caught up with it in a patch of open ground, where it was placidly grazing while its ears flicked this way and that, alert for any sound.
They all looked at each other. Now was the time to Take. All four of them were skilled hunters and spread out just right without anyone saying a word. All four knew how to be quiet, move slow, hide in the shadows. They stepped closer, hugging the undergrowth, spears in hand—
And the Brown One attacked.
The moose bolted the instant the bear burst out of the bush barely a good throw to their left, but the predator was faster, stronger, and far more terrible. It didn’t even seem to spend any real effort as it ignored the distance to its fleeing prey and smashed into the moose at a full run.
The moose was heaved right off its feet and dumped to the ground. Huge paws snapped ribs like twigs, and claws as long as Yan’s fingers tore ragged gouges in its hide.
Jooyun was right. This ‘bear’ wasn’t nearly as big or as dangerous-looking as a Brown One—in fact, the moose was bigger—but it was mean. Fast, strong, ferocious… and it had completely snuck up on them.
It held the moose’s head down with one massive paw, engulfed its throat in powerful jaws and shook, dragging the flailing bull around like a toy. There was a crack, and the moose was no more.
Then it whipped around on its paws to face them, teeth bared and bloody, and it roared.
The message was clear: “MINE!”
“Holy testicle Tuesday…” Heff muttered. He had the rifle aimed squarely at the bear, but every line of him said he’d rather be somewhere else.
Jooyun spread his arms to ward them back. “Slowly…” he cautioned. “Give him room, don’t give him a reason to get ornery. Big fella just wants to eat.”
“He’s fuckin’ welcome to it,” Heff promised, taking slow steps backward.
Yan considered. The four of them could take the prey from the ‘bear,’ and for all its impressive strength, Yan was bigger and he had no doubt he could wrestle it by himself. But it was fast, had huge claws, and they were pretending to just knives and spears anyway. He would need to be desperate for meat to try something that could get him or one of his hunters killed.
He backed off, without looking away. Vemik did the same.
Satisfied, the bear grabbed the moose’s neck again and with an effortless yank it dragged the meat away as though it weighed nothing. The bear was big, and very strong for its size.
In another hand of breaths, it was gone. Only a blood trail showed where it went.
“Whew…” Heff lowered his rifle. “…Well there’s somethin’ ya don’t see erryday.”
“No shit,” Jooyun agreed. “They almost never go after a full-grown bull moose! I can’t believe we got to see that!” He seemed almost giddy with excitement.
“Big bastard.”
“Hell yeah! Looked like he was in good health too, so why did he risk it?”
“Because he could.” Yan sighed to himself and patted his belly. He probably wouldn’t taste moose today.
“Man, I gotta report this to the park rangers… Ooh! Vemik! Your GoPro! Is it still on?”
Vemik looked up at the strange box strapped to his head. “…Yes? The little red light is on…”
“We’ll have video of it! You can show everyone back home!”
…Well. That wasn’t something Yan could taste, but he could at least tell a strong story, and show the Given-Men the proof. Which made today a successful hunt of a sort after all.
“Alright then. It’s getting late and we still have a deer we’ve got to butcher, so whaddya say we head back to the cabin, Yan?”
“Mm.” Yan nodded. The ‘cabin’ was a tree-made hut built next to a river, which just seemed wrong to him, but Jooyun had promised him on his word as a man of the tribe that nothing in that river was dangerous except the fast-flowing, cold water itself. It also had fish which, Yan had to admit, were tasty. Especially smoked.
“Yes. We smoke the deer too, bring home to share?”
“Sounds good,” Heff agreed. Jooyun nodded, then turned to look back at where the bear had been.
“…Still can’t believe we got to see that. Jeez!”
Heff backhanded his arm. “You can geek out about it later, man. C’mon, in case there’s any more around here.”
“Oh, there will be,” Jooyun nodded. “If there’s one bear, another will be snuffling around to see if it can steal the prey, or eat the scraps. Bears have noses as good as Daar’s.”
“Greeeat. Any tips on avoiding it?”
“Yeah. Make noise. I like to sing in the woods. They usually don’t fuck with humans if they know we’re coming.”
