Date Point: 15y9m1w AV
Dataspace adjacent to Observatory Station, Neptune, Sol
Six/Cynosure
You were right.
There were unexpected setbacks.
No. I’m going to miss this window.
They noticed the missing package
sooner than I thought.
I don’t think so. They’ve scanned
everybody for implants like you said
they would. They didn’t find any,
of course. But we’re on lockdown
while they search the whole facility.
Of course not. And there shouldn’t be
any evidence that the log was tampered
with, either.
Thanks. I don’t know why, but this stuff
just… I don’t know.
Comes more easily nowadays.
I mean, I was a straight-A student all
the way through college
But now…
…You didn’t do anything to me, did you?
I know, I just…
…You know what, never mind.
I do have one question for you, though.
You have to know that AEC won’t be
happy about this. They’ll view it
as an act of war. Doesn’t that take
peace off the table? I thought lasting
peace with humanity was your end goal?
God.
You’re right, that does change things.
It changes everything!
They’re playing with forces that could
doom us all
But how does what I’m doing play into it?
I wouldn’t talk.
…Fine. No further questions.
I’ll do my best to ensure we
achieve the next window.
See you in a few months.
Date Point: 15y9m1w AV
The White House, Washington DC, USA, Earth
President Arthur Sartori
Hephaestus were in no danger of telling the world they’d just managed to lose a nuclear device. That little revelation would have sent their share prices punching right through rock bottom and out the other side.
A fate they absolutely and thoroughly deserved, in Sartori’s estimation.
According to his briefing document, there were exactly thirty-two ‘Pinnacle – Broken Arrow’ incidents on record since 1950, none more recent than 1980, and none of which had ever involved a physics package just going missing. Somehow, Hephaestus had managed to fuck up worse in just a few months than the entire Department of Defence had achieved in more than eighty years.
When their executives were finally escorted from the building and returned to their duties, they’d done so as absolutely broken figures who’d just found themselves facing the full wrath of the state in all its terrible glaring glory. It was in Sartori’s power to absolutely ruin every single one of them, and right now he had no good reason not to, beyond the desire to keep the whole incident quiet until it was resolved. Adele Park in particular had looked frail and trembling, a far cry from her actual status as the wealthiest and most powerful businesswoman in human history.
And the worst part was that the investigators could find nothing. Everybody who had the opportunity and ability had an absolutely airtight alibi. Suspicion had obviously fallen on the crew of HCS-501 I Met God And She Booped My Nose. They were the ones who’d taken aboard some bombs, detonated one, and returned two less than they left with.
But… nothing. Everyone’s movements were accounted-for, the ship’s logs showed nothing unusual, every one of the ten thousand one hundred and seventeen Hephaestus personnel in the asteroid belt had been scanned for implants…
Nothing.
Sartori had been assured that there would be a breakthrough. The problem was, such a breakthrough needed to happen before that bomb went off. They were running against the clock, and the clock seemed to be winning.
He tried to sign a few things and do some paperwork to let his brain work over the matter in peace, and even succeeded for a few minutes until there was a knock on the door.
“General Kolbeinn, Mister President.”
“Thanks. Show him in.”
Sartori let the Supreme Allied Commander of Extrasolar Defence stand in front of the desk for a few seconds while he finished signing his most recent letter. Kolbeinn had lent his approval to letting Hephaestus have the nukes, on the grounds that they needed the materials from asteroid mining in order to expand the fleet: Sartori wasn’t happy about that.
He scrawled his autograph at the bottom of the letter, sealed it in an envelope, pressed it deliberately down on the top of his out tray, and finally looked up at the general. Kolbeinn was staring blankly at nothing through the window, face totally locked down and not so much as a bead of sweat showing. That was the look of a man who’d prepared himself for an absolute flaying.
“…I think the Secretary of Defence wants your head.”
Kolbeinn didn’t reply, though the subtlest shift said he was paying rapt attention.
“…Exactly how much trouble could this cause, Greg? What can they do with a nuke in space?”
Kolbeinn swung a folder out from under his arm and placed it on the desk. “…A lot, sir. They could certainly destroy the Ceres facility and its shipyards.”
“Is that what you think they’ll do?”
