Date Point: 15y9m2w AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Allison Buehler
“She doesn’t mind?”
Ava chuckled. “I think she said something like… ‘thousands of people are going to see me naked anyway, what’s one more?’”
Allison snorted. It was exactly the kind of answer she’d have given. “I think I like her already.”
“She’s pretty amazing,” Ava agreed. She paused and took a sip of water from her Camelbak. They were in the woods high above Folctha and some ways to the south, hiking along a dirt trail out to the site she’d picked for her next Laid Bare shoot.
It was a far cry from the dusty civic hall she’d used to record Daar’s groundbreaking exclusive, and her as-yet-unpublished shoot with Coombes had been done in the Doghouse, surrounded by gym equipment and weights.
Sachi Patel had requested somewhere “happy.” And because Allison was still gritting her teeth and making uncomfortable noises about the idea of Julian doing a Laid Bare, Ava had invited her along on the pretense that she was there as security to fend off passers-by and would-be voyeurs.
Allison’s honest curiosity had trumped her sense of conservative discretion, and she’d allowed herself to be talked into it. Actually, she was enjoying the hike. It wouldn’t be too much longer before the little life inside her became too demanding and took such excursions off the table. Best to enjoy them while she could.
“Tell me about her.”
Ava shook her head. “I’ll let her tell her own story… left here.”
If Ava hadn’t pointed it out, Allison would never have seen the trail between the trees. It barely deserved the word. “Damn! How’d you find this place?”
“We found it when I was sixteen. Not a lot of people know about it, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“So you’re going to do a location shoot here and publish it for the world to see. Makes perfect sense.”
Ava laughed, ducked under a branch and vanished up the track. When Allison followed, she found herself weaving between low-hanging twigs and swiping aside leaves for all of about fifty yards or so when quite abruptly she pushed through a curtain of what she guessed was probably willow and found herself on a stoney beach of some kind.
It was a spring. There were a lot of aquifers around Folctha, fed by the geology and a pattern of nightly rains that had gone uninterrupted for millennia, and you could hardly throw a stone near the city without it making a splash when it landed. But this one definitely won a prize for sheer picturesque quality. The water lunged up out of a split in the rock before bubbling and splashing down into a vaguely oval pool and finally spilling away over the edge of another rock and down the hill as a stream. Presumably it met up with the river somewhere far below.
“…Woah.”
“Yeah.” Ava smiled at it, with a blend of fondness and sadness. “I promised I was gonna do a shoot up here one day. Took me a while, but here we are.”
“No model, though,” Allison noted.
“That’s fine, we need to prepare for her anyway.” Ava dumped her pack on the ground. “Could you get out the blankets and stuff? That water’s cold, she’s gonna be freezing by the time we’re done.”
“Okay. What are you doing?”
“Setting the stage.” Ava took her boots off and quickly followed them with her hiking shorts and t-shirt. To Allison’s relief, she was wearing a bikini underneath and clearly didn’t feel the need to lose that as well. She hopped over a rock and plunged into the pool with a gasp.
“You okay?”
Ava nodded. “Yeah! Whoo! This is, uh… bracing!” She waded into the middle, scooped up a double armful of fallen leaves and carried them to the shore.
Allison shucked off her own pack and unpacked the blankets and camping supplies it contained. The air here wasn’t warm, and that water had to be pretty damn cold. Sure enough, when Ava declared herself satisfied that the pool was free of more than the artistic minimum of debris and climbed out again, she’d gone several shades paler and every inch of her was goosebumped.
It didn’t seem to slow her down, though. She swiped the water off her arms, shook herself off, squeezed some water out of her hair, and then pounced on her camera and lenses with a kind of energized mania. It didn’t take her long at all to arrange things to her satisfaction and she finally put on her jacket having regained her usual warm brown complexion.
“Bracing, huh?” Allison commented, dryly.
“Nothing like cold water to wake you up…” Ava checked her phone and nodded. “…She should be here soon. Could you, uh… there’s Ovaltine in the purple flask there?”
Allison fetched it, poured some into a metal mug and handed it to Ava who warmed her hands around it. “Gotta say, I don’t see the appeal of getting naked, cold and wet.”
“Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it! I actually feel great right now!”
“Hey, I’ve tried it. In a hot spring.”
“Really? Naked and everything?”
