Date Point: 16y2m1d AV
Chiune Station, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Allison Buehler
Allison hadn’t slept well in a couple of nights. It wasn’t that she begrudged Julian and Xiù going offworld, not at all, but it did disrupt the sense of familiarity that made home, well… Home.
If she didn’t have her brothers to look after, she’d have used the hotel facilities at Chiune Station instead and just stayed within jogging distance of work. As it was… she treated the boys to a McDonald’s breakfast before school, and nursed a toffee latte most of the way out along the eighty minute drive to the MBG enclave out west of town.
Neither of them had ever had an Egg McMuffin before. What a goddamned travesty. Al had to promise them both she’d teach them how to make one for themselves…but in the meantime, they each had another.
She was barely ten minutes into the drive and listening to the drivetime show on SKID radio when she got a call from Clara Brown.
“Morning!”
Clara wasn’t big on small talk. She just launched straight into the reason for her call in a sunny way that always put a wide smile on Allison’s face. “Hi Al! Misfit’s back!”
There was some good news! Al’s smile got even wider, and she celebrated with a sip of her coffee. “Early!”
“Yeah, apparently they found a good one. They’re dealing with the HEAT right now…”
“After what happened to My Other Spaceship, I’m not complaining…” MBG had been informed, and everyone in the Folctha security community—a group that included Allison—was aware of what had happened. Though some details were being kept close to the chest, what she’d heard made Al perfectly happy to have her colleagues endure the HEAT’s tender affections.
“How far out are you? We want to have the whole team ready for inspection by the time they land.”
“Seventy minutes,” Al predicted confidently. She’d memorized pretty much every inch of the winding, beautiful road through Lakebeds National Park and alongside the winding river Dagnabbit, and she’d just passed the first of the park’s car parks for hikers.
She quite liked the long commute: it was thinking time, private time. Work was busy, home was manic… the hour and a half she got in the car twice a day was welcome downtime for switching mental gears and relaxing.
“Awesome! You’ll be just in time to see her land. See you soon!”
“See you soon,” Al promised, and ended the call.
The news shifted her right out of calm and collected and right into something more… motherly. Her baby was home! The big metal one, not the one behind her bellybutton. The thought of laying eyes again on her favorite spaceship in all the wide worlds made her heart lift in her chest.
She indulged herself a little and put her foot down to get there a few minutes early.
Sure enough, the support vehicles were out around the landing pad as she parked the car. She’d have jogged over to join her team, but that was getting increasingly difficult and undignified thanks to the little girl, so she settled for a determined stride instead.
…God, she wasn’t really looking forward to getting any bigger. She didn’t feel heavy exactly, but she was definitely feeling less mobile.
Still, the sound of a sonic boom rippling through the air from high overhead put a little extra spring in her step as she joined her team.
Team Two’s leader, Chuck Gifford, gave her a grin and a wave. He was nearly done with his morning cigarette. “Mornin’, Al.”
“Mornin’ Chuck.”
“Lookin’ forward to seein’ the old girl again?”
Al looked up and shielded her eyes from the sunlight. “…Yup!”
That exchange pretty much dried up Chuck’s supply of small talk. “Anything we should watch out for?”
“Well, we just had about ten tons of angry space marines with guns go tearing through, so…”
“…Check the deck plating, got it.”
Misfit finally came into view, and Allison couldn’t resist jigging eagerly on her toes. The ship looked so handsome in the morning light as she dropped down in a gentle swooping turn to come to a perfect hover a hundred feet above the pad, then descended steadily to land with the heavy racket of metal on concrete.
Xiù never landed like that.
That was an automatic landing sequence: line up, set the rate of descent, let the instruments do the work. Safe and efficient, but Xiù had always prided herself on setting the ship down softly and with a deft touch. It was a good landing, but the current crew’s pilot had a more… workmanlike approach to piloting. Xiù had always viewed it as a kind of dance.