“We don’t even know who ‘they’ are yet, sir. But given the lack of implants, our working theory is somebody at Hephaestus has APA sympathies. If so, breaking one of the big extraplanetary ventures and crippling our ability to expand and maintain the space fleet would fit with their stated objectives…” He cleared his throat. “…And if I’m right, then we have to assume that the APA has somebody very high up in our security services, too.”
“…Sit down.”
Kolbeinn did so, perching on the edge of one of the two large cream sofas that Sartori had brought into the oval office.
“…Who?” Sartori asked.
“We’re talking… director of the CIA, that sort of level. With a substantial cabal of support lower down the pole, too.”
Sartori turned his head and cursed in a whisper. “Jesus.”
“Not completely without precedent, I’m afraid.”
“You’re certain, now?”
“No. I can’t be. But with the skill they’ve shown and the resources they’ve used… At the very least, somebody high up in the APA knows a lot about the trade.”
The ‘trade.’ Funny how a word so honest and hardworking had become so ingrained in the intelligence community. They had tradecraft, terms of art, a whole lexicon of honest jargon to describe the business of navigating the grayest areas.
Sartori meanwhile had been handed the equivalent of a traveller’s handbook and pushed off the boat in unfamiliar territory. And now he was facing the possibility that people he’d appointed, maybe even somebody in his own Cabinet, was a bona fide terrorist ringleader.
…A terrorist ringleader with a nuke, now.
Who could he trust? Did he start with the man in front of him? Had Kolbeinn merely been outwitted, or could he be complicit? God, the Hierarchy was easy next to this: stick an ultrasound wand to the suspect’s head and you got a clear red-or-green, yes-or-no, binary indicator of whether you were dealing with an Igraen agent.
But this? When the enemy was just as human in the head as anybody else?
“…We’ve definitely ruled out the Hierarchy?”
“There’s not a single person in the asteroid belt with an implant in their head. I’d swear to it.”
“Not what I asked, Greg. Could they have a sympathizer?”
Kolbeinn scowled. “…I can’t rule it out.”
“But you think the APA angle is more likely,” Sartori finished for him. He watched Kolbeinn wrestle with the statement for a second before finally nodding.
“…We’re gambling with lives at this point, Mister President. A lot of ‘em. If I could give you solid truth and facts, we’d’ve caught the bastards already. The best I can do is play the odds, and I think… yeah. The odds lie with the APA.”
“And I have to decide where the odds lie on who is and isn’t likely to have APA sympathies. The spotlight falls on you too, general.”
“…Yes sir. It has to.”
Well. Either he was trustworthy or he was truly peerless at deception. And Sartori had to trust somebody. May as well start with the man who’d delivered the news.
“…Alright. Get military intelligence on this, people you know and trust personally. Follow the APA angle as far as it leads, keep it as quiet as you can. And I want every package we gave Hephaestus confiscated, and locked up safe and secure in Minot as soon as possible.”
“Yes sir.”
“And… Kolbeinn?”
“Yes, sir?”
“If I even think of letting civilians within sniffing distance of a nuke ever again, I want you to invoke the twenty-fifth.”
Kolbeinn finally relaxed a little and a small ghost of a laugh flickered across his face. “Heh! …Yes sir.”
“That will be all, general.”
Kolbeinn left the office, and Sartori found to his mild surprise that he had a moment’s peaceful alone time to get his thoughts in order. He leaned back in his seat, stretched, then stood up and took a stroll around the office to relieve his legs and back.
If he was being dispassionate, he had to admit it looked like the Hephaestus Consortium had simply been badly outplayed, rather than incompetent. If the CIA and military investigators who’d gone flocking up to Ceres to interview everybody, pick through the base and ship computer systems and whatever else they’d done hadn’t been able to immediately identify the thief and recover the physics package, that meant worrying things.
The APA? The APA had proven to be remarkably competent. Orchestrating multiple simultaneous attacks in several cities in different countries, continents and even planets wasn’t child’s play. And from what he’d seen, Kolbeinn was completely right that somebody high up in the APA was the real deal and not just a college kid full of revolutionary zeal.
But did that translate to being able to steal a nuke right out from under the most intense scrutiny? Sartori wasn’t so sure. That kind of thing smacked more of the kind of bullshit that the Hierarchy could achieve. They were known to employ temporal manipulation technology, after all. The captured flying saucer at Scotch Creek was packed full of stasis technology along its underside. And with stasis technology and God-knew-what else at their disposal, a heist like that might even be easy for them.