“I’m not a prude,” Allison said a little indignantly. “It’s just, we were the only humans on an entire planet. So why not, y’know? Nobody saw us.”
“Yeah, it’d be nice if Folctha had hot springs…” Ava admitted. “But still… you seem so uncomfortable about all this, I have a hard time picturing you trying out some naturism.”
“What, you’re one of these hippies who’s all about getting in touch with nature?”
Ava laughed and shook her head. “No, I’m about getting in touch with me. Being comfortable in my own skin, you know?”
“I guess I never had any trouble there.”
“Sure. You had different troubles. Everyone has troubles. And… hey, maybe baring myself to the world is how I cope with mine. Maybe you need a different approach. I don’t judge.”
“And I shouldn’t either.” Allison scowled at the slightly bitter note in her own voice. “…God, I sound like my mother.”
Wherever the conversation would have gone next, they were interrupted by the crackle of foliage and the swish of leaves against synthetic fabric. There was a flash of bright blue rain jacket and an Indian woman so petite she made even Xiù look downright amazonian plowed through the willow stems and paused blinking in the dappled light around the pool.
“…Wow!”
“Hey!” Ava sprang to her feet full of smiles and warmth. “What do you think?”
“I think… wow! This is gorgeous!”
“Glad you like it! Anyway, Sachi, this is Allison Buehler, Allison, Sachi Patel…”
“Oh! Oh wow!” Patel had an earnest, double-handed handshake. “Uh… Hi! I know Ava said you were going to be here, but I didn’t… It’s a real honour to meet you.”
Not Indian, Allison corrected herself: English. Nobody with an accent like that was anything other than a Brit through and through, skin tone be damned.
“I feel like I should be saying that to you…” Allison retorted. “Look, I’m just here to keep prying eyes away and make up my mind on some stuff. Pretend I’m not even here.”
Patel smiled and did an unconvincing impression of relaxing. “I’ll try. But I definitely want to talk shop with you later.”
“Sure, sure. You two can bewilder me with spaceship engineer jargon later…” Ava said, and not unkindly steered Patel toward the spring. “But for the purposes of the shoot, she isn’t here. Okay?”
“Right. Yes.”
“Bueno. Now, I know you’ve never modelled before, so we’ve got some things to go over first…”
The ‘some things’ turned out to be paperwork. Licenses, declarations, stuff like that. It didn’t take long, and Allison had to appreciate the professionalism of it all. In short order they’d gone over the details and Allison was honestly a little surprised when Patel shrugged her clothes off without any discernible hesitation and left them neatly folded on the picnic sheet. She cracked a joke with Ava and… that seemed to be it. No big deal.
That… honestly made Allison feel pretty angry at herself. She wasn’t a prude. In fact she took it as a point of pride that she was tough, adventurous, confident and bold. And yet the thought of doing what Patel had just done so casually made her feel almost sick with anxiety.
She sat and listened as Ava launched into her questions. They focused at first on Patel’s early life, why she’d signed up, what it had taken for her to get the posting on Caledonia… At first it was light, playful, fun and fresh.
The tone took a dramatic downturn when the subject turned to the battle of Gao, however, and Allison saw the moment Ava took what would probably be the iconic photo of the shoot. She mentioned that Patel had lost comrades, Patel looked away and down and crossed an arm vulnerably across her body. Up until that moment she’d looked confident and free: Now a wound was showing, and Ava immortalized it.
What followed was a kind of compassionate trauma. Not unkindly, Ava grabbed on that thread of grief and pulled, drawing it out painfully like a worm from a wound and she never stopped shooting as a parade of emotions crossed her subject’s face. There was sad, fond memory. There was guilt, but also gladness. There were tears which ended in the strange, pure smile that only catharsis could bring to somebody’s face. In the end, there was hope and happiness again. It was like watching the entire grieving process condensed down to twenty minutes or so.
And then they were done. Patel took Ava’s hand as she stepped out of the pool, soaked from scalp to sole and shivering, but… healed. Reborn, even. She wrapped herself in a towel and a blanket, accepted a mug of Ovaltine, and sat on a rock laughing nervously with Ava as they reviewed the pictures together and she brushed her hair.
Allison decided it wouldn’t be inappropriate to reintroduce herself. She opened the thermal box she’d brought with her, and found that the warm food she’d prepared was still nice and hot. Perfect.
