A plural system has learned to survive, safeguarding them against the traumas of capitalism. When the Affini Compact takes over, will those learned behaviours keep them alive or doom them to a different fate?
Lucky Star (Human Domestication Guide)
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Chapter 1 - Hard Goodbyes
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
A Bar, Planetside
It sat at a table, dissociating gently with the hubbub of the bar washing over its ears. The space wasn't too loud - it was too early in the evening for a real crowd - but it was enough to send it retreating into its headspace. It sniffed as one of the others said something rude about a patron who had just walked past. It was the closest it wanted to get to laughing right now, the closest it wanted to get to drawing attention.
It rolled its drink idly in the glass, letting condensation run down the sides. A droplet touched its finger and pooled, a little moment of sensory input dragging it up towards the front. It set its glass level and raised its finger to its mouth, sucking the cool water off of its skin.
Words became clearer from the patrons murmuring at the bar. The tinny sound of cheap speakers droned news reports in an interminable hum; another colony gone dark, refugee transports on the run, a Terran Accord Navy squadron missing in an uninhabited system. It snorted out a breath, pleased to see the war was going well.
"Hey?" A familiar voice cut through the sound and it turned slowly, dragging its eyes away from the screens now showing yet another propaganda broadcast.
"Angelique?" it asked, clearing its throat, "Hey, how're you doing?"
"Worried about my friends. Your message seemed… strained? How are you all doing?"
It shrugs, gesturing with its chin towards the dim screens,
"We're shipping out tomorrow. Out to the frontlines. Whatever comes next I have a feeling we're not coming back."
She held out a hand and it took it gratefully. They were silent for a little while, basking in the ambient noise as it sipped at its soda.
"Can you do us a favour?" It asked, breaking the silence but not the physical contact.
"Depends what it is." Angelique answered, not looking. It huffed out a small laugh, a smile crossing its face that never touched its eyes.
"I don't wanna…" It unhooked a carabiner from its belt, sliding a key from out of the bunch, "I don't wanna go back to my apartment. I'll sleep on base tonight. Whatever's there, it's yours if you want it. If not, can you give it to charity or something? I don't want a letter from my landlord in six months."
It didn't expect to be alive in six weeks, but the spectre of a final notice didn't seem to want to shift.
"I- you-" She stammered over her words, eventually taking a breath and starting again. "Yeah. I will."
It pressed the key into her hand. She shuffled in her chair until she could lean against it, her shoulder pressed into its side and her head on its shoulder. It slowly, carefully, shifted to put its arm around her.
"I'm gonna miss you. All of you." She said, her voice catching in her throat.
"Yeah. Us too"
Three weeks later, spinwards defensive cordon
She walked the line, rifle slung across her back and a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. She wasn't supposed to smoke on duty, she'd been put on KP more than once after the Sergeant Major had caught her. She stifled a tired laugh, rolled her shoulders against the weight of her service weapon and maintained her careful watch on the perimeter.
They were rotating out into the field in a couple of days. 'Distributed Dispositions' the officers called it when they were briefed after landing. Put troops out into the grasslands and the woods to reduce the impact of orbital bombardment and ensure that the defence could be… proactive.
It all sounded like a load of shit to her. The 'enemy' were making entire fleets disappear, capturing entire systems in barely the blink of an eye. Whatever they were doing - whether they were just glassing planets or disabling jump drives or whatever other rumour was going around the barracks - a bunch of poor bloody infantry with whatever support weapons they could yomp across a couple hundred kilometres weren't going to stop it. They might as well all be getting a solid eight hours and waiting for the end to come.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement, out there in the darkness. In a moment the cigarette was in the mud and her rifle was off her back, being brought up to the ready.
"Halt and Identify!" She shouted, voice cutting through the darkness. There was a pregnant pause, neither her nor the shape in the darkness moving. She was scarcely even breathing.
"Fuck me, Howe, what's got you so jumpy?" The faceless voice stepped forward until just enough light illuminated his face, "it's Oster."
"Oster, you prick, I nearly shot you." She brought the rifle back down from her shoulder, breathing deep to slow her heart rate. "You gonna tell me you're nothing but relaxed waiting for some alien fucks to show up and blast us all out of existence."
Oster shrugged, dropping down a small incline to stand next to her. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from inside his smock and placed one between his lips. He glanced at her, at the packet, then back at her before finally offering one. She grinned and plucked it from between the cardboard, placing it between her lips and pulling a lighter out of one of the innumerable pockets on her plate carrier. She lit hers, then his. In the flickering gaslight his eyes shone, pupils deep pits of darkness.
"Fuck were you doing out in the bush anyway?" She asked, exhaling a cloud of carcinogens.
"Taking a shit, fuck do you care?" He spat the answer with venom.
"We're gonna be out there for a couple weeks. What, are you pining for a lack of toilets that badly?"
"Fuck off, Howe. Enjoy the cig." He stalked off into the night, dragging hard enough on his own that it lit up his face in the darkness.
I hate him, she thought.
That's because he's a prick, Iskandar grumbled from inside their shared head. He was shooting up. Out there in the dark.
Idiot. He'll fry his brain. She paused, taking a drag on the cigarette, or his body.
Iskandar laughed, a harsh, barking sound that echoed between their ears.
How's the cigarette? It asked. I hate that you insist on smoking those.
She took another long drag, savouring the taste on her tongue, enjoying the moment.
No one is making you smoke them, my love.
You are literally in the process of doing exactly that. I can taste them when I wake up. I can smell them on our clothes. I can-
Arrȇte! Ta dispute est-, a third voice joined the fray
English, Elodie, please. Iskander responded, calming immediately.
You're annoying. And loud. Elodie switched into English without a moment's hesitation.
Did we wake you? Sorry, sweetheart. Marie paused her walk, refocus on their shared headspace, Iskander, can you?
C'mon sweetheart, let's go back to sleep. It took Elodie's hand and led her… somewhere else. None of them could work out where anyone went when they weren't here, but they certainly weren't here anymore.
Marie sighed, trying to settle back into being alone. It never felt 'right' when everything went quiet. It'd been so long since it was just her. Or whoever they were before everyone woke up. Before she never had to be alone again.
She sighed and took a last drag on the cigarette, crushing the butt under her boot. She'd finish her patrol and then finally get some damn sleep.
The bothie was small, cramped, and damp. With eleven other soldiers in the shack it also stank to high heaven. Someone had cracked a chem-heater in the centre of the room, a bare approximation of the campfire the situation deserved but which they weren't allowed. Light discipline, radio discipline, even noise discipline was strictly enforced by the platoons' non-coms. It sucked. It was boring, and the food was even worse than usual.
All they had to do was wait. Keep an eye on the sky, keep a stag out and keep the radio tuned in for emergency warnings. Each section was divvied out in a different shack, strung out across a square kilometre of the planet's rolling hills. Distributed Dispositions. Force security. Bullshit and boring.
Iskander - for it was fronting and nobody here knew them well enough to know any difference - scratched its jaw and yawned. It needed a piss. It needed to stretch out its tired limbs and smell clean air and run. About the only benefit to being in the Army was the opportunity to spend so much time just moving and being physical.
The Army. It didn't know why they were still here. She - Marie, that is - had only meant to be in for a couple of years to qualify for education and a better job once she was out. Then she found she loved the rigidity, the structure, the sense of belonging. By the time Iskandar and Elodie showed up they were signed up for another four year contract. There was still a year left on their tab when the enemy started picking at the fringes of the Terran Accord.
It levered itself up, slinging its rifle and picking its way across the various limbs, discarded bags and half eaten ration packs.
"Where are you going, Howe?" Sergeant Rigby, sitting in a chair by the door with his legs outstretched and his hands folded neatly over his stomach.
"Need to piss." It growled, trying to keep Marie's voice at the forefront of its mind. They spoke differently, held themselves differently, things they couldn't do if they wanted to maintain a low profile amongst the rest of the unit.
"Make it quick."
"Where am I gonna go, Terra?" It grumbled, pushing the bothie door open. It shut slowly, a soft click signalling the latch catching. Iskandar stood in the quiet evening air for a few moments, catching its breath and letting the stink of the shack slide away.
The planet was called a number of different names depending on who you asked. According to the Terran Accord Central Records Bureau it was Delta-Omicron-Nine-One-Baker. On original colonisation records it was Conchertus II and the capital city was still called Conchertus. Everyone living here just called it Doldrum.
The briefing that got handed out in the TAA transport had talked a little about the system's past. Underneath the propaganda was the hopeful glimmer of what the settlers had wanted it to be. The outer system was rich with resources, raw materials for building ships and infrastructure, for turning Conchertus into a bustling hub of interplanetary trade. Doldrum was habitable enough that a human wouldn't need a suit just to breathe and a worker population could establish itself easily enough.
So what went wrong? What turned grand plans into a boring, desolate planet with boring, grey stone cities ringed by boring, quiet agricultural communities?
The same interstellar shipping that those early colonists wanted to be a hub for. Turns out, it was cheaper to run the mines here with a minimum of investment and trans-ship the material out to processing plants tens or hundreds of light years away. The corporations never bothered to put the money down to build new shipyards or factories and decided it was easier to just let the settlers eke out an existence than try to give them a better life.
Iskander pulled its smock closer around it as it walked out into the nearest clump of bushes where the section had dug out latrines. It was dark but it was warm, Doldrum going through what passed for a summer season. Bugs buzzed around its head and it wafted them away with an idle gesture. Their numbers only increased as it got nearer the pit in the ground that passed for a toilet. How they already stank so bad after only a couple days it had no idea but it sure did.
It leaned its rifle against a nearby tree and sat with a tired sigh. All the unit had to do was not kill each other out of sheer boredom. They could manage that, right?
The door of the shack burst open, the squad pouring out into the darkness, just as Iskander was re-cinching its belt.
"Lance-Corporal Howe, sound off!" A voice bawled and it grabbed it's rifle to hurry into the circle of torch light.
"Here, Sergeant. What's happening?" It looked around at the faces of its squad mates, looking for an answer. Some of them looked terrified, others determined. Oster gave it a shit eating grin and a shrug.
"Enemies made an orbit already, we're gonna RV with the rest of the platoon then work our way into the city. So long as there's something to fight for, we're gonna fight." Rigby pulled a magazine from his vest, slotting it home in his rifle and racking the bolt, "Let's go soldiers, on the bounce. We've got a long walk ahead of us."
In the distance, above the treelines, invisible shapes rose into the sky on columns of smoke and fire. As they rose high enough they caught reflected sunlight and began to shine in the night sky.
Pretty fireworks, a very sleepy sounding Elodie whispered.
Yeah. Pretty fireworks.
It sat at a table, dissociating gently with the hubbub of the bar washing over its ears. The space wasn't too loud - it was too early in the evening for a real crowd - but it was enough to send it retreating into its headspace. It sniffed as one of the others said something rude about a patron who had just walked past. It was the closest it wanted to get to laughing right now, the closest it wanted to get to drawing attention.
It rolled its drink idly in the glass, letting condensation run down the sides. A droplet touched its finger and pooled, a little moment of sensory input dragging it up towards the front. It set its glass level and raised its finger to its mouth, sucking the cool water off of its skin.
Words became clearer from the patrons murmuring at the bar. The tinny sound of cheap speakers droned news reports in an interminable hum; another colony gone dark, refugee transports on the run, a Terran Accord Navy squadron missing in an uninhabited system. It snorted out a breath, pleased to see the war was going well.
"Hey?" A familiar voice cut through the sound and it turned slowly, dragging its eyes away from the screens now showing yet another propaganda broadcast.
"Angelique?" it asked, clearing its throat, "Hey, how're you doing?"
"Worried about my friends. Your message seemed… strained? How are you all doing?"
It shrugs, gesturing with its chin towards the dim screens,
"We're shipping out tomorrow. Out to the frontlines. Whatever comes next I have a feeling we're not coming back."
She held out a hand and it took it gratefully. They were silent for a little while, basking in the ambient noise as it sipped at its soda.
"Can you do us a favour?" It asked, breaking the silence but not the physical contact.
"Depends what it is." Angelique answered, not looking. It huffed out a small laugh, a smile crossing its face that never touched its eyes.
"I don't wanna…" It unhooked a carabiner from its belt, sliding a key from out of the bunch, "I don't wanna go back to my apartment. I'll sleep on base tonight. Whatever's there, it's yours if you want it. If not, can you give it to charity or something? I don't want a letter from my landlord in six months."
It didn't expect to be alive in six weeks, but the spectre of a final notice didn't seem to want to shift.
"I- you-" She stammered over her words, eventually taking a breath and starting again. "Yeah. I will."
It pressed the key into her hand. She shuffled in her chair until she could lean against it, her shoulder pressed into its side and her head on its shoulder. It slowly, carefully, shifted to put its arm around her.
"I'm gonna miss you. All of you." She said, her voice catching in her throat.
"Yeah. Us too"
Three weeks later, spinwards defensive cordon
She walked the line, rifle slung across her back and a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. She wasn't supposed to smoke on duty, she'd been put on KP more than once after the Sergeant Major had caught her. She stifled a tired laugh, rolled her shoulders against the weight of her service weapon and maintained her careful watch on the perimeter.
They were rotating out into the field in a couple of days. 'Distributed Dispositions' the officers called it when they were briefed after landing. Put troops out into the grasslands and the woods to reduce the impact of orbital bombardment and ensure that the defence could be… proactive.
It all sounded like a load of shit to her. The 'enemy' were making entire fleets disappear, capturing entire systems in barely the blink of an eye. Whatever they were doing - whether they were just glassing planets or disabling jump drives or whatever other rumour was going around the barracks - a bunch of poor bloody infantry with whatever support weapons they could yomp across a couple hundred kilometres weren't going to stop it. They might as well all be getting a solid eight hours and waiting for the end to come.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement, out there in the darkness. In a moment the cigarette was in the mud and her rifle was off her back, being brought up to the ready.
"Halt and Identify!" She shouted, voice cutting through the darkness. There was a pregnant pause, neither her nor the shape in the darkness moving. She was scarcely even breathing.
"Fuck me, Howe, what's got you so jumpy?" The faceless voice stepped forward until just enough light illuminated his face, "it's Oster."
"Oster, you prick, I nearly shot you." She brought the rifle back down from her shoulder, breathing deep to slow her heart rate. "You gonna tell me you're nothing but relaxed waiting for some alien fucks to show up and blast us all out of existence."
Oster shrugged, dropping down a small incline to stand next to her. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from inside his smock and placed one between his lips. He glanced at her, at the packet, then back at her before finally offering one. She grinned and plucked it from between the cardboard, placing it between her lips and pulling a lighter out of one of the innumerable pockets on her plate carrier. She lit hers, then his. In the flickering gaslight his eyes shone, pupils deep pits of darkness.
"Fuck were you doing out in the bush anyway?" She asked, exhaling a cloud of carcinogens.
"Taking a shit, fuck do you care?" He spat the answer with venom.
"We're gonna be out there for a couple weeks. What, are you pining for a lack of toilets that badly?"
"Fuck off, Howe. Enjoy the cig." He stalked off into the night, dragging hard enough on his own that it lit up his face in the darkness.
I hate him, she thought.
That's because he's a prick, Iskandar grumbled from inside their shared head. He was shooting up. Out there in the dark.
Idiot. He'll fry his brain. She paused, taking a drag on the cigarette, or his body.
Iskandar laughed, a harsh, barking sound that echoed between their ears.
How's the cigarette? It asked. I hate that you insist on smoking those.
She took another long drag, savouring the taste on her tongue, enjoying the moment.
No one is making you smoke them, my love.
You are literally in the process of doing exactly that. I can taste them when I wake up. I can smell them on our clothes. I can-
Arrȇte! Ta dispute est-, a third voice joined the fray
English, Elodie, please. Iskander responded, calming immediately.
You're annoying. And loud. Elodie switched into English without a moment's hesitation.
Did we wake you? Sorry, sweetheart. Marie paused her walk, refocus on their shared headspace, Iskander, can you?
C'mon sweetheart, let's go back to sleep. It took Elodie's hand and led her… somewhere else. None of them could work out where anyone went when they weren't here, but they certainly weren't here anymore.
Marie sighed, trying to settle back into being alone. It never felt 'right' when everything went quiet. It'd been so long since it was just her. Or whoever they were before everyone woke up. Before she never had to be alone again.
She sighed and took a last drag on the cigarette, crushing the butt under her boot. She'd finish her patrol and then finally get some damn sleep.
The bothie was small, cramped, and damp. With eleven other soldiers in the shack it also stank to high heaven. Someone had cracked a chem-heater in the centre of the room, a bare approximation of the campfire the situation deserved but which they weren't allowed. Light discipline, radio discipline, even noise discipline was strictly enforced by the platoons' non-coms. It sucked. It was boring, and the food was even worse than usual.
All they had to do was wait. Keep an eye on the sky, keep a stag out and keep the radio tuned in for emergency warnings. Each section was divvied out in a different shack, strung out across a square kilometre of the planet's rolling hills. Distributed Dispositions. Force security. Bullshit and boring.
Iskander - for it was fronting and nobody here knew them well enough to know any difference - scratched its jaw and yawned. It needed a piss. It needed to stretch out its tired limbs and smell clean air and run. About the only benefit to being in the Army was the opportunity to spend so much time just moving and being physical.
The Army. It didn't know why they were still here. She - Marie, that is - had only meant to be in for a couple of years to qualify for education and a better job once she was out. Then she found she loved the rigidity, the structure, the sense of belonging. By the time Iskandar and Elodie showed up they were signed up for another four year contract. There was still a year left on their tab when the enemy started picking at the fringes of the Terran Accord.
It levered itself up, slinging its rifle and picking its way across the various limbs, discarded bags and half eaten ration packs.
"Where are you going, Howe?" Sergeant Rigby, sitting in a chair by the door with his legs outstretched and his hands folded neatly over his stomach.
"Need to piss." It growled, trying to keep Marie's voice at the forefront of its mind. They spoke differently, held themselves differently, things they couldn't do if they wanted to maintain a low profile amongst the rest of the unit.
"Make it quick."
"Where am I gonna go, Terra?" It grumbled, pushing the bothie door open. It shut slowly, a soft click signalling the latch catching. Iskandar stood in the quiet evening air for a few moments, catching its breath and letting the stink of the shack slide away.
The planet was called a number of different names depending on who you asked. According to the Terran Accord Central Records Bureau it was Delta-Omicron-Nine-One-Baker. On original colonisation records it was Conchertus II and the capital city was still called Conchertus. Everyone living here just called it Doldrum.
The briefing that got handed out in the TAA transport had talked a little about the system's past. Underneath the propaganda was the hopeful glimmer of what the settlers had wanted it to be. The outer system was rich with resources, raw materials for building ships and infrastructure, for turning Conchertus into a bustling hub of interplanetary trade. Doldrum was habitable enough that a human wouldn't need a suit just to breathe and a worker population could establish itself easily enough.
So what went wrong? What turned grand plans into a boring, desolate planet with boring, grey stone cities ringed by boring, quiet agricultural communities?
The same interstellar shipping that those early colonists wanted to be a hub for. Turns out, it was cheaper to run the mines here with a minimum of investment and trans-ship the material out to processing plants tens or hundreds of light years away. The corporations never bothered to put the money down to build new shipyards or factories and decided it was easier to just let the settlers eke out an existence than try to give them a better life.
Iskander pulled its smock closer around it as it walked out into the nearest clump of bushes where the section had dug out latrines. It was dark but it was warm, Doldrum going through what passed for a summer season. Bugs buzzed around its head and it wafted them away with an idle gesture. Their numbers only increased as it got nearer the pit in the ground that passed for a toilet. How they already stank so bad after only a couple days it had no idea but it sure did.
It leaned its rifle against a nearby tree and sat with a tired sigh. All the unit had to do was not kill each other out of sheer boredom. They could manage that, right?
The door of the shack burst open, the squad pouring out into the darkness, just as Iskander was re-cinching its belt.
"Lance-Corporal Howe, sound off!" A voice bawled and it grabbed it's rifle to hurry into the circle of torch light.
"Here, Sergeant. What's happening?" It looked around at the faces of its squad mates, looking for an answer. Some of them looked terrified, others determined. Oster gave it a shit eating grin and a shrug.
"Enemies made an orbit already, we're gonna RV with the rest of the platoon then work our way into the city. So long as there's something to fight for, we're gonna fight." Rigby pulled a magazine from his vest, slotting it home in his rifle and racking the bolt, "Let's go soldiers, on the bounce. We've got a long walk ahead of us."
In the distance, above the treelines, invisible shapes rose into the sky on columns of smoke and fire. As they rose high enough they caught reflected sunlight and began to shine in the night sky.
Pretty fireworks, a very sleepy sounding Elodie whispered.
Yeah. Pretty fireworks.
Chapter 2 - The First to Fight
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
The comms set was useless. Not long after the enemy ship had made orbit, an hour after they'd linked up with the rest of the platoon, almost every channel had gone dead. They weren't filled with static, they just weren't able to connect to any other systems.
Almost every channel bar one. Marie flicked a couple of switches on her personal radio and tuned back into one of the most unsettling things she'd ever heard. It started with a hissing, pulsating sound that reminded her of cords of rope running across one another or wind blowing the tops of a dense forest against one another. Then the voice started.
"Sophonts of the Terran Accord." It spoke confidently, carefully, every syllable enunciated with concern, "You are free. The Affini Compact is here to ensure the safety and well-being of every person. We promise, you will not be harmed."
It continued like that for some time, so many well-meaning promises and lies. Marie knew that it was just enemy propaganda. It was a particularly bald-faced attempt at it, not convincing in the slightest, so she found it easy to tune out. At least its lilting melody was nicer to listen to than the deathly silence of the other channels or the quiet sound of boots on tarmac. The soothing voice quickly became just another background noise.
Switch it off, Iskander was blunt, blunter than it would usually be.
Marie shook her head. Usually she'd listen to her headmate, for comfort's sake if nothing else, but why? She could snatch a few seconds more of the warm, low tones that flowed through her headphones.
Switch it off! It was halfway to shouting at her. You wanna find out what happens if we get caught?
She didn't need to be asked again. She turned off her radio and just like that she, and the platoon, was functionally alone.
She tried to think through what had happened, to get herself back into the right frame of mind. They'd seen the anti-orbital missiles launch, the fireworks Elodie had been so entranced by, but they'd never detonated. There was no upper atmosphere nuclear blast to wipe out the satellite system, no harsh display of artificial aurora brightening the night sky. Were they that badly maintained that every single one was a dud? There was no way, right? The enemy must have done something to them.
The platoon was moving in near silence, nothing but hushed commands and half-seen hand signals keeping them moving forwards. Moods were low, even the most determined were keeping their mouths shut and eyes forwards. The thirty-plus men and women of 3rd platoon moved, on the bounce and ready for combat.
They were moving through the outskirts of urban Conchertus, empty buildings that had stood since the first settling of Doldrum. The first engineers had planned for goldrush populations and built accordingly and they had left tower blocks ringing the city, long since abandoned and never torn down. They loomed overhead, a standing cenotaph to dashed hopes.
Rigby held up a hand and the strung out squad came to a half. He gestured again, and as the message filtered down they each flipped down and switched on their goggles. She went from barely being able to see a thing to being able to seeing the entire street - though, bathed in a sickly green glow - in the flick of a switch. They'd been avoiding using them to save batteries, but now it seemed the Sergeant had deemed it necessary.
Three fireteams clustered up, one around Rigby, one around the squad Corporal - a woman called Gorecki - and one around her. Another hand signal came down the line. She nudged her team's gunner, whispered for him to unsling his launcher. Their rifleman pulled a tube off her back, unpacking and arming a missile before loading it into the tube. She raised a hand, signalling their readiness back up the line. Rigby gave an affirmative, then gestured up. Marie followed the gesture and for a moment it felt like her heart stopped.
A shape was hanging in the air, massive and sleek. It barely reflected any light, almost a blank spot in the sky, but she could make out the outline. It was long and slender, and as it moved ever so slowly across the sky it was silent. She flipped to heat-sensitive and almost baulked. It wasn't just silent, it was cold.
She motioned for her team to stay where it was and scurried forwards up to kneel beside Rigby.
"You checked thermals?" She snapped, voice hushed.
"Yup."
"The fuck is it?"
"Not one of ours," he murmured, still staring up at it.
"Yeah, no shit," she sighed. It presumably hadn't seen them yet or they'd be so much dust, "My teams ready."
"Good. I'm gonna scatter the squad, send a runner to the rupert. On my signal, you hit the bastard."
"Gottit." She tapped his shoulder, turned and hurried back to her part of the unit. The three were staring up into the sky, watching the great shape glide gently across the urban backdrop. She grabbed their attention, dragging them back down to look at her, "tuck into the building, but keep your eyes up. When I say, Dillon, you put a hole in the fucker. Carter, ready on the reload. Caito, security. Gottit? Good."
She didn't wait for an answer, instead shepherding her fireteam towards the building's nearest wall. She pressed herself into it on one side of her launcher team, watching the route up the road. She trusted Caito to be covering the other direction, providing cover and security for the duo preparing to shoot down an enemy shuttle. The signal came far sooner than she expected, Sergeant Rigby leaning out from a covered doorway, gesturing.
"Go." She barked. Dillon and Carter stepped out a handful of paces, kneeling back down further into the street. Marie heard Dillon open up the scope, letting the missile take a look at the distant shuttle. She heard it grumble, indicating a lock.
"Ease!" Dillon shouted, and Marie opened her mouth automatically. The missile kicked itself out of the tube mere moments before its main rocket motor kicked in and sent it spiralling into the sky. Her goggles washed out for a second, adjusting for the sudden bright light, before slowly filtering back to full vision. She watched the missile ascend, and ascend and come closer and closer and-
The motor cut out. It disappeared. The Mk 48 MMI (Missile, Multi-purpose, Infantry portable) was a short-bodied, medium-range weapon with a dialable warhead that could be configured for antipersonnel, anti-tank or anti-air attacks. In this mode it was supposed to use a dual warhead system to penetrate any armour the target had while it peppered it with a thousand shards of white hot shrapnel. Instead there was no explosion, no secondary fragmentation warhead, no nothing. Even the sound stopped, the echo between the buildings the only indication that there had ever been a missile at all. Marie snapped her head around, checking her team. The two in the street were staring, dumbfounded. Caito still had his back to them.
"Carter, reload, Dillon hit it again!" She barked, snapping them back to reality. She looked back up and realised the shuttle was moving now. It had come about, had shifted its facing and was accelerating towards their position. Something detached from it, then another, and plummeted towards the ground. Marie didn't see the impact, she had her focus entirely on the shuttle. "Dillon!"