But they’d been so certain that there were no longer any Hierarchy assets inside the Sol Containment Field. And there were certainly no biodrones on Ceres.
Reflecting ruefully on what episodes like this must do to the lines in his face and a hairline that wasn’t so much receding as in full rout, he decided what he needed was a coffee, a sandwich, and something nice and simple to tackle. Like, say, a refugee crisis or a supreme court nomination.
Or a state visit…maybe not. Those seemed to involve either too much anodyne conversation and false smiling, or in near-broken ribs and a gut-splitting feast if he visited the Gao.
…It occurred to him that what he really wanted was to spend a weekend soaking up the sun somewhere. Take just forty hours off to commit to some good old-fashioned relaxation. Read a book, have a few drinks. There never seemed to be a good opportunity.
Maybe he should make one.
Date Point: 15y9m1w AV
Clan Whitecrest starship Tearing Dusk, Rvzrk System, Domain Space
Regaari
There was little point in blockading an invaded planet when the invaders were using jump technology to supply their forces on the ground, but the Dominion were doing it anyway. Their cordon of war platforms was enormous, blanketing the system in sensor coverage and warning broadcasts, but Regaari knew what Domain war-platforms were capable of and wasn’t impressed. One V-class human frigate and its contingent of Bulldog drones would have been enough to completely blind the entire force with ECM.
It wasn’t that the Rrrrtktktkpch were stupid. Far from it, they were every inch as smart as Gaoians. But they were… staid. Slow to adopt new technologies. And, frankly, constrained by the need to make their technology compatible with the needs of their more numerous but much less brainy cousins the Vz’ktk.
The Allied fleet, on the other hand….
Most of it had returned to regular duty, presumably on a hair trigger to jump back in should they be needed. HMS Violent, HMS Myrmidon and USS San Diego had remained, supported by a close patrol of five firebirds and two Clan One-Fang ships; the Sprinting Vengeance and the Lancing Tempest.
The Tearing Dusk was something unlike every other ship in the system. It was built around sensor invisibility and emissions control, to the point where even its warp drive was tuned to produce only minimal ripples in spacetime. At speeds below one kilolight, it was effectively indistinguishable from background fluctuations, and thanks to wormhole-router comms it didn’t have to broadcast EM radiation to communicate with other ships. That had neatly filled one of the holes in creating a truly stealthy starship.
They were going to need that stealth to get close enough for the drop over Rvzrk’s south pole. They’d broken stealth only once, to transfer Father Genshi over to HMS Myrmidon where he was now liaising with the Fleet Intelligence Center.
Naturally, he was worried. He too had wanted to take to the field to…well, if not precisely redeem himself, at least regain some of his own self-respect. Unfortunately, Champion Thurrsto had more or less thrashed him into a broken heap, which meant his physical recovery would be a slow, painful process.
“The timing on this will be tight. The drones should create a window for you, but no more than a few minutes.”
Regaari duck-nodded solemnly as his techs checked his suit over one last time. He was about to spend an indefinite length of time in it, after all: everything needed to be perfect.
At least it wasn’t an EV-MASS. Rather than crushing pressure, the Whitecrest suit was just… snug. He could, and had, worn it for weeks at a time. He would come out of it at the far end with stinking matted fur and a profound need to roll around in a dust bath, but at least his body wouldn’t be aching, bruised and half-starved.
“That will be enough,” he promised.
“Good. Waiting on your go.”
Suit checks took another ten minutes, and passed without incident, during which time the Tearing Dusk inserted itself into as low a polar orbit as the captain dared without straying inside the Hunter wormhole suppression field.
Finally, there was no putting it off any longer even if Regaari had wanted to. This was a test. It might prove to be more than he could handle, despite the bravado he’d shown back in High Mountain Fortress, but at that moment he had a giddy feeling in his stomach that was almost intoxicating. Part fear, part… something else.
He took a deep breath. “Father. Cub wants to play.”
The techs withdrew from the bay and left him alone in the airlock. The front ramp smoothly mawed open, leaving him separated from infinity by nothing more than gossamer fields of captive electrons.
“Be good. Mother’s watching.” Genshi sounded like he had more of a shake in his voice than Regaari did. “Cousins making mischief.”