Allison hadn’t really had time to meet the new crew. Apparently their research specialist, the woman doing the same job Julian had once done, had been a Folctha colonist.
…What was her name again? Shit. Something Irish, wasn’t it?
Al called up the mission summary on her tablet as she waited for the ship to settle, to spare herself the embarrassment of not remembering her replacement’s names when they came down the ramp. Misfit was dirty, well-travelled, and leaking waterfalls of fog as her hull temperature equalized with the warm morning air.
But God she was gorgeous.
There they were. Field Researcher Sinéad Byrne, Flight Engineer Richard Adams, and the man responsible for that landing, Pilot Jamal Thompson.
Still, even if he didn’t throw in the little flourish that Xiù might have, he’d still observed the little details. He’d landed so the airlock was facing the waiting ground crew, for instance.
Byrne opened the airlock while the other two powered down the ship. The ground team waited until the ESFALS shut down and Thompson gave them a thumbs-up through the canopy before approaching to start offloading stuff as Byrne sent the dumbwaiter down with the first sample crate.
Al ducked under the fuselage and ran through the landing gear inspection. If the gear was going to fail it probably would have done it at first contact with the ground, but safety demanded she check it first.
Once she was happy there were no problems, she returned to the ladder, where Adams was the last down. He was a small, slim man barely larger than Allison himself which Al could appreciate. A bigger guy would have had a hellish time trying to fit through the narrow confines of the engineering station. They’d managed to find some more elbow room for BGEV-12’s engineer, but Misfit was always going to be cramped in the back.
“You taking good care of my baby?” Al asked him as he stepped off the ladder. He grinned and shook her hand.
“She’s my baby too,” he promised.
“Attaboy.”
“Maybe a little roughed up by the HEAT though,” Byrne said. “They brought Adam along. I don’t know how he even fit!”
“You know Adam?” Al asked, shaking her hand.
Byrne had the filthiest grin. “Biblically.”
“…You’re braver than you look.”
“Wait, you and that hulk-lookin’ dude?” Thompson asked, disbelievingly.
“Like the Energizer bunny…” Byrne reminisced, distantly.
“I don’t think I want to know…” Adams muttered. “God I’ve never felt so completely helpless. They manhandled me like a child and ransacked everything I owned.”
“Yeah,” Allison said sympathetically. “That’s the HEAT for ‘ya.”
“It was a Gaoian that did it to me!” Thompson complained. “He threw me up against a wall, pinned my head and sniffed at my neck!”
“Still HEAT.“ Allison shrugged. “Trust me, they’re nice guys in real life. On the job… well, their job isn’t to play nice.”
Byrne nodded, but she looked a little unnerved. “I didn’t remember Adam being so terrifying…”
“He isn’t Adam on mission. He’s Warhorse, and the two are very different people.”
“Right. Well…”
Allison decided a change of subject was in order. “You found something good?”
“Hell yeah we did!” Thompson indicated the crates with a grin. “Class twelve, ninety-nine point oh-four Gs, seventy percent ocean coverage, everything. No sign of natives, either.”
“Nice! What’d you call her?”
“Nesoi,” Adams said firmly.
“…I get the impression there were other contenders.”
“Somebody,” Adams shot a dark look at Byrne, “wanted to call it ‘Steve.’”
Byrne’s unrepentant giggle was just infectious, and even Adams smiled and shook her head at it. Al certainly couldn’t keep a straight face.
“Steve? Kinda… I dunno. Irreverent, ain’t it?”
“Exactly!” Byrne chirped.
“In the end, that’s what we called its largest moon,” Thompson said.
“Largest?”
“It has four. Makes for a hell of a night sky, I tell you that.”
“I’d like to see that someday,” Al decided. “…Anyway, we’d better get to work. I wanna see how well you’ve been treating my baby.”
“You mean our baby,” Thompson retorted with a grin. “I found a neat optimization for the ventral distributor. Check it out.”
“I will!” Al set her foot on the ladder and hauled herself up it, reflecting as she did so that she was glad they’d come back sooner rather than later. Climbing that ladder and squeezing around the ship’s insides would have been impossible in ten more weeks.
