Date Point: 16y4m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Allison Buehler
Tristan and Ramsey had a lot they shared—they liked much the same music, TV shows and videogames, and they were so remarkably up-to-date on fashion that Xiù consulted them before buying anything…
But they had their differences, too. Ramsey was definitely turning into more of a jock than his brother, for instance.
It wasn’t that Tristan didn’t like physical pursuits well enough, but he was definitely the quieter, more introverted of the two. And unlike his brother, he needed no persuading to pick up a book now and then.
So, while Julian and Xiù took the marginally older twin to martial arts practice after school, Allison had stayed behind and was introducing her littlest sibling to the basics of aerospace engineering.
Honestly, it was nice to hang out one-to-one for a change.
“So…” she finished scribbling down one of the most important things she’d ever memorized. “This is the Bartlett Field Equation. You use this to figure out the energy needed to form a warp field based on the field’s curvature…” she circled the relevant bit, “the total mass it contains and how fast you want your apparent linear velocity to be.”
“What’s that symbol there?”
“That’s Lambda, the cosmological constant.”
Tristan sighed and put his pencil down. “…This is a bit more advanced than I’ve done in class, Allison.”
Allison laughed. “I bet. But you said you wanted to know what being the flight engineer on Misfit was like, and I used to play around with this equation all the time.” She smiled fondly at the memory. “…Funny thing is, I used to hate math in school. I thought I’d never be any good at it. And to be honest, it still wasn’t my favorite part of the job, but… when I put my mind to it, I got pretty good at it.”
“You said we were gonna start with the basics.” Tristan pointed out.
Allison shrugged, grinned, and retrieved the little case of electronic parts she’d fetched from the workshop earlier. “I know. It’s just the basics of what I do is, like, several steps up. You need to start right at the bottom, which is why I put this together for you.”
“What is it?” He asked, taking it.
“Basic electronics. How about I show you how to build something simple, like, hmm… How about a fire alarm?”
“That’s simple?”
“Really simple. Let me show you…”
Date Point: 16y4m AV
Tactical Fitness, Folctha, Cimbrean, the Far Reaches
Julian Etsicitty
Never in a million years would Julian have guessed that Christian Firth of all people would open his own martial arts academy. Or, in fact, that he’d be such a good and patient teacher.
Or that people would flock to his classes despite that he stood over seven feet tall, had shoulders about half that wide, and was possessed of a superhumanly dense physique whose subtlest movements rippled with untamed power. Firth was one of the very few people alive that could make Julian seem tiny by comparison.
Which, now that he thought about it, went a long way toward explaining why Julian had ended up helping teach, whenever he had the chance.
Firth’s classes were studies in contradictions. The man was pretty much literally the size and weight of a champion bull and much stronger (and more aggressive) to boot, yet most of his students were gangly children and mousey types who’d never once thrown a fist in anger.
They flocked to him, still.
Stranger yet, he didn’t pretend to any higher spiritual or ethical purpose with his teachings. He had a no-nonsense martial ethic forged pretty much entirely of murder, one he’d earned from years of personal experience. Everyone knew it, and there really wasn’t any disguising it.
And yet, he had to turn clients away.
Today was mixed martial arts for Firth’s special projects. Ramsey was one. So was Julian. The price he paid for that esteem was being effortlessly tossed around to demonstrate the principles.
Firth wasn’t gentle. At all. But Julian was a big boy these days and he didn’t really mind. Heck, it was kinda fun really, especially when he got to turn the tables and hip-toss a man that huge across the mat. Repeatedly, so the students could see from every angle.
For science, of course.
Adam owned several buildings these days, having carefully managed his finances until he was a bit of a Folcthan real estate baron. Early on he’d built a second apartment building identical to the first on the far end of the street, then slowly bought up all the property between them that wasn’t owned by the rest of the Lads. Firth had invested early and snagged the top apartment for his own, and decided to exercise a purchase option when the original ground-floor business owner had gone bankrupt.
With that, Firth opened Tactical Fitness. A pretty blunt name, to be honest. What he taught was how to fight and he taught all comers, with special classes set aside for women’s self-defense, and another for kids. He didn’t have time to teach every day of course, in fact he only did three classes a week, but all martial arts were welcome in his dojo, and he was merely one teacher among a colorful and cheery roster who rented out the space when he wasn’t there.