Regaari had a tactical view of the orbits up on a little screen to his left. He watched it intently as six bulldogs peeled away from their formation with HMS Violent and zipped into a polar orbit, where they began viciously strobing the Hunter sensor net at its weakest spot.
“Mother’s distracted.”
Tearing Dusk’s pilot answered. “Watch me pounce.”
Orbital insertion took less than a heartbeat. The planet, from Regaari’s perspective, had been a distant blue circle one second, and now it was a flat blue expanse close enough to touch.
“Cub can play,” Genshi declared, confirming that they were in position for the drop.
This was it. Regaari keyed his own radio. “Watch me jump,” he said, dropped to four-paw, and slapped the large button on the bulkhead.
The forcefield dropped, and all the air in the lock exploded out into the void and carried him with it.
He felt a thump in his whole body as Tearing Dusk went to warp, briefly generating intense gravimetric shear that managed to rattle him even from hundreds of meters away. Then he was alone. Oh, he knew that he was surrounded by a bodyguard of ECM drones, but the nearest of them was probably hundreds of kilometers away. Already, he was decelerating into a steep entry trajectory, but it would be a minute or two before he kissed the first trace of atmosphere.
This moment in a HELLNO was always eerie. He was shooting along at incredible speeds, but the sheer scale of it all completely obfuscated that fact. When he oriented himself toward “down,” the fastest movement he could see was the languid dance of clouds.
That was the deceptive part, though. It was impossible to detect the moment where he finally realized that the world was getting bigger, but it still dawned on him that it had. Then there was a faint flicker of light in his peripheral vision. Then another, and another, until they merged into a constant stream of bright plasma that his helmet protectively dimmed to spare his vision.
This was the moment of peak hazard. Hopefully, the Hunters were still blinded. If they weren’t… he was on a completely predictable trajectory and surrounded by a brilliant, obvious halo of opaque plasma. If they intercepted him, he’d never see it coming.
There was nothing to do except relax and take solace in the fact that if the worst did happen, he would feel nothing. No pain, no fear, no impending helplessness. He would simply…cease. There were worse things than that.
He didn’t cease. After several unending minutes, the plasma flickered and faded more abruptly than it had first begun, and the view below cleared. He was still high enough up to just make out the planet’s curvature, but it was almost flat now.
He angled down as steep as he dared. Too shallow and he’d be high in the air and visible when the drones were finally destroyed or driven off. Too steep though, and he’d either inflict savage G-forces on himself when he came to level out, or leave himself stranded out over the polar ocean, too far out to glide to land. Judging the difference was a fine margin.
Fortunately, he’d practiced this too many times to get it wrong.
The clouds came up to meet him. He plunged into them doing a hefty multiple of the speed of sound in this planet’s atmosphere and felt the jolt as his suit extended its forcefield wings to their widest, slimmest extent. He was a supersonic glider now, and riding a knife-edge between bleeding off speed and maintaining his altitude.
The coastline was gentle and sloped easily up into a kind of chilly rolling lowlands dotted with trees and fields. A long meandering escarpment to his left was his target and he slipped sideways into the updraft its steep inner surface generated. The result was turbulent, but he had a long way to travel inland and no means of powered flight. He’d be riding a tight line of lift, speed, altitude and stealth the whole way.
It took hours. Supersonic gliders didn’t remain supersonic for long, and once he was below mach he had to claw every thermal and updraft he could find, creeping his way inland toward the target. It was still much faster than covering the same distance on foot, however, and the stealthing in his suit made him basically undetectable.
The best thermals came off towns and cities. He got some good recon images of those as he went over, and got the general impression that life there seemed to be on lockdown: armed and armored Vz’ktk and their vehicles had set up everywhere, and the civilians seemed to have been relocated into defensible safe zones—not a bad idea in theory. In practice, they were basically gift-wrapping the Hunters’ next meals.
There’d been some debate about contacting the ground commanders and letting them know about his mission and the support in orbit, maybe dropping some message capsules and propaganda as he flew over. Both Genshi and Caruthers had felt that without knowing how secure the Domain military’s comms were, that was probably a bad idea. While it might buy him allies, it might also get him exposed and caught. In the end, they’d decided against it.