"Two seconds!" he shouted back, a note of fear rising in his throat. He'd seen the first missile fair just about as well as she had. "Ease!"
The missile went spiralling up, but this time she managed to cover her goggles and save them from the flash. She watched it go up, up, up and… it failed again.
"Contact front!" One of the other fireteams shouted, moments before they opened up. Rifles and LMG's burned blazing tracers across the wide boulevards between the buildings, lighting up a pair of shapes moving, undulating towards them. Marie raised her rifle, flicking the safety off with her thumb and letting out a long burst. The enemy, whatever the enemy was, was massive. Masses of something flowed across the streets, shooting out ropes and swimming up the side of buildings as they avoided streams of bullets. They seemed untouchable, hulking patches of darkness sweeping across her line of sight as she desperately tried to keep them in her sight picture.
One reached the first fireteam, snatching four soldiers off their feet without a moment's hesitation and seemingly no effort. One slipped into the mass of tentacles, subsumed beneath the surface of the monstrous thing. She heard Gorecki scream. She heard an alien melody wash across the battlefield.
Caito opened fire, Carter following suit. Marie couldn't do it, couldn't fire her weapon when she was so at risk of hitting a friendly. Then the scream cut out and for a just the barest of moments there was silence. In the silence there was a word, a single note in the melody that speared her to the spot. Then Marie saw the eyes.
Six eyes, blazing in the dark night. Six eyes, fixing themselves on her. Six eyes, alien in the extreme.
"Run. Run!" she choked out, already turning on her heel. She broke. She ran. She fled the utterly alien thing that was wiping out her unit.
By the time she stopped running, the last sounds of her boots on the hard tarmac echoing off the buildings, the now distant gunfire had ceased. Whatever was left of her platoon, they'd either brought down those, those… Monsters, or they'd-
Hush, my love, hush, A strong voice, distant but coming closer, welled up from inside her.
Iskander, I… they… She tried to string the words together, found she couldn't and gave up.
Let me take over. Let go. We've got you, Iskander pushed through the wash of emotions, letting them slip away. It felt the body go limp, muscles loosen and unknot themselves. It felt Marie slip backwards, into the warm embrace of their headspace. It sighed in relief. It had been trying to break through her walls for almost as long as she'd been running, but she hadn't listened until exhaustion had finally forced her to stop.
Iskander took a deep breath, looking around at the quiet streets. They were closer to the urban core, far closer. There were none of the sounds of fighting it would have expected from an opposed enemy landing, just the occasional pop or crack of a distant weapon discharging. Where were the streams of tracer, the rattle of automatics, the crump of explosions? Hell, where was the orbital bombardment they'd been preparing for?
It checked itself over with its hands, letting its heart rate come down, its breathing slowing. No injuries, no pain bar a stitch in its side that was rapidly fading. The military kept them fit and while it wasn't about to thank them for that it had a feeling it was going to need that fitness in the next twenty-four hours.
They no longer had their rifle. Who knows where Marie had dropped it, but it was too late to worry about it. A sidearm hung heavy on its hip, an electromagnetic piece that could punch a hole in the side plate of a light vehicle but only had enough battery for six shots. It was a hold-out weapon at best. A couple of grenades were tucked into its vest, a flash and a frag. A few magazines were still locked into pouches and it thought about dumping them, but maybe it could pick up another weapon at some point. It would be foolish to dump potential resources.
It looked around, trying to get its bearings. It didn't know the city well and had barely been on the planet for more than a week. It drew a map from one of a myriad of pockets, tried to get a sense of where it was and eventually threw it away in disgust. It half-unfurled in the air, hitting the ground with a disappointing sound and not the thump that Iskander would have preferred.
Finally it looked up at the city lights that were, somehow, still shining brightly despite the enemy attack. They should have gone into blackout, dimming all the power to non-essential services and re-routing to military requirements. Instead there was a glowing skyline, the few tall buildings of the capital still lit up against the night sky.
Iskander considered heading back to the platoons last known, but it already knew it wasn't going to do that. Either everyone was dead or it would be labelled a deserter.
With a sigh, it did the only thing it could and began to walk towards the city proper.
It moved quickly for an hour, maybe two, holding that steady, loping pace it had been taught for fast marches. Without a pack and a rifle it wasn't even getting tired by the time it hit the inhabited sectors, instead just feeling warm under the collar and enjoying the faint sheen of sweat on its face. It hadn't seen a single other person all the way in. It had expected refugees to be streaming out of the city, running from the invasion force, but instead it was eerily quiet. There should have been screaming, crying, fighting, evacuation forces, people fleeing, something. But instead it was just quiet.
Iskander slowed right down, moving more carefully. Something was wrong, and it only felt more wrong the closer to the city they got. Conchertus wasn't exactly a heavily populated city, but it wasn't this deathly quiet.
Is everyone dead? It wondered, and felt a reassuring warmth in the back of its head. Whatever was happening, it wasn't in this alone.
When a truck came careening around a corner not ten minutes later, Iskander nearly dove back into the nearest puddle of darkness. Then it realised the truck had the THA logo painted on the side and whoever was learning was wearing something approaching Army battle rattle. It stuck an arm in the air and the truck screeched to a stop, air brakes hissing in the wind.
"Get on if you're getting, c'mon!" A voice shouted, and Iskander ran to the back of the truck, not waiting to be asked twice. It was hauled up by strong arms as the truck began to accelerate again, tearing off down the street. Collapsing into the floor of the bed, it felt rather than saw the force as the truck turned another corner and nearly threw it into somebody's legs.
A hand reached down from above and it gripped it, being hauled into a sitting position against the truck's sideboards.
"Are you local?" Someone asked, a gruff, gravelly voice, "I don't recognise you."
"Howe, Hundred-and-sixty-first Rifles, TAAF."
"Bohmer, CNS Praetorian, TACN. These are Crane, Abbas and Fenn."
Iskander shares a nod with the four sailors crouched in the rear deck of the truck.
"Where are we headed?" It asks, trying to scrape even a little control or understanding about the situation. It was reeling, the fighting followed by the solitude followed by bundling itself into this pile of sailors.
Bohmer let out a short bark of a laugh, a harsh, horrible noise.
"The last shuttle off-world. Welcome to the Navy, soldier."
Almost every channel bar one. Marie flicked a couple of switches on her personal radio and tuned back into one of the most unsettling things she'd ever heard. It started with a hissing, pulsating sound that reminded her of cords of rope running across one another or wind blowing the tops of a dense forest against one another. Then the voice started.
"Sophonts of the Terran Accord." It spoke confidently, carefully, every syllable enunciated with concern, "You are free. The Affini Compact is here to ensure the safety and well-being of every person. We promise, you will not be harmed."
It continued like that for some time, so many well-meaning promises and lies. Marie knew that it was just enemy propaganda. It was a particularly bald-faced attempt at it, not convincing in the slightest, so she found it easy to tune out. At least its lilting melody was nicer to listen to than the deathly silence of the other channels or the quiet sound of boots on tarmac. The soothing voice quickly became just another background noise.
Switch it off, Iskander was blunt, blunter than it would usually be.
Marie shook her head. Usually she'd listen to her headmate, for comfort's sake if nothing else, but why? She could snatch a few seconds more of the warm, low tones that flowed through her headphones.
Switch it off! It was halfway to shouting at her. You wanna find out what happens if we get caught?
She didn't need to be asked again. She turned off her radio and just like that she, and the platoon, was functionally alone.
She tried to think through what had happened, to get herself back into the right frame of mind. They'd seen the anti-orbital missiles launch, the fireworks Elodie had been so entranced by, but they'd never detonated. There was no upper atmosphere nuclear blast to wipe out the satellite system, no harsh display of artificial aurora brightening the night sky. Were they that badly maintained that every single one was a dud? There was no way, right? The enemy must have done something to them.
The platoon was moving in near silence, nothing but hushed commands and half-seen hand signals keeping them moving forwards. Moods were low, even the most determined were keeping their mouths shut and eyes forwards. The thirty-plus men and women of 3rd platoon moved, on the bounce and ready for combat.
They were moving through the outskirts of urban Conchertus, empty buildings that had stood since the first settling of Doldrum. The first engineers had planned for goldrush populations and built accordingly and they had left tower blocks ringing the city, long since abandoned and never torn down. They loomed overhead, a standing cenotaph to dashed hopes.
Rigby held up a hand and the strung out squad came to a half. He gestured again, and as the message filtered down they each flipped down and switched on their goggles. She went from barely being able to see a thing to being able to seeing the entire street - though, bathed in a sickly green glow - in the flick of a switch. They'd been avoiding using them to save batteries, but now it seemed the Sergeant had deemed it necessary.
Three fireteams clustered up, one around Rigby, one around the squad Corporal - a woman called Gorecki - and one around her. Another hand signal came down the line. She nudged her team's gunner, whispered for him to unsling his launcher. Their rifleman pulled a tube off her back, unpacking and arming a missile before loading it into the tube. She raised a hand, signalling their readiness back up the line. Rigby gave an affirmative, then gestured up. Marie followed the gesture and for a moment it felt like her heart stopped.
A shape was hanging in the air, massive and sleek. It barely reflected any light, almost a blank spot in the sky, but she could make out the outline. It was long and slender, and as it moved ever so slowly across the sky it was silent. She flipped to heat-sensitive and almost baulked. It wasn't just silent, it was cold.
She motioned for her team to stay where it was and scurried forwards up to kneel beside Rigby.
"You checked thermals?" She snapped, voice hushed.
"Yup."
"The fuck is it?"
"Not one of ours," he murmured, still staring up at it.
"Yeah, no shit," she sighed. It presumably hadn't seen them yet or they'd be so much dust, "My teams ready."
"Good. I'm gonna scatter the squad, send a runner to the rupert. On my signal, you hit the bastard."
"Gottit." She tapped his shoulder, turned and hurried back to her part of the unit. The three were staring up into the sky, watching the great shape glide gently across the urban backdrop. She grabbed their attention, dragging them back down to look at her, "tuck into the building, but keep your eyes up. When I say, Dillon, you put a hole in the fucker. Carter, ready on the reload. Caito, security. Gottit? Good."
She didn't wait for an answer, instead shepherding her fireteam towards the building's nearest wall. She pressed herself into it on one side of her launcher team, watching the route up the road. She trusted Caito to be covering the other direction, providing cover and security for the duo preparing to shoot down an enemy shuttle. The signal came far sooner than she expected, Sergeant Rigby leaning out from a covered doorway, gesturing.
"Go." She barked. Dillon and Carter stepped out a handful of paces, kneeling back down further into the street. Marie heard Dillon open up the scope, letting the missile take a look at the distant shuttle. She heard it grumble, indicating a lock.
"Ease!" Dillon shouted, and Marie opened her mouth automatically. The missile kicked itself out of the tube mere moments before its main rocket motor kicked in and sent it spiralling into the sky. Her goggles washed out for a second, adjusting for the sudden bright light, before slowly filtering back to full vision. She watched the missile ascend, and ascend and come closer and closer and-
The motor cut out. It disappeared. The Mk 48 MMI (Missile, Multi-purpose, Infantry portable) was a short-bodied, medium-range weapon with a dialable warhead that could be configured for antipersonnel, anti-tank or anti-air attacks. In this mode it was supposed to use a dual warhead system to penetrate any armour the target had while it peppered it with a thousand shards of white hot shrapnel. Instead there was no explosion, no secondary fragmentation warhead, no nothing. Even the sound stopped, the echo between the buildings the only indication that there had ever been a missile at all. Marie snapped her head around, checking her team. The two in the street were staring, dumbfounded. Caito still had his back to them.
"Carter, reload, Dillon hit it again!" She barked, snapping them back to reality. She looked back up and realised the shuttle was moving now. It had come about, had shifted its facing and was accelerating towards their position. Something detached from it, then another, and plummeted towards the ground. Marie didn't see the impact, she had her focus entirely on the shuttle. "Dillon!"
"Two seconds!" he shouted back, a note of fear rising in his throat. He'd seen the first missile fair just about as well as she had. "Ease!"
The missile went spiralling up, but this time she managed to cover her goggles and save them from the flash. She watched it go up, up, up and… it failed again.
"Contact front!" One of the other fireteams shouted, moments before they opened up. Rifles and LMG's burned blazing tracers across the wide boulevards between the buildings, lighting up a pair of shapes moving, undulating towards them. Marie raised her rifle, flicking the safety off with her thumb and letting out a long burst. The enemy, whatever the enemy was, was massive. Masses of something flowed across the streets, shooting out ropes and swimming up the side of buildings as they avoided streams of bullets. They seemed untouchable, hulking patches of darkness sweeping across her line of sight as she desperately tried to keep them in her sight picture.
One reached the first fireteam, snatching four soldiers off their feet without a moment's hesitation and seemingly no effort. One slipped into the mass of tentacles, subsumed beneath the surface of the monstrous thing. She heard Gorecki scream. She heard an alien melody wash across the battlefield.
Caito opened fire, Carter following suit. Marie couldn't do it, couldn't fire her weapon when she was so at risk of hitting a friendly. Then the scream cut out and for a just the barest of moments there was silence. In the silence there was a word, a single note in the melody that speared her to the spot. Then Marie saw the eyes.
Six eyes, blazing in the dark night. Six eyes, fixing themselves on her. Six eyes, alien in the extreme.
"Run. Run!" she choked out, already turning on her heel. She broke. She ran. She fled the utterly alien thing that was wiping out her unit.
By the time she stopped running, the last sounds of her boots on the hard tarmac echoing off the buildings, the now distant gunfire had ceased. Whatever was left of her platoon, they'd either brought down those, those… Monsters, or they'd-
Hush, my love, hush, A strong voice, distant but coming closer, welled up from inside her.
Iskander, I… they… She tried to string the words together, found she couldn't and gave up.
Let me take over. Let go. We've got you, Iskander pushed through the wash of emotions, letting them slip away. It felt the body go limp, muscles loosen and unknot themselves. It felt Marie slip backwards, into the warm embrace of their headspace. It sighed in relief. It had been trying to break through her walls for almost as long as she'd been running, but she hadn't listened until exhaustion had finally forced her to stop.
Iskander took a deep breath, looking around at the quiet streets. They were closer to the urban core, far closer. There were none of the sounds of fighting it would have expected from an opposed enemy landing, just the occasional pop or crack of a distant weapon discharging. Where were the streams of tracer, the rattle of automatics, the crump of explosions? Hell, where was the orbital bombardment they'd been preparing for?
It checked itself over with its hands, letting its heart rate come down, its breathing slowing. No injuries, no pain bar a stitch in its side that was rapidly fading. The military kept them fit and while it wasn't about to thank them for that it had a feeling it was going to need that fitness in the next twenty-four hours.
They no longer had their rifle. Who knows where Marie had dropped it, but it was too late to worry about it. A sidearm hung heavy on its hip, an electromagnetic piece that could punch a hole in the side plate of a light vehicle but only had enough battery for six shots. It was a hold-out weapon at best. A couple of grenades were tucked into its vest, a flash and a frag. A few magazines were still locked into pouches and it thought about dumping them, but maybe it could pick up another weapon at some point. It would be foolish to dump potential resources.
It looked around, trying to get its bearings. It didn't know the city well and had barely been on the planet for more than a week. It drew a map from one of a myriad of pockets, tried to get a sense of where it was and eventually threw it away in disgust. It half-unfurled in the air, hitting the ground with a disappointing sound and not the thump that Iskander would have preferred.
Finally it looked up at the city lights that were, somehow, still shining brightly despite the enemy attack. They should have gone into blackout, dimming all the power to non-essential services and re-routing to military requirements. Instead there was a glowing skyline, the few tall buildings of the capital still lit up against the night sky.
Iskander considered heading back to the platoons last known, but it already knew it wasn't going to do that. Either everyone was dead or it would be labelled a deserter.
With a sigh, it did the only thing it could and began to walk towards the city proper.
It moved quickly for an hour, maybe two, holding that steady, loping pace it had been taught for fast marches. Without a pack and a rifle it wasn't even getting tired by the time it hit the inhabited sectors, instead just feeling warm under the collar and enjoying the faint sheen of sweat on its face. It hadn't seen a single other person all the way in. It had expected refugees to be streaming out of the city, running from the invasion force, but instead it was eerily quiet. There should have been screaming, crying, fighting, evacuation forces, people fleeing, something. But instead it was just quiet.
Iskander slowed right down, moving more carefully. Something was wrong, and it only felt more wrong the closer to the city they got. Conchertus wasn't exactly a heavily populated city, but it wasn't this deathly quiet.
Is everyone dead? It wondered, and felt a reassuring warmth in the back of its head. Whatever was happening, it wasn't in this alone.
When a truck came careening around a corner not ten minutes later, Iskander nearly dove back into the nearest puddle of darkness. Then it realised the truck had the THA logo painted on the side and whoever was learning was wearing something approaching Army battle rattle. It stuck an arm in the air and the truck screeched to a stop, air brakes hissing in the wind.
"Get on if you're getting, c'mon!" A voice shouted, and Iskander ran to the back of the truck, not waiting to be asked twice. It was hauled up by strong arms as the truck began to accelerate again, tearing off down the street. Collapsing into the floor of the bed, it felt rather than saw the force as the truck turned another corner and nearly threw it into somebody's legs.
A hand reached down from above and it gripped it, being hauled into a sitting position against the truck's sideboards.
"Are you local?" Someone asked, a gruff, gravelly voice, "I don't recognise you."
"Howe, Hundred-and-sixty-first Rifles, TAAF."
"Bohmer, CNS Praetorian, TACN. These are Crane, Abbas and Fenn."
Iskander shares a nod with the four sailors crouched in the rear deck of the truck.
"Where are we headed?" It asks, trying to scrape even a little control or understanding about the situation. It was reeling, the fighting followed by the solitude followed by bundling itself into this pile of sailors.
Bohmer let out a short bark of a laugh, a harsh, horrible noise.
"The last shuttle off-world. Welcome to the Navy, soldier."
Chapter 3 - CPO Rasma Stern
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
The shuttle they'd reached, after another half-hour of crazed driving and desperate attempts to get out from under the enemy's guns, took off under full military power. Engine bells glowing, exhaust tearing the roofs from nearby buildings, it boosted directly from the pad and into a nap-of-the-earth escape program. A few of the strange enemy craft gave chase for just a little while, but the shuttle's pilot pulled some truly death-defying stunts and one by one the enemy gave up and let them go.
Iskander saw none of this. None of their system did. They were deep in the belly of the shuttle's crew compartment, strapped into an acceleration couch aligned with the vessels direction of thrust. Their bloodstream was being pumped full of G-resistant fluids, the best of the Accord's medical tech desperately trying to keep the soldier alive through tens of G's of acceleration.
At some point the pilot decided they were home free and dragged the shuttle's nose up, up, up. The vehicle soared upwards, nose pointed almost vertical as it punched through Doldrum's dense atmosphere. Friction heating lit the forward surfaces of the shuttle's wings in reddish-orange plasma until it got high enough that there wasn't enough air to burn.
They went ballistic, engines shutting down until they were just a mass of metal and advanced polymers arcing up into the path of something far larger than them. A ship, accelerating as its orbit dropped lower until it was travelling at tens of kilometres per second. Its own massive engines were silent, utilising nothing but the power of orbital mechanics to go faster and faster and faster. Enemy ships moved to intercept, but even with remarkably advanced technology, they could not move faster than physics.
The shuttle was snatched out of empty space, one moment alone in the void and the next suspended snugly in a Terran warship's small craft bay.
The system barely heard the announcement, an authoritative voice speaking over the shipwide intercom;
"All hands, brace for jump, all hands, brace for jump."
The ship vanished into non-relativistic space, and the shuttle went with it.
[They are ingenious, these little terrans.] Vines susurrated as they slithered across each other, a chorus of discontent that echoed around the quiet bridge.
[An escape now simply extends their suffering] A voice responded [One would assume they would be less committed to their own pain.]
The two masses of foliage reached across the empty space to touch, vines intertwining and soothing one another.
[You have to admire their persistence.]
[I refuse to 'admire' self-harm.] The second Affini's tone was dour, harsh, [Even if a jump from this deep inside a gravity well shows a certain level of understanding of elementary physics.]
The first mass laughs, a shifting, rustling sound that sets their leaves on end.
[Very good, very good. I'm sure despite their 'understanding' we'll have them soon enough.]
[For their sake, it cannot possibly come soon enough]
A year later, Shipside
Marie didn't join the Cosmic Navy in the end. She also didn't go back to her unit, as there wasn't one to go back to. The One-Six-One had all but disappeared along with most of the forces assigned to the Spinward Cordon, annihilated in what had surely been fierce fighting with the enemy, the 'Affini' as she had learned they were called. She tried to put the eerie silence of Doldrum out of her mind. She'd missed the real fighting there, she must have done.
She didn't join the Navy in the end. She was taken off of the CNS Praetorian by a fast picket and shipped impossibly quickly back towards the Terran core worlds. She'd been thoroughly debriefed over the course of several months, as well as being subjected to medical tests both simple and advanced, the purpose of which she didn't know. She had been interrogated by the OCNI, Accord Army Intelligence and the Civilian Intelligence Bureau. All of them were trying to figure out something, but she couldn't work out what.
And somehow, through it all, she had managed to keep herself safe.
We kept all of us safe, Iskander murmured, sleeping fitfully in their shared headspace.
Yeah, we did , she responded, leaning down to scratch a sleeping Elodie behind the ear. The girl giggled, muttering something unintelligible in her sleep.
Isolated from the relationships she'd formed with her unit and with those from before she was called up, Marie had been spending more time than ever before developing their collective internal space. Now it wasn't uncommon for Marie and Iskander to be awake simultaneously, watching over their third with loving care. Elodie had barely had a chance to front since before they'd reached Doldrums and it had been hard on her. They - Marie and Iskander - tried their best to keep her active even if she couldn't be in control in a way she'd like.
I still can't believe they didn't figure us out. Marie chuckled, that OCNI interrogator was sure we were a sleeper agent or something, the way our voices kept switching.
An Indoctrinated Agent of the Enemy. Iskandar laughed, Guy had watched too many spy vids. At least the old saw about military intelligence held true.
There isn't any.
Marie sighed, trying to drag her focus back into meatspace. She was on yet another shuttle, her second of the day, taking her to a new ship. She'd bounced across Accord space, back and forth from depot to intelligence hub to temporary posting. Her commanding officers didn't seem to know what to do with a non-commissioned officer with little to recommend her other than her survival in the face of an enemy that, by all accounts, didn't leave survivors.
Sometimes ships got away. Sometimes a freighter made it out with a data cache. But so far there were barely more than a handful of people like her, people who'd seen the Affini on the ground and lived to tell the tale.
It was during this unfocused drifting that she had begun to encounter what she could only consider to be particularly poorly made propaganda. It wasn't just the obvious, the news reports about great victories and the posters with banners that read 'Doing Your Part' or 'The Accord Needs You'. Those were the surface level attempts to keep morale high.
It was the other things, the subtler things, that began to weigh heavy on her soul. The movie billboards were either action films about brave soldiers winning out against impossible odds or 'true-life' stories of overcoming adversity and coming together as families or communities. These drove home the message that humanity had to be united to face the outsider threat, and that it was the Accord who would be doing the uniting.
Even the women-focused media had changed. Before her last deployment, Marie could have easily picked out headlines about the latest celebrity gossip, or the newest fashion trend or the next must-buy skin cleanser to keep yourself looking pubescent and fuckable. Now all the the sites and the glossies and the blogs were studiously informing their readers about the best way to re-style an outfit and how the trillionaire celebs were touring navy bases to put on a show for the troops. It was sickeningly trite and would go entirely unnoticed by most consumers.
Finally they found her a post that wasn't just busywork and took her away from all the media schlock. They'd made her up to Sergeant and assigned her to an army intelligence field team and another Cosmic Navy picket, the CNS Faithful Intervention.
She stretched, dragging herself off of the grav couch as the shuttle came in to dock. The needles dragged against her skin as they disconnected a little later than they should have done, scratches drawing a wince from her. She grabbed her duffel and pushed off towards the airlock, letting herself float slowly towards the access point.
Watch your head! Elodie shouted,
I swear, I crash into a wall one time. Marie snapped back with a laugh,
It wasn't once. It was almost every time during null-gee training! The girl giggled, and it was disarmingly adorable.
Marie smiled to herself. They had only passed null-gee - and a couple of other certifications that had been required for this deployment - because Iskander had completed them. Somehow it had better coordination and control over the body, which wasn't just remarkable but it was unfair.
She worked her way through the airlock, boots hitting the 'floor' on the other side. As the mag-clamps locked her down she came to attention, saluting the officer standing in front of her.
"At ease, Sergeant, I work for a living." The woman was standing at a comfortable parade rest, and the sparkle in her eyes was dancing like firelight.
"Ma'am?" She was so bad at TCN ranks and it never failed to show her up. Nonetheless when the other woman extended a hand to be shaken, she shook it.
"Chief Petty Officer Rasma Stern. Welcome aboard the Faithful Intervention."
"Sergeant Marie Howe." The woman's handshake was strong, firm. It gave Marie that little buzz of confidence she got from confident women. "Sorry, I'm still not great at Navy rank tabs."
Rasma waves a hand, dismissing the apology.
"What, you think I'm going to be upset that someone from the junior service doesn't know what they're doing?" She grinned, "C'mon, I'll give you the tour."
The Faithful Intervention wasn't a particularly large ship at just over two-hundred metres from stem to stern. Most of that length was given over to a quartet of massive drives, the machinery that put the 'fast' in fast picket, with a cramped crew pod slapped haphazardly on the front. She was neither sleek nor particularly pretty, and the inside was little better. There was clearly some sort of logic to the arrangement of things, but whatever it was Marie couldn't tell. The 'bridge' was a three person cockpit, fire control was a box in between an engine and the magazines and the mess was almost standing room only, just a collection of battered metal chairs and a rehydrator. The tour barely took ten minutes.
"And these are the bunks. Heads adjacent. I'm afraid with your team aboard, we'll be hot bunking but a rack's still better than whatever hole in the ground the Army had you in."
"I'll have you know that the mud of Endymion makes a perfectly good place to lay one's head, thank you very much." Marie bit back, grinning. She hadn't been in a foxhole for over a year, but she knew better than to deny the stereotypes. It was too much fun to tease sailors about their own inherent failings, after all.
She strapped her duffel to the nearest bunk and sat herself down on it. This zero-gee lark was going to take some getting used to, but she'd faced far harder challenges. After all, it wasn't like she was doing this - or anything else in life - alone.
Marie ran her hand through short curls, feeling the ends float gently. She said a small prayer that she'd already adjusted and that her stomach wasn't giving her trouble. After a minute or so of quiet, a hand appeared in front of her face.