Xiù had found room in her schedule to help out too. She was tough and fit and strong as ever, but there were some things she just couldn’t and shouldn’t do while pregnant, so for now she contented herself with wrangling the really tiny human kids and Gaoian cubs whose parents found Firth and his instructors a little too formidable.
Firth didn’t personally put much stock in Taiji and Gung Fu, but Xiù had made her case calmly and simply that, even if the mysticism and spiritual side were stripped out, that still left behind a solid core of exercises that taught precision, poise and physical awareness. The kind of thing, in short, that developing young nervous systems needed to form a solid foundation for the more vigorous stuff.
Whether Firth found that persuasive or not wasn’t clear, but he was the kind of guy who, even innocently, tended to lose eighty IQ points and nod a lot when a beautiful woman was trying to persuade him of something.
Julian might have thrown him just a little bit harder than was necessary, a few times.
…For science.
Tonight, though, they were watching Ramsey enjoy his first class. He was a surprisingly scrappy kid considering his upbringing. And like all boys his age his bones seemed to be made of rubber. He was having a whale of a time, bouncing off the mat and making friends.
…And beaming with pride every time Julian put Firth on his ass, even in a demonstration.
“A’right! Line up! Now we’re gonna show ‘ya a couple’a practical things. I’m just gonna be a regular dude mindin’ his business, an’ Julian here’s gonna be some loser with a knife who wants my money. Watch closely!”
Julian chuckled, “Hey!”
“Can it, pretty boy. Go git ‘yer knife!”
The “knife” was a foam thing made out of a cut-down pool noodle. Julian got in position, and the class watched intently as Firth sauntered up the room, whistling tunelessly. On cue, Julian advanced on him and Firth…
…Turned and ran away as fast as his legs could take him. He even crashed through the double doors at the far end of the room and vanished from sight. Laughter shot around the room.
“Don’t be a hero,” Julian grinned at the distant, heavy sounds of the big guy slowing to a halt halfway up the stairs. “Do you kids know what’s better than getting stabbed?”
Firth came jogging back. “Not getting stabbed! Trust me on that, I know.”
He let the smiles and chuckles fade before seriousing up himself. “But sometimes, ‘ya can’t just run away,” he added. “You gotta be able ‘ta–oof!”
Julian decided that Firth needed to be on the floor. And he needed to be on the other end of the gym. Strictly for demonstration’s sake, of course.
Firth barely felt it, naturally. He just slid to a halt laughing. “Ha! Exactly that!” he roared. “Now I’m pretty good at this but even I gotta take a moment to git up. And that gives Julian time ‘ta run away! See?”
He kipped himself up explosively onto his feet, which never failed to awe the kids. “If ‘ya know what ‘yer doin’ then size don’t always matter as much. I’ve seen little hunnerd-pound gals send three-hunnerd pound drunken fools over the moon with that, and there ain’t much better way to gentle an idjit up and get away. Why do we wanna get away?”
The kids choroused as one, “A smart fighter doesn’t fight at all!”
“Ha! Good! But our time’s up ‘fer this week…”
Groans all around.
“Yeah yeah. Don’t worry, we’ll do more throws in next week’s lesson, okay? Y’all kicked…uh, butt today, so let’s get cooled down and stretched out…” Firth clapped his huge mitts together loudly. “Find a partner and git ‘er dun! Go!”
Naturally, Ramsey wouldn’t stop chattering excitedly on the way home.
Date Point: 16y4m AV
Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Allison Buehler
Talking with Tristan as their electronics project came together had turned up an interesting fact about their mother’s recent behaviour.
The divorce had come as a surprise. Divorce in LDS circles was huge, a real event. And scandalous! Maybe Allison was just being cynical, but she suspected that Jacob had sent the preliminary papers to try and scare Amanda into bringing herself and the kids back to Earth. It seemed like the sort of power play he favored.
God only knew how he’d reacted when he’d found the signed papers in his mailbox. And now it turned out, Amanda had done something else that was very un-LDS, on the same day.
“She drank tea?”
“Yeah. Iced tea.”
“Huh.” Allison thought about that one. She’d never really been big on the family faith anyway, and had dropped it pretty much the second she’d run away to Boston on her eighteenth birthday. Hell, she’d gone totally reactionary and blown most of her first paycheck on coffee, cigarettes and cute underwear. She’d quit smoking pretty quickly, but the coffee and cute underwear had stuck.