Finally, however, he could glide no more. There was a long stretch between towns where some sinking cold air robbed him of height and there were no convenient ridges or heat sources to find a boost. He banked his fields, came almost to a dead stop a ways above ground, and dropped the last twenty meters on a cushion of air. No parachute to hide, no mess to clean up.
There was smoke on the horizon now. He was twenty kilometers from where he’d hoped to land, but still well inside the acceptable margin. Infiltrating through the Hunter line was going to be a serious test, but he was up to it.
For the first time since leaving the ship, he broke comms silence to send an update. He was carrying a thin-packed laser retroreflector, the most secure method they had for communicating with ships in orbit. Deploying it was as simple as tugging it out of his harness and flipping it open with a snap of his arm and wrist.
“Father. Cub had fun. Playing sneak-and-hide now.”
He waited a couple of seconds for light-lag, and could hear the relief in Genshi’s voice when the reply arrived.
“Mother didn’t notice. Cubs raid the kitchen.”
“Watch me play.”
Satisfied with a job well done, Regaari tuned his suit’s forcefields to charge off solar energy, packed his reflector, then turned toward the smoke and opened the seals on his mask so he could sniff the air. The wind smelled of ruin and blood.
He headed toward it.
Date Point: 15y9m1w2d AV
The Dog House Gym, Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Julian Esticitty
“Dude,” enthused ‘Horse, “You lookin’ at yourself? See the difference hobbling around on that foot made? See how you stand up better now? You move and lift better, too…”
Julian had to admit, it made a pretty striking difference. The old pictures Adam had taken at the start of this looked just fine if a fella didn’t know what he was looking for. Except, now that Julian had experienced the difference he could see the how the little things added up, and they’d genuinely been hampering his ability to move.
He’d healed up fast after his month on the Crude, found himself able to move like the wind. It was amazing, the trees felt just like a jungle gym! He’d agreed to Ava’s offer of a Laid Bare shoot right as he was riding a personal high about all that. At pretty much the same time, Ambassador Rockafeller came through with Julian’s appointment, officially making him a special envoy to the Ten’Gewek. That was good to have because it came with a paycheck, a budget, official government authority…and along with that, serious responsibility, too.
That appointment really drove home something Julian had not really internalized: he was in this for the long haul, definitely years, probably for life. When he’d asked the ambassador who might eventually take his place, Rockefeller had just laughed good-naturedly and asked, “who else could?”
That had prompted a long, serious conversation with Al and Xiù, and a bunch of his friends. He’d dreaded what that all might mean for him, honestly. He wasn’t sure he liked his options.
In the end, near the end of his month of rehab, it was a potentially serious injury he’d earned while visiting Akyawentuo that finally brought things to a head. He’d been jumping around with Vemik and managed to twist his left ankle with a bad slip on a slick rock; his control was improving but not quite perfect. It was a bad twist too, so bad that Vemik ended up having to carry Julian back to the village. That stung his pride, but that wasn’t the part that got his attention.
The bit that really grabbed him by the hair was Vemik’s surprise that such an injury was even possible. The Sky-Thinker had never personally encountered anyone who had hurt themselves that way. None of the Singers knew of one except their elder, who in all her years had seen such a thing exactly once before…and then it had been paired with a fall from a tree.
They’d asked him how long it would take him to heal. Julian had almost answered it would take a couple of weeks maybe, assuming nothing had been broken…but then something in the back of his mind tickled at him. He knew the modern answer was actually “a couple of hours.” Sitting around and waiting for it to heal naturally was downright stupid nowadays.
So, he’d answered along those lines. “I think it’ll be fine by tomorrow.” That seemed to satisfy them, so when Julian hobbled back through the gate, he’d paid a visit to the local clinic, and honesty he’d ended up sitting in the waiting room longer than the actual treatment took. The staff took his vitals, made him try a few different scales before they would believe the number. He went into the doctor’s office, who quickly examined the ankle, skimmed his medical history—some raised eyebrows, there—and prepared a hypodermic needle.
The medicine, of course, turned out to be related to Crude.
It wasn’t the same stuff Adam used, of course. The civilian medicine was made to target specific use-cases and had other stuff along for the ride. In Julian’s case, that came with painkillers, an anti-inflammatory, some nutrients to speed healing, apparently something that was good for bones…he wasn’t a medical tech.