She paused at the top and touched the wall, whispered a fond ‘Hey, girl,’ to the ship and then followed her oh-so-familiar route from the airlock to the engineer’s station like she’d already done it ten times that morning.
Misfit didn’t quite feel the same, though. Maybe it was the scent of three strangers, or some subtle difference in Thompson’s idling power settings. Maybe it was the different heights and builds of the excursion suits in their lockers, or the lingering musk of the HEAT’s presence.
She fought off a sudden feeling of melancholy and pushed through into engineering.
There was work to do.
Date Point: 16y2m3d AV
”Stinkworld,” The Irujzen Reef
Garl, Grandfather of Clan Stoneback and Warleader of the Grand Army of the Gao
“…Go.”
The Hierarchy’s relay was weird to look at. Like looking into a pit that yawned sideways in a direction that Garl couldn’t quite put his claw on.
He was glad he wasn’t anywhere near it. He had a great view through the Fang’s helmet-cams, but they were taking an enormous risk breaching the facility at the base of the enormous transmitting tower, and everyone knew it.
Plus, Garl knew he wasn’t quite as agile as he once was. The niggles and complaints his body had accumulated over decades had begun to make themselves heard, and the Crue-G wasn’t holding them off anymore. He’d resorted to ‘ibuprofen’ in eight hundred milligram doses.
Allegedly his liver should handle the medicine just fine…but he was eighty-eight. Garl was old.
…More than old. Garl was dying. He didn’t have even half a year left, prob’ly. He knew it in his bones, in his fading eyesight, and in a way he couldn’t put to words. After this mission…he needed to retire before he became a liability. The Great Father deserved fit and hale generals, after all. That went doubly so for the Warleader of the Grand Army, and extra double for the Grandfather of Stoneback.
Still: Garl was the most wisest and strongest ‘Back they had that weren’t Daar, so he’d see this job done as best as he could. In fact, right now he was the strongest he’d ever been, so his “plan” to chip in was to help with any digging, pushing, or any general labor that needed doing.
A ‘Back had to lead from the front. Or, failing that, at least be willing to do the hardest work.
For now, though, he watched the Fang dash over the cleared ground around the Hierarchy facility and sneer at the wall. A ‘Back on four-paw with some tricks borrowed from those tricksy Whitecrest suits could flow over a mere five-meter concrete wall like it was hardly there.
He tensed, expecting a flurry of armed drones or automated gun emplacements or whatever, but that weird digital Entity they had on their side had promised the place was safe. From the looks of things, it might have been right, too.
It didn’t take long for his ‘Backs to secure the inside perimeter, shape charges, and blow a hole wide open in the concrete wall. From there, the next teams joined in the assault, they pried the opening yet wider, more territory was secured…
In a few minutes, they’d completely secured the compound. Fortunately the mind-melting warp above wasn’t doing anything to the ground below. Which…prol’ly made sense, now that Garl thought about it.
The inside pretty obviously wasn’t designed for living beings to navigate, though. It was designed for drones and automated robotic systems, and optimized in all three dimensions without regard for people wanting to walk around.
Fortunately, they had some nicely small and clever Clanless to help ‘em out. “Hey, little guys!”
Garl couldn’t help but like his corps of his bravest, most littlest soldiers he could find in the Grand Army. They were proof that ain’t nobody is useless or inferior, they just gotta find their place in life.
Wriggling through a vertical maze of alien technology? Not a problem. Not gettin’ squished by the maintenance drones? Just as easy! Sorta. There were a couple of close calls, but the worst anyone suffered was a tuft of fur torn out the end of his tail as he narrowly squeezed into a side space as a robotic arm whipped past him.
“Gods-damn you little guys kick tail,” Garl praised over the radio. “I’mma owe ‘ya each a steak!”
That got them motivated. Ain’t nothin’ any red-blooded male liked more than a big ‘ol slab of barely-cooked meat.