“That looked pretty intense,” she said, by way of reminding them that she existed. Patel jumped and looked at her, then cleared her throat.
“…It was,” she agreed.
“Are you okay?”
“I feel great, actually… Is that Chinese food?”
Allison grinned and offered her the tupperware box full of baozi. “Home cooking in our house. Xiù makes them better, but… I’m not terrible.”
Actually, Xiù’s recipes always seemed to turn a ‘not terrible’ cook into a gourmet masterchef as far as the uninitiated were concerned. They certainly went down well.
“So… are you going to do this?” Patel asked after inhaling her third.
“Me? I, uh…” Allison glanced at Ava, who had the careful expression of somebody who didn’t want to apply pressure either way. “…I’m not… I don’t… I think the thing is, I don’t really have anything I wanna get off my chest. Like… Life is good. I’ve got some drama, but I’m dealing with it… There’s nothing I really feel like I need to bare my soul over, right? And like… I’m not ashamed of my body, but I’m not comfortable with letting thousands of complete strangers see it either.”
“I kinda figured you’d say that,” Ava said.
“Hate to disappoint ‘ya,” Allison apologized.
Ava smiled. “I’ll get over it… you girls wanna head back into town? Lunch is on me.”
“Sure.” Allison turned to Patel. “I think I owe you some talking shop about our ships, right?”
“Absolutely.” Patel stood up and went to get dressed. “How many women are spaceship reactor technicians?”
“Not many, that’s for sure.”
They packed up the camping gear while Ava packed up her camera and lenses. Patel took one last fond look at the pool before ducking into the foliage and vanishing up the track with a rustle of leaves on raincoat. Ava followed a moment later, and Allison took one last look around before joining them.
One thing had changed for certain. Now, she was looking forward to Julian’s turn in front of the lens.
Date Point: 15y9m2w AV
Occupied territory, planet Rvzrk, Domain Space
Regaari
Regaari had locked down his emotions. He had to: without the clear objectives of his mission to focus on, the things he was seeing would be…
There were camps. Different camps, with different purposes. Some seemed to be for… for livestock bound offworld via Jump Array. Breeding stock. Females, and the most docile, meaty males. The reports from Garaaf on how force-breeding worked were too much for any sane soul to bear.
Then there were the labor camps, where slaves were worked until they could work no more, building whatever the Hunters wanted. Digging ditches, piling up the dirt into walls. It was the kind of exhausting work that would have broken a deathworlder, and these people were no deathworlders.
When one of them fell, they were dragged away to the larder camps to lie exhausted and mentally broken among the blood and bones until their turn came.
The first hint of defiance resulted in a violent and sadistically prolonged death. A dispassionate corner of Regaari’s mind noted with some disapproval how the herd species never unified to overwhelm their oppressors; Gaoians and Humans would have, or at the very least would have needed vastly more force to control. These…there were a handful of listless guards per camp, patrolling fences that any enterprising Goian cub would have chittered at. It was…
Well, it was still evil, whatever else it was.
He documented it all, mapping methodically back and forth throughout the occupied territory to create a millimeter-perfect survey of everything. Every damaged building, every camp, every Hunter patrol and drone, every command post, Jump Array, aircraft landing platform, armory…
He would have mapped every resistance cell too, if there had been any.
By day, he lurked on rooftops and survey the land and mapped points of interest that he would investigate at night, when he could stalk the streets under the twin cover of darkness and his suit’s active camo. Thus armed, he could tail patrols close enough to hear their claws skittering on the asphalt, or the fizz of their fusion weapons.
Hunters never talked among themselves. They sometimes deigned to spit a command at a slave, or taunt them over their imminent demise, but they never spoke or used hand gestures otherwise. That made tracking them more challenging than tracking a squad of Humans might have been, even though the Humans would have been far more aware and professional. If he alerted the Hunters, there wouldn’t be hand gestures or alarm calls: the group would simply turn on him as a single unit, and call for backup just as effortlessly.
Each such shadowing, or infiltration, was therefore all about giving absolutely no sign of his presence at all. Loose gravel, rubble, trash or metal grates were deadly hazards. He sometimes had to spider-climb on the walls to navigate particularly cluttered sections of street. On one occasion, he was forced to ride a Hunter tank because it was the only way to exfiltrate the area without making a sound.