Amanda on the other hand had always seemed to take the proscriptions of her church very seriously. “I mean, I know she lost her temple recommend and now there’s the divorce too, but I thought that stuff was still important to her…”
Tristan shrugged. “I don’t understand Mom,” he said, quietly.
Of course, he and Ramsey had both been raised as good Mormons too. And Allison had promised not to interfere, there. The boys were both members of Folctha’s tiny branch, and the only members of its Young Men organization. She briefly wondered what kind of private, quiet crisis of faith they were going through—or even if they were—then put an arm round him and gave him a sisterly hug.
“That makes two of us, li’l bro,” she said.
He smiled a little sadly, then stuck his tongue out in concentration as he soldered the last component of their fire alarm into place, then conscientiously turned off the soldering iron and returned it to its stand. Allison had driven home how hot the thing was by burning some scorched dots in a block of wood, and he was respecting the hell out of it as a result.
“…Is it ready?” he asked.
“Let’s find out!” Allison grabbed a lighter and waved it gently back and forth under the PNP transistor that was the core of the circuit. Tristan held his breath and watched intently, waiting… waiting…
The relay actuated with a satisfying click, and Tristan made an excited gesture with both fists as the buzzer sounded insistently and the red LED started flashing.
Allison gave him a high-five. “Pretty cool, huh?”
“Yeah!”
Their celebration was interrupted a knock at the door. The authoritative, heavy kind of somebody who knew somebody was home and was going to talk with them come Hell or high water.
Allison glanced at her brother, then shrugged, stood, and went to answer it. The door cam revealed a black-suited man waiting outside, flanked by a Folctha police officer in her distinctive high-vis yellow jacket.
She opened the door. “…Can I help you?”
“Allison Buehler?” the man in the suit checked.
“Yes?”
“Special inspector Foster, colonial security.” He said, showing her ID with the CCS logo and motto on it. “May I come in?”
Well, he didn’t have a warrant or he wouldn’t have asked. Obviously he didn’t have a warrant, Allison couldn’t think of any reason he might. She’d certainly not done anything illegal, and there was no way Julian or Xiù had either.
But after being stung by Folctha’s legal system once already, she wasn’t inclined to invite him inside if she didn’t have to. “We can have this conversation outside, I think,” she said, and then turned to call back into the living room. “Tristan? Go hang out in your room for me, okay?”
Tristan nodded and retreated upstairs, casting wary looks at the cops as he went. Allison put on her garden shoes and stepped outside, shutting the door behind her.
“Alright, what’s this about?” she asked once they were alone.
“You’re the mother of one Alex Hamlin?” Foster checked.
“…Oh, God. What’s he done now?”
“Have you had any contact with him recently?”
Allison shook her head. “I tried writing to him, but I never heard back. His dad told me he just deletes my emails and burns my letters…”
“You know Zane Reid?”
“Zane? We knew him, but we, uh… parted ways with him a long time ago. Honestly, seeing his face on the news was a huge surprise.”
“Did you ever introduce Zane Reid to your son?”
“No. Never had the chance even if I’d wanted to.”
“When you say you ‘parted ways’ with Reid, what exactly do you mean?”
“This was, uh…” Allison thought. “…Six years ago. From my perspective. Eleven, I guess, ‘cuz we were in stasis for five of those years. When my partner Julian and I were on the starship Sanctuary, rescuing stranded abductees. We found Reid, and took him along… our next stop was the planet Aru, and he assaulted us. He hit me in the head and knocked me out, badly wounded two of our ET friends, and tried to kidnap Xiù. We overpowered him, kicked him off the ship and left him behind. I don’t know how he got off the planet and back to Earth.”
“He lost his arm in that incident?”
“Yeah. One of the ETs, Kirk, had a fusion blade. Zane took him hostage and Kirk used the blade to break free.”
The man nodded. “Are you familiar with Wilhelmina Briggs-Davies?”
“Never heard of her.”
“Your son never mentioned her? She’s known to go by ‘Bill.’”
“Like I said, my son doesn’t talk to me.” Allison folded her arms, and tapped into the reserves of calm she’d learned to build up when under pressure in the Box back at Omaha during her Misfit training. The cop’s questioning felt a lot like the kind of relentless unpleasantness the MBG assessors had used to test them.
Foster nodded, as though ticking off something on a mental list.