An hour later, it was like nothing had happened at all.
So: he had several lifetime commitments, all at once. His women, his children, the Ten’Gewek. All of them utterly depended on his good health. Medicine had become straight spacemagic when he wasn’t paying attention; his left foot attested to that.
Where did that leave him? Besides snowed under.
Okay. List the things he had to be. He had to be just stupid, crazy strong. Check. He had to be healthy for decades. That, apparently, was also a check? But was it really?
But did he also have to be Ten’Gewek unbreakable? And if he could, should he?
He’d considered staying on the Crude after his month was up. That was technically an option now. Heck, his new employers were quite keen on him taking full advantage, if for no other reason then the longevity and health benefits. And after taking the leap and getting his foot regrown… or before that, after taking the leap and doing the Rite of Manhood….
It seemed like his life lately had involved a lot of finally deciding to say ‘fuck you’ to his comfort zones because there were more important things to worry about.
Stepping on the clinic’s scales was an unavoidable reminder of one of them. He was…fuckin’ big. Like, modern-day strongman big. Walsh big! Well, at least…before he left for HEAT, anyway. Which was still goddamned huge. Aptitude or no, being the kind of big and strong he was these days couldn’t be completely risk free, could it? And it wasn’t like he could go back, or even should. But he didn’t want to, like, die of a heart attack when he was fifty, either.
But on the other hand, if he had the talent to ride this dragon, shouldn’t he? Shouldn’t he represent humanity as best as he possibly could, in the way the Ten’Gewek respected most?
But wasn’t a big part of what they were doing about getting them to respect a human’s natural strengths, too? How could he do that with a straight face if he were eventually walking around like another Beef? He was pretty sure Al and Xiù wouldn’t be happy with that, either.
He’d felt himself pulled in ten directions at once, and finally resolved to ask Adam about it. Really, there probably wasn’t really anyone else to ask, besides him or his friends.
Adam’s advice had been surprisingly even-keeled.
“For you? I‘m gonna say you really shouldn’t, bro. I mean… it depends on what you’re looking to do, but I don’t think you should get any bigger.”
“…Are you feeling okay?” Julian joked.
“Bro! Right now you’re a genuinely huge fuckin’ dude, but you’re just, like, regular huge. Much more and you’re gonna start gettin’ into, like, HEAT freak territory. You cross a point where you can’t walk away, dude. That ain’t for you, trust me.”
Julian looked down at himself, and nodded. Then he glanced at Adam and nodded a little more firmly. Adam’s physique was…well…
He was in fact a very good-looking man. But that was tempered by being so grotesquely broad and hypermuscular that he was edging against barely looking human at all.
Julian didn’t have that problem. Hell, he looked fucking heroic rather than freakish, like something out of a comic book. That was a heck of a feeling. Adam on the other hand was pretty much straight up the Hulk. That… wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Al and Xiù both said they thought Julian was sexier, and if he was being totally honest with himself, he liked feeling sexy.
“Right. Good. But I’m still worried about, uh, getting hurt. That makes us…well, me, look bad.”
“The medicine healed you up right away, bro!”
“I know, but…”
Adam sighed and clapped a giant mitt on Julian’s shoulder. “…Okay. Look. If you wanna take body hardening as far as you can go, that’s doable. I understand that for you a lot more than going full Beef. Just don’t do what I did, okay? Doing this made me literally wider. It’s thickened my bones, it’s made me taller. When I enlisted, I was only like five foot seven. Now? I’m several inches taller than you. The only reason I went that far was ‘cuz we really do need a few people like me to do this mission, and like you, I’ve got the genetics to do it. So lemme ask you this? Does your mission need you as a freak? Do you want to be?”
“Well…jeez, you put it that way, no.”
“Exactly. Like, remember Tiny? He’s gonna be arriving at the unit pretty soon, and guess what? He decided he ain’t gonna bulk up too much more. He’s got the ability, and if he wanted to he could get as big as Rebar was, right? He ain’t gonna. Which, hey! That’s great. He’s gonna be a lot more like Sikes than Titan. ‘Know why?”
“…’Cuz, what? You guys don’t need it?”