Yan blinked. “…They don’t?” A Brown One back on Akyawentuo would happily tear down a tree to eat the People in the branches, if the tribe’s hunters or their Given-Man couldn’t fend it off.
“Nah. We smell strange, like we don’t belong. And we act strange, we stand tall…lots of things are afraid of us.”
“…Including bears?” Vemik asked.
Jooyun grinned. “Including bears.”
“But you’re scared of them too,” Vemik pointed out.
“Yup. Better for everyone that way.”
“Why?”
Jooyun’s grin got a little wider and he nodded toward home.
“Because that way we don’t have to kill them,” he said.
Yan glanced at Vemik, then back at the bear’s kill-site, then back at the humans again. And Heff’s rifle, held so loosely and comfortably. And the can of spray on Jooyun’s hip, there to warn bears off rather than get in a fight to the death.
“…Yes,” he agreed at last. “Let’s go.”
Date Point: 15y6m2w3d AV
HCS My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon, Spacelane 1045, The Coalsack Nebula
Dog Wagner
♪♫—but their beauty and their style went kind of smooth after a while, take me to them dirty ladies every time… Aaaahhh, won’t you take me home tonight—♫♪
“Holy fuck, Dog, this one sounds older than you!”
Dog chuckled and took his boots down off the console. He’d been enjoying having Flight Ops to himself, with nothing to do but watch the stars crawl past and listen to music that actually had some substance and quality to it. “Not quite, brother. Close, though.”
Sam Jordan, MOSITMF’s pilot, chuckled and handed Dog his lunch. “Who is it?”
Dog obliged him by turning the music down a notch, but shook his head with a grin. “…Gonna have to get up a lot earlier’n that to fool me, Sam. You know damn well who it is.”
Sam shook his head and his expression of innocent curiosity became a grin. “See, this is why we should stop inviting you to poker night.” He handed over a tablet as well. “Today’s cargo inspection. Care to sign?”
Dog skimmed it. He trusted his crew 100%, they’d all proven they could hack deep-space freight and the monotony that came with it. Not a one of them would have just glanced out through a window at the shipping containers around the hull and declared the inventory was still good. A team of three had spacewalked to check the racks, so the least he owed them was to confirm that everything was exactly as good as it had been for the preceding nine days.
Sure, it was a formality—they’d all definitely have noticed if a shipping container full of Cimbrean lumber suddenly tore off the hull and smacked into the warp field boundary—but it was an important formality.
Fortunately, it was easy to swipe down through it and see that every field read a nice happy “Inspection OK.”
The return trip would be far less monotonous. Once they’d taken on their cargo of supercapacitors at the Rauwryhr homeworld, they’d just pop their jump drive and moor with Armstrong Station. Payday was just two days away, and after that they’d get a week off before heading out on the next run. It was a good rhythm.
“…Looks good,” he conceded after a minute in which his free hand had helped him drink about half his coffee. “Think we can call the dock crew’s fix on Three permanent, huh?”
“Think so,” Sam agreed.
“Awesome.” Dog applied his thumb to the sensor, signing off on the report.
“What’s today’s traffic report?”
Dog waved distractedly at the comms station. “Same as it’s been the whole trip. General advisory of increased Hunter activity. I kept the bugout jump charged just in case, but the last beacon didn’t have a specific warning, so…”
“Right. Shift change?”
“Shift change,” Dog agreed. He stood up and stepped aside. “You have the helm.”
Sam sat down, adjusted the seat to his preferred position, put on his seatbelt and nodded after glancing at the autopilot settings. “I have the helm.”
Dog called up the ship’s log on the tablet and logged the transfer. Another drumbeat in the slow rhythm of the day. “Okay. See you in two hour—” he began.
The alarm went off only a shaved second before the whole deck lurched violently and MOSITMF’s superstructure made a cetacean groan. Dog staggered three paces across the bridge before losing his balance and landing heavily on his back.
“Gravity spike!” Sam slapped the autopilot and heaved hard left on the controls. The stars outside wheeled.
A spike of pain shot up Dog’s right arm as he tried to roll over and get to his feet. He gritted his teeth and used his left arm instead, hugging the right to his chest. The volumetric tank at the front of Flight Ops was way more full of ships than he’d like, and a lot of them were fast little fuckers making a bee-line right for them.