“…Mister Hamlin is missing, Miss Buehler,” he explained. “And as you know, he’s under surveillance due to his involvement with the terrorist group who call themselves the Alien Protection Army. WIlhelmina Briggs-Davies is a known APA member and an associate of Zane Reid. She’s on the FBI’s Most Wanted list in connection with the MBG bombing in Omaha and possible Hierarchy collaboration. They’re believed to be working together.”
Allison didn’t have a name for the emotion that dropped through her like lead weights landing on her shoulders. She just… sagged, starting with the top of her head and working down.
“…Well… fuck.”
“If you know anything at all…” Foster prompted, not unkindly. “Where he might go, who he might talk to, any friends he might have…?”
“…I’m sorry. I wish I did. But Alex hates me, and I’ve never heard of this Briggs character. I can’t help you.”
Foster nodded, and again she got the impression of him closing a notebook and putting it away, even though his hands were empty. Instead, he fished a business card out of his pocket and handed it to her. She took it numbly.
“If he does contact you—”
“Inspector, if he’s working with the bitch who bombed the AAAF and killed my best friend’s dad, you bet your ass I’ll help you,” Allison told him fiercely. “If he contacts me, you’ll know.”
“…Thank you. Have a good evening, Miss Buehler.”
Allison considered that a deeply unlikely prospect at this point, but she nodded and shook his hand. “…Good luck.”
“Thank you,” Foster repeated, and… was gone. He and the officer climbed into a Folctha Police marked SUV and vanished with a whine of electric motor.
Allison retreated back through the door, and… let go.
She slid down the wall into as tiny a miserable ball as her pregnant belly would allow, her fingers knotted themselves up in her hair, and spent a minute or so feeling alone, and a failure, and responsible for everything.
Tristan pulled her out of it. She didn’t hear him come back downstairs, but he sat down next to her and did his awkward best, despite never really learning how, to be comforting. Maybe he just knew what to do by what he’d have wanted, in her position: A hug.
It helped. After a minute, Allison was ready to take a deep, cleansing breath and let go, a little.
“Its not my fault,” she reminded herself, aloud. “It’s not.”
“What isn’t?” Tristan asked. Allison sighed, and sat up straighter again. She leaned back against the wall, slid her feet out in front of her and rested a hand on her new baby.
“…I couldn’t be there for my first kid,” she said. “And he’s… he didn’t turn out so great.”
Tristan didn’t understand, she could tell by the way he looked at her. So she sighed and gave him a squeeze. “…That was the cops. Alex is… It seems like he’s hanging out with an actual card-carrying terrorist. And I just… I mean, that’s my son. I know it’s not my fault, but I still feel like…”
“You need a cup of cocoa,” Tristan decided. Allison laughed and tidied her hair out of her face.
“…Sure. Cocoa’s good.” Honestly she needed something a lot stronger than that, but she’d take it.
So, that was how Julian and Xiù found her when they got home ten minutes later. Sipping hot chocolate with red eyes while talking Tristan through a circuit that would detect incoming cell calls. They knew instantly that something was wrong, of course.
She left Tristan to follow the circuit diagram while Ramsey watched with interest, and the three of them retired to the living room where she explained everything.
Julian summed it up perfectly.
“Goddammit…”
“Yeah. I’m… trying not to blame myself, you know? I didn’t raise him, I’m not responsible for how he turned out.”
Julian’s answer to that was a tight hug, and a nuzzle to the top of her head. Xiù of course had curled up next to her right away and wasn’t letting go.
Allison sighed at the drying brown crust at the bottom of her mug and set it aside. Truthfully, the cocoa had helped, probably more than a hard drink would have. Especially with the marshmallows. But still.
“You know me. I hate feeling useless.”
“We all do,” Xiù agreed. “But you’re not.”
“…Yeah. I know.” She decided to move on to a different subject. “So. Back to Akyawentuo next week?”
Xiù nodded. “Yup. Tilly says the ‘Bawistuh—’” she grinned at the Ten’Gewek mispronunciation, “—is basically ready. And that Brown One keeps probing the forest near Torf’s village, looking for a way in. It definitely wants another shot at the People.”
“Please tell me you’re not gonna hunt that thing with spears and bows if Vemik’s ballista doesn’t work,” Allison begged Julian.