“Eh, more like, if you’re growin’ past a quarter-ton and you still don’t think you’re strong enough, you’d better think damn good and hard before you push through and let the Crude take you further. Because it can, and once it does, your body will be changed forever. So honestly, don’t undersell yourself. You’re actually a bit stronger than Murray, you know that?”
“Wait, really?”
“Yeah, and he definitely ain’t bottom of the list, either. The big difference is that Murray can move a lot faster, and the rest of the older Lads’re all way better conditioned than you. Like, to the point they can shrug off a beating that would straight kill you, or run a marathon in three hundred pounds of EV-MASS and gear. That is what Crude can do. If you wanna be that kinda fit, we can do that. But before you say yes,” Adam warned, “keep in mind that you’re still hardening up yourself. Let’s see how far you can take things yourself first, okay? You’re barely thirty, you’ve got years left in your prime.”
“…You really think I can do this?”
““Dude. You’ll be fine, trust me. You did pretty much on your own what almost nobody can do with the best drugs there are. So stop worrying! I ain’t lying when I say you’re basically made for this. And honestly, I kinda wanna see just how far a man can really go without the spacemagic. Maybe, how far I coulda gone, if I hadn’t joined the HEAT.”
“…That does sound good,” Julian admitted.
“Arright. For today though, we’re just gonna keep doing what we were doin’. If you wanna change direction, I’m gonna hafta think it through first…”
“…Okay,” Julian agreed. “I did have, uh, one favor to ask, though. It’s honestly a little embarrassing but, well…”
“Name it!”
“Ava wants me to do a shoot.”
Adam grinned. “You wanna get super ripped?”
“…I guess? No. Mostly, I wanna not embarrass myself.”
“Bro you’re not gonna… Eh. Never mind. We can do that! All we’d be doing is just that conditioning you were worried about, really. Gotta warn you though, prep diet is rough. You’re gonna be hangry as shit the last week or two.”
…Hell. Well, as long as it wasn’t anything too weird. “Sure.”
“Awesome. I’m gonna make you her best model yet!”
Somehow, those were not comforting words…
Fortunately, whatever new and creative tortures that might involve were for another day. For now, Julian grunted himself through his regular dose of pain and, after saying goodnight, caught a cab home. He was…a bit too spent to jog thanks to Adam the sadist.
Folctha had put into practice an idea regarding electric vehicles and self-driving cars that had kinda just been “what-if” thinking back on Earth. Getting a car to Cimbrean was a big deal: they took up a lot of valuable space on the jump platform, and with 90% of Folctha’s population living in Folctha itself rather than the surrounding area, there wasn’t a whole lot of need for vehicles. Most folks walked.
And the road network was regular, well-planned, and self-driving technology had come a real long way since before first contact, as had electric vehicles.
The result was that nearly all the cars in Folctha belonged to the cab company. There were government vehicles and the Byron Group’s fleet of company cars, one of which was parked in Julian’s driveway and driven to work by Allison whenever she went down to Chiune Station. There were a few private cars too, and Al had seriously considered importing one…but no.
The cab company didn’t have any drivers. It had custodians. Half a dozen guys whose job was basically just to keep them clean inside and out, plus the guy who owned the company and paid them. To fit through the Array in an economical way, the cabs themselves were essentially a battery sled with a sleek plastic chassis on top, which itself was flat-pack and assembled in the garage. Somebody had called them “Ikea Cars” and the name stuck.
On the consumer side, the system was way cheaper than owning a car would have been. No road tax, no insurance, no gas, no need to change the tires or whatever. It cost Julian like forty pence to ride from the Doghouse to home in Palace Lake, and because the whole system was in communication with itself he didn’t have to wait at a single red light or deal with even one idiot in the wrong lane.
The single-rider models were a bit cramped, though. They cost almost nothing to hire so it wasn’t like he could complain; if he wanted shoulder room, he could pay a pound extra for the Premium option of a properly-sized car, affectionately known as a “JohnnyCab” after some old movie about explosions on mars, or something.
He probably would have, if the Ikea Car hadn’t at least had plenty of headroom.
And they pulled up right outside the front door, right in the spot where Allison’s company car usually was. He levered himself out, swiped his phone to pay, and heard the car pull away making a quiet melodic humming noise as it moved on to its next job. Apparently somebody had decided that electric cars were too silent and needed to make a noise, and now manufacturers were touting the fact that the silent car hummed as it drove as a feature.