"On your feet soldier, you've got a team to meet."
Days aboard the Faithful Intervention quickly turned to weeks and just as soon those weeks gave way to months. They would jump slowly across the new border into Affini space, moving from empty system to empty system until they made that precarious move into somewhere populated.
The ship would appear in the outer reaches of a star system previously held by the Accord, accelerate using those massive engines and then switch as much off as possible and simply… drift. They tried to look akin to an asteroid or other silent stellar object, hoping to pass themselves off as an anomaly of a magnetometer. Aboard ship the crew would go about their duties quietly, without hurry and in all the time they had they would simply watch. They would watch the comings and goings of great ships, scores of vessels larger than a Terran leviathan that seemed unsuited to the cold realities of space. They would study traffic, absorb radio signals, they would listen and, as always, they would watch.
Eventually the Captain would get twitchy and he'd tell the OCNI officer in charge of their little expeditions that enough was enough, that they'd be charging the jump drive and bugging out of this system and heading for home. The slimeball from OCNI would always complain, always try to twist and turn to get a little closer, stay a little longer, but eventually the Captain would insist and that would be that. They would jump away, heading for home, for resupply and a short rest. Then it was back out again.
There was little for Marie, Iskander and Elodie to do. They were, at least in theory, a specialist in enemy ground operations and a well of information about what to expect from them. What they actually were was a lucky survivor who had neither the technical expertise nor the actual depth of experience their CO expected of them. They were, in many ways, functionally useless.
Fortunately the Navy has never had an issue with giving jobs to idle hands. There were all sorts of things a physically fit, intelligent and - more important than anything else - unthinkingly dedicated soldier could do. They replaced small parts in even smaller access ways, they hauled supplies and they even filled out no small amount of paperwork.
At some point they fell into a routine of working with CPO Stern almost daily, checking in with her every few hours to find another job to do, another task to be set chasing after. It kept them busy, kept them focused, kept them tired. Every off-shift they got to collapse into their bunk and fall asleep almost immediately. It wasn't exactly the most rewarding of work, but it gave them a sense of satisfaction that even if they couldn't do much to contribute to the ship's main mission, they could at least do something.
It's also how they found themselves fucking Rasma pretty much daily.
Curled up against the tall, powerfully built woman, languishing in the sweat of their congress, Marie sighed with satisfaction. She ran her fingers across the other woman's stomach, enjoying the flutter of muscles tensing and untensing below the surface. A strong hand pressed into the small of her back, pulling her clips closer against Rasma's.
"Remind me again why this doesn't count as fraternisation?" Marie asked dreamily.
"Different chains of command. While I outrank you, I can't actually give you orders. Not that it seems to stop you from following them."
Marie flushed, burrowing her face into the other woman's side. A laugh resonated through her lover's ribcage, tickling her nose.
"I've never been suited to leadership. They only made me a sergeant because they didn't know what else to do with me." She said with a wry chuckle. Rasma rolled over, pressing her breasts against Marie's.
"You sure?"
"Uh, yeah? I skipped two grades to get this posting."
"No I mean…" Rasma sighed, touching her fingers to the underside of Marie's chin. She looked up, meeting the sailors' eyes. "Most of the time you're so soft and sweet, I'm amazed you even made it in the military. Then other times…" She paused, thinking, "Sometimes when you're on top of me, you get this look in your eyes. Like you're hungry. Like you want to pin me down and fuck me till you're spent."
Fuck , Iskander barked and it was all Marie could do not to start laughing.
She saw you,
What do we do, Marie, fuck!
I told you she'd see you!
Do we tell her? It finally asked
Do you wanna be a Section 8? I like her too, but I'm not stupid.
Marie giggled, pressing her face into Rasma's shoulder.
"Occasionally - and I mean very occasionally - I get over my hang-ups for long enough that topping seems like it could be fun."
"Yeah? Well," Rasma rolled on top of her, pressing her hips between Marie's and grinning, "Don't go getting any big ideas, okay?" She leaned forward, nipping at the soft skin of Marie's neck, eliciting a gasp, "I like how sweet you taste."
"Oh I wasn't going-" Her lover's fingers found somewhere sensitive and pressed, "Ohhhhh…"
Iskander saw none of this. None of their system did. They were deep in the belly of the shuttle's crew compartment, strapped into an acceleration couch aligned with the vessels direction of thrust. Their bloodstream was being pumped full of G-resistant fluids, the best of the Accord's medical tech desperately trying to keep the soldier alive through tens of G's of acceleration.
At some point the pilot decided they were home free and dragged the shuttle's nose up, up, up. The vehicle soared upwards, nose pointed almost vertical as it punched through Doldrum's dense atmosphere. Friction heating lit the forward surfaces of the shuttle's wings in reddish-orange plasma until it got high enough that there wasn't enough air to burn.
They went ballistic, engines shutting down until they were just a mass of metal and advanced polymers arcing up into the path of something far larger than them. A ship, accelerating as its orbit dropped lower until it was travelling at tens of kilometres per second. Its own massive engines were silent, utilising nothing but the power of orbital mechanics to go faster and faster and faster. Enemy ships moved to intercept, but even with remarkably advanced technology, they could not move faster than physics.
The shuttle was snatched out of empty space, one moment alone in the void and the next suspended snugly in a Terran warship's small craft bay.
The system barely heard the announcement, an authoritative voice speaking over the shipwide intercom;
"All hands, brace for jump, all hands, brace for jump."
The ship vanished into non-relativistic space, and the shuttle went with it.
[They are ingenious, these little terrans.] Vines susurrated as they slithered across each other, a chorus of discontent that echoed around the quiet bridge.
[An escape now simply extends their suffering] A voice responded [One would assume they would be less committed to their own pain.]
The two masses of foliage reached across the empty space to touch, vines intertwining and soothing one another.
[You have to admire their persistence.]
[I refuse to 'admire' self-harm.] The second Affini's tone was dour, harsh, [Even if a jump from this deep inside a gravity well shows a certain level of understanding of elementary physics.]
The first mass laughs, a shifting, rustling sound that sets their leaves on end.
[Very good, very good. I'm sure despite their 'understanding' we'll have them soon enough.]
[For their sake, it cannot possibly come soon enough]
A year later, Shipside
Marie didn't join the Cosmic Navy in the end. She also didn't go back to her unit, as there wasn't one to go back to. The One-Six-One had all but disappeared along with most of the forces assigned to the Spinward Cordon, annihilated in what had surely been fierce fighting with the enemy, the 'Affini' as she had learned they were called. She tried to put the eerie silence of Doldrum out of her mind. She'd missed the real fighting there, she must have done.
She didn't join the Navy in the end. She was taken off of the CNS Praetorian by a fast picket and shipped impossibly quickly back towards the Terran core worlds. She'd been thoroughly debriefed over the course of several months, as well as being subjected to medical tests both simple and advanced, the purpose of which she didn't know. She had been interrogated by the OCNI, Accord Army Intelligence and the Civilian Intelligence Bureau. All of them were trying to figure out something, but she couldn't work out what.
And somehow, through it all, she had managed to keep herself safe.
We kept all of us safe, Iskander murmured, sleeping fitfully in their shared headspace.
Yeah, we did , she responded, leaning down to scratch a sleeping Elodie behind the ear. The girl giggled, muttering something unintelligible in her sleep.
Isolated from the relationships she'd formed with her unit and with those from before she was called up, Marie had been spending more time than ever before developing their collective internal space. Now it wasn't uncommon for Marie and Iskander to be awake simultaneously, watching over their third with loving care. Elodie had barely had a chance to front since before they'd reached Doldrums and it had been hard on her. They - Marie and Iskander - tried their best to keep her active even if she couldn't be in control in a way she'd like.
I still can't believe they didn't figure us out. Marie chuckled, that OCNI interrogator was sure we were a sleeper agent or something, the way our voices kept switching.
An Indoctrinated Agent of the Enemy. Iskandar laughed, Guy had watched too many spy vids. At least the old saw about military intelligence held true.
There isn't any.
Marie sighed, trying to drag her focus back into meatspace. She was on yet another shuttle, her second of the day, taking her to a new ship. She'd bounced across Accord space, back and forth from depot to intelligence hub to temporary posting. Her commanding officers didn't seem to know what to do with a non-commissioned officer with little to recommend her other than her survival in the face of an enemy that, by all accounts, didn't leave survivors.
Sometimes ships got away. Sometimes a freighter made it out with a data cache. But so far there were barely more than a handful of people like her, people who'd seen the Affini on the ground and lived to tell the tale.
It was during this unfocused drifting that she had begun to encounter what she could only consider to be particularly poorly made propaganda. It wasn't just the obvious, the news reports about great victories and the posters with banners that read 'Doing Your Part' or 'The Accord Needs You'. Those were the surface level attempts to keep morale high.
It was the other things, the subtler things, that began to weigh heavy on her soul. The movie billboards were either action films about brave soldiers winning out against impossible odds or 'true-life' stories of overcoming adversity and coming together as families or communities. These drove home the message that humanity had to be united to face the outsider threat, and that it was the Accord who would be doing the uniting.
Even the women-focused media had changed. Before her last deployment, Marie could have easily picked out headlines about the latest celebrity gossip, or the newest fashion trend or the next must-buy skin cleanser to keep yourself looking pubescent and fuckable. Now all the the sites and the glossies and the blogs were studiously informing their readers about the best way to re-style an outfit and how the trillionaire celebs were touring navy bases to put on a show for the troops. It was sickeningly trite and would go entirely unnoticed by most consumers.
Finally they found her a post that wasn't just busywork and took her away from all the media schlock. They'd made her up to Sergeant and assigned her to an army intelligence field team and another Cosmic Navy picket, the CNS Faithful Intervention.
She stretched, dragging herself off of the grav couch as the shuttle came in to dock. The needles dragged against her skin as they disconnected a little later than they should have done, scratches drawing a wince from her. She grabbed her duffel and pushed off towards the airlock, letting herself float slowly towards the access point.
Watch your head! Elodie shouted,
I swear, I crash into a wall one time. Marie snapped back with a laugh,
It wasn't once. It was almost every time during null-gee training! The girl giggled, and it was disarmingly adorable.
Marie smiled to herself. They had only passed null-gee - and a couple of other certifications that had been required for this deployment - because Iskander had completed them. Somehow it had better coordination and control over the body, which wasn't just remarkable but it was unfair.
She worked her way through the airlock, boots hitting the 'floor' on the other side. As the mag-clamps locked her down she came to attention, saluting the officer standing in front of her.
"At ease, Sergeant, I work for a living." The woman was standing at a comfortable parade rest, and the sparkle in her eyes was dancing like firelight.
"Ma'am?" She was so bad at TCN ranks and it never failed to show her up. Nonetheless when the other woman extended a hand to be shaken, she shook it.
"Chief Petty Officer Rasma Stern. Welcome aboard the Faithful Intervention."
"Sergeant Marie Howe." The woman's handshake was strong, firm. It gave Marie that little buzz of confidence she got from confident women. "Sorry, I'm still not great at Navy rank tabs."
Rasma waves a hand, dismissing the apology.
"What, you think I'm going to be upset that someone from the junior service doesn't know what they're doing?" She grinned, "C'mon, I'll give you the tour."
The Faithful Intervention wasn't a particularly large ship at just over two-hundred metres from stem to stern. Most of that length was given over to a quartet of massive drives, the machinery that put the 'fast' in fast picket, with a cramped crew pod slapped haphazardly on the front. She was neither sleek nor particularly pretty, and the inside was little better. There was clearly some sort of logic to the arrangement of things, but whatever it was Marie couldn't tell. The 'bridge' was a three person cockpit, fire control was a box in between an engine and the magazines and the mess was almost standing room only, just a collection of battered metal chairs and a rehydrator. The tour barely took ten minutes.
"And these are the bunks. Heads adjacent. I'm afraid with your team aboard, we'll be hot bunking but a rack's still better than whatever hole in the ground the Army had you in."
"I'll have you know that the mud of Endymion makes a perfectly good place to lay one's head, thank you very much." Marie bit back, grinning. She hadn't been in a foxhole for over a year, but she knew better than to deny the stereotypes. It was too much fun to tease sailors about their own inherent failings, after all.
She strapped her duffel to the nearest bunk and sat herself down on it. This zero-gee lark was going to take some getting used to, but she'd faced far harder challenges. After all, it wasn't like she was doing this - or anything else in life - alone.
Marie ran her hand through short curls, feeling the ends float gently. She said a small prayer that she'd already adjusted and that her stomach wasn't giving her trouble. After a minute or so of quiet, a hand appeared in front of her face.
"On your feet soldier, you've got a team to meet."
Days aboard the Faithful Intervention quickly turned to weeks and just as soon those weeks gave way to months. They would jump slowly across the new border into Affini space, moving from empty system to empty system until they made that precarious move into somewhere populated.
The ship would appear in the outer reaches of a star system previously held by the Accord, accelerate using those massive engines and then switch as much off as possible and simply… drift. They tried to look akin to an asteroid or other silent stellar object, hoping to pass themselves off as an anomaly of a magnetometer. Aboard ship the crew would go about their duties quietly, without hurry and in all the time they had they would simply watch. They would watch the comings and goings of great ships, scores of vessels larger than a Terran leviathan that seemed unsuited to the cold realities of space. They would study traffic, absorb radio signals, they would listen and, as always, they would watch.
Eventually the Captain would get twitchy and he'd tell the OCNI officer in charge of their little expeditions that enough was enough, that they'd be charging the jump drive and bugging out of this system and heading for home. The slimeball from OCNI would always complain, always try to twist and turn to get a little closer, stay a little longer, but eventually the Captain would insist and that would be that. They would jump away, heading for home, for resupply and a short rest. Then it was back out again.
There was little for Marie, Iskander and Elodie to do. They were, at least in theory, a specialist in enemy ground operations and a well of information about what to expect from them. What they actually were was a lucky survivor who had neither the technical expertise nor the actual depth of experience their CO expected of them. They were, in many ways, functionally useless.
Fortunately the Navy has never had an issue with giving jobs to idle hands. There were all sorts of things a physically fit, intelligent and - more important than anything else - unthinkingly dedicated soldier could do. They replaced small parts in even smaller access ways, they hauled supplies and they even filled out no small amount of paperwork.
At some point they fell into a routine of working with CPO Stern almost daily, checking in with her every few hours to find another job to do, another task to be set chasing after. It kept them busy, kept them focused, kept them tired. Every off-shift they got to collapse into their bunk and fall asleep almost immediately. It wasn't exactly the most rewarding of work, but it gave them a sense of satisfaction that even if they couldn't do much to contribute to the ship's main mission, they could at least do something.
It's also how they found themselves fucking Rasma pretty much daily.
Curled up against the tall, powerfully built woman, languishing in the sweat of their congress, Marie sighed with satisfaction. She ran her fingers across the other woman's stomach, enjoying the flutter of muscles tensing and untensing below the surface. A strong hand pressed into the small of her back, pulling her clips closer against Rasma's.
"Remind me again why this doesn't count as fraternisation?" Marie asked dreamily.
"Different chains of command. While I outrank you, I can't actually give you orders. Not that it seems to stop you from following them."
Marie flushed, burrowing her face into the other woman's side. A laugh resonated through her lover's ribcage, tickling her nose.
"I've never been suited to leadership. They only made me a sergeant because they didn't know what else to do with me." She said with a wry chuckle. Rasma rolled over, pressing her breasts against Marie's.
"You sure?"
"Uh, yeah? I skipped two grades to get this posting."
"No I mean…" Rasma sighed, touching her fingers to the underside of Marie's chin. She looked up, meeting the sailors' eyes. "Most of the time you're so soft and sweet, I'm amazed you even made it in the military. Then other times…" She paused, thinking, "Sometimes when you're on top of me, you get this look in your eyes. Like you're hungry. Like you want to pin me down and fuck me till you're spent."
Fuck , Iskander barked and it was all Marie could do not to start laughing.
She saw you,
What do we do, Marie, fuck!
I told you she'd see you!
Do we tell her? It finally asked
Do you wanna be a Section 8? I like her too, but I'm not stupid.
Marie giggled, pressing her face into Rasma's shoulder.
"Occasionally - and I mean very occasionally - I get over my hang-ups for long enough that topping seems like it could be fun."
"Yeah? Well," Rasma rolled on top of her, pressing her hips between Marie's and grinning, "Don't go getting any big ideas, okay?" She leaned forward, nipping at the soft skin of Marie's neck, eliciting a gasp, "I like how sweet you taste."
"Oh I wasn't going-" Her lover's fingers found somewhere sensitive and pressed, "Ohhhhh…"
Chapter 4 - Emergency Jump
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
Slowly, but surely, the Affini pushed back the border. They were like a growth of creeper plants climbing up the side of a house, tendrils stretching outwards into Accord space. They were spreading their roots with every passing day and every time the Faithful Intervention returned home it would have to go further into 'civilised' space to reach safe haven. Their routes back, slipping from between the grasping coils of the great enemy, became more circuitous, more cautious and less willing to take a chance. Nonetheless, they still saw every sign that things were not proceeding as planned.
They once stumbled across a fleet battle. Arriving in a system that was supposed to be their respite, they instead found nothing but danger. The Terran 9th fleet, the protectors of Endymion, that had an otherwise unheard of five Leviathans counted amongst their forces, were arrayed in full battle dress by the time the Intervention arrived. Rasma mirrored the ship's sensor returns on a screen down in the ready bay and the two NCO's watched anxiously as the Terran Cosmic Navy displayed its full might. Each of those massive dreadnoughts were surrounded by concentric rings of cruisers, destroyers, corvettes and fighters.
The Affini, on the other hand, drifted towards combat ranges in something that barely resembled a combat formation. There were twelve of their ships, 8 small ones, 3 medium ones and one far larger than the others. Marie could have laughed at the disparity of force strength on display. It wasn't until Rasma pointed out the scale of those ships that she began to understand just what she was looking at.
The largest Terran ship present was the CNS Valiant, one of the most modern Cosmic Navy dreadnoughts, which spanned a little more than fourteen hundred metres stem to stern. The absolute smallest of the twelve Affini ships was twice as long and half again as wide. The largest, the centrepiece of their fleet, was approaching thirty kilometres in length and could have held three Valiants laid end-to-end across her middle section.
They couldn't see the battle, couldn't watch the carnage, but she could imagine it. The Terran Navy would fire their main kinetic batteries, massive railgun slugs travelling across the darkness in fractions of a second. Missiles following after, nuclear and plasma warheads ready to tear apart armour plating and vent compartments to the cold void. The most powerful guns conceived of and built by human - by terran! - minds and hands would be turned on the most dangerous enemies ever encountered.
But the sheer size of the enemy fleet, the scope of those ships. Even those great guns, the powerful ships, the steely-eyed missile men and the sailors with a heart of oak, what could they do against a ship the size of a city.
The light blinked out, one by one. Not the enemies signatures, but the Terran ones. First a frigate then a pair of cruisers then, as if to punctuate the hopelessness, a dreadnought's lights winked out. One by one they disappeared until it culminated in the disappearance of every remaining terran light all at once.
"What happened?" Marie asked after several minutes of silence, finally finding her voice.
"Emergency jump." Rasma switched off the monitor, leaning back in her seat. She sighed, staring at the room's low ceiling, "Well executed and by the numbers, hardly a 'sauve qui peut' but a retreat nonetheless."
"''Sauve qui peut'?"
Run for your life! Elodie interjected.
"Save yourselves," Rasma gave a look of mock fear, a sarcastic tone undercutting her words, "Every sailor for themselves and don't look back to check on your buddies."
That's not right. The girl added with a pout.
"I don't get it." Marie took a deep breath, mind racing a mile a minute as she considered the consequences of what she'd just seen. "That was… that was the most ships I've ever seen in one place and they just, what, they just left? We're supposed to be fighting back, we're supposed to be, I don't know, doing something!"
Rasma reached out an arm and pulled Marie against her. They sat like that for some time, resting against each other in silence. There wasn't anything that either of them could say. Eventually the console between them beeped and the sailor leaned forwards.
"The captain had the telescope trained the entire time. We're a few light hours away so we're only just getting pictures of the engagement. Want to get a real look at what we're dealing with?"
Marie didn't. She didn't want anything to do with this war, not anymore. Not after she'd watched a platoon, a fleet, a planet, a system, all crumple in the face of this enemy.
I do , Iskander said, quietly subsuming control, letting Marie drop backwards. It squared its shoulders and met Rasma's worried look with a lackadaisical smile and a nod.
What followed were a flurry of photos, each a snapshot taken through an extremely powerful telescope array mounted along the flank of the ship. The computer interpreted a thousand bits of data, light and heat and all kinds of radiation, and turned them into real images a human could understand.
At least, they were supposed to. When it first looked through the pictures, Iskander couldn't really, truly see what it was looking at. It seemed like the Affini ships had burst open, tendrils and vines flailing out into the void and lashing at the darkness like the guts of a disembowelled creature. Then it looked closer, saw pictures that were further zoomed in, and it saw the truth; at the centre of these writhing masses, captured in the grasp of these monstrous alien vessels, were terran ships. It could barely make out the largest of them, but there they were, unmistakable in their design and in how trapped they were.
Other pictures, later ones from after the engagement had ended, showed the Affini ships reaching orbit, hovering over the planet and spilling a thousand seeds from within themselves. These touched the upper atmosphere and glowed, like fireflies, as they dropped towards the surface. Landing forces? Orbital bombardment? Difficult to say from here.
"Gods above, they're monstrous." It murmured, flicking back and forth between the pictures. One particularly eye-catching shot showed an Accord cruiser pierced amidships by a gigantic vine. Other, smaller, tendrils wrapped around it. It was the battle between their platoon and the Affini back on Doldrum all over again. Just as it had been there, the Terran forces were overwhelmed in minutes.
Iskander wondered how long it would take for the Affini ship to crush the Terran vessel. It hoped it would be quick, for everyone's sake.
Their search pattern accelerated after that, shorter missions that took them further, faster in the desperate hope that they and the other scout ships would find even the barest scrap of information with utility. Slowly but surely ships would fail to return. Howe knew of eight ships that were part of the shared mission into Affini space and in the course of barely a few months they were reduced to just three.
Even as they were pressed back deeper into the core of Terran space, they could see the stress the war was placing on the Navy, on the crews, even on civilians. The stations they docked at to rest and resupply were filled with tired looking workers, exhausted stevedores and wounded sailors pressed into roles they could still perform despite their injuries. It was the clearest signs they'd ever seen not just that the war was happening but that the Accord probably wasn't currently on the winning side.
It wasn't just stationside that they saw changes: even aboard a 'strategically-vital' ship they were reduced to eating ration packs instead of even the simplest of mess meals. They hadn't seen a fresh vegetable in weeks, let alone meat. At least there was still variety in the chemically-induced flavours even if the texture was somewhat samey no matter what the meal was supposed to be.
What are we even still doing here? Marie wondered, not for the first time, we could bolt the next time we make port. It's not like the Accord has the time to hunt for us.
You're so right, we should desert the Army while we're at war. I'm sure that will end in something other than capital punishment. Iskander bit back.
Is maybe getting caught worse than definitely going to get ourselves killed fighting the Affini?
Marie, I- It paused, collecting its feelings before letting out something akin to a sigh, You know I've never really wanted to be here. I've never wanted us to be in the army at all.
I'm sor-
No, darling, no apologies. I'm not trying to make you feel bad. You did what felt right for you and I don't begrudge you that. But now we're here we're going to keep ourselves safe. You understand that, yes?
There was a pause, a long, pregnant silence. It lasted for a handful of heartbeats, maybe ten at the most. Then, finally, she spoke.
I know . She laughed, a half choked chuckle, We're not doing great at it, are we? Stuck out here on a near defenceless scout ship.
We'll be okay, Marie. I'll make sure of it.
The ship was heading home from another successful mission. Well, successful perhaps wasn't the right word. They had been deep into what was now Affini space, focusing their sensors on planets that had once been part of the Accord. Worlds that had hosted shipyards, orbital factories and cramped little space colonies all suspended above smog brown and smoke grey clouds were a staple of the Terran Accord, the final fate of any planet that was held under the thumb of the system for long enough. That wasn't what they had found, though. The stations and yards had been replaced by massive Affini ships orbiting slowly, ponderous in their bulk. The horrible poisonous atmosphere was thinning, giving a view of the surface for what might have been the first time in decades.
It wondered what had become of the population. Some of these planets had thousands or even millions of people living on them and had done so for generations. Were they being put to work in labour camps, were they being rounded up for execution? Perhaps it was even worse than that.
Iskander didn't believe the rumour of the Affini eating people. It wasn't a realistic fear, just a horror story straight out of a cheap sci-fi book. That didn't make it impossible, but given that the Accord could grow vat-meat fast enough to make it a basic staple, it was far less likely than some seemed to believe. If they could cross the stars, they could feed their armies, couldn't they?
Wherever they were, Iskander hoped they were… comfortable was the wrong word. Safe, maybe. Alive, at least.
"All hands, prepare for jump, all hands prepare for jump."
The intercom was barely necessary, you could shout from one end of the ship to the other and either way Iskander had been wearing its suit for an hour already. This was their last jump before home, their last stop before at least a week or two of R&R. Everyone aboard was ready for some rest.
"General Quarters, All crew to ready stations, General Quarters."
Iskander pulled itself upright and trotted down a small hallway. It was part of a damage control team, a group of four who waited in near silence through jumps and tense situations. Even after months aboard, it barely knew them as more than names and faces. The regular sailors weren't even part of its chain of command, but there was no point getting close to them - they kept getting rotated out due to combat stress anyway.
"All Hands, jump in T-minus Ten."
It secured itself in a harness, pulled down its faceplate and watched the suit sealing light tick green. Trying to relax, it spent the last few seconds prior to transition, pressing its head back into the bulkhead and waiting.
The slide through jump space was near instantaneous, hardly noticeable to anyone aboard the Faithful Intervention, and still somehow made Iskander feel nauseous. The doctors had called it a psychosomatic symptom of discomfort around interstellar travel, something that affected more than one in ten humans who travelled between the stars, and labelled it fit for service aboard a starship.
Lights flickered as power was re-diverted away from the drive and back into the ship's main systems, taking them back off of reserve batteries. Iskander sighed, untensing muscles it hadn't even realised it had clenched.
"All Hands, prepare to stand down from General Quarters, prepare to-... What the fuck?"
Iskanders eyes snapped open, muscles locking rigid. The ship shuddered, throwing the four members of its DamCon team against their harnesses. It looked around, raising a hand to forestall questions. It waited, holding a breath. Finally, a set of warning lights lit up its faceplate and a voice came through clear on its headphones.