“Hunters!”
“Yeah,” Sam agreed grimly. “Bugging ou-SHIT!”
The proximity alarm wailed as a second freighter, a Domain cargo ship that had been only a few light-hours behind them ever since they merged onto 1045, hit the spike too and slammed back into sub-luminal frame of reference bare meters away. If Sam hadn’t pushed them sideways and accelerated, it would have rammed right up MOSITMF’s ass.
Dog watched the volumetric display. One Broodship, a handful of Swarmships vectoring their way at ten Gs… Then nothing. Just Armstrong Station.
“Bugout Jump successful,” Sam declared. His hands were shaking as he took them off the controls.
“…Good call,” Dog managed weakly, just before the comms lit up as Armstrong noticed them.
“Incoming ship, this is Armstrong tower. IFF flags you as Hotel-Charlie-Foxtrot-One, ‘My Other Spaceship Is The Millennium Falcon.’ You’re not scheduled to be back yet, please verify your identity.”
Dog cussed and limped to the comms station just as the rest of the crew barrelled into Flight Ops. Mitch and Cathy had a half-dressed, coitus interruptus look to them, which he noted with an inward sense of amusement but didn’t comment on. Instead he grabbed the mic and replied.
“Armstrong Tower, Hotel-Charlie-Foxtrot-One. Emergency jumpback after a Hunter attack on Lane Ten-Four-Five. No casualties, minor injuries. Sending beacon details…”
“Jesus, Hunters?” Cathy went pale and buckled herself in at her station. Dog mimed zipping up her flight suit at her, and pale white became flush pink as she fumbled to neaten herself up. Mitch meanwhile dropped into the comms seat and quickly sent over the codes for the beacon they’d left behind on bugging out. Right now, the Hunters would be ripping through that unfortunate freighter that had followed them into the spike. If AEC had ships and fighters ready to scramble…
“Copy that, Hotel-Charlie. Hold station, await inspection.”
There’d be a shuttle full of border security on its way out to them in a minute. Dog handed the mic over to Mitch and inspected his arm.
Definitely a break. Old bones and metal decking didn’t mix well.
Sam gave him a concerned look. “Dog, are you okay? That was a hard fall.”
“Think I broke my arm a bit.”
“Shit…”
“Ain’t the first time, brother. Don’t worry ‘bout me none.”
He sagged in his own chair at last and let Mitch handle the insistent call from their engineers, Floyd and Kyle. He could feel a headache coming on, though maybe it got a little better when he saw a cluster of wormhole signatures flare up on sensors. At least three of the Royal Navy ships had just jumped out.
“…I’m gettin’ too damn old for this shit,” he muttered, and closed his eyes.
Date Point: 15y6m2w3d AV
HMS Myrmidon, Spacelane 1045, The Coalsack Nebula
Commodore Rajesh Bathini
The Hunters didn’t know what hit them. Myrmidon, Violent and Viceroy completed their jumps, achieved EWAR and firing solutions in microseconds, blinded every ship in the area, then took their time to confirm Hunter targets before ending them. The whole engagement lasted… heartbeats, at most.
The spacelane would need sweeping clean of debris, but to judge from the four drifting freighters caught in the gravity spike, they’d just prevented a massacre. The Hunters had timed that one far too well.
“HEAT team just jumped aboard, sir. Suited and ready.”
“Are any of those freighters being boarded?”
“Yes sir, that Domain one at the front.”
“Save them.”
“Aye aye!”
Seconds later, one of Myrmidon’s airlocks blew out the HEAT and their launch. It flashed across to within a meter of the victim’s hull on a precise warp pulse, and the men riding it needed only seconds to cut their way into the Swarmship.
And then they were done. “Myrmidon, ABBOTT. Target vessel secured, helping the survivors.”
Those men were terrifyingly fast.
Two squadrons of Firebirds jumped in and, in response to commands from the Fleet Intelligence Center, promptly flashed outwards in a search pattern to secure the volume… but the battle was over before it had really begun.
All those drills, maneuvers and rehearsals had completely paid off today. Lives saved, disaster averted and one less Broodship in the sky. Some good press for humanity, for a change.
…He hoped.