He shook his head at the thought and let himself in with a smile. The kitchen turned out to be full of smoke. Ramsey and Tristan must be practicing their cooking again.
They were. Xiù was being the most angel-hearted teacher, and both looked like they’d basically murdered a bunny or something. No worries, Julian knew what to do.
“Hey fellas!” He scooped them up into a sweaty hug. “Burned broccoli? Did you forget the butter?”
“…It smells like farts on fire…” Tristan muttered. Clearly he was annoyed at himself.
“Could be a lot worse. I went ‘round a dude’s house one time in school, he’d left three chicken breasts in the fridge for, like, two months. That stunk!”
“So do you,” Xiù interjected, but she gave him a kiss anyway. “You know the drill, go shower.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Good boy.” She gave him a twinkling smile and ruefully examined the twisted black mess that should have gone with dinner. “…okay, so let’s find out what we’ve got in to replace this…” she said, dropping back into teacher mode.
“What about Al? Her car wasn’t outside?”
“She got called up to Chiune on some kinda emergency with the ship. Something about the onboard heat recycler oscillating.”
Julian frowned as he tried to figure that one out. “You mean, like, it was cycling on and off incorrectly, or…?”
“Nope! I mean it was literally oscillating right on its mount. She sent me a video.”
“…How…?”
“You got me. Anyway, she sai d they’re not leaving until they’ve fixed it and that means re-sealing the whole refrigeration system, so… she might not be home until five in the morning, maybe.”
“Urgh.”
“Yeah. There was something else too, what was it…? Your meal prep? I’m almost done for the next few days…Maybe something else…” Xiù paused and tapped her chin dramatically.
“Babe, I see through you. You wanna keep teasing me? Maybe you need a big sweaty hug too!”
She giggled and overacted suddenly having her memory jogged. “…Oh yeah! I’m pregnant!”
“–!” He couldn’t do much but gawp happily for a moment. She beamed at him, and dug the proof out of her pocket in the form of a positive test.
Nevertheless, he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it. “You’re kidding!”
“Nope! Well, I’m not. I get why Al wanted to have a scan before she told you, now… part of me doesn’t quite believe this thing.” She considered the test ruefully, then pocketed it again.
“You’re still eating broccoli? Al can’t stand the smell of it right now…”
She shrugged. “I’m fine. Maybe I won’t be in a couple weeks, but right now.. Better eat it while I can still enjoy it, right? Anyway! You: shower, stinky.”
“Going, going…”
In fact, he could barely contain himself and spent the whole shower bouncing and grinning giddily under the water rather than properly washing. They’d been trying for a while now, a lot longer than it had taken with Allison, and even though they hadn’t discussed it, there’d been some… concern. Xiù had gone through a lot, after all. Hell, she’d been nervejammed that one time, and who knew what that did to a body in the long run?
He’d lately started worrying about himself, too. Was it actually his fault? That had done a lot to stoke doubts about his, as Xiù called it, “slabgical journey.” He was being very careful and doing exactly what the smart people around him said to do, but…
It felt beyond good to have those doubts and fears put firmly to bed.
He had a family. Well, no. He had a family on the way…No. He had one right now and it was going to grow, and maybe it was a misfit family, with alien gorillas for uncles and furry clawed aliens for aunts, and literally tons of fun with surrogate HEAT brothers to help out…
But it was theirs.
Suddenly, he was kinda glad to be in the shower. They were happy tears, but he wanted to keep them to himself.
…His stomach grumbled, and Julian chuckled; if there was anything gym rats could be said to have in common, it was an obsession with food. He stepped out of the shower and toweled off, threw on some basketball shorts and padded downstairs.
Tonight smelled like broiled salmon with lemon sauce. One of his favorites! Not even Amanda could spoil it by showing up early, having come to pick up the boys. He briefly considered putting on a shirt or something but…nah. She needed to loosen up. Had been! The boys were happier, things were more… relaxed now that Jacob was on Earth and communicating via letters and his lawyers…
Not perfect. Never perfect with the Buehler family. Amanda had always been part of the problem for her children, even if her husband had been worse… But things were better. She was better, or at least had learned how to accept that it was their house and their rules.
And hell. It wouldn’t be a real family if things were perfect, would it?
They said grace, and tucked in.