"DamCon team to three deck forrard. DamCon team to three deck forrard." Rasmas voice was clear and confident, coordinating the response to, what, enemy weapons fire?
"You heard the woman!" Iskander called, popping its harness open and letting its mag clamps lock it to the deck, "Grab a soft-lock and a power cutter, plus standards. On the bounce, sailors!"
If they minded being ordered around by a member of the Army, they didn't show it. Instead, they burst into action, grabbing equipment that was strapped to the walls. Iskander picked up the fire axe that was secured over its head and made for the doorway.
Three deck forwards was hardly far - ten paces, a ladder shaft, another ten paces, around a corner and-
There was a gods-damned vine shoved through a bulkhead. It seemed like it had come through the starboard side and went straight out to port, and nothing in between had come close to stopping it. Air was venting around the hole on both sides, lighting up the low pressure alert on Iskanders visor.
It's them. They've got us. Marie's voice was small, scared. Smaller vines, fronds and leaves were spreading out from the point of penetration, The Affini are here .
Yeah, well, they're not gonna win today .
"Simmons, curtain of this side. Mitchell, head up to two deck, see if you can get on the other side and do the same there. Laska, got that power cutter? Good, give it here and find an outlet."
Iskander hefted the cutter - a chunky piece of equipment that fired a six-inch beam of plasma and could cut through an armoured bulkhead in minutes - and waited. Behind it, Simmons was sealing up a thin polymer barrier, and Mitchell would do the same on the other side. It would create an airlock that, other than the tiny gap allowing the cutter's power cable, would stop the loss of oxygen aboard the ship. Iskander waited, watching the small vines and leaves grow and stretch and twist and-
The holes in the hull sealed up. Air pressure normalised, even rising to a tiny overpressure, bowing the plastic sheeting of the soft-lock outwards. It pulled an air composition sensor from its belt, watching as the orange light pinged for a few seconds before turning green. It could, if it was an idiot, take off its helmet and breathe fresh air.
How in the hell? Iskander said to itself, reaching towards the shattered edges of the bulkhead and the plant life that was still knotting and curling around the damaged section.
A tug on the cutter's power cable dragged it back to its senses and it snatched its hand back. A tiny curl of fern-frond that had been reaching out to meet its finger shrivelled away, unnoticed by the suited soldier.
Let's see how a plant handles this.
The cutter flared and sputtered, spilling coarse light into the freshly enclosed space. Iskanders faceplate automatically darkened to protect its eyes, flashing a dark brown against the arcing blue plasma. Slowly but surely it brought it down against the vine.
The mass of plantlife screamed. Not vocally, it didn't open a strange monstrous mouth, but the space was filled with a high-pitched keening sound that overwhelmed Iskanders external mics and filled its ears with static. It ripped backwards, pulling away so suddenly that it tore the smaller vines away and left them curling and floating in the null-grav environment. The air between the two soft-locks was sucked away in barely a moment, thin polymer sheets holding the rest of the Faithful Interventions atmosphere inside. The team had done that part of its job right and done it well.
"All Hands, All Hands, Brace for Emergency Jump."
Iskanders head snapped up, even as the voice was piped into its ears. They weren't supposed to jump so soon after returning into realspace, the drive had to cool off, they had to vent exotic matter, right? It stared at a blank spot on the wall, wracking its brain, trying to remember everything that Rasma had taught it about the ship's systems.
It dumped the cutter and shoved its way back through the soft-lock, the plastic sealing behind it.
"Strap in, now!" It yelled at its team, grabbing one part of a harness and wrapping it around its forearm. It watched Simmons and Laska strap in, took a deep breath and tensed.
Did time freeze, or was that a response to a traumatic experience? Iskander felt like it was thinking at a normal pace and everything around it was moving ever so slowly. The faces of the damage control team. The light from above, sharp and white. The soft-lock fluttered gently as it attempted to seal the gap between the atmosphere of the ship and the harsh void of space. The jump happened (was happening? Was going to happen?) and was followed (accompanied by?) by a grinding, tearing sound. A flush of heat washed along the corridor, an outgassing from a drive that couldn't possibly have cooled properly. The ship was going to die, they were all going to die. Everything stretched like rubber, an impossibility of existence split between two realspace points of being.
I'm so sorry. It said to nobody in particular as the Faithful Intervention split in half.
They once stumbled across a fleet battle. Arriving in a system that was supposed to be their respite, they instead found nothing but danger. The Terran 9th fleet, the protectors of Endymion, that had an otherwise unheard of five Leviathans counted amongst their forces, were arrayed in full battle dress by the time the Intervention arrived. Rasma mirrored the ship's sensor returns on a screen down in the ready bay and the two NCO's watched anxiously as the Terran Cosmic Navy displayed its full might. Each of those massive dreadnoughts were surrounded by concentric rings of cruisers, destroyers, corvettes and fighters.
The Affini, on the other hand, drifted towards combat ranges in something that barely resembled a combat formation. There were twelve of their ships, 8 small ones, 3 medium ones and one far larger than the others. Marie could have laughed at the disparity of force strength on display. It wasn't until Rasma pointed out the scale of those ships that she began to understand just what she was looking at.
The largest Terran ship present was the CNS Valiant, one of the most modern Cosmic Navy dreadnoughts, which spanned a little more than fourteen hundred metres stem to stern. The absolute smallest of the twelve Affini ships was twice as long and half again as wide. The largest, the centrepiece of their fleet, was approaching thirty kilometres in length and could have held three Valiants laid end-to-end across her middle section.
They couldn't see the battle, couldn't watch the carnage, but she could imagine it. The Terran Navy would fire their main kinetic batteries, massive railgun slugs travelling across the darkness in fractions of a second. Missiles following after, nuclear and plasma warheads ready to tear apart armour plating and vent compartments to the cold void. The most powerful guns conceived of and built by human - by terran! - minds and hands would be turned on the most dangerous enemies ever encountered.
But the sheer size of the enemy fleet, the scope of those ships. Even those great guns, the powerful ships, the steely-eyed missile men and the sailors with a heart of oak, what could they do against a ship the size of a city.
The light blinked out, one by one. Not the enemies signatures, but the Terran ones. First a frigate then a pair of cruisers then, as if to punctuate the hopelessness, a dreadnought's lights winked out. One by one they disappeared until it culminated in the disappearance of every remaining terran light all at once.
"What happened?" Marie asked after several minutes of silence, finally finding her voice.
"Emergency jump." Rasma switched off the monitor, leaning back in her seat. She sighed, staring at the room's low ceiling, "Well executed and by the numbers, hardly a 'sauve qui peut' but a retreat nonetheless."
"''Sauve qui peut'?"
Run for your life! Elodie interjected.
"Save yourselves," Rasma gave a look of mock fear, a sarcastic tone undercutting her words, "Every sailor for themselves and don't look back to check on your buddies."
That's not right. The girl added with a pout.
"I don't get it." Marie took a deep breath, mind racing a mile a minute as she considered the consequences of what she'd just seen. "That was… that was the most ships I've ever seen in one place and they just, what, they just left? We're supposed to be fighting back, we're supposed to be, I don't know, doing something!"
Rasma reached out an arm and pulled Marie against her. They sat like that for some time, resting against each other in silence. There wasn't anything that either of them could say. Eventually the console between them beeped and the sailor leaned forwards.
"The captain had the telescope trained the entire time. We're a few light hours away so we're only just getting pictures of the engagement. Want to get a real look at what we're dealing with?"
Marie didn't. She didn't want anything to do with this war, not anymore. Not after she'd watched a platoon, a fleet, a planet, a system, all crumple in the face of this enemy.
I do , Iskander said, quietly subsuming control, letting Marie drop backwards. It squared its shoulders and met Rasma's worried look with a lackadaisical smile and a nod.
What followed were a flurry of photos, each a snapshot taken through an extremely powerful telescope array mounted along the flank of the ship. The computer interpreted a thousand bits of data, light and heat and all kinds of radiation, and turned them into real images a human could understand.
At least, they were supposed to. When it first looked through the pictures, Iskander couldn't really, truly see what it was looking at. It seemed like the Affini ships had burst open, tendrils and vines flailing out into the void and lashing at the darkness like the guts of a disembowelled creature. Then it looked closer, saw pictures that were further zoomed in, and it saw the truth; at the centre of these writhing masses, captured in the grasp of these monstrous alien vessels, were terran ships. It could barely make out the largest of them, but there they were, unmistakable in their design and in how trapped they were.
Other pictures, later ones from after the engagement had ended, showed the Affini ships reaching orbit, hovering over the planet and spilling a thousand seeds from within themselves. These touched the upper atmosphere and glowed, like fireflies, as they dropped towards the surface. Landing forces? Orbital bombardment? Difficult to say from here.
"Gods above, they're monstrous." It murmured, flicking back and forth between the pictures. One particularly eye-catching shot showed an Accord cruiser pierced amidships by a gigantic vine. Other, smaller, tendrils wrapped around it. It was the battle between their platoon and the Affini back on Doldrum all over again. Just as it had been there, the Terran forces were overwhelmed in minutes.
Iskander wondered how long it would take for the Affini ship to crush the Terran vessel. It hoped it would be quick, for everyone's sake.
Their search pattern accelerated after that, shorter missions that took them further, faster in the desperate hope that they and the other scout ships would find even the barest scrap of information with utility. Slowly but surely ships would fail to return. Howe knew of eight ships that were part of the shared mission into Affini space and in the course of barely a few months they were reduced to just three.
Even as they were pressed back deeper into the core of Terran space, they could see the stress the war was placing on the Navy, on the crews, even on civilians. The stations they docked at to rest and resupply were filled with tired looking workers, exhausted stevedores and wounded sailors pressed into roles they could still perform despite their injuries. It was the clearest signs they'd ever seen not just that the war was happening but that the Accord probably wasn't currently on the winning side.
It wasn't just stationside that they saw changes: even aboard a 'strategically-vital' ship they were reduced to eating ration packs instead of even the simplest of mess meals. They hadn't seen a fresh vegetable in weeks, let alone meat. At least there was still variety in the chemically-induced flavours even if the texture was somewhat samey no matter what the meal was supposed to be.
What are we even still doing here? Marie wondered, not for the first time, we could bolt the next time we make port. It's not like the Accord has the time to hunt for us.
You're so right, we should desert the Army while we're at war. I'm sure that will end in something other than capital punishment. Iskander bit back.
Is maybe getting caught worse than definitely going to get ourselves killed fighting the Affini?
Marie, I- It paused, collecting its feelings before letting out something akin to a sigh, You know I've never really wanted to be here. I've never wanted us to be in the army at all.
I'm sor-
No, darling, no apologies. I'm not trying to make you feel bad. You did what felt right for you and I don't begrudge you that. But now we're here we're going to keep ourselves safe. You understand that, yes?
There was a pause, a long, pregnant silence. It lasted for a handful of heartbeats, maybe ten at the most. Then, finally, she spoke.
I know . She laughed, a half choked chuckle, We're not doing great at it, are we? Stuck out here on a near defenceless scout ship.
We'll be okay, Marie. I'll make sure of it.
The ship was heading home from another successful mission. Well, successful perhaps wasn't the right word. They had been deep into what was now Affini space, focusing their sensors on planets that had once been part of the Accord. Worlds that had hosted shipyards, orbital factories and cramped little space colonies all suspended above smog brown and smoke grey clouds were a staple of the Terran Accord, the final fate of any planet that was held under the thumb of the system for long enough. That wasn't what they had found, though. The stations and yards had been replaced by massive Affini ships orbiting slowly, ponderous in their bulk. The horrible poisonous atmosphere was thinning, giving a view of the surface for what might have been the first time in decades.
It wondered what had become of the population. Some of these planets had thousands or even millions of people living on them and had done so for generations. Were they being put to work in labour camps, were they being rounded up for execution? Perhaps it was even worse than that.
Iskander didn't believe the rumour of the Affini eating people. It wasn't a realistic fear, just a horror story straight out of a cheap sci-fi book. That didn't make it impossible, but given that the Accord could grow vat-meat fast enough to make it a basic staple, it was far less likely than some seemed to believe. If they could cross the stars, they could feed their armies, couldn't they?
Wherever they were, Iskander hoped they were… comfortable was the wrong word. Safe, maybe. Alive, at least.
"All hands, prepare for jump, all hands prepare for jump."
The intercom was barely necessary, you could shout from one end of the ship to the other and either way Iskander had been wearing its suit for an hour already. This was their last jump before home, their last stop before at least a week or two of R&R. Everyone aboard was ready for some rest.
"General Quarters, All crew to ready stations, General Quarters."
Iskander pulled itself upright and trotted down a small hallway. It was part of a damage control team, a group of four who waited in near silence through jumps and tense situations. Even after months aboard, it barely knew them as more than names and faces. The regular sailors weren't even part of its chain of command, but there was no point getting close to them - they kept getting rotated out due to combat stress anyway.
"All Hands, jump in T-minus Ten."
It secured itself in a harness, pulled down its faceplate and watched the suit sealing light tick green. Trying to relax, it spent the last few seconds prior to transition, pressing its head back into the bulkhead and waiting.
The slide through jump space was near instantaneous, hardly noticeable to anyone aboard the Faithful Intervention, and still somehow made Iskander feel nauseous. The doctors had called it a psychosomatic symptom of discomfort around interstellar travel, something that affected more than one in ten humans who travelled between the stars, and labelled it fit for service aboard a starship.
Lights flickered as power was re-diverted away from the drive and back into the ship's main systems, taking them back off of reserve batteries. Iskander sighed, untensing muscles it hadn't even realised it had clenched.
"All Hands, prepare to stand down from General Quarters, prepare to-... What the fuck?"
Iskanders eyes snapped open, muscles locking rigid. The ship shuddered, throwing the four members of its DamCon team against their harnesses. It looked around, raising a hand to forestall questions. It waited, holding a breath. Finally, a set of warning lights lit up its faceplate and a voice came through clear on its headphones.
"DamCon team to three deck forrard. DamCon team to three deck forrard." Rasmas voice was clear and confident, coordinating the response to, what, enemy weapons fire?
"You heard the woman!" Iskander called, popping its harness open and letting its mag clamps lock it to the deck, "Grab a soft-lock and a power cutter, plus standards. On the bounce, sailors!"
If they minded being ordered around by a member of the Army, they didn't show it. Instead, they burst into action, grabbing equipment that was strapped to the walls. Iskander picked up the fire axe that was secured over its head and made for the doorway.
Three deck forwards was hardly far - ten paces, a ladder shaft, another ten paces, around a corner and-
There was a gods-damned vine shoved through a bulkhead. It seemed like it had come through the starboard side and went straight out to port, and nothing in between had come close to stopping it. Air was venting around the hole on both sides, lighting up the low pressure alert on Iskanders visor.
It's them. They've got us. Marie's voice was small, scared. Smaller vines, fronds and leaves were spreading out from the point of penetration, The Affini are here .
Yeah, well, they're not gonna win today .
"Simmons, curtain of this side. Mitchell, head up to two deck, see if you can get on the other side and do the same there. Laska, got that power cutter? Good, give it here and find an outlet."
Iskander hefted the cutter - a chunky piece of equipment that fired a six-inch beam of plasma and could cut through an armoured bulkhead in minutes - and waited. Behind it, Simmons was sealing up a thin polymer barrier, and Mitchell would do the same on the other side. It would create an airlock that, other than the tiny gap allowing the cutter's power cable, would stop the loss of oxygen aboard the ship. Iskander waited, watching the small vines and leaves grow and stretch and twist and-
The holes in the hull sealed up. Air pressure normalised, even rising to a tiny overpressure, bowing the plastic sheeting of the soft-lock outwards. It pulled an air composition sensor from its belt, watching as the orange light pinged for a few seconds before turning green. It could, if it was an idiot, take off its helmet and breathe fresh air.
How in the hell? Iskander said to itself, reaching towards the shattered edges of the bulkhead and the plant life that was still knotting and curling around the damaged section.
A tug on the cutter's power cable dragged it back to its senses and it snatched its hand back. A tiny curl of fern-frond that had been reaching out to meet its finger shrivelled away, unnoticed by the suited soldier.
Let's see how a plant handles this.
The cutter flared and sputtered, spilling coarse light into the freshly enclosed space. Iskanders faceplate automatically darkened to protect its eyes, flashing a dark brown against the arcing blue plasma. Slowly but surely it brought it down against the vine.
The mass of plantlife screamed. Not vocally, it didn't open a strange monstrous mouth, but the space was filled with a high-pitched keening sound that overwhelmed Iskanders external mics and filled its ears with static. It ripped backwards, pulling away so suddenly that it tore the smaller vines away and left them curling and floating in the null-grav environment. The air between the two soft-locks was sucked away in barely a moment, thin polymer sheets holding the rest of the Faithful Interventions atmosphere inside. The team had done that part of its job right and done it well.
"All Hands, All Hands, Brace for Emergency Jump."
Iskanders head snapped up, even as the voice was piped into its ears. They weren't supposed to jump so soon after returning into realspace, the drive had to cool off, they had to vent exotic matter, right? It stared at a blank spot on the wall, wracking its brain, trying to remember everything that Rasma had taught it about the ship's systems.
It dumped the cutter and shoved its way back through the soft-lock, the plastic sealing behind it.
"Strap in, now!" It yelled at its team, grabbing one part of a harness and wrapping it around its forearm. It watched Simmons and Laska strap in, took a deep breath and tensed.
Did time freeze, or was that a response to a traumatic experience? Iskander felt like it was thinking at a normal pace and everything around it was moving ever so slowly. The faces of the damage control team. The light from above, sharp and white. The soft-lock fluttered gently as it attempted to seal the gap between the atmosphere of the ship and the harsh void of space. The jump happened (was happening? Was going to happen?) and was followed (accompanied by?) by a grinding, tearing sound. A flush of heat washed along the corridor, an outgassing from a drive that couldn't possibly have cooled properly. The ship was going to die, they were all going to die. Everything stretched like rubber, an impossibility of existence split between two realspace points of being.
I'm so sorry. It said to nobody in particular as the Faithful Intervention split in half.
Chapter 5 - Hospitalised
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
The first time Marie came to it was for just long enough to see the stars. She watched the pinpricks of light studded in the firmament move as she spun ever so slowly. Some of them glittered gold and blue and orange and faded and faded, and she was gone.
The second time Marie came to, it was to the sounds of a minor alert flashing against her faceplate. She grumbled wordlessly, trying to blink away the flashing light that was forcing her into consciousness. Finally, she opened her eyes properly, fighting down a wave of nausea and checking her vitals.
Heart rate fine, blood pressure fine, so significant signs of injury, suit integrity compromised, minor air leak.
The last bit finally brought her out of her funk. She bit back the urge to panic, instead focusing on everything she'd been taught, every emergency survival lesson. She kept her breathing slow so as not to waste her air supply and moved slowly, ever so slowly, to check herself over. She rolled her wrists, checked her elbows, turned left and right to look over her shoulders. Then she - again, moving slowly to avoid inducing a roll - pulled her knees up to her chest to look over her legs and feet.
Ah. There. A small tear, presumably caused by a piece of debris, had nicked the inner lining. The suit wasn't able to self seal because of the position of the damage, and now it was leaking precious O2 out into the void. Marie murmured a small prayer that it hadn't got worse and pulled a syringe of sealant from her belt. Spraying it into the tear, she uncurled and sighed. As the alarm ceased, and she calmed, she passed into oblivion once more.
The syringe floated away, another piece of junk leftover from the death of a starship.
The third time Marie came to, she almost panicked. She couldn't feel the tight confines of her suit, couldn't see the blinking readouts of her heads up display. Nothing was right. Was she dead? Was this the afterlife?
It took her a few seconds to register the eye-piercing lights and the sounds of AC units. If this was heaven, the ceiling looked a lot like a medical bay and felt a lot like one too. She blinked, hard, trying to process. Her attempt to take a deep breath was foiled by a plug of plastic blocking her nose. She retched, gagged on it, tried to haul herself upright and almost screamed as a catheter's needle was pressed too deeply into her elbow.
She flopped back into the bed as a heart monitor went into overdrive beside the bed, pinging overwhelming sounds into her ear. She tried to take long, soothing breaths, ignoring the feeling of plastic dragging at the inside of her sinuses. Slowly but surely the beeping slowed and she sighed.
Where the fuck have we ended up? She wondered, staring at the square ceiling panels.
Look on the bright side. We're not dead. Iskanders voice was like a wash of warm feelings inside their headspace.
Not for want of trying. She groaned as fresh memories swam into her head, I thought double-jumping-
It was a stupid idea. Guess the Captain panicked.
The… the others? The rest of the crew? Marie couldn't bring herself to ask what she wanted to ask.
I know as much as you do, my love. Try to rest. We clearly need it.
She tried to relax, she really did. She tried to force her brain to settle, tried to grow accustomed to the sounds of medical machinery and the other noises that infiltrated the room. It didn't work. Every rattle of a gurney, every half-heard shout that she couldn't make out the content of, each one tugged at her attention and dragged her back into the room.
She tried not to think about it, but she kept coming back to the ship, the Faithful Intervention. It was gone, destroyed. She might have hated it, hated the cramped bunks, the stinking mess, the scutwork, but it was home for months. She'd grown used to the routines and the way everything worked. The noise. The rumble of the engines. She-
Marie. Stop.
She couldn't help it. She hadn't got close to many people aboard, not the DamCon team, not the Army unit, not the Captain, but… Rasma Stern. Was she dead? Captured? She couldn't imagine the Affini had managed to grab anyone through a fucked misjump. What the fuck had the Captain been thinking, what the fuck had any of them been-
Marie! Iskander snapped, loud enough to make her jump.
What?
You're spiralling. You need to ground.
I- She paused. She couldn't breathe like she needed to, but she could feel the synth-cloth bedding under her fingertips, she could hear the pings of hospital tech, and could see the ceiling tiles. She started counting cracks, actively following the scatter-shot patterns as she felt herself calming.
The door slammed open and she almost screamed. A harassed looking man who couldn't be a day under sixty hurried in, white coat flapping as he flicked through papers on a clipboard. He grabbed up another board from the foot of her bed, scanning over it quickly.
"Sorry I didn't get to you sooner, we're busy," He apologised without ever sounding like he was sorry at all, "Sergeant Marie Howe, detached service?"
"Uh-" She croaked, throat dry, "whas-"
"Are you with us yet?" He peered over his glasses, expression severe. She nodded in reply. He stepped around the bed, casting his eyes over the machines and monitors.
"Do you know who you are?"
She nodded again.
"Do you know where you are?"
She shook her head. He sighed, rubbing his eyes.
"Welcome to Peralez, I suppose. You've been here for a week, we've had you in something akin to a medically induced coma for five days so that you could…" he shrugged, "heal.
"Wha happen-" She paused, cleared her throat, "Space. I was spaced."
"You certainly were. A recovery team found you about an hour before your O2 ran out. Not so lucky for the corpses they pulled out of the debris field."
Fuck.
"Who?" She croaked.
"I'm sure you can find a list at some point. For now, we need to think about recovery. Ready for that tube to come out of your face?"
She nodded, and he stepped towards, leaning over her.
"Now… this is going to feel like hell for a few seconds."
It wasn't hell, but it was almost unlike anything she'd ever felt. A dragging from somewhere behind her eyes, a scraping, rasping feeling that made her want to throw up and cough and sneeze all at one. It lasted far longer than she expected it too, and not one bit of it was anything but unpleasant - or worse.
Finally, it was done, and the doctor was backing away. Smells hit her suddenly, a shock of alcohol sanitiser, shit, blood and the overpowering aftershave of the man now once again standing at the foot of her bed. He looked over her charts again and dropped them on the end of the bed. They should have hit her, but she didn't feel a thing.
"I'll have a nurse come and disconnect your lines soon. You should be able to eat an actual meal tonight."
"Can't feel… leg?" She murmured, already exhausted from the conversation.
"That doesn't surprise me. When you were recovered, there was damage to your suit's lining, as I understand it. There was vacuum damage to the foot and ankle. The recovery team decided it wasn't economical to attempt a save."
His tone was almost conversational, casual, but he was talking about her leg? She pulled on the sheets weakly, trying to uncover her feet.
"No… I sealed that?"
"Seems it was too late. Nothing to do. The Army will pay for a replacement, of course. Now try to get some rest. Your body needs it." He walked out of the room, pulling the door closed behind him.
She wanted to scream again, wanted to rage. It wasn't economical? It didn't fit financially to recover her fucking foot? She wanted to… to…
She wanted to sleep. She was so tired. She slipped into unconsciousness so easily she hardly noticed.
It took her another week to leave the hospital, and three months after that to get out of the veterans' recuperation centre she was transferred to. It took her that long to adjust to the new foot the army had given her, a chunky, ungainly prosthetic that was at least tied into her nervous system on a basic level. It couldn't move like her flesh and blood original, but she could mostly keep her balance after ten weeks of learning and a cane to assist her.
She was discharged as well, of course. Honourably, and with a bump to Staff Sergeant that meant her pension was ever so slightly better than it would be otherwise, but she was still out of a job and a home. They couldn't do anything with a disabled soldier, not with the implants that Army Insurance was willing to cover. If she could have paid for a bioidentical model out of her own pocket, then, well, maybe they could have done something, but it was too late for that now.
They at least paid her passage off of Peralez, giving her a one way ticket to wherever she wanted to go. She had spent another week racking her brain trying to find a destination. The Army had been her home for years, and the planet she'd been born on was nothing but a rock with nothing worth going back for. The only place that ever came to mind was Alcurops, the place she'd met Angelique and where hopefully she would find her again.
The trip was uneventful. Apparently, civilian traffic was still moving within what was left of Accord space. The newscasts she saw while she was travelling were even worse than the last time, full of reports of glorious victories and brave soldiers holding back the tide. Recruitment adverts showed every couple of minutes, suggesting it was every Terrans - not humans, Terrans - duty to hold back the tide of the evil alien threat. She sat in an uncomfortable economy seat, a half-upright design that meant she could never quite relax, watching ad rolls and reports that just made her angry. Where was the honesty, the integrity? Had they always been like this, and she'd just, what, missed it?
She shuffled off the transport at the other end in a foul mood. Clumping down the stationside walkway, one boot heavier than the other, she found herself glaring. People were sitting outside cafés, drinking coffee or beer, laughing and joking and smiling. Couples walked past her hand in hand, making doe-eyes. They had a right to it, they deserved it; it was, in theory, why she had been fighting at all.