The suit saved his life over and over again. The optical camo was one thing, but its ability to refrigerate itself down to ambient temperature and camouflage him in infrared proved just as valuable.
The real breakthrough, however, was when it finally helped him identify his primary target.
He’d been trailing a contingent of what Garaaf called “worker” Hunters for a few days. This rarer, more industrious clade were definitely no less dangerous than their vicious brethren, but their efforts were more… focused. Their pattern seemed to be that of receiving a job, proceeding directly to the job site, and then completing the job quickly and efficiently with frankly breathtaking teamwork and coordination. Then they’d wait until the next job, until presumably their slot in the work schedule reached its end and they returned to a central depot.
This time, their vehicle convoy was outbound toward what Regaari had identified as a power substation. There had been Domain military units out that way until a day or two ago. Then there’d been explosions and gunfire in that direction, and when the smoke cleared the Hunters held the area. The Domain soldiers had either fled, or been wholly annihilated.
Now the workers were heading out that way… but as Regaari tailed them, they made a stop-off at a facility whose function he hadn’t quite discerned yet. When they emerged, the rear vehicle had been loaded with several massive spools of insulated cable, which it unwound behind it.
Regaari couldn’t hope to keep up with the convoy, but on a hunch he checked around the facility, and found a thick bundle of such cable heading further inward toward the heart of the city.
He found what he was looking for two tense days later, after crawling, sneaking and skulking his way through the very worst of the Hunter occupation. Sometimes he had to spend whole hours immobile, waiting for danger to pass. Other times, it was an ass-clenched dash to minimize his time spent in an area. But he made it.
The Hunters had deforested a park, shoved the fallen trees unceremoniously out of the way, and installed an enormous modular piece of equipment on the cleared ground. It was, to judge by the spider-web of power cables feeding it, absolutely drinking power, and that was Regaari’s first clue as to what it might be.
The Farthrow generator on Gao had a whole nuclear power plant devoted to keeping it running. Running on that kind of power, it could safely enclose Gao in a bubble of wormhole-nullified space several light-seconds in diameter. The Hunters, meanwhile, had just about managed to suppress Rvzrk out as far as low orbit. If they wanted to expand that radius of effect while still running their other systems, they’d need more power. Hence the workers tapping into extra power sources, presumably.
Without that generator, the fleet could claim low orbit and really go to work. With it, they’d be pinned to the sky by superluminal ground-to-orbit weapons and unable to take evasive action.
Which meant the only hope for what civilians remained here was for Regaari to destroy it. And, frankly, his only hope of living to return home hinged on destroying that generator too.
He found a suitable rooftop, settled in, and watched.
Date Point: 15y9m2w AV
Ceres Base, Asteroid Belt, Sol
Drew Cavendish
Nothing. Not a bloody thing.
All of the Consortium’s most senior personnel were working against the clock, now. The Sartori administration weren’t being patient, and it was only a matter of time before they publicly withdrew the special license that had permitted Hephaestus some limited access to nuclear ordnance for the purposes of asteroid mining.
When they did, the Consortium’s stock would go into freefall. Which meant a lot of wealth was on the chopping block, and the accountants could only do so much to get heads out from under the axe. That part was inevitable now.
But it would be much worse if they couldn’t figure out where, when and how the nuke had gone missing. Orders of magnitude worse if it actually went off somewhere. And if—God forbid—it actually made it back to Earth and went off inside a city…
Drew, in short, was running on caffeine, worry, and sporadic fitful sleep. His neck was one of those directly under the axe.
Maybe that was why he couldn’t find anything. Maybe he was just so stressed and anxious that he was missing the little crumb trail that would lead him to a Sherlock Holmes revelation.
Or maybe there legitimately was nothing to catch. The longer he fruitlessly perused the evidence, the more and more convinced of that he became.
The crew of I Met God And She Booped My Nose were hyper-competent, all of them. But none of them had the skills (so far as anybody knew) to actually disguise jettisoning the bomb from the ship’s magazine.
And yet… the bomb had been loaded onto the ship. He had forms in triplicate proving that, not to mention security camera footage. And the bomb had not been offloaded. Drew had forms and footage to that effect too.
Which meant the bomb had unquestionably gone missing sometime during the mining run.