He shook his head. “No, we already agreed. If it doesn’t work, we back off, repair it, and try again. Yan can keep the Given-Men in line for a few attempts. But Tilly says it’s working, and I trust her.”
“You’re free to come with, right?” Xiù asked, suddenly. “I mean, it’s not like you can squeeze inside EV-13 any longer…” she tapped Al’s baby bump, which was a lot more pronounced than her own. They were about eight weeks apart, and the difference showed.
Allison thought about it. “I guess I could!” she realized. “I’ve been doing office work and stuff for a while now anyway… If I can clear it with Clara, I’d love to be there.”
“By drone,” Xiù clarified.
“Well, yeah. But still.”
“Just so long as you don’t pop early and have the first human baby born on Akyawentuo…” Julian muttered.
“You worry about not getting eaten by an alien monster, I’ll worry about not giving birth in a tent,” Allison instructed him. “Deal?”
He chuckled, sat down between them, and held them both. Exactly what Allison had needed to finish what the Cocoa started.
“…Deal,” he agreed.
Date Point: 16y4m AV
V1661 CYG 23.3° 83-EIW2Y4-BINARY K3V-1, Deep Space
Entity
The Entity was aware of certain facts about its new “body.”
There were obvious facts that the ship reported directly into the Entity’s consciousness, such as mass, thrust, the ratio between those two, the peak output of its hydrogen fusion reactor, the total storage of its capacitors, the peak draw of its systems, the range, tracking speed, granular finesse and direct kinetic energy of its single weapon, how much ammunition it had…
But there were other, less obvious facts to take into consideration as well.
For instance, courtesy of the Mrwrki Station library, the Entity was intimately familiar with Ted Bartlett and Claude Nadeau’s declassified papers on warp fields and spatial distortion. It was therefore aware that the rarified atoms of the interstellar medium, upon being caught in a warp field, were pulled into, through and around the edge of the field where they would become ionized, losing electrons into the field and being ejected out as a “wake” of positively charged plasma.
This phenomenon had two practical consequences for the Entity. The first was that over time its ship-body gained an increasingly dangerous negative charge, and the second was that it left behind it a snail-trail of plasma that a ship with the right sensors could track.
The Interspecies Dominion devoted a lot of its tax income to maintaining spacelanes to overcome the former problem. Great fleets of industrial ships would clear corridors through the endless dark, sweeping them clean of the omnipresent interstellar dust and gas. Ships travelling along the spacelanes accumulated charge hundreds of times slower than flying through open space, meaning they didn’t have to stop every few dozen lightyears to discharge into a planet’s magnetic field
The Entity had considered making use of the spacelanes in its escape, but rejected that idea. The spacelanes might have obfuscated its wake and let it travel further before needing to stop, but the Hunters and the Dominion alike watched them closely. Using them carried an unacceptable risk of being intercepted.
Flying through deep space carried the certainty of pursuit, but the Entity had found that it preferred certainty to possibility. Certain pursuit was a controlled variable, something it could plan for.
Hence V1661 CYG 23.3° 83-EIW2Y4-BINARY. A smallish K-type and a largish M-type star, dancing around a shared center of gravity like an olympic hammer-thrower. They were doomed to part ways in a few million years, but for now they were home to five gas giants, each with an accompanying swarm of moons. The Entity picked one of the cold blue ice giants in the K-star’s orbit and smoothly inserted into the titanic cerulean world’s uppermost wisps of atmosphere. With a simple re-tuning of its shields, it got rid of the accumulated charge in a sequence of fat lightning bolts.
Unbidden, the Ava-memories offered the comparison of taking off a badly-fitting bra after a stressful day. There was that same sense of encroaching, barely-noticed and yet still overbearing discomfort being released.
No time to relish the sensation, sadly. As soon as the Entity determined that its structure was no longer overflowing with stray electrons, it boosted out to one of the ice giant’s smaller moons and took a good look.
The moon barely deserved the word, really. It wasn’t even big enough to pull itself into a sphere under its own gravity. But it had suffered a relatively recent collision—within the last few hundred thousand years—that had smashed off the loose dusty stuff on its outer surface and exposed a rich metallic core. The Entity barely had to glance at it to find copper, uranium, titanium and manganese.
Not perfect—the Entity really needed scandium and aluminium—but a good starting point. It launched its mining drones and then set out to investigate the other moons and larger asteroids for what it needed.
Time was against it, if it was going to be ready when the Hunters caught up.