But on the other hand, she'd just walked away the only survivor from two fucked up military ops. She'd lost a platoon, a planet, a ship, all in a little less than a year. If she was honest with herself, she'd go so far as to say she'd lost a love. She was in pain, and not just from the ache of her prosthetic. The rawness of her feelings were scratched and scraped by the apparent oblivious response of the people around her. Not oblivious to her, but to the pain that was being suffered not so very far away, as a war was being conducted in their names.
She found a sailor's hostel and paid for a week. Somewhere to rest her head while she got herself settled. She could drop down to the surface, cheap enough. Find work, find a flat. Find an old friend.
[Curious] a mass of vines shifted, pulling screens closer to six eyes that glowed.
[What is?] the other asked, shifting to peer over what could be a shoulder and could just as easily be a leg.
[The mining world where we saw action last. There was a sophont, part of their ground combat unit.]
[I remember. 'Missing in Action' is quite the euphemism.] It sent some vines out to mingle with the others, tangling the two creatures together.
[Quite. I set up a couple of data taps to look for information relating to them. There was surprisingly little, but not long ago, I found them again.]
[They're alive? I had assumed-]
[We all had. Not just alive, but still fighting.]
[You must admire the spirit of these little terrans. To go back to fighting is remarkable, when they're so small and delicate.]
[No. I don't. I would much prefer they simply surrendered. It is the optimal solution.]
[Perhaps.] It extended another vine, wrapping itself around its kin more closely until they were almost intermingled, [Tell me about the sophont.]
[She - I understand she uses she/her - was aboard a tiny little ship that got caught up in the Trifasciata's web.]
[So she's been captured? Excellent news.] It's vines and leaves extended suddenly in pleasant surprise, [But wait, the Trifasciata was-]
[Heavily damaged. The little ship tried to jump away. It did not end well.]
The other Affini's leaves drooped, flowers wilting,
[So she's-]
[I'd have thought so, but my taps have pulled more data. She's still alive.]
[This is too much! You are doing this on purpose.]
[However could I resist?] It said, and wrapped itself around its frustrated companion, soothing it with deft vine strokes and rumbling sounds.
The second time Marie came to, it was to the sounds of a minor alert flashing against her faceplate. She grumbled wordlessly, trying to blink away the flashing light that was forcing her into consciousness. Finally, she opened her eyes properly, fighting down a wave of nausea and checking her vitals.
Heart rate fine, blood pressure fine, so significant signs of injury, suit integrity compromised, minor air leak.
The last bit finally brought her out of her funk. She bit back the urge to panic, instead focusing on everything she'd been taught, every emergency survival lesson. She kept her breathing slow so as not to waste her air supply and moved slowly, ever so slowly, to check herself over. She rolled her wrists, checked her elbows, turned left and right to look over her shoulders. Then she - again, moving slowly to avoid inducing a roll - pulled her knees up to her chest to look over her legs and feet.
Ah. There. A small tear, presumably caused by a piece of debris, had nicked the inner lining. The suit wasn't able to self seal because of the position of the damage, and now it was leaking precious O2 out into the void. Marie murmured a small prayer that it hadn't got worse and pulled a syringe of sealant from her belt. Spraying it into the tear, she uncurled and sighed. As the alarm ceased, and she calmed, she passed into oblivion once more.
The syringe floated away, another piece of junk leftover from the death of a starship.
The third time Marie came to, she almost panicked. She couldn't feel the tight confines of her suit, couldn't see the blinking readouts of her heads up display. Nothing was right. Was she dead? Was this the afterlife?
It took her a few seconds to register the eye-piercing lights and the sounds of AC units. If this was heaven, the ceiling looked a lot like a medical bay and felt a lot like one too. She blinked, hard, trying to process. Her attempt to take a deep breath was foiled by a plug of plastic blocking her nose. She retched, gagged on it, tried to haul herself upright and almost screamed as a catheter's needle was pressed too deeply into her elbow.
She flopped back into the bed as a heart monitor went into overdrive beside the bed, pinging overwhelming sounds into her ear. She tried to take long, soothing breaths, ignoring the feeling of plastic dragging at the inside of her sinuses. Slowly but surely the beeping slowed and she sighed.
Where the fuck have we ended up? She wondered, staring at the square ceiling panels.
Look on the bright side. We're not dead. Iskanders voice was like a wash of warm feelings inside their headspace.
Not for want of trying. She groaned as fresh memories swam into her head, I thought double-jumping-
It was a stupid idea. Guess the Captain panicked.
The… the others? The rest of the crew? Marie couldn't bring herself to ask what she wanted to ask.
I know as much as you do, my love. Try to rest. We clearly need it.
She tried to relax, she really did. She tried to force her brain to settle, tried to grow accustomed to the sounds of medical machinery and the other noises that infiltrated the room. It didn't work. Every rattle of a gurney, every half-heard shout that she couldn't make out the content of, each one tugged at her attention and dragged her back into the room.
She tried not to think about it, but she kept coming back to the ship, the Faithful Intervention. It was gone, destroyed. She might have hated it, hated the cramped bunks, the stinking mess, the scutwork, but it was home for months. She'd grown used to the routines and the way everything worked. The noise. The rumble of the engines. She-
Marie. Stop.
She couldn't help it. She hadn't got close to many people aboard, not the DamCon team, not the Army unit, not the Captain, but… Rasma Stern. Was she dead? Captured? She couldn't imagine the Affini had managed to grab anyone through a fucked misjump. What the fuck had the Captain been thinking, what the fuck had any of them been-
Marie! Iskander snapped, loud enough to make her jump.
What?
You're spiralling. You need to ground.
I- She paused. She couldn't breathe like she needed to, but she could feel the synth-cloth bedding under her fingertips, she could hear the pings of hospital tech, and could see the ceiling tiles. She started counting cracks, actively following the scatter-shot patterns as she felt herself calming.
The door slammed open and she almost screamed. A harassed looking man who couldn't be a day under sixty hurried in, white coat flapping as he flicked through papers on a clipboard. He grabbed up another board from the foot of her bed, scanning over it quickly.
"Sorry I didn't get to you sooner, we're busy," He apologised without ever sounding like he was sorry at all, "Sergeant Marie Howe, detached service?"
"Uh-" She croaked, throat dry, "whas-"
"Are you with us yet?" He peered over his glasses, expression severe. She nodded in reply. He stepped around the bed, casting his eyes over the machines and monitors.
"Do you know who you are?"
She nodded again.
"Do you know where you are?"
She shook her head. He sighed, rubbing his eyes.
"Welcome to Peralez, I suppose. You've been here for a week, we've had you in something akin to a medically induced coma for five days so that you could…" he shrugged, "heal.
"Wha happen-" She paused, cleared her throat, "Space. I was spaced."
"You certainly were. A recovery team found you about an hour before your O2 ran out. Not so lucky for the corpses they pulled out of the debris field."
Fuck.
"Who?" She croaked.
"I'm sure you can find a list at some point. For now, we need to think about recovery. Ready for that tube to come out of your face?"
She nodded, and he stepped towards, leaning over her.
"Now… this is going to feel like hell for a few seconds."
It wasn't hell, but it was almost unlike anything she'd ever felt. A dragging from somewhere behind her eyes, a scraping, rasping feeling that made her want to throw up and cough and sneeze all at one. It lasted far longer than she expected it too, and not one bit of it was anything but unpleasant - or worse.
Finally, it was done, and the doctor was backing away. Smells hit her suddenly, a shock of alcohol sanitiser, shit, blood and the overpowering aftershave of the man now once again standing at the foot of her bed. He looked over her charts again and dropped them on the end of the bed. They should have hit her, but she didn't feel a thing.
"I'll have a nurse come and disconnect your lines soon. You should be able to eat an actual meal tonight."
"Can't feel… leg?" She murmured, already exhausted from the conversation.
"That doesn't surprise me. When you were recovered, there was damage to your suit's lining, as I understand it. There was vacuum damage to the foot and ankle. The recovery team decided it wasn't economical to attempt a save."
His tone was almost conversational, casual, but he was talking about her leg? She pulled on the sheets weakly, trying to uncover her feet.
"No… I sealed that?"
"Seems it was too late. Nothing to do. The Army will pay for a replacement, of course. Now try to get some rest. Your body needs it." He walked out of the room, pulling the door closed behind him.
She wanted to scream again, wanted to rage. It wasn't economical? It didn't fit financially to recover her fucking foot? She wanted to… to…
She wanted to sleep. She was so tired. She slipped into unconsciousness so easily she hardly noticed.
It took her another week to leave the hospital, and three months after that to get out of the veterans' recuperation centre she was transferred to. It took her that long to adjust to the new foot the army had given her, a chunky, ungainly prosthetic that was at least tied into her nervous system on a basic level. It couldn't move like her flesh and blood original, but she could mostly keep her balance after ten weeks of learning and a cane to assist her.
She was discharged as well, of course. Honourably, and with a bump to Staff Sergeant that meant her pension was ever so slightly better than it would be otherwise, but she was still out of a job and a home. They couldn't do anything with a disabled soldier, not with the implants that Army Insurance was willing to cover. If she could have paid for a bioidentical model out of her own pocket, then, well, maybe they could have done something, but it was too late for that now.
They at least paid her passage off of Peralez, giving her a one way ticket to wherever she wanted to go. She had spent another week racking her brain trying to find a destination. The Army had been her home for years, and the planet she'd been born on was nothing but a rock with nothing worth going back for. The only place that ever came to mind was Alcurops, the place she'd met Angelique and where hopefully she would find her again.
The trip was uneventful. Apparently, civilian traffic was still moving within what was left of Accord space. The newscasts she saw while she was travelling were even worse than the last time, full of reports of glorious victories and brave soldiers holding back the tide. Recruitment adverts showed every couple of minutes, suggesting it was every Terrans - not humans, Terrans - duty to hold back the tide of the evil alien threat. She sat in an uncomfortable economy seat, a half-upright design that meant she could never quite relax, watching ad rolls and reports that just made her angry. Where was the honesty, the integrity? Had they always been like this, and she'd just, what, missed it?
She shuffled off the transport at the other end in a foul mood. Clumping down the stationside walkway, one boot heavier than the other, she found herself glaring. People were sitting outside cafés, drinking coffee or beer, laughing and joking and smiling. Couples walked past her hand in hand, making doe-eyes. They had a right to it, they deserved it; it was, in theory, why she had been fighting at all.
But on the other hand, she'd just walked away the only survivor from two fucked up military ops. She'd lost a platoon, a planet, a ship, all in a little less than a year. If she was honest with herself, she'd go so far as to say she'd lost a love. She was in pain, and not just from the ache of her prosthetic. The rawness of her feelings were scratched and scraped by the apparent oblivious response of the people around her. Not oblivious to her, but to the pain that was being suffered not so very far away, as a war was being conducted in their names.
She found a sailor's hostel and paid for a week. Somewhere to rest her head while she got herself settled. She could drop down to the surface, cheap enough. Find work, find a flat. Find an old friend.
[Curious] a mass of vines shifted, pulling screens closer to six eyes that glowed.
[What is?] the other asked, shifting to peer over what could be a shoulder and could just as easily be a leg.
[The mining world where we saw action last. There was a sophont, part of their ground combat unit.]
[I remember. 'Missing in Action' is quite the euphemism.] It sent some vines out to mingle with the others, tangling the two creatures together.
[Quite. I set up a couple of data taps to look for information relating to them. There was surprisingly little, but not long ago, I found them again.]
[They're alive? I had assumed-]
[We all had. Not just alive, but still fighting.]
[You must admire the spirit of these little terrans. To go back to fighting is remarkable, when they're so small and delicate.]
[No. I don't. I would much prefer they simply surrendered. It is the optimal solution.]
[Perhaps.] It extended another vine, wrapping itself around its kin more closely until they were almost intermingled, [Tell me about the sophont.]
[She - I understand she uses she/her - was aboard a tiny little ship that got caught up in the Trifasciata's web.]
[So she's been captured? Excellent news.] It's vines and leaves extended suddenly in pleasant surprise, [But wait, the Trifasciata was-]
[Heavily damaged. The little ship tried to jump away. It did not end well.]
The other Affini's leaves drooped, flowers wilting,
[So she's-]
[I'd have thought so, but my taps have pulled more data. She's still alive.]
[This is too much! You are doing this on purpose.]
[However could I resist?] It said, and wrapped itself around its frustrated companion, soothing it with deft vine strokes and rumbling sounds.
Chapter 6 - Dinner Date
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
"Angelique!" Marie shouted, an arm raised to beckon over the older woman. She was leaning against a tree - a bedraggled, ancient thing that looked half-dead - outside a diner, wearing something akin to casual evening wear, or as close to it as she could find. Combats big enough to fit her issued boots, a jacket to cover up the scars and marks of violence she still bore. She didn't doubt she still looked like a soldier, especially with a half smoked cigarette dangling from between her lips.
"Marie?" The other woman offered as she came close enough, waiting for a gentle nod before continuing, "It's been far, far too long, my dear."
They kissed cheeks and embraced warmly, a greeting that refused to entertain the years since they'd last been in each other's company.
"I'm afraid I didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. Would that I could have stayed." Marie found herself slipping into a more formal, gentler tone
"The service is, of course, a needful husband." She lit a cigarette of her own, a slender thing pinched between ruby-red lips, "And how is the rest of the family? Elodie and the boy."
"Iskander isn't a boy, Angelique, and you know that."
"Find me a butch who objects to being called a good boy by an older woman and I'll have found you a liar." She inhaled, cherry tip glowing in the golden evening sunlight.
"Hmm. Well, it's… doing as well as any of us are."
"And our dear daughter?"
"We haven't seen Elodie in… some time. Things have been hard." She inhaled nicotine and ash, trying to stave off ill feelings, "Really hard."
Dark eyes flashed as a cigarette was flung casually to the ground and ground beneath a fashionable heel. The duo stood in the silence of a living city, breathing, not speaking, just looking at each other.
"Come. I'm buying you dinner. We can discuss how hard things have been."
They found a table in the diner, ordering coffee and hot food. They shared a handful of niceties as they waited, Marie not wanting to broach things until they were properly settled. Or rather, she was using the delay to order her thoughts and work out what she could and could not say.
"So." Angelique continued once they had food in front of them, "what has happened?"
"I'm not sure how much I can say-"
"Pfft, absurd. You can tell me anything." The older woman waved a hand, dismissing Marie's objection.
"No, I mean, I literally cannot tell you some things. Military secrets and all that." Marie watched hungrily as Angelique tasted a rich, red soup and smiled. Her stomach grumbled just loud enough to remind her to take a bite of the toasted sandwich she'd ordered.
"Begin with what you know you can. Then we can discuss the things you think you cannot."
"Fine," She sighed, taking another bite of melted cheese substitute and synth-meat and something that wasn't quite bread. She chewed thoughtfully for a few seconds before swallowing, "I spent six weeks on Doldrums, before… well, before that stopped being the front line. As far as I know, I was the only one out of my unit who made it out, and I haven't heard about anyone coming back to the Accord from out that way since."
She paused, breathing deeply. She remembered the wild running, the screaming fear that cut through her as the monstrous enemies plunged into their ranks. Her heart hammered in her chest and she stared at the table-top. A hand reached out and clasped itself in hers.
"Got passed around a bunch after that, probably travelled more light years than I ever have before. Ended up on a ship, which I shouldn't mention the name of, I'm sure. It was a dinky little scout ship and we… Well, we went scouting. There was a woman there-"
"There usually is." The other woman smiled innocently when Marie shot her a sour look.
"It was shit. We were constantly waiting for something to go wrong - a fucked jump or enemy action or something like that. Other ships went missing and pretty much every time we came back from an operation we had to hit our second or even third haven. It felt like we weren't doing anything that mattered." She trailed off, staring out the window at passing traffic, but not really seeing it.
"It sounds intensely stressful."
Marie let out a hollow sounding laugh, a little bark of frustration.
"It… was. In a way, I guess I was waiting for a death I'd dodged on Doldrums. We're not winning this war, Angelique, though I can't imagine I'm supposed to say that."
"I know." Marie shot her an inquisitive look, and she gave the most stereotypical Gallic shrug, "You think I don't pay attention? The news is full of made up fairy tales about battles won and planets reclaimed, and slowly but surely the net they cover is shrinking. I had a friend thirty light years coreward. She is not just out of contact, the system refuses to admit her address ever existed. It is only a matter of time until the war comes to Alcurops, and then I will be the one that never existed."
"I'm sorry."
"Hush. This structure, the Accord, was never going to last forever. Either the proletariat would rise up and tear it apart from within, or something bigger and more cruel than us would come along and crush it. It is only a shame the second came before the first. I would like to have seen what the people could have built." She sighed, and it was her turn to gaze longingly into the middle distance, but only for a moment. "It is not hard to see what is coming. I am prepared for it."
"Angelique… You make it sound like you've given up."
"I am a realist, dear one, not a pessimist." She smiled, glitter in her eyes, "You were telling me about a woman."
Marie finished her sandwich, brushing the last crumbs from her fingers. She needed a couple of seconds to arrange her thoughts and come back to something resembling gentle conversation. The way this woman bounced around her topics, trying to keep up with her was an effort. One Marie always savoured, but nonetheless it was exhausting.
"Rasma Stern was a sailor. Met her my first day aboard ship and kind of… never let go. We were friends first. It was easy, we held similar ranks but in different services, so we could just hang out and talk and not worry so much about what anyone above or below us would think. She was confident and capable and ever so skilled. If only she'd have joined the Army, she would have been perfect." Marie chuckled, a brief smile crossing her lips. Angelique returned it, motioning with a squeeze of her hand for her to continue. "She kept me going. I was out of place and had almost nothing to do. What's a Sergeant supposed to do on a Navy ship? She set me up with work, jobs, something to keep me busy and sane. Have you ever changed a busted particle transfer manifold?"
"You have taken great pleasure in pointing out that I have never worked a day in my life."
"Hah. Point taken. Well, neither had I before I shipped out with the Intervention, but I don't think there's a single part of a TACN complex-3 manifold bus I don't know these days. Or didn't, anyway, I doubt I'll ever see one again. Like, I love digging foxholes and route marches," She lied, "but there was something about taking a piece of machinery apart and putting it back together and watching the lights blink green. Something deeply satisfying."
Marie sighed and took a sip of her drink. Something orange and sparkling and so sweet, she wondered if she'd have teeth left by the end of it. A waitress appeared, harassed-looking and tired. Marie tried to offer her a smile, but she barely looked up as she gathered plates and flipped open a pad. They quickly ordered dessert once Angelique had once again made clear that she was paying, and spent a little while in companionable silence.
"So when did you start fucking her?"
"Wow, just like that, huh? Glad I didn't have a mouthful of drink." She laughed, pushing a loose strand of hair back behind her ear, "Maybe three, four months into our tour. We're out in some backwater system in the middle of nowhere. It was a colony once, a group of religious separatists who tried to leave the accord and just got folded back in after they, I don't know, failed to pay their loan sharks or something. Not the point. We're sitting in a maintenance access shaft, shooting the shit while we work on something or other. She's wearing this white tank top, and she's got grease on her face, and I'm such an easy mark for a woman with muscular shoulders. She catches me staring, I blush and about ten seconds later she's kissing me, and I'm fumbling with the zip on her coverall."
Marie fell silent, and the two women sat quietly. Desert arrived, a slice of pie for Marie and a single scoop of delightfully coloured sorbet for Angelique. She took a forkful and savoured it, the sugar-sweet artificial cherries contrasting with the dry, crackling pie crust. It was still a little warm, presumably kept so by a heat lamp, but nonetheless reminding her of home backed food. Eventually, she continued.
"She was rough and crass and beautiful. She worked hard, and she fucked hard and-" She paused, emotion catching in her throat, "I fell in love with her."
The clatter of the restaurant washed over them, dousing the fire of feeling that threatened to overwhelm her. Angelique watched her, her sorbet forgotten, pushed aside, a hand on the table waiting in case of need. Tears prickled at Marie's eyes, making her blink in a vain attempt to hold them back.
"I can't do it." She whispered, almost to herself. "I can't… can't deal with another loss like this. The ship, the whole crew, it's all gone. She's dead, and I can't keep going."
"Marie-"
"It's too much. People are dying, and I can't do anything, and it's- I- I can't-"
"Marie, my love, please just-"
"Goodbye, Angelique."
Her head bowed, nodding into her chest, as if strings had been cut and her puppeteer had stepped away. Seconds passed, and suddenly the body snapped upright, gasping in a deep breath. Eyes focused slowly, uncertainly, fixing on Angelique. Finally, a deeper voice spoke;
"I never expected to see you again."
"It's nice to see you too, Iskander."
"Mm." It paused, taking a moment to tie its hair into a tight bun and roll its neck, "what happened? I thought she was spending the night with you?"
"We never got that far. She was telling me about Rasma. About the ship. About lost love and pain and-" It was Angeliques turn to take a moment, looking out the window at the dark street, "She's not coming back, is she. Neither she nor Elodie."
It was barely a question. An understanding, a statement rather than an inquiry. Iskander sighed, crossing its arms across its chest.
"It hurts them too much. Both of them are too gentle, too soft for this war. For any war."
"And you? Are you so cold it doesn't touch you? So heavily warded from your own actions that you cannot suffer in the ways they do? You're no fool, Iskander. Or perhaps you are, but don't forget I've seen your heart."
"I can hold it." It murmurs, curling its hands into fists. "This pain and this hurt. For them, I'll hold it."
I'll keep them safe.
"Marie?" The other woman offered as she came close enough, waiting for a gentle nod before continuing, "It's been far, far too long, my dear."
They kissed cheeks and embraced warmly, a greeting that refused to entertain the years since they'd last been in each other's company.
"I'm afraid I didn't have a lot of choice in the matter. Would that I could have stayed." Marie found herself slipping into a more formal, gentler tone
"The service is, of course, a needful husband." She lit a cigarette of her own, a slender thing pinched between ruby-red lips, "And how is the rest of the family? Elodie and the boy."
"Iskander isn't a boy, Angelique, and you know that."
"Find me a butch who objects to being called a good boy by an older woman and I'll have found you a liar." She inhaled, cherry tip glowing in the golden evening sunlight.
"Hmm. Well, it's… doing as well as any of us are."
"And our dear daughter?"
"We haven't seen Elodie in… some time. Things have been hard." She inhaled nicotine and ash, trying to stave off ill feelings, "Really hard."
Dark eyes flashed as a cigarette was flung casually to the ground and ground beneath a fashionable heel. The duo stood in the silence of a living city, breathing, not speaking, just looking at each other.
"Come. I'm buying you dinner. We can discuss how hard things have been."
They found a table in the diner, ordering coffee and hot food. They shared a handful of niceties as they waited, Marie not wanting to broach things until they were properly settled. Or rather, she was using the delay to order her thoughts and work out what she could and could not say.
"So." Angelique continued once they had food in front of them, "what has happened?"
"I'm not sure how much I can say-"
"Pfft, absurd. You can tell me anything." The older woman waved a hand, dismissing Marie's objection.
"No, I mean, I literally cannot tell you some things. Military secrets and all that." Marie watched hungrily as Angelique tasted a rich, red soup and smiled. Her stomach grumbled just loud enough to remind her to take a bite of the toasted sandwich she'd ordered.
"Begin with what you know you can. Then we can discuss the things you think you cannot."
"Fine," She sighed, taking another bite of melted cheese substitute and synth-meat and something that wasn't quite bread. She chewed thoughtfully for a few seconds before swallowing, "I spent six weeks on Doldrums, before… well, before that stopped being the front line. As far as I know, I was the only one out of my unit who made it out, and I haven't heard about anyone coming back to the Accord from out that way since."
She paused, breathing deeply. She remembered the wild running, the screaming fear that cut through her as the monstrous enemies plunged into their ranks. Her heart hammered in her chest and she stared at the table-top. A hand reached out and clasped itself in hers.
"Got passed around a bunch after that, probably travelled more light years than I ever have before. Ended up on a ship, which I shouldn't mention the name of, I'm sure. It was a dinky little scout ship and we… Well, we went scouting. There was a woman there-"
"There usually is." The other woman smiled innocently when Marie shot her a sour look.
"It was shit. We were constantly waiting for something to go wrong - a fucked jump or enemy action or something like that. Other ships went missing and pretty much every time we came back from an operation we had to hit our second or even third haven. It felt like we weren't doing anything that mattered." She trailed off, staring out the window at passing traffic, but not really seeing it.
"It sounds intensely stressful."
Marie let out a hollow sounding laugh, a little bark of frustration.
"It… was. In a way, I guess I was waiting for a death I'd dodged on Doldrums. We're not winning this war, Angelique, though I can't imagine I'm supposed to say that."
"I know." Marie shot her an inquisitive look, and she gave the most stereotypical Gallic shrug, "You think I don't pay attention? The news is full of made up fairy tales about battles won and planets reclaimed, and slowly but surely the net they cover is shrinking. I had a friend thirty light years coreward. She is not just out of contact, the system refuses to admit her address ever existed. It is only a matter of time until the war comes to Alcurops, and then I will be the one that never existed."
"I'm sorry."
"Hush. This structure, the Accord, was never going to last forever. Either the proletariat would rise up and tear it apart from within, or something bigger and more cruel than us would come along and crush it. It is only a shame the second came before the first. I would like to have seen what the people could have built." She sighed, and it was her turn to gaze longingly into the middle distance, but only for a moment. "It is not hard to see what is coming. I am prepared for it."
"Angelique… You make it sound like you've given up."
"I am a realist, dear one, not a pessimist." She smiled, glitter in her eyes, "You were telling me about a woman."
Marie finished her sandwich, brushing the last crumbs from her fingers. She needed a couple of seconds to arrange her thoughts and come back to something resembling gentle conversation. The way this woman bounced around her topics, trying to keep up with her was an effort. One Marie always savoured, but nonetheless it was exhausting.
"Rasma Stern was a sailor. Met her my first day aboard ship and kind of… never let go. We were friends first. It was easy, we held similar ranks but in different services, so we could just hang out and talk and not worry so much about what anyone above or below us would think. She was confident and capable and ever so skilled. If only she'd have joined the Army, she would have been perfect." Marie chuckled, a brief smile crossing her lips. Angelique returned it, motioning with a squeeze of her hand for her to continue. "She kept me going. I was out of place and had almost nothing to do. What's a Sergeant supposed to do on a Navy ship? She set me up with work, jobs, something to keep me busy and sane. Have you ever changed a busted particle transfer manifold?"
"You have taken great pleasure in pointing out that I have never worked a day in my life."
"Hah. Point taken. Well, neither had I before I shipped out with the Intervention, but I don't think there's a single part of a TACN complex-3 manifold bus I don't know these days. Or didn't, anyway, I doubt I'll ever see one again. Like, I love digging foxholes and route marches," She lied, "but there was something about taking a piece of machinery apart and putting it back together and watching the lights blink green. Something deeply satisfying."