The densely packed systems gave way to an honest mineshaft. From what Garl could see, it looked like there was an automated mine down there, drawing equipment and replacement parts from a small nanofactory at ground level. There was no immediate indication of what the mine was extracting, and the shaft itself was too deep to explore for the time being, so instead the explorers kept moving up, toward the top of the structure and the generator responsible for that weird pucker in spacetime.
As more of the facility was mapped and more of its systems discovered, however, things got a lot more complicated. Whatever else it was, they weren’t dealing with a mere comms relay.
One piece of the puzzle fell into place when the infiltrators dropped a drone down the mineshaft.
“…Coal?” Garl wasn’t sure he’d heard the report correctly.
“Bituminous coal, yeah. Must be a big ol’ vein too. There’s a jump array down there big enough to handle a thousand tonnes a day, easy.”
One of his assistants was confused by that. “Why would they need coal?”
“Iron,” Garl answered gruffly. “If ‘yer gonna make iron from ore, ain’t nothin’ better. There’s other ways t’do it but a redux reaction at high temp with a rich carbon source is the bestest, ‘cuz the pig iron you get can be made directly into steel.”
“…Didn’t they basically run the galaxy from behind the scenes? Why do they need to make their own iron?”
“Ain’t nobody don’t need steel. I mean, would you be happy if we imported all of it instead of makin’ it ourselves?”
“Right. That’d be a big strategic weakness…”
“…Somebody get a jump beacon in there, see if you can sneak it into the next coal shipment,” Garl ordered. “If we’re lucky, it’ll tell us where that coal’s goin’ to.”
“We don’t have anything that small…”
Garl sighed, and shook out his pelt. He was gettin’ the itch to do something physical. “Well, talk to the Clans, then! I can’t imagine Whitecrest or Longear or someone ain’t got a toy ‘fer this.”
By the time Clan Longear got back to him, the facility had been completely mapped. Their contact came in the form of a very welcome face: Champion Meereo. The tall, debonair midnight-black Champion came through the array stooped and with his large ears tucked flat against his head as a hedge against the Array’s tight confines, and visibly shook himself when the transit was complete.
…Had Garl ever tussled with him? He didn’t think so. Meereo looked nicely fit and tricky…maybe they could spar some later!
Anyway.
“Welcome ‘ta Stinkworld, Champion.”
Garl liked Meereo. The Longears originally came from working Clanless stock and were still a relatively “new” clan. Some of that legacy still clung to them, in their sense of humor and their relaxed attitude to formalities. Another Champion might have questioned the moniker, but Meereo just chittered merrily and pulled a face.
“Good name,” he agreed. “Yeugh.”
“Sad ‘ta say you get used to it,” Garl told him.
“I brought you a toy.” Meereo handed it over. It was pill-shaped and just the right size to fit in Garl’s paw. “We made these a long time ago, just in case Big Hotel turned out to have a jump network of their own.”
Garl handed it off to a runner, who duck-nodded sharply and set off the make sure it reached the infiltrators. Meereo watched him go, then gave Garl an expectant look. “…I gather there’s other stuff in there you don’t know what it is?”
“An’ I betcha ‘yer just itchin’ ‘ta get ‘yer Brothers down there and tear it apart, huh?”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
Garl chittered. “I don’t think any of my Brothers would fit!”
“Go on a diet, then! Anyway…on the subject of exploitation…”
”You and all the other technically-minded Clans are gonna need ‘ta put together a plan for that. In the meantime, what we’re dealin’ with ain’t safe ‘fer a buncha thinky-types. No offense.”
“None taken.”
“Right. So. What’re we hopin’ ‘ta learn outta this?”
Meereo found the facility schematic as the scouts had laid it out easily enough. He stooped over the table and inspected it, shifting the expanding map this way and that with the tip of his claw. “We’re hoping to gain more insight into dataspace and the Hegemony.”
“The hedgey-what?”