And yet nowhere in any of the hundreds of thousands of automatically generated log entries was there any mention of a command being received to jettison it. And all the crew were accounted-for 100% of the time.
So unless God himself had reached down to punish Hephaestus for the ship’s name, Drew was missing something.
There was a snore from the desk behind him. Drew M had apparently succumbed at last–he was slumped in his chair with his chin against his chest and a mouse dangling precariously in his fingers. He too was sitting there scrolling through line after line after interminable line of dense, dry text. For hours, the only sound in their shared office had been the gentle clicking of scroll wheels rolling down, down, down…
The mouse slipped from his fingers, and woke him with a snort when it clattered to the ground. He blinked blearily at the office, got his bearings, then swore softly while rubbing his face.
“Fuck me sideways…”
“Yeah,” Drew agreed.
“…Fuck this. I need a leg-stretch and some tucker.”
“Right.”
‘Tucker’ on Ceres, once upon a time, had meant the canteen. Maybe the vending machines. Those had been the old days, when the facility was little more than a handful of airtight modules dropped delicately onto the asteroid’s surface, anchored down, and then ultimately enclosed in three concentric concrete domes.
Now, the base was a sprawling warren of underground chambers and they had what was basically a food court. Hell, they had a unique outlet specializing in alien food called “ET Eats.” The largest part of the menu belonged to Gaoian cuisine, but there was a healthier option in the Cqcq salad, and the vegan quiche had peppery edible mushrooms from the Corti homeworld.
Drew M, however, was in the mood for pizza. A Naxas Hawaiian, blending all that was best in alien imported meat, with all that was worst in pineapple.
Drew C settled on the fried chicken.
They sat and contemplated their food listlessly for a minute or so before Drew M groaned and reluctantly tore off a slice.
“…We’re goin’ to bloody prison, aren’t we?” he predicted, cupping a hand under the slice’s droopy end to catch the trailing cheese.
“…Might do.”
“I’m too bloody pretty for prison.”
Drew blinked at his weatherbeaten old friend, who gave him a crooked smile and half a shrug. It made him laugh, for the first time in days.
“Drew, mate. If anybody fancies a shot at your arse when we’re inside, it’ll be part of an insanity plea,” he retorted. Drew M laughed too, and ate his pizza.
“Y’know… thiff shid’s fug’n imposs’bw, righ’?” he asked around a mouthful of the worst insult to pizza mankind had ever created.
“Come on, we’re still waiting on–” Drew C began to reassure him for the umpteenth time, but he shook his head and swallowed.
“Yeah, nah. I’m losing hope, mate. I might just flip my lid if we get back and there’s a nice anomaly report waitin’ for us, but be honest. How likely is that now?”
“Sometimes, these things aren’t noticed for weeks, mate. It depends on which detection engine gets lucky.”
“Weeks. Great.”
“Mostly quicker than that.” Drew C glanced at his wristwatch. “Look, we’re due to synch with the guys on Earth in an hour, that’s when we’ll get the latest from the analysts. Maybe they’ll have found something this time.”
“That’s what you said yesterday. And the day before. And the–”
“Yes, I know, but I’m not ready to give up just yet. Whatever happened, they had to leave a fingerprint somewhere.”
“You said that too,” Drew M said fatalistically.
“Well, they had to! There are thousands of devices on that ship, I refuse to believe anyone or anything can fool all of them and make it completely seamless. It’s just a question of figuring out which ones and running the right kind of analysis on them.”
Drew M selected another slice of pizza. “Well, I’ve been thinkin’ about that, and something related.”
“About what?”
“About Adele’s abduction. You remember, the mongrels who did it played around with some weird kinda temporal fuckery.”
“Yeah.”
“Shit, they stole Adele right off the bridge and landed My Other Spaceship twenty lights away facin’ the wrong direction and nobody on board even noticed ‘til after it happened!”
“I remember. We checked for that, too: Ship’s clock agreed with Ceres.”
“Damn.” Drew M sighed and took a bite. Then, abruptly, he frowned. He chewed thoughtfully for a second, then swallowed and put his half-slice down.
“…Drew?” he asked, dusting his hands clean.
“Yeah?”
“Dumb question about those clocks…”
“What?”
“…Did we check if they agreed with Earth?”