Marie sighed and took a sip of her drink. Something orange and sparkling and so sweet, she wondered if she'd have teeth left by the end of it. A waitress appeared, harassed-looking and tired. Marie tried to offer her a smile, but she barely looked up as she gathered plates and flipped open a pad. They quickly ordered dessert once Angelique had once again made clear that she was paying, and spent a little while in companionable silence.
"So when did you start fucking her?"
"Wow, just like that, huh? Glad I didn't have a mouthful of drink." She laughed, pushing a loose strand of hair back behind her ear, "Maybe three, four months into our tour. We're out in some backwater system in the middle of nowhere. It was a colony once, a group of religious separatists who tried to leave the accord and just got folded back in after they, I don't know, failed to pay their loan sharks or something. Not the point. We're sitting in a maintenance access shaft, shooting the shit while we work on something or other. She's wearing this white tank top, and she's got grease on her face, and I'm such an easy mark for a woman with muscular shoulders. She catches me staring, I blush and about ten seconds later she's kissing me, and I'm fumbling with the zip on her coverall."
Marie fell silent, and the two women sat quietly. Desert arrived, a slice of pie for Marie and a single scoop of delightfully coloured sorbet for Angelique. She took a forkful and savoured it, the sugar-sweet artificial cherries contrasting with the dry, crackling pie crust. It was still a little warm, presumably kept so by a heat lamp, but nonetheless reminding her of home backed food. Eventually, she continued.
"She was rough and crass and beautiful. She worked hard, and she fucked hard and-" She paused, emotion catching in her throat, "I fell in love with her."
The clatter of the restaurant washed over them, dousing the fire of feeling that threatened to overwhelm her. Angelique watched her, her sorbet forgotten, pushed aside, a hand on the table waiting in case of need. Tears prickled at Marie's eyes, making her blink in a vain attempt to hold them back.
"I can't do it." She whispered, almost to herself. "I can't… can't deal with another loss like this. The ship, the whole crew, it's all gone. She's dead, and I can't keep going."
"Marie-"
"It's too much. People are dying, and I can't do anything, and it's- I- I can't-"
"Marie, my love, please just-"
"Goodbye, Angelique."
Her head bowed, nodding into her chest, as if strings had been cut and her puppeteer had stepped away. Seconds passed, and suddenly the body snapped upright, gasping in a deep breath. Eyes focused slowly, uncertainly, fixing on Angelique. Finally, a deeper voice spoke;
"I never expected to see you again."
"It's nice to see you too, Iskander."
"Mm." It paused, taking a moment to tie its hair into a tight bun and roll its neck, "what happened? I thought she was spending the night with you?"
"We never got that far. She was telling me about Rasma. About the ship. About lost love and pain and-" It was Angeliques turn to take a moment, looking out the window at the dark street, "She's not coming back, is she. Neither she nor Elodie."
It was barely a question. An understanding, a statement rather than an inquiry. Iskander sighed, crossing its arms across its chest.
"It hurts them too much. Both of them are too gentle, too soft for this war. For any war."
"And you? Are you so cold it doesn't touch you? So heavily warded from your own actions that you cannot suffer in the ways they do? You're no fool, Iskander. Or perhaps you are, but don't forget I've seen your heart."
"I can hold it." It murmurs, curling its hands into fists. "This pain and this hurt. For them, I'll hold it."
I'll keep them safe.
Chapter 7: Star Sailor
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
It didn't stay on Alcurops. Angelique invited it to stay longer than a week, offering it her sofa for as long as it took for the Affini to roll over the system. It couldn't though, couldn't just wait for something to come and end it all. It needed a job, a purpose, and it wasn't going to find it on a planet that was already just a few jumps from being part of the conquered systems. It signed on with a small merchant ship that needed a maintenance technician, talking up its experiences on the Faithful Intervention into a berth at least as far as the next system. It used Marie's name and veteran's card, of course. It had done so for as long as it had existed.
The ship claimed to be a merchant but was halfway to being a garbage scow, engines wanting to fall apart at the first sign of hard Gs and an internal electronics system that desperately needed a deep refit if not being replaced entirely. Half of the access closets were of different designs, apparently having been haphazardly replaced as and when major systems failed, rather than as part of any concerted effort to keep the ship a consistent machine.
It's the perfect ship of Theseus it had once said in its headspace, before remembering that nobody was there to listen.
Iskander was fascinated by the ship. It spent every hour of its duty shift replacing, rewiring and repairing different elements to ensure nothing went wrong. Off duty, it would climb into the internal machinery and inspect, learn and diagnose problems that had yet to occur. The small vessel was a gigantic puzzle, and it committed to learning the shape of every single piece. More than once another member of the crew - the pilot, the captain, once even the nervous, stuttering purser - had to come and drag it out of one piece of ductwork or another so that it would eat and sleep.
It didn't make friends, didn't carve out a home, but there was something about being on the fringes of a small, tight-knit group that was comforting. It had never been alone before, had never existed without someone else being inside its head, and it had thus far found it intensely lonely. But at least it felt secure in the knowledge that even when it was the one awake, there were other people just a few metres away.
More than once, sitting in the mess or floating around on the bridge or even just passing in the corridor, the captain had caught Iskanders arm and pulled it into a conversation. He'd mention that they could take it on more permanently, could offer it a role in the longer term. That they valued its work and would hate to lose it when it finally grew bored with its time aboard the strange little broken down ship.
The captain was a big man, over six feet and broad across the shoulders. He wore his hair in tight rows, and piercing eyes peered out from a thoughtful face. Iskander didn't exactly avoid him, but it also didn't make it easy for any of the ship's crew to find him, let alone the most intimidating of them. Something about the big man set Iskander on edge, raised his heartbeat, made his stomach flip. It felt unsettled and while it didn't understand why, it had long since learned to trust its gut.
So it turned down the offer as often as the offer was made, and nonetheless never found a reason for leaving and the crew never found a reason to replace it. It liked the ship, and it enjoyed the work, but it could never forget that there was still a war being fought out there. It couldn't tie itself to working on a freight hauler when it still owed a debt. Maybe not to the accord, not to the government or the military, but to people. People who had trusted it, and others like it, to keep them safe. If the Accord kept on losing the war, and losing experienced soldiers and sailors along with it, then soon enough they would come knocking for anyone with fighting experience. Iskander knew that it had to be ready to serve when the time came. It didn't think it had some special place in it all, that it would fire the shot that would end it all - it wasn't delusional, after all. But it owed so much. It had failed twice and had lost more than it could begin to explain. It wanted another chance to prove itself, and that wasn't something it could do while it was stuck on a barge.
I'll make it up to you, it whispered, I promise.
So it stayed aboard the little cargo ship, and it watched the steady decline of the Terran Accord. It would catch reports as it worked from passing gossip or murmured fears, listening to the net close around humanity's last holdouts against the oncoming Affini threat. It heard the broadcasts from Sol, FTL transmissions carrying demands that every last human stand against the enemy, that those on already conquered worlds rise up against the vile conquerors. Not only that, but it also saw the first Affini messages it had encountered since Conchertus, the propaganda of the conquering alien threat: The promises of safety and security, the offers of free food, free homes, free healthcare - it was all absurd. Even worse were the speeches by so-called 'florets'. Drugged up, traumatised Terrans, manipulated into saying whatever made their captors seem the most amenable to anyone who wasn't in their hands yet. They were easy to dismiss. Iskander had seen enough Terran psychological warfare efforts to know the game: take a prisoner of war, offer them food and comforts and gaslight them into believing all their fellow POWs were being kept in the same conditions. Then tell them there was a price to pay to keep receiving these benefits - make a speech praising your new masters. Let them record it. Let your old friends brand you a traitor and a rebel. But oh, you would be ever so comfortable.
It made Iskander sick to see these doe-eyed, spaced out vermin sell away their compatriots. They were giving in, giving up. It got footage from one of these speeches transferred to its hand-terminal and watched it when it was alone in a dark access crawlway. Anger washed through its mind, incensed that this Terran looked so comfortably blissed out. Where was the fight, the freedom, the fury? Where was the - its thought was interrupted as thick vines moved into view from off-screen, wrapping around the human. They were huge, long and prehensile as they gently manoeuvred the Terran away from the camera. The image turned for a moment and-
Iskander's stomach lurched. Adrenaline flooded its mouth, the sharp iron taste of fear. It flung the tablet away as it sucked air, listening to the sickening crunch of a shattering screen. It gasped, trying and failing to fill its lungs all the way, snatched breaths leaving it feeling light-headed. Its heart hammered in its chest, cold sweat beaded on its forehead. It was panicking, and it couldn't even begin considering doing anything else.
That thing, that monster on the video, it was the same kind of creature that had barrelled through its platoon back on Doldrums. It was the same mass of vines and leaves and flowers that had cut down twelve good, well-trained soldiers in a matter of seconds. It was the same thing that would have got them had Marie not picked flight over fight when confronted with the unknown.
Its mind jumped unbidden to the thought of warships caught in the tendrils of Affini cruisers, injecting these shambling horrors between the decks. Did they crash and tumble through gangways and bulkheads, smashing apart anti-boarding teams and ships crew like so much wheat before the scythe? Iskander felt a wave of nausea churn in its stomach, threatening to bring an already insufficient lunch back into the light. It thought about how cramped the Intervention had been and couldn't stop the image of an enemy compressing itself into those tight spaces and snaking out long vines like tentacles to grip and grasp and tear through everyone aboard.
It dry-heaved, autonomic reactions attempting to expel whatever was causing such vile feelings in its gut. It wished it could just vomit out the horrible visions cascading through its head, a physical expulsion of dread and fear and adrenaline-fuelled anxiety. Instead, it choked on its own instincts, trying to keep air in its lungs as its gullet made a desperate attempt to close off.
It tried to shift, to hang its head between its knees and just breath, but without gravity to weigh it down all it did was cramp its stomach up even further until a spasm forced it to unfold. The extra mass of its prosthesis applied a little rotational momentum to the movement and set it to spinning until it collided with the other side of the boxy little cubicle of space it had hidden itself in. Its head collided with a metal edge hard enough to elicit a whimper of pain, dragging it from the harmful reminiscence into the painful present.
It gasped, sobbing, tears floating away from its face in the weightless environment. Every lurch of its chest forced more saltwater from its skin to hang in empty space, little globules of upset and fear that danced in the gloomy light. It took some time for the crying to slow and finally stop. Silence returned to the access closet, silence except for the sound of breathing and the thumping of its heartbeat in its ears.
When Iskander finally opened its eyes, it saw a little galaxy of droplets drifting. Each caught a bundle of photons, scattering them like prisms and spraying bright colours across the space. Its muscles were sore, its head ached, and its eyes felt hollow from how much it had cried, and yet the simple beauty it saw in that moment held it entranced. Then, as if the moment couldn't possibly hold, a shudder ran through the ship and the tears danced, splashing towards the bulkhead and shattering the hypnotic rainbow.
The door to the access cubby swung open, a blast of white light beaming almost directly into Iskanders face. Standing in the doorway, upside down compared to the technicians' orientation, was the captain.
"Marie, what are you-" He paused, eyes connecting with its ankles before sliding down all the way to its face. He locked eyes with Iskander, brow furrowed, "What's happened?"
"Nothing, I just…" It reaches up to touch its head, finding a tender spot, and pressing down as if they were feeling it for the first time, "Hit my head."
"Yeah?" The captain reaches up to grab something over his head, pulling it back towards his body. It was Iskanders tablet, screen shattered but still functional, "Didn't realise cranial trauma could cause this."
It reaches out to grab the pad, but the big man spins it in his hands, showing Iskander the frozen image of an Affini. It recoils, shutting its eyes and pulling back its hand, as if it had been burned. The captain sighs, spinning himself so that he was oriented the same way as Iskander was.
"Listen, Marie, I don't know much about you, and I've never really pried into what you were doing before you joined us. You're a talented tech, I think I've been clear about that. Between your ID and your skill, I know you were in the Navy-"
"Army."
"Huh?"
"I was in the Army. Not the Navy. Staff Sergeant Marie Howe, retired."
He blinked, and Iskander blinked back. It felt a little strange to use her name again, but it's not like it wasn't used to it.
"But I thought… Your background was… huh?"
"I spent six months and change on a Navy picket before I mustered out. Learned a lot. Lost a lot. It was useful to me to let you think whatever you wanted about my service. I figured if I'd've said Army, you'd've said you had no use for me." Iskander said, curling up on itself. It was planning on leaving soon anyway, if they decided to throw it off at the next port, it wouldn't be such a big deal. It'd miss the ship, though, far more than-
"-not mad about it."
Oh. He had been speaking. Iskander opened its eyes, staring at the man with a panicked look.
"Huh? What?"
"I said that you're probably right, so I'm glad you didn't. We would have lost out on one hell of a sailor." He extended a hand, gripping Iskanders and pulling it into a brief, casual embrace, "I don't know what happened, and I'm not about to start asking. I'm smart enough to know war isn't pretty. But you've got a place on this ship for as long as you need one, gottit?"
Iskander experienced a broad array of feelings in a matter of seconds. It felt embarrassed and shy. It felt a warm flutter in its chest. It felt anxious about the contact, the closest it had been to someone since it had said goodbye to Angelique, since it had been with Rasma. Fresh tears prickled at the corners of its eyes.
"Yeah." I said, voice catching in its throat for just long enough to flood its cheeks with rosy blush. It turned away, hiding its embarrassment, but gave the captain a nudge with an elbow, an appreciative gesture, "Yeah, I hear you. Thank you."
The ship claimed to be a merchant but was halfway to being a garbage scow, engines wanting to fall apart at the first sign of hard Gs and an internal electronics system that desperately needed a deep refit if not being replaced entirely. Half of the access closets were of different designs, apparently having been haphazardly replaced as and when major systems failed, rather than as part of any concerted effort to keep the ship a consistent machine.
It's the perfect ship of Theseus it had once said in its headspace, before remembering that nobody was there to listen.
Iskander was fascinated by the ship. It spent every hour of its duty shift replacing, rewiring and repairing different elements to ensure nothing went wrong. Off duty, it would climb into the internal machinery and inspect, learn and diagnose problems that had yet to occur. The small vessel was a gigantic puzzle, and it committed to learning the shape of every single piece. More than once another member of the crew - the pilot, the captain, once even the nervous, stuttering purser - had to come and drag it out of one piece of ductwork or another so that it would eat and sleep.
It didn't make friends, didn't carve out a home, but there was something about being on the fringes of a small, tight-knit group that was comforting. It had never been alone before, had never existed without someone else being inside its head, and it had thus far found it intensely lonely. But at least it felt secure in the knowledge that even when it was the one awake, there were other people just a few metres away.
More than once, sitting in the mess or floating around on the bridge or even just passing in the corridor, the captain had caught Iskanders arm and pulled it into a conversation. He'd mention that they could take it on more permanently, could offer it a role in the longer term. That they valued its work and would hate to lose it when it finally grew bored with its time aboard the strange little broken down ship.
The captain was a big man, over six feet and broad across the shoulders. He wore his hair in tight rows, and piercing eyes peered out from a thoughtful face. Iskander didn't exactly avoid him, but it also didn't make it easy for any of the ship's crew to find him, let alone the most intimidating of them. Something about the big man set Iskander on edge, raised his heartbeat, made his stomach flip. It felt unsettled and while it didn't understand why, it had long since learned to trust its gut.
So it turned down the offer as often as the offer was made, and nonetheless never found a reason for leaving and the crew never found a reason to replace it. It liked the ship, and it enjoyed the work, but it could never forget that there was still a war being fought out there. It couldn't tie itself to working on a freight hauler when it still owed a debt. Maybe not to the accord, not to the government or the military, but to people. People who had trusted it, and others like it, to keep them safe. If the Accord kept on losing the war, and losing experienced soldiers and sailors along with it, then soon enough they would come knocking for anyone with fighting experience. Iskander knew that it had to be ready to serve when the time came. It didn't think it had some special place in it all, that it would fire the shot that would end it all - it wasn't delusional, after all. But it owed so much. It had failed twice and had lost more than it could begin to explain. It wanted another chance to prove itself, and that wasn't something it could do while it was stuck on a barge.
I'll make it up to you, it whispered, I promise.
So it stayed aboard the little cargo ship, and it watched the steady decline of the Terran Accord. It would catch reports as it worked from passing gossip or murmured fears, listening to the net close around humanity's last holdouts against the oncoming Affini threat. It heard the broadcasts from Sol, FTL transmissions carrying demands that every last human stand against the enemy, that those on already conquered worlds rise up against the vile conquerors. Not only that, but it also saw the first Affini messages it had encountered since Conchertus, the propaganda of the conquering alien threat: The promises of safety and security, the offers of free food, free homes, free healthcare - it was all absurd. Even worse were the speeches by so-called 'florets'. Drugged up, traumatised Terrans, manipulated into saying whatever made their captors seem the most amenable to anyone who wasn't in their hands yet. They were easy to dismiss. Iskander had seen enough Terran psychological warfare efforts to know the game: take a prisoner of war, offer them food and comforts and gaslight them into believing all their fellow POWs were being kept in the same conditions. Then tell them there was a price to pay to keep receiving these benefits - make a speech praising your new masters. Let them record it. Let your old friends brand you a traitor and a rebel. But oh, you would be ever so comfortable.
It made Iskander sick to see these doe-eyed, spaced out vermin sell away their compatriots. They were giving in, giving up. It got footage from one of these speeches transferred to its hand-terminal and watched it when it was alone in a dark access crawlway. Anger washed through its mind, incensed that this Terran looked so comfortably blissed out. Where was the fight, the freedom, the fury? Where was the - its thought was interrupted as thick vines moved into view from off-screen, wrapping around the human. They were huge, long and prehensile as they gently manoeuvred the Terran away from the camera. The image turned for a moment and-
Iskander's stomach lurched. Adrenaline flooded its mouth, the sharp iron taste of fear. It flung the tablet away as it sucked air, listening to the sickening crunch of a shattering screen. It gasped, trying and failing to fill its lungs all the way, snatched breaths leaving it feeling light-headed. Its heart hammered in its chest, cold sweat beaded on its forehead. It was panicking, and it couldn't even begin considering doing anything else.
That thing, that monster on the video, it was the same kind of creature that had barrelled through its platoon back on Doldrums. It was the same mass of vines and leaves and flowers that had cut down twelve good, well-trained soldiers in a matter of seconds. It was the same thing that would have got them had Marie not picked flight over fight when confronted with the unknown.
Its mind jumped unbidden to the thought of warships caught in the tendrils of Affini cruisers, injecting these shambling horrors between the decks. Did they crash and tumble through gangways and bulkheads, smashing apart anti-boarding teams and ships crew like so much wheat before the scythe? Iskander felt a wave of nausea churn in its stomach, threatening to bring an already insufficient lunch back into the light. It thought about how cramped the Intervention had been and couldn't stop the image of an enemy compressing itself into those tight spaces and snaking out long vines like tentacles to grip and grasp and tear through everyone aboard.
It dry-heaved, autonomic reactions attempting to expel whatever was causing such vile feelings in its gut. It wished it could just vomit out the horrible visions cascading through its head, a physical expulsion of dread and fear and adrenaline-fuelled anxiety. Instead, it choked on its own instincts, trying to keep air in its lungs as its gullet made a desperate attempt to close off.
It tried to shift, to hang its head between its knees and just breath, but without gravity to weigh it down all it did was cramp its stomach up even further until a spasm forced it to unfold. The extra mass of its prosthesis applied a little rotational momentum to the movement and set it to spinning until it collided with the other side of the boxy little cubicle of space it had hidden itself in. Its head collided with a metal edge hard enough to elicit a whimper of pain, dragging it from the harmful reminiscence into the painful present.
It gasped, sobbing, tears floating away from its face in the weightless environment. Every lurch of its chest forced more saltwater from its skin to hang in empty space, little globules of upset and fear that danced in the gloomy light. It took some time for the crying to slow and finally stop. Silence returned to the access closet, silence except for the sound of breathing and the thumping of its heartbeat in its ears.
When Iskander finally opened its eyes, it saw a little galaxy of droplets drifting. Each caught a bundle of photons, scattering them like prisms and spraying bright colours across the space. Its muscles were sore, its head ached, and its eyes felt hollow from how much it had cried, and yet the simple beauty it saw in that moment held it entranced. Then, as if the moment couldn't possibly hold, a shudder ran through the ship and the tears danced, splashing towards the bulkhead and shattering the hypnotic rainbow.
The door to the access cubby swung open, a blast of white light beaming almost directly into Iskanders face. Standing in the doorway, upside down compared to the technicians' orientation, was the captain.
"Marie, what are you-" He paused, eyes connecting with its ankles before sliding down all the way to its face. He locked eyes with Iskander, brow furrowed, "What's happened?"
"Nothing, I just…" It reaches up to touch its head, finding a tender spot, and pressing down as if they were feeling it for the first time, "Hit my head."
"Yeah?" The captain reaches up to grab something over his head, pulling it back towards his body. It was Iskanders tablet, screen shattered but still functional, "Didn't realise cranial trauma could cause this."
It reaches out to grab the pad, but the big man spins it in his hands, showing Iskander the frozen image of an Affini. It recoils, shutting its eyes and pulling back its hand, as if it had been burned. The captain sighs, spinning himself so that he was oriented the same way as Iskander was.
"Listen, Marie, I don't know much about you, and I've never really pried into what you were doing before you joined us. You're a talented tech, I think I've been clear about that. Between your ID and your skill, I know you were in the Navy-"
"Army."
"Huh?"
"I was in the Army. Not the Navy. Staff Sergeant Marie Howe, retired."
He blinked, and Iskander blinked back. It felt a little strange to use her name again, but it's not like it wasn't used to it.
"But I thought… Your background was… huh?"
"I spent six months and change on a Navy picket before I mustered out. Learned a lot. Lost a lot. It was useful to me to let you think whatever you wanted about my service. I figured if I'd've said Army, you'd've said you had no use for me." Iskander said, curling up on itself. It was planning on leaving soon anyway, if they decided to throw it off at the next port, it wouldn't be such a big deal. It'd miss the ship, though, far more than-
"-not mad about it."
Oh. He had been speaking. Iskander opened its eyes, staring at the man with a panicked look.
"Huh? What?"
"I said that you're probably right, so I'm glad you didn't. We would have lost out on one hell of a sailor." He extended a hand, gripping Iskanders and pulling it into a brief, casual embrace, "I don't know what happened, and I'm not about to start asking. I'm smart enough to know war isn't pretty. But you've got a place on this ship for as long as you need one, gottit?"
Iskander experienced a broad array of feelings in a matter of seconds. It felt embarrassed and shy. It felt a warm flutter in its chest. It felt anxious about the contact, the closest it had been to someone since it had said goodbye to Angelique, since it had been with Rasma. Fresh tears prickled at the corners of its eyes.
"Yeah." I said, voice catching in its throat for just long enough to flood its cheeks with rosy blush. It turned away, hiding its embarrassment, but gave the captain a nudge with an elbow, an appreciative gesture, "Yeah, I hear you. Thank you."
Chapter 8 - Armistice Day
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
It stayed aboard that broken down ship, unsure as to exactly why it was doing so, but doing so nonetheless. Their shipping routes shrank, shrank and shrank again as the Affini cage closed around the Terran Accord. Eventually they were contained to a handful of systems, hurriedly moving cargo, guns, ammunition and even food back and forth for what remained of the Cosmic Navy. Twice they jumped away from a system as the Affini arrived, those same gigantic ships floating into view as the little merchant's jump drive threatened to shake itself apart before tearing a hole in space.
Iskander spent a day after each of those drunk, high, or preferably both. It couldn't escape the thoughts that dug themselves into its head, the fear and the panic, the terror that those vines would grab their ship next. The cowardice, it chastised itself, and felt shame with every swig from a deep bottle.
Standard communications channels became unusable. Interstellar comms were awash with Affini propaganda, little speeches by their drugged up and brainwashed 'florets', announcements about how kind they were and how safe they wanted to keep anything. Sometimes they would broadcast appeals to the remaining ships of the Cosmic Navy, to any merchants still flying, to the people of the systems still part of the Accord, encouraging them to give up and embrace the security of the so-called Affini Compact.
Local comms were little better. Most channels had either been washed out by jamming, reserved for TACN use or were pumping out near constant Accord transmissions, idly threatening anyone caught working with the enemy and detailing just how close the Accord was to victory. Nobody aboard their ship bought it, everyone knew just how bad things had got. They knew the Accord only had so much time left, but none of them were about to just give up either. After all, Iskander mused over a bottle of cheap vodka that tasted more like ethanol than alcohol, everyone knew the Affini sent people to work camps or used them as fertiliser or ate them. It had its money on fertiliser, though really there wasn't that much difference between any of them. All it cared about was not getting grabbed by the weeds.
Grabbed by the weeds. When Iskander had signed on there had been eleven other people aboard the ship, mostly men but also a few women and one openly (and aggressively) non-binary sailor. Three men and one of the women had disappeared since then, vanishing from the ship on whatever shithole the ship had docked with. Two of them left their duffels behind, not even bothering to recover their personal effects before bouncing. A few of the others murmured dark thoughts between themselves, calling them traitors or weaklings. Iskander wondered if they'd been grabbed, snatched in the night by the real monster under the bed.
Even with all the muttered curses and the claims that no-one else would ever bolt, it was an affecting experience to watch crewmates, comrades, friends, lovers disappear. Whenever the ship put down on a station, an outpost or even on the rarest of occasions an actual planet, the entire crew would disembark, find the nearest dive bar and spend the next twenty-four hours raising hell in as many ways as they could find.
More than once, Iskander woke up with a banging headache, a dry mouth and stuck in a local lock-up. It was a humiliating experience, calling the Captain and asking to be bailed out and promising not to do it again (it would almost certainly do it again the next time they made port on this station). Sometimes it woke up with company, sometimes it woke up alone. No matter what, it always knew what to do when it finally had enough time to sober up. Message the ship, get bailed out, go back to work.
That was the routine of those last desperate weeks until one miserably morning it found itself standing in front of a comms terminal, scrolling through a list of docked ships. A basic search had failed to turn up the little merchant it had crewed for the last year and change. There were a few warships, a handful of big cargo haulers and even some trillionaire's yacht - but no tramp trader with mismatched access cupboards. It checked the arrival board: yep, there it was just a couple of days ago earth-time. A tingle ran up its spine, a cold sweat prickling across its skin. It flicked across to the departure board.
Six hours ago, the ship had undocked from Telos Station and made the best speed out of the system it could. They hadn't waited for Iskander. They hadn't come to find it. They'd just gone into the night without even a simple goodbye.