“It’s what the Igraens call their civilization. The ones we’ve interacted with are highly trained individuals who’ve spent decades or even centuries learning how to interact with…. Us. This.” He knocked on the desk. “Matterspace, they call it. Or Meatspace, if they’re being insulting.”
“And they need special training to do that?”
“Yup. Apparently life in dataspace is fundamentally very different from life out here. According to one of the interrogated agents, even a basic query like ‘how many Igraens live in the Hegemony?’ is the wrong kind of question.”
“…That don’t make no sense,” Garl objected.
Meereo just duck-shrugged helplessly and made a note on a tablet of his own. “How much stink is there on a Naxas?” he asked.
Garl decided to push the conversation forward rather than get bogged down in… whatever that was. “So we’re here to learn more about dataspace.”
Meereo duck-nodded as he explored the facility map some more. He jotted a small diagram down on his tablet.
“The Humans have done a lot of research on dataspace,” he said as he drew. “As much as they can, anyway. Between interrogated Igraens and the… Entity… they’ve had more access to it than anybody else, and they’ve worked closely with us on the problem, but we’re not helped by the fact that none of the sources really know how it works…”
“How come?”
“The same way you and I don’t really know how our brains work, I guess. Which seems to be a fair approximation. Dataspace isn’t… it seems to be a higher-order product of the interactions between lower-order devices, rather than something they do deliberately. A lot of very stupid machines producing something big and incomprehensible as an emergent property? That’s my best guess, anyway. But there’s always been a flaw in that theory.”
“Do tell,” Garl encouraged. He’d worked with enough geeks in his time to know when they were pretty much just thinkin’ aloud by talkin’ with him.
“Well…” Meereo scrolled the relay’s schematic and tapped a claw at something. “Devices go where people are, and people are clustered on inhabited worlds, space stations, ships… and those clusters are a long way apart. How does any kind of coherent pattern emerge from clusters of technology spread across thousands of light years?”
“…Slowly?” Garl guessed.
“Exactly!” Meereo scrolled again, tapped again then made a note on his own tablet. “Too slowly. Which means…”
Whatever it meant, he didn’t finish the thought out loud. Instead he scrolled, tapped, made another note and then flowed across the command center to the large crate he’d brought with him. When he entered a code on the top, the thing unfolded in an intricate way and turned out to be full of what Garl thought of as gizmos. He recognized wire, solder and a workbench. Pretty much everything else, though, was…
“…You brought a field lab with you?”
“How am I supposed to design devices to interface with an Igraen data relay when I don’t know anything about their technological architecture?” Meereo asked. “Can’t be done. Hell, we had a hard enough time getting our equipment to work properly with Human technology, and they’re several steps behind us.”
“…This is why I prefer civil engineerin’,” Garl groused. “A big pile’a concrete is a big pile’a concrete everywhere in the universe.”
“And that’s exactly why I prefer what I do,” Meereo retorted. “Same thing every day sounds boring.”
“Eh,” Garl shook his pelt again. He always felt a bit back on his haunches around really smart people. “Different habits, I guess. Y’ain’t gonna get strong if ‘ya don’t follow routine. I ‘spose bein’ a nimble thinker needs th’ opposite o’ that.”
“Think of it as progressing to a heavier weight…” Meereo set his tablet down on the lab’s worktop and Garl flicked an ear, mildly impressed, as it seemed to seamlessly pick up whatever he’d been working on and load it onto a larger display. Longear sure had some fancy tricks. “…I’m going to need your guys inside to bring me back some things.”
“Just send me the shoppin’ list, I’ll make sure you get it,” Garl promised, and left Meereo to his work.
This was, he decided, a young man’s war. He wasn’t out of his depth, not quite… but he weren’t in his element neither.
He shook off that melancholy thought and returned to his own desk. It didn’t matter if he was in his element. He had a job to do, and he’d do it ‘til he dropped. Just like a true ‘Back.
But part of him, somewhere deep in his soul, was looking forward to a well-deserved rest.