Iskander crumpled. It slumped forwards across the terminal as a great sob wracked its chest. Tears fell down its cheeks and onto the console screen, leaving little clear tracks in the otherwise grimy surface. It choked on its own sadness and coughed, stumbling away from the console and back towards the hard shelf it had for a bed. It wasn't the crew it was sad about, it consoled itself, they could have been anyone. It wouldn't miss any of them, not the cute pilot, not the constantly grease stained engineer, and certainly not the Captain. It didn't mourn the ship, the place that it had resisted calling home for almost a year now, it was just a liminal space that helped it achieve its goals of going… somewhere. No, instead it was those odd little access hatches it had spent so long getting to know like they were its own skin; the quick fixes and jury-rigs as familiar to it as every scar it and Marie and Elodie had earned - those were what it missed.
It was coming up on the anniversary of silence. Or maybe it was more now? Marie hadn't shown her face since that dinner with Angelique, months ago now. Iskander wanted to scream. It was so tired. No one had ever expected it to do this alone before. It didn't even have anyone to ask for help. It missed the little girl it shared a head with, and the sweetheart too. It missed them so much that it was painful, not physically, but deep in its heart and in its soul. They were the thing it missed the most.
Its chest hurt. Muscles ached to fill its lungs fully, and it couldn't do it. It could barely gasp breaths. Was this worse than all the losses it had suffered? Was this worse than someone dying? It didn't know, all it knew was that it hurt. It slowly slipped into a silent funk and then on into a broken and uncomfortable sleep. There was no-one coming for them. Why bother staying awake?
"Howe!"
A billy club rattled off of polymer bars, echoing strangely in the enclosed space. They reverberated like a strange musical instrument, dragging Iskander from its restless sleep and into a kind of half-light wakefulness.
It rolled onto its side, squinting against the harsh fluorescent light and the shadowy form of one of its jailers. It had gotten to know them pretty well in the last week or so - Jimmy, Syrus and Tsumugi - as it served its short sentence for being drunk and disorderly. Ten days in exchange for one night of madness, reduced to seven for good behaviour.
"Syrus? What is it?" It raised a hand, shading its eyes from the interminable glare.
Rather than an immediate answer, Syrus unlocked the gate and let it swing open under its own weight. He stepped back from the gate, leaning against the wall with a sigh.
"While it's been a pleasure hosting you, I'm afraid your stay is up. If you've enjoyed your time here at Chez Brig, you can leave us a five-star review on your choice of hotel review app." He paused, waiting for a response before finally stepping forwards, grinning, "C'mon Howe, you're free to go."
Iskander dragged itself upright, stretching slowly.
"And I was just starting to like it here," It murmured, voice catching in its throat, "Got anything to drink?"
"You're not a prisoner anymore, you think we can just give away things like that?"
"C'mon man, some water?" It got to its feet unsteadily. Seven days in low-G with basically nothing to do had done it no favours in that regard.
"Literally every drop is counted, what do you wanna do?" Syrus shrugged, gesturing towards the lock-up door, "your stuff's outside."
Iskander walked onto the station promenade a free person, thirsty, hungry and strangely tired. It had slept, it had done almost nothing but sleep for the last few days, and all it wanted to do was curl up in a bunk it would likely never see again. It scrubbed its face with a free hand and sighed. One problem at a time.
It found a public terminal down near the docks, signing in with Marie's ID and paying a small fee before skimming through a handful of incoming mail. Most of it was spam, one was something to do with the continuation of Marie's pension and the last was a note from the Captain. It screwed up its face in a frustrated pout and clicked the button to open it.
"Hey Marie. Listen, I feel fucking awful about leaving you behind but when news of the peace hit everything got real weird real fast. A couple of Navy boats tried to interdict the station and if we hadn't bolted when we did we were never getting out of the system. I'm sending this just before we hit a safe jump point. I hope you're gonna be okay. You're a tough one, we all know that, and I don't doubt you'll survive. Just… listen, be careful. If we ever end up in the same port again, look me up. I owe you more than a drink."
It screwed up its eyes as they stung, tears prickling at the corners. There would be plenty of time to cry about it later, for now there were even more questions it needed to find answers too. But first, a drink.
It made its way quickly around the outer ring of the station, through strangely quiet merchant docks. There were people here or there but none of the sheer number that had been working when it had first disembarked from the ship. The message had said something about interdiction but if they shut down all the merchant traffic…
It would explain the graffiti. A hundred messages were daubed on the normally bare station walls in an eclectic rainbow of colours, ranging from the relatively pedestrian declamations of territorial claims to the ardent calls for all 'Free Terrans' to rise against the 'Affini Menace'.
It finally reached a port-side diner with just enough gravity to be comfortable. It found a seat at the bar and ordered a cup of coffee and a bowl of something hot and filling. It expected little in the way of flavour, but even a flavourless mash would be preferable to the gnawing in its belly. The server put down a steaming, lidded mug and a rimmed bowl in front of it after only a couple of minutes' wait.
"Anything else?" She asked, bloodshot eyes peering out from over dark eye bags.
"You got a few minutes to chat?" It asked, taking a sip of hot coffee and letting it scald its way down its throat. She looked around the diner before shrugging.
"Why not? What's on your mind?"
"I got out of the brig, like, half an hour ago," It paused, holding its hands up in mock surrender, "I got a little drunk on shore leave, nothing sketchy. I've been cut off from pretty much anything for a week. My ship even bounced without me. You, uh…. Do you know what's going on?"
The waiter looked halfway to fainting, skin pale and eyes wide. She reached out a hand, resting it on top of Iskanders. It was warm, a tender action, and it couldn't help but smile innocently at her.
"Didn't they tell you anything?" She sighed, a long low breath of anxiety, "Sweetie, I don't know exactly how to put this, so I'm just going to say it; the war is over."
"Oh," It said, its heart beating so loud in its ears that it almost couldn't hear her. Over? Just like that? How had they done it? Who had - No, that didn't matter right now. Marie could come back, Elodie could come back! "That's… that's great news," The look on her face said otherwise, "right?"
"No, darling. We lost."
They had lost. The Terran Accord had lost. The men and women who led an interstellar empire the scale of which had never been seen before had given up and surrendered.
The waiter, who had eventually introduced herself as Julie as she pulled up a bunch of news articles on a tablet, quietly refilled Iskander's coffee mug repeatedly over the course of a couple of hours. It devoured information, grasping at every news feed it could to try and get its head around what had happened. The Affini and their giant ships had made it all the way to Sol and, rather than go out fighting, the central government of the Accord had sued for peace.
Now Iskander was drifting idly through the passages and gangways of the station, ruminating. While a treaty was still being hashed out between the Affini and whatever remained of the Terran government, the implications in the broadcasts - most of them captioned as 'Affini Approved' - were that it was an entirely one-sided discussion. The aliens had won, and now they got to set the terms.
What the fuck kind of use had it been, it chastised itself. It had spent the last year swanning around Terran space on a beat up merchant instead of doing something actually useful. Why wasn't it out there with the rest of the Cosmic Navy or the Army or whoever, sacrificing it all to give the rest of humanity a fucking chance.
It looked down, glaring at the lump of metal that had replaced its leg. Ah yes; the economical choice that had barred it from a type of service it was actually good at. The fucking Affini had stolen its leg, and now it stomped around without a place in the world. Marie had worked so hard to build them one and that was taken away, then they'd gone into Naval service together and that was taken away as well. Now this bullshit peace had spooked that same Navy bad enough to close down an entire system. At least that's what it assumed had happened. Either way, the Affini hurt it again.
Stewing in its own thoughts, it found itself wandering into a main concourse. The ever-present graffiti was less dense here, and it was easy to see why. Pockets of sailors dressed in working uniform were scattered around the deck, eyeing up passers-by warily. As Iskander floated past, one of them called out:
"Hey, girl. Are you a sailor?" he was loud enough for his voice to carry across the entire concourse. Iskander furrowed its brow.
"I've sailed, Navy and merchant both." It replied, pushing off the wall and flying in a straight line towards the sailor. It grabbed their hand in a well practised motion, one trained into both of them aboard starships, and brought it to a stop.
"You hear about the surrender?" he asked, and it nodded in reply, "Wanna get back at the weeds?"
A breath caught in Iskander's throat. It glanced down at its prosthesis, then back up at the shrewd-eyed man. Of course, it wanted to get back at them, it wanted nothing more, but the war was over, wasn't it?
"Petty Officer Cavendish, CNS Unbridled Fate," The sailor - Cavendish - extended a hand to shake. "We had some desertions after the news got out, fucking traitors. Pulling in every able hand on the docks that's still willing to put their lives on the line. That sound like you?"
"Ye- um. Aye?" Iskander attempted and drew a short bark of a laugh from Cavendish.
"That's the spirit, welcome aboard. What's your name, sailor?"
It took a long moment to think, mouth slightly open, looking into the middle distance.
"Iskander Howe."
"Iskander? Funny name for a girl."
"Aye. But it's mine."
Iskander spent a day after each of those drunk, high, or preferably both. It couldn't escape the thoughts that dug themselves into its head, the fear and the panic, the terror that those vines would grab their ship next. The cowardice, it chastised itself, and felt shame with every swig from a deep bottle.
Standard communications channels became unusable. Interstellar comms were awash with Affini propaganda, little speeches by their drugged up and brainwashed 'florets', announcements about how kind they were and how safe they wanted to keep anything. Sometimes they would broadcast appeals to the remaining ships of the Cosmic Navy, to any merchants still flying, to the people of the systems still part of the Accord, encouraging them to give up and embrace the security of the so-called Affini Compact.
Local comms were little better. Most channels had either been washed out by jamming, reserved for TACN use or were pumping out near constant Accord transmissions, idly threatening anyone caught working with the enemy and detailing just how close the Accord was to victory. Nobody aboard their ship bought it, everyone knew just how bad things had got. They knew the Accord only had so much time left, but none of them were about to just give up either. After all, Iskander mused over a bottle of cheap vodka that tasted more like ethanol than alcohol, everyone knew the Affini sent people to work camps or used them as fertiliser or ate them. It had its money on fertiliser, though really there wasn't that much difference between any of them. All it cared about was not getting grabbed by the weeds.
Grabbed by the weeds. When Iskander had signed on there had been eleven other people aboard the ship, mostly men but also a few women and one openly (and aggressively) non-binary sailor. Three men and one of the women had disappeared since then, vanishing from the ship on whatever shithole the ship had docked with. Two of them left their duffels behind, not even bothering to recover their personal effects before bouncing. A few of the others murmured dark thoughts between themselves, calling them traitors or weaklings. Iskander wondered if they'd been grabbed, snatched in the night by the real monster under the bed.
Even with all the muttered curses and the claims that no-one else would ever bolt, it was an affecting experience to watch crewmates, comrades, friends, lovers disappear. Whenever the ship put down on a station, an outpost or even on the rarest of occasions an actual planet, the entire crew would disembark, find the nearest dive bar and spend the next twenty-four hours raising hell in as many ways as they could find.
More than once, Iskander woke up with a banging headache, a dry mouth and stuck in a local lock-up. It was a humiliating experience, calling the Captain and asking to be bailed out and promising not to do it again (it would almost certainly do it again the next time they made port on this station). Sometimes it woke up with company, sometimes it woke up alone. No matter what, it always knew what to do when it finally had enough time to sober up. Message the ship, get bailed out, go back to work.
That was the routine of those last desperate weeks until one miserably morning it found itself standing in front of a comms terminal, scrolling through a list of docked ships. A basic search had failed to turn up the little merchant it had crewed for the last year and change. There were a few warships, a handful of big cargo haulers and even some trillionaire's yacht - but no tramp trader with mismatched access cupboards. It checked the arrival board: yep, there it was just a couple of days ago earth-time. A tingle ran up its spine, a cold sweat prickling across its skin. It flicked across to the departure board.
Six hours ago, the ship had undocked from Telos Station and made the best speed out of the system it could. They hadn't waited for Iskander. They hadn't come to find it. They'd just gone into the night without even a simple goodbye.
Iskander crumpled. It slumped forwards across the terminal as a great sob wracked its chest. Tears fell down its cheeks and onto the console screen, leaving little clear tracks in the otherwise grimy surface. It choked on its own sadness and coughed, stumbling away from the console and back towards the hard shelf it had for a bed. It wasn't the crew it was sad about, it consoled itself, they could have been anyone. It wouldn't miss any of them, not the cute pilot, not the constantly grease stained engineer, and certainly not the Captain. It didn't mourn the ship, the place that it had resisted calling home for almost a year now, it was just a liminal space that helped it achieve its goals of going… somewhere. No, instead it was those odd little access hatches it had spent so long getting to know like they were its own skin; the quick fixes and jury-rigs as familiar to it as every scar it and Marie and Elodie had earned - those were what it missed.
It was coming up on the anniversary of silence. Or maybe it was more now? Marie hadn't shown her face since that dinner with Angelique, months ago now. Iskander wanted to scream. It was so tired. No one had ever expected it to do this alone before. It didn't even have anyone to ask for help. It missed the little girl it shared a head with, and the sweetheart too. It missed them so much that it was painful, not physically, but deep in its heart and in its soul. They were the thing it missed the most.
Its chest hurt. Muscles ached to fill its lungs fully, and it couldn't do it. It could barely gasp breaths. Was this worse than all the losses it had suffered? Was this worse than someone dying? It didn't know, all it knew was that it hurt. It slowly slipped into a silent funk and then on into a broken and uncomfortable sleep. There was no-one coming for them. Why bother staying awake?
"Howe!"
A billy club rattled off of polymer bars, echoing strangely in the enclosed space. They reverberated like a strange musical instrument, dragging Iskander from its restless sleep and into a kind of half-light wakefulness.
It rolled onto its side, squinting against the harsh fluorescent light and the shadowy form of one of its jailers. It had gotten to know them pretty well in the last week or so - Jimmy, Syrus and Tsumugi - as it served its short sentence for being drunk and disorderly. Ten days in exchange for one night of madness, reduced to seven for good behaviour.
"Syrus? What is it?" It raised a hand, shading its eyes from the interminable glare.
Rather than an immediate answer, Syrus unlocked the gate and let it swing open under its own weight. He stepped back from the gate, leaning against the wall with a sigh.
"While it's been a pleasure hosting you, I'm afraid your stay is up. If you've enjoyed your time here at Chez Brig, you can leave us a five-star review on your choice of hotel review app." He paused, waiting for a response before finally stepping forwards, grinning, "C'mon Howe, you're free to go."
Iskander dragged itself upright, stretching slowly.
"And I was just starting to like it here," It murmured, voice catching in its throat, "Got anything to drink?"
"You're not a prisoner anymore, you think we can just give away things like that?"
"C'mon man, some water?" It got to its feet unsteadily. Seven days in low-G with basically nothing to do had done it no favours in that regard.
"Literally every drop is counted, what do you wanna do?" Syrus shrugged, gesturing towards the lock-up door, "your stuff's outside."
Iskander walked onto the station promenade a free person, thirsty, hungry and strangely tired. It had slept, it had done almost nothing but sleep for the last few days, and all it wanted to do was curl up in a bunk it would likely never see again. It scrubbed its face with a free hand and sighed. One problem at a time.
It found a public terminal down near the docks, signing in with Marie's ID and paying a small fee before skimming through a handful of incoming mail. Most of it was spam, one was something to do with the continuation of Marie's pension and the last was a note from the Captain. It screwed up its face in a frustrated pout and clicked the button to open it.
"Hey Marie. Listen, I feel fucking awful about leaving you behind but when news of the peace hit everything got real weird real fast. A couple of Navy boats tried to interdict the station and if we hadn't bolted when we did we were never getting out of the system. I'm sending this just before we hit a safe jump point. I hope you're gonna be okay. You're a tough one, we all know that, and I don't doubt you'll survive. Just… listen, be careful. If we ever end up in the same port again, look me up. I owe you more than a drink."
It screwed up its eyes as they stung, tears prickling at the corners. There would be plenty of time to cry about it later, for now there were even more questions it needed to find answers too. But first, a drink.
It made its way quickly around the outer ring of the station, through strangely quiet merchant docks. There were people here or there but none of the sheer number that had been working when it had first disembarked from the ship. The message had said something about interdiction but if they shut down all the merchant traffic…
It would explain the graffiti. A hundred messages were daubed on the normally bare station walls in an eclectic rainbow of colours, ranging from the relatively pedestrian declamations of territorial claims to the ardent calls for all 'Free Terrans' to rise against the 'Affini Menace'.
It finally reached a port-side diner with just enough gravity to be comfortable. It found a seat at the bar and ordered a cup of coffee and a bowl of something hot and filling. It expected little in the way of flavour, but even a flavourless mash would be preferable to the gnawing in its belly. The server put down a steaming, lidded mug and a rimmed bowl in front of it after only a couple of minutes' wait.
"Anything else?" She asked, bloodshot eyes peering out from over dark eye bags.
"You got a few minutes to chat?" It asked, taking a sip of hot coffee and letting it scald its way down its throat. She looked around the diner before shrugging.
"Why not? What's on your mind?"
"I got out of the brig, like, half an hour ago," It paused, holding its hands up in mock surrender, "I got a little drunk on shore leave, nothing sketchy. I've been cut off from pretty much anything for a week. My ship even bounced without me. You, uh…. Do you know what's going on?"
The waiter looked halfway to fainting, skin pale and eyes wide. She reached out a hand, resting it on top of Iskanders. It was warm, a tender action, and it couldn't help but smile innocently at her.
"Didn't they tell you anything?" She sighed, a long low breath of anxiety, "Sweetie, I don't know exactly how to put this, so I'm just going to say it; the war is over."
"Oh," It said, its heart beating so loud in its ears that it almost couldn't hear her. Over? Just like that? How had they done it? Who had - No, that didn't matter right now. Marie could come back, Elodie could come back! "That's… that's great news," The look on her face said otherwise, "right?"
"No, darling. We lost."
They had lost. The Terran Accord had lost. The men and women who led an interstellar empire the scale of which had never been seen before had given up and surrendered.
The waiter, who had eventually introduced herself as Julie as she pulled up a bunch of news articles on a tablet, quietly refilled Iskander's coffee mug repeatedly over the course of a couple of hours. It devoured information, grasping at every news feed it could to try and get its head around what had happened. The Affini and their giant ships had made it all the way to Sol and, rather than go out fighting, the central government of the Accord had sued for peace.
Now Iskander was drifting idly through the passages and gangways of the station, ruminating. While a treaty was still being hashed out between the Affini and whatever remained of the Terran government, the implications in the broadcasts - most of them captioned as 'Affini Approved' - were that it was an entirely one-sided discussion. The aliens had won, and now they got to set the terms.
What the fuck kind of use had it been, it chastised itself. It had spent the last year swanning around Terran space on a beat up merchant instead of doing something actually useful. Why wasn't it out there with the rest of the Cosmic Navy or the Army or whoever, sacrificing it all to give the rest of humanity a fucking chance.
It looked down, glaring at the lump of metal that had replaced its leg. Ah yes; the economical choice that had barred it from a type of service it was actually good at. The fucking Affini had stolen its leg, and now it stomped around without a place in the world. Marie had worked so hard to build them one and that was taken away, then they'd gone into Naval service together and that was taken away as well. Now this bullshit peace had spooked that same Navy bad enough to close down an entire system. At least that's what it assumed had happened. Either way, the Affini hurt it again.
Stewing in its own thoughts, it found itself wandering into a main concourse. The ever-present graffiti was less dense here, and it was easy to see why. Pockets of sailors dressed in working uniform were scattered around the deck, eyeing up passers-by warily. As Iskander floated past, one of them called out:
"Hey, girl. Are you a sailor?" he was loud enough for his voice to carry across the entire concourse. Iskander furrowed its brow.
"I've sailed, Navy and merchant both." It replied, pushing off the wall and flying in a straight line towards the sailor. It grabbed their hand in a well practised motion, one trained into both of them aboard starships, and brought it to a stop.
"You hear about the surrender?" he asked, and it nodded in reply, "Wanna get back at the weeds?"
A breath caught in Iskander's throat. It glanced down at its prosthesis, then back up at the shrewd-eyed man. Of course, it wanted to get back at them, it wanted nothing more, but the war was over, wasn't it?
"Petty Officer Cavendish, CNS Unbridled Fate," The sailor - Cavendish - extended a hand to shake. "We had some desertions after the news got out, fucking traitors. Pulling in every able hand on the docks that's still willing to put their lives on the line. That sound like you?"
"Ye- um. Aye?" Iskander attempted and drew a short bark of a laugh from Cavendish.
"That's the spirit, welcome aboard. What's your name, sailor?"
It took a long moment to think, mouth slightly open, looking into the middle distance.
"Iskander Howe."
"Iskander? Funny name for a girl."
"Aye. But it's mine."
Chapter 9 - Captain Angela Wong
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
Besides the massive troop transports that had once carried Iskander, Marie and their fellow soldiers to their deployments, the Unbridled Fate was the largest ship it had ever been on. A Cosmic Navy Heavy Cruiser, it was designed to be the centrepiece of smaller flotillas and a heavy-hitter in a fleet engagement. It was three-hundred-and-fifty metres from stem to stern, eighty metres across the beam, and was clad in some of the most modern armour composites available to the accord. Equipped with a quartet of heavy anti-capital missile launchers on each flank and a trio of fixed railguns in the bow, as well as a preponderance of light defence guns and close-in mounts, it was about as heavily armed as a ship of its size could be expected to be.
All of this was part of the tour Iskander had received three days into its service aboard the Navy ship. It had been strange, coming back aboard a military vessel, one that operated on a hard routine and pushed its sailors to be the best they could be. Stranger still to be relearning how to hurry into a ship-suit with a clunky prosthesis, and how to rush down a gangway when the call for general quarters came. But no matter how strange it felt, it felt good as well. It was fundamentally satisfying to feel like it was making a difference again, now that it was back in the Navy.
Not the Cosmic Navy though, not anymore; the Cosmic Navy had ceased to exist along with the surrender of the Accord. Now it was the Free Navy Ship Unbridled Fate. The Captain, a gregarious woman in her fifties named Angelina Wong, had given a speech when they had finally undocked from the shitty little station Iskander had been stuck on; she'd told them that she was proud to continue the fight against the invaders, that she was proud to have an opportunity to strike back against the weeds, and that she was proud of each and every one of them.
It was strange to hear a stranger was proud of it, stranger still to have it come from the Captain of a warship. Still, it seemed to work; morale aboard the ship was high as they random-walked a series of jumps across a multitude of systems just as quickly as the drive could cool. Iskander slotted right into place and for a month it was like all was right with the world. It got itself assigned to an engineering working crew and found itself scampering through closets and maintenance corridors again. This time, however, it wasn't alone.
"Howe." a burly man, wearing the overalls of a working engineer, caught its attention at breakfast. It had been trying to make hot porridge disappear as fast as it possibly could, but paused, swallowed, and raised its eyes from the bowl on the table in front of it.
"Aye, chief?"
"You're a volunteer, right? Came on after the peace?"
They had stopped at two more stations in their desperate flight from the Affini's takeover and brought on more volunteers. The cruiser was perhaps overcrowded now, even despite the relative dearth of available experienced sailors, and Iskander had quickly blended in and stopped being the 'newbie'.
"Yeah, joined up on Telos a month ago."
"The fuck were you doing on that shithole?" The engineer asked. Iskander shrugged, unsure as to what useful answer it could give, "Merchant sailor?"
"Spent a year or so aboard a tramp trader. Army before that, seconded to the Navy."
"Shit, we've got a ground-pounder for a sailor," he laughed, slapping his open palm on the table, grabbing the attention of the others sitting nearby "How the hell did you end up on a ship? You military intelligence or something?"
"No, Infantry. Five years with the one-six-one rifles." That earned it a quizzical look, and when it scanned around, it realised everyone was paying attention. Several other sailors moved to join their table, eyes not moving from Iskanders hunched form, "I uh… guess the Espionage Act doesn't mean much any more, not here anyway. Any of you ever heard of Doldrum? Uhhh, Conchertus it was called too."
A woman a few seats away raised her hand, "I was there before the war started, aboard a destroyer. Don't remember much."
"There's not much to remember. Just another half-failed colony world, but we were there as part of a defence cordon against the Affini." It picked up its coffee mug, and winced when it tasted the cold, thin muck. Still, it was enough to wet its throat, and it quickly fell back into the same tone it had used to defend its report of the action years ago, "We made contact with an enemy attack craft and my platoon engaged. We hit them with a pair of portable surface-to-air missiles and enough infantry weapons fire to bring down a, uh… y'know, one of those big quadrupeds-"
"Horse!" a baby-faced sailor interrupted, helpfully.
"No, bigger than that." Iskander shot the youngster an encouraging smile. "The aliens they uh… They didn't even flinch. Got off world on a Navy ship, the Praetorian."
"Hey, I served aboard the Praetorian for a bit!" Someone said anonymous, in the gathered crowd,
"But you… you fought them? The Weeds? You showed them Terran mettle, right?" The same baby-faced soldier had a misty eyed look on their face, full of hope and glory.
Iskander gave them another encouraging look. They needed to keep that spirit in the coming months.
"We showed them. We hit them with everything we had before pulling out. It was a hell of a battle." Iskander's knuckles were white on the coffee mug; it set it down before anyone could notice, moving its hands into its lap. Nothing about that fight had been noble or good, it had been a massacre. It had been hell.
A shout from behind the gathered crowd interrupted the first wave of gloomy thoughts.
"Ten-hut!" someone shouted, and everyone standing straightened. Even those who were sitting down sat up in their chairs. An officer - a lieutenant by her rank pinks - pushed to the front of the little crowd and waved a hand around.
"If you're done eating, get to your posts. This isn't a sewing circle, ladies and gentlemen." She said, authority running through every word. The crowd slowly scattered, drifting apart now that they knew they weren't getting any more gossip. Iskander pushed its tray away, appetite gone, and made as if to stand, but a firm hand on its shoulder held it in place. "Not you, Howe."
They waited together as the group separated, and even the Chief finally gave in with a huff and wandered off.
"Did I overhear correctly, Howe, that you've seen the enemy in action?" It nodded, tight-lipped, "Come with me."
It stood, following her towards the mess hatchway. She paused just long enough to let it stow its tray before continuing on into the gangway. Her soft boot falls were a bass note to the clunking harshness of metal prosthetic on metal deck plate.
Iskander tried to slow its breathing. It knew it was rapidly approaching a panic attack, its thoughts racing away from it like a pack of wild beasts. Its eyes flicked left and right as it followed the Lieutenant, looking for a non-existent way out. The pair transitioned from the spun section of the cruiser to the main hull, letting go of the ladder and dropping the last few feet into free fall. Did they know something about Doldrum? About the Faithful Intervention? How Iskander had failed and had left so many people to die, and now they were going to throw it in the brig, and it would lose its chance to make a difference right after it had found a new way to actually protect the people it loved so much?
They took a series of turns, but Iskander wasn't paying attention to them. It only noticed they were approaching the forward sections of the ship when the paint got a little neater and the lighting turned a little less harsh. This wasn't just officers' country, it realised, but command decks. There hadn't been anything like this back on the little scout, and it never saw it on troop transports, but it knew the concept from the muttering and cursing of soldiers and sailors. This was where the money was, where the children of billionaires gave up just a little bit of their medically extended lifespans to protect their fortunes and, incidentally, the Accord.
The Lieutenant came to a halt by a hatchway with a closed door and pressed a button on the intercom mounted on the wall beside it. There was an exchange of muted words that Iskander didn't pay attention to, still trying to figure out a way to run for it. The door opened, hinges grinding slightly and, even in the middle of its panic, Iskander couldn't help but make a mental note that they needed to be logged as a maintenance issue.
It stepped into the room and three things happened. First, it realised it was standing in the Captain's ready room. Second, the Captain was already seated behind her desk, eyes fixed on a computer screen it couldn't see, typing furiously. The third was that Iskander, and the Lieutenant following it into the room, came as sharply to attention as they could in the free fall environment.
"Faulkner." The Captain finally said, looking up after several minutes, "and… Howe? Is that correct?"
"Aye, Sir." Iskander snapped, eyes fixed on an invisible point on the wall behind the Captain's head. Wong reached forward to switch off her screen before folding her hands across her chest and sighing.
"So what is this, a discipline problem? You're not Howe's department lead, are you?" She addressed the latter question to the Lieutenant. Iskander froze in place, barely breathing. Had it done something wrong by sharing?
"No, Sir, not at all. You said anyone with combat experience against the Affini should come see you. Turns out Seaman Howe does."
"You've fought them?" The Captain turned back to it, posture more upright, facial expression more alive, "Where? What ship were you on, Sailor?"
"Oh, um," Iskander broke its gaze on the wall, blushing gently and ducking its head, "My first contact with them was on Doldrum, actually. Ground forces."
It recounted the story quickly, though this time it didn't gloss over the sheer, overwhelming force that the Affini were able to bring to bear. It went on to talk about its time aboard the Faithful Intervention, watching the Affini bring down fleet after fleet and system after system until it finally lost its home in the ships (foolhardy) attempt to escape. It did not mention Rasma or any of the others who died. It didn't seem like the time.
By the time it finished, the Captain had dismissed Lieutenant Faulkner back to her duties and was staring at Iskander with an expression that mixed frustration with exhaustion.
"The fact that we've got you working in maintenance is a crime." She finally said, doing so with a sigh that seemed to last for an age.
"Um," Iskander fidgeted, unsure of what to do with such an informal statement, "I like fixing things, Sir. I'm good at it."
"I'm sure you are," She gestured to a seat that faced her desk, "Do you want a drink?"
"A drink, Sir?"
"Whisky, port, brandy. I think I even have some truly awful marsala wine somewhere." She got up from her chair and pushed off her desk, ending up in front of a cabinet set into one wall. She opened it and drew a couple of glasses, dropping ice into one of them.
Iskander was stunned into silence for a moment. This woman had fresh ice available to her, and she was using it to cool her drinks? Most of the crew had to ration showers and their water tasted just a little too much like algae to be refreshing, and the Captain had just placed two crystal clear cubes into a tumbler without a thought. It blinked, staring, before finally realising what it was doing when she rattled the glass.
"Whisky. Please, Sir." It said, still a little thrown. She busied herself for a few moments more and then returned to the desk with two sealed beakers. One, she handed to Iskander, the other she kept for herself. Iskander took a sip and realised it was quite possibly the best whisky it had ever tasted.
"I was there, y'know, with the Ninth at Bakersville. I had a destroyer then, two-hundred metres long and thirty-five years old, the Niagra . We were part of the 3rd Flotilla, port side of the Dreadnought Jupiter's Cataclysm. That was-" She paused with a sigh, "It's funny to think it was barely eighteen months ago. This war has been hard on the officers' corps, even with contracts getting extended due to the war. Too many medical discharges. Anyway, Bakersville. From what you said, you saw it too, but we were less than a kilometre from the Jaycee when the Affini took it. One minute it was a blaze of railgun discharges, the next it was infested with vines. I watched a ship from my flotilla shudder when the enemy hit it."
She put her tumbler down on the desk, letting the magnet hidden in the base lock it onto the metal surface. The silence lengthened slowly, seconds ticking away. Iskander didn't know if it was supposed to speak or keep its thoughts to itself. It didn't think Wong would appreciate what it was thinking right now anyway. It was angry, furious even. She talked about medical leave and the difficulty of command like it was comparable to the deaths that had stained its hands red. She had experienced the war, even those great battles, in the relative opulence of a warship. She had ice cubes, for fuck's sake.
"Most of the kids on this ship are fresh. I have some of the last officers to graduate an academy, and I have sailors who barely know how to navigate in free fall. You and I might be the only people aboard who've seen them in action, and I've never seen them on the ground." She took a long drink from her beaker, "I need my crew in good shape. I need their morale to hold if we're going to retake everything we've lost. I need them to know they have a fighting chance."
"You're asking me to lie for you." It said, forgetting itself, "Sir."
"I'm asking you to help me give this crew the best chance of winning this war. I don't want you to lie to them, sailor, I want to make sure you're spreading the right message to them. Look, we clearly made the right decision here. We saw how dangerous the Affini are, and we kept fighting anyway. That's noble, that's good, but I know the threat that a little knowledge poses. I saw more than one officer throw their hands up and surrender in the face of the enemy. I cannot have that happening on this ship, do you understand, especially not in the ranks?"
She held its gaze for a long moment until it finally looked down.
"Aye, Sir. I'll be careful what I say. You have my word." It said, before drinking the rest of its (exceptional) whisky in a single long sip.
"Good. I knew I could rely on you. Dismissed."
Iskander left her ready room without a backwards glance.
The Affini bristled, leaves and thorns standing up as straight as a shiver passed through the mass of plant matter. It heaved, its bulk coming almost upright before collapsing into an undifferentiated mound again. The door chime rang out, cutting through the quiet gloom, announcing the arrival of a visitor. The Affini ignored it.
It rang again and, rather than answering, a vine extended to curl around a bowl that had once held nutrient water and tossed it at the entrance. It shattered against the wall with a crash. Shards of crystal clattered to the ground like sudden, heavy and short-lived rain. The door slid open a moment later. A bundle of vines hurried in, a deeper, darker green mass that quickly extended towards the mass on the ground.
[Talk to me] the newcomer spoke in hushed patterns.
[What's the point?] the first asked, a breeze through a copse.
[Your mood will not improve this way. Wallowing in your depression-]
[It is not depression!] The first creature's voice becomes a gale, the copse bending before the blow, [I am not sad, I am angry. This is the third time I should have had her! The third time she should have been wrapped safely in my vines. Instead, I learn that her friends, her comrades, have abandoned her! I swear to the Everbloom, this callousness that infects these humans is some of the cruellest I have ever seen.]
The newcomer shuddered, unfolding, before laying itself across the heap in a comforting blanket. Together, they looked like nothing more than dense ground cover. Cores pulsed, biorhythms intermingled in a lingering moment of quiet.
[We will get her, I promise. The protectorate has given up all of their files. She cannot evade us for much longer. None of the rebels will.]
All of this was part of the tour Iskander had received three days into its service aboard the Navy ship. It had been strange, coming back aboard a military vessel, one that operated on a hard routine and pushed its sailors to be the best they could be. Stranger still to be relearning how to hurry into a ship-suit with a clunky prosthesis, and how to rush down a gangway when the call for general quarters came. But no matter how strange it felt, it felt good as well. It was fundamentally satisfying to feel like it was making a difference again, now that it was back in the Navy.
Not the Cosmic Navy though, not anymore; the Cosmic Navy had ceased to exist along with the surrender of the Accord. Now it was the Free Navy Ship Unbridled Fate. The Captain, a gregarious woman in her fifties named Angelina Wong, had given a speech when they had finally undocked from the shitty little station Iskander had been stuck on; she'd told them that she was proud to continue the fight against the invaders, that she was proud to have an opportunity to strike back against the weeds, and that she was proud of each and every one of them.
It was strange to hear a stranger was proud of it, stranger still to have it come from the Captain of a warship. Still, it seemed to work; morale aboard the ship was high as they random-walked a series of jumps across a multitude of systems just as quickly as the drive could cool. Iskander slotted right into place and for a month it was like all was right with the world. It got itself assigned to an engineering working crew and found itself scampering through closets and maintenance corridors again. This time, however, it wasn't alone.
"Howe." a burly man, wearing the overalls of a working engineer, caught its attention at breakfast. It had been trying to make hot porridge disappear as fast as it possibly could, but paused, swallowed, and raised its eyes from the bowl on the table in front of it.
"Aye, chief?"
"You're a volunteer, right? Came on after the peace?"
They had stopped at two more stations in their desperate flight from the Affini's takeover and brought on more volunteers. The cruiser was perhaps overcrowded now, even despite the relative dearth of available experienced sailors, and Iskander had quickly blended in and stopped being the 'newbie'.
"Yeah, joined up on Telos a month ago."
"The fuck were you doing on that shithole?" The engineer asked. Iskander shrugged, unsure as to what useful answer it could give, "Merchant sailor?"
"Spent a year or so aboard a tramp trader. Army before that, seconded to the Navy."
"Shit, we've got a ground-pounder for a sailor," he laughed, slapping his open palm on the table, grabbing the attention of the others sitting nearby "How the hell did you end up on a ship? You military intelligence or something?"
"No, Infantry. Five years with the one-six-one rifles." That earned it a quizzical look, and when it scanned around, it realised everyone was paying attention. Several other sailors moved to join their table, eyes not moving from Iskanders hunched form, "I uh… guess the Espionage Act doesn't mean much any more, not here anyway. Any of you ever heard of Doldrum? Uhhh, Conchertus it was called too."
A woman a few seats away raised her hand, "I was there before the war started, aboard a destroyer. Don't remember much."
"There's not much to remember. Just another half-failed colony world, but we were there as part of a defence cordon against the Affini." It picked up its coffee mug, and winced when it tasted the cold, thin muck. Still, it was enough to wet its throat, and it quickly fell back into the same tone it had used to defend its report of the action years ago, "We made contact with an enemy attack craft and my platoon engaged. We hit them with a pair of portable surface-to-air missiles and enough infantry weapons fire to bring down a, uh… y'know, one of those big quadrupeds-"
"Horse!" a baby-faced sailor interrupted, helpfully.
"No, bigger than that." Iskander shot the youngster an encouraging smile. "The aliens they uh… They didn't even flinch. Got off world on a Navy ship, the Praetorian."
"Hey, I served aboard the Praetorian for a bit!" Someone said anonymous, in the gathered crowd,
"But you… you fought them? The Weeds? You showed them Terran mettle, right?" The same baby-faced soldier had a misty eyed look on their face, full of hope and glory.
Iskander gave them another encouraging look. They needed to keep that spirit in the coming months.
"We showed them. We hit them with everything we had before pulling out. It was a hell of a battle." Iskander's knuckles were white on the coffee mug; it set it down before anyone could notice, moving its hands into its lap. Nothing about that fight had been noble or good, it had been a massacre. It had been hell.
A shout from behind the gathered crowd interrupted the first wave of gloomy thoughts.
"Ten-hut!" someone shouted, and everyone standing straightened. Even those who were sitting down sat up in their chairs. An officer - a lieutenant by her rank pinks - pushed to the front of the little crowd and waved a hand around.
"If you're done eating, get to your posts. This isn't a sewing circle, ladies and gentlemen." She said, authority running through every word. The crowd slowly scattered, drifting apart now that they knew they weren't getting any more gossip. Iskander pushed its tray away, appetite gone, and made as if to stand, but a firm hand on its shoulder held it in place. "Not you, Howe."
They waited together as the group separated, and even the Chief finally gave in with a huff and wandered off.
"Did I overhear correctly, Howe, that you've seen the enemy in action?" It nodded, tight-lipped, "Come with me."
It stood, following her towards the mess hatchway. She paused just long enough to let it stow its tray before continuing on into the gangway. Her soft boot falls were a bass note to the clunking harshness of metal prosthetic on metal deck plate.
Iskander tried to slow its breathing. It knew it was rapidly approaching a panic attack, its thoughts racing away from it like a pack of wild beasts. Its eyes flicked left and right as it followed the Lieutenant, looking for a non-existent way out. The pair transitioned from the spun section of the cruiser to the main hull, letting go of the ladder and dropping the last few feet into free fall. Did they know something about Doldrum? About the Faithful Intervention? How Iskander had failed and had left so many people to die, and now they were going to throw it in the brig, and it would lose its chance to make a difference right after it had found a new way to actually protect the people it loved so much?
They took a series of turns, but Iskander wasn't paying attention to them. It only noticed they were approaching the forward sections of the ship when the paint got a little neater and the lighting turned a little less harsh. This wasn't just officers' country, it realised, but command decks. There hadn't been anything like this back on the little scout, and it never saw it on troop transports, but it knew the concept from the muttering and cursing of soldiers and sailors. This was where the money was, where the children of billionaires gave up just a little bit of their medically extended lifespans to protect their fortunes and, incidentally, the Accord.
The Lieutenant came to a halt by a hatchway with a closed door and pressed a button on the intercom mounted on the wall beside it. There was an exchange of muted words that Iskander didn't pay attention to, still trying to figure out a way to run for it. The door opened, hinges grinding slightly and, even in the middle of its panic, Iskander couldn't help but make a mental note that they needed to be logged as a maintenance issue.
It stepped into the room and three things happened. First, it realised it was standing in the Captain's ready room. Second, the Captain was already seated behind her desk, eyes fixed on a computer screen it couldn't see, typing furiously. The third was that Iskander, and the Lieutenant following it into the room, came as sharply to attention as they could in the free fall environment.
"Faulkner." The Captain finally said, looking up after several minutes, "and… Howe? Is that correct?"
"Aye, Sir." Iskander snapped, eyes fixed on an invisible point on the wall behind the Captain's head. Wong reached forward to switch off her screen before folding her hands across her chest and sighing.
"So what is this, a discipline problem? You're not Howe's department lead, are you?" She addressed the latter question to the Lieutenant. Iskander froze in place, barely breathing. Had it done something wrong by sharing?
"No, Sir, not at all. You said anyone with combat experience against the Affini should come see you. Turns out Seaman Howe does."
"You've fought them?" The Captain turned back to it, posture more upright, facial expression more alive, "Where? What ship were you on, Sailor?"
"Oh, um," Iskander broke its gaze on the wall, blushing gently and ducking its head, "My first contact with them was on Doldrum, actually. Ground forces."
It recounted the story quickly, though this time it didn't gloss over the sheer, overwhelming force that the Affini were able to bring to bear. It went on to talk about its time aboard the Faithful Intervention, watching the Affini bring down fleet after fleet and system after system until it finally lost its home in the ships (foolhardy) attempt to escape. It did not mention Rasma or any of the others who died. It didn't seem like the time.
By the time it finished, the Captain had dismissed Lieutenant Faulkner back to her duties and was staring at Iskander with an expression that mixed frustration with exhaustion.
"The fact that we've got you working in maintenance is a crime." She finally said, doing so with a sigh that seemed to last for an age.
"Um," Iskander fidgeted, unsure of what to do with such an informal statement, "I like fixing things, Sir. I'm good at it."
"I'm sure you are," She gestured to a seat that faced her desk, "Do you want a drink?"
"A drink, Sir?"
"Whisky, port, brandy. I think I even have some truly awful marsala wine somewhere." She got up from her chair and pushed off her desk, ending up in front of a cabinet set into one wall. She opened it and drew a couple of glasses, dropping ice into one of them.
Iskander was stunned into silence for a moment. This woman had fresh ice available to her, and she was using it to cool her drinks? Most of the crew had to ration showers and their water tasted just a little too much like algae to be refreshing, and the Captain had just placed two crystal clear cubes into a tumbler without a thought. It blinked, staring, before finally realising what it was doing when she rattled the glass.
"Whisky. Please, Sir." It said, still a little thrown. She busied herself for a few moments more and then returned to the desk with two sealed beakers. One, she handed to Iskander, the other she kept for herself. Iskander took a sip and realised it was quite possibly the best whisky it had ever tasted.
"I was there, y'know, with the Ninth at Bakersville. I had a destroyer then, two-hundred metres long and thirty-five years old, the Niagra . We were part of the 3rd Flotilla, port side of the Dreadnought Jupiter's Cataclysm. That was-" She paused with a sigh, "It's funny to think it was barely eighteen months ago. This war has been hard on the officers' corps, even with contracts getting extended due to the war. Too many medical discharges. Anyway, Bakersville. From what you said, you saw it too, but we were less than a kilometre from the Jaycee when the Affini took it. One minute it was a blaze of railgun discharges, the next it was infested with vines. I watched a ship from my flotilla shudder when the enemy hit it."
She put her tumbler down on the desk, letting the magnet hidden in the base lock it onto the metal surface. The silence lengthened slowly, seconds ticking away. Iskander didn't know if it was supposed to speak or keep its thoughts to itself. It didn't think Wong would appreciate what it was thinking right now anyway. It was angry, furious even. She talked about medical leave and the difficulty of command like it was comparable to the deaths that had stained its hands red. She had experienced the war, even those great battles, in the relative opulence of a warship. She had ice cubes, for fuck's sake.
"Most of the kids on this ship are fresh. I have some of the last officers to graduate an academy, and I have sailors who barely know how to navigate in free fall. You and I might be the only people aboard who've seen them in action, and I've never seen them on the ground." She took a long drink from her beaker, "I need my crew in good shape. I need their morale to hold if we're going to retake everything we've lost. I need them to know they have a fighting chance."
"You're asking me to lie for you." It said, forgetting itself, "Sir."
"I'm asking you to help me give this crew the best chance of winning this war. I don't want you to lie to them, sailor, I want to make sure you're spreading the right message to them. Look, we clearly made the right decision here. We saw how dangerous the Affini are, and we kept fighting anyway. That's noble, that's good, but I know the threat that a little knowledge poses. I saw more than one officer throw their hands up and surrender in the face of the enemy. I cannot have that happening on this ship, do you understand, especially not in the ranks?"
She held its gaze for a long moment until it finally looked down.
"Aye, Sir. I'll be careful what I say. You have my word." It said, before drinking the rest of its (exceptional) whisky in a single long sip.
"Good. I knew I could rely on you. Dismissed."
Iskander left her ready room without a backwards glance.
The Affini bristled, leaves and thorns standing up as straight as a shiver passed through the mass of plant matter. It heaved, its bulk coming almost upright before collapsing into an undifferentiated mound again. The door chime rang out, cutting through the quiet gloom, announcing the arrival of a visitor. The Affini ignored it.
It rang again and, rather than answering, a vine extended to curl around a bowl that had once held nutrient water and tossed it at the entrance. It shattered against the wall with a crash. Shards of crystal clattered to the ground like sudden, heavy and short-lived rain. The door slid open a moment later. A bundle of vines hurried in, a deeper, darker green mass that quickly extended towards the mass on the ground.
[Talk to me] the newcomer spoke in hushed patterns.
[What's the point?] the first asked, a breeze through a copse.
[Your mood will not improve this way. Wallowing in your depression-]
[It is not depression!] The first creature's voice becomes a gale, the copse bending before the blow, [I am not sad, I am angry. This is the third time I should have had her! The third time she should have been wrapped safely in my vines. Instead, I learn that her friends, her comrades, have abandoned her! I swear to the Everbloom, this callousness that infects these humans is some of the cruellest I have ever seen.]
The newcomer shuddered, unfolding, before laying itself across the heap in a comforting blanket. Together, they looked like nothing more than dense ground cover. Cores pulsed, biorhythms intermingled in a lingering moment of quiet.
[We will get her, I promise. The protectorate has given up all of their files. She cannot evade us for much longer. None of the rebels will.]
Chapter 10 - Merchant Convoy
New
4WheelSword
The original N-body Problem
- Pronouns
- It/She/They
Iskander found itself garnering an odd type of celebrity about the Unbridled Fate. It wasn't fame, or popularity. It didn't gain friends from it, but everyone seemed to know who it was. It went from being an unknown quantity, a new recruit with little social currency, to being a member of a select group of 'veterans' of the Affini War. When it moved through the corridors of the ship, it was given room to make its way without even asking. When it went to eat, it was invited to eat with one of a number of different gangs of enlisted sailors and none ever expected it to share any more of its story than it already had; though a few did us the opportunity to brag about how bad this ship and the rest of the Rebel Fleet were going to slap the weeds around.
It wasn't the only one, either; there were a handful of so-called veterans scattered around the ship's crew of several hundred. Over the course of the next few months it grew to know them all, by face if not by name. There was Cassidy, a diminutive man who'd been a gunnery technician on one of the first ships to make contact with the enemy. Fariq, a heavy-set communications specialist with his fingers in two illegal stills and three plans to steal extra rations from the commissary and Tiana, a marine who had apparently seen combat in at least three actions and refused to be particularly open about any of them, even when she was only in the company of the other vets.
She was violently attractive, heavily scarred and inked and with a curl to her smile that was half burn damage and half contempt for everyone she ever seemed to speak to. More than once, Iskander found itself staring at her across the mess table, unable to drag its eyes away from the way her face creased when she gave a malevolent grin. She was dangerous, but different from Iskander's kind of danger. She was quick-release muscle and whip-crack violence rather than the slow rage that burned in Iskander's belly. She was hotter than a star, and Iskander wanted her. She didn't offer it even a crumb of attention.
Their little group formed over the course of the next few months, coming together in a self-isolating clique that protected them from the attention of officers with big thoughts and wide-eyed teenagers who considered them heroes. They played cards and drank when off-duty, avoiding as much notice as possible. They watched the steady formation of a truly organised rebel fleet, out in the distant reaches of what was once Accord space, what was now the fringes of the Terran Protectorate. There were other cruisers, numerous destroyers and frigates and even a trio of capital ships; two carriers and a dreadnought that dominated every report on the status of the fleet.
Iskander tried to ignore that it was half the size of a single pre-treaty fleet. It tried to ignore that some ships in the force bore scarring from terran weapons fire. It tried to ignore that somewhere in those months there had been a change in mood. They were all here to hit back at the weeds and take back terran space, or so it had thought, but now it was hearing dark mutters about the behaviour of 'plant fuckers' and other traitors to the cause. Now it was hearing rumours that they were going to strike back at the ones who'd betrayed the Navy and humanity as a whole.
Their first real action as part of the Rebel fleet came not long after. They'd settled into what was essentially a port side routine - keeping everything ticking over and doing more cleaning than anything else - when the alert came down. The ship was manoeuvring to a safe distance to jump, then going directly into combat conditions. All crew were expected to reach emergency stations inside the next 120 seconds, or otherwise prepare for thrust. For the first time since the loss of the Faithful Intervention , Iskander responded to the beat to quarters in earnest.
It probably should have been sad about that. It probably should have felt a whole host of emotions in the wake of such a stark realisation. Instead, it effortlessly compartmentalised the feeling, closed the access hatch it had been working in and pushed off the bulkhead to send itself flying down the gangway at just above walking speed. It joined a main corridor, kicking off the hatch frame and matching its pace to other members of the surrounding crew. It was even back in the same role when at action stations, a member of a damage control team. At least it wasn't in command, this time. At least this time, a failure couldn't be its fault.
It made it to the ready bay in seventy seconds, after their Ensign, but before a couple of the other regular sailors made it. The small man with glasses nodded at Iskander as it buckled itself into a jump seat. He looked so pale, Iskander worried for a moment that he might pass out any second.
"Are you okay?" It asked once it was secured. Its vacuum hood was loose in its lap, pulled from a hip pocket, ready in case of decompression. "Sir." It appended when it remembered the teenager outranked it.
He looked up, fixing his eyes on Iskander, and for a moment looked like a frightened boy.
"Yes, Sailor, I'm fine. Just-" he paused, clearly searching for an excuse, "running through checklists in my head."
It rolled its eyes as the rest of the damage control team finally arrived, four others hauling themselves into seats as the ten-second warning sounded. They settled in silence and Iskander put a hand on its hood. It wouldn't do for it to go sailing across the cabin.
The engines kicked with a distant thump and the rattle of hull girders that flexed under the sudden g-load. Iskander was pressed back into its chair, a weight on its chest as cushioning gave just enough that it wouldn't hurt. The mismatched weight of its prosthetic tickled its brain as something out of place, but it put the thought to one side. Finally, after just a short burn, the acceleration stopped, and they re-entered free-fall. Before Iskander could restart the conversation, it was interrupted by the ship-wide intercom.
"All hands, all hands, this is the Captain. We are underway to our first detached operation as part of the Free Terran Fleet, accompanied by the destroyers Fubuki and Spider . We have received intelligence that a relief convoy is moving unescorted towards one of the outer colonies. If it is captured, it will feed the fleet for months to come. We will be engaging whatever escort they have, before moving to capture the merchants before either the traitors or the enemy have time to respond. This is what we have trained for. This will be the first victory on the road to Terra. Our spirit is indomitable. Thank you."
Iskander settled back into its g-couch and tried to ignore the uncomfortable feeling gnawing at its belly.
They exited the jump directly into combat. Guns ran out, and missile tubes swung open. The massive rail guns that punctuated the bow of the lethal cruiser charged slowly, exotic matter reactors dumping massive amounts of energy into capacitors that would soon unleash a vicious cargo. Elsewhere, small amounts of waste heat were run through steam turbines, generating additional power before the glowing coolant was exposed to the void along massive, rapidly unfurling radiators. An Accord cruiser ready for battle was an intimidating sight, a winged dart ready for brutal action against whatever it found.
Iskander saw none of this. The damage control compartment was sealed against decompression and otherwise buried deep in the hull. Instead of seeing, it could only hear and feel instead. The first launches, massive ship-to-ship missiles, vibrated the ship's ribs just so, made them flex just a little as they absorbed the force of rocket motors capable of accelerating a warhead across thousands of kilometres. Long range targets, then, something that would require the course correction and intercept capabilities of multi-warhead nuclear torpedoes. It felt itself settling into a sort of dissociative fugue state, allowing the feelings of naval conflict to wash over it. A shudder went down the ships' spine as the forward rail guns fired one after the other, timed from port to starboard with slightly randomised delays so as to avoid the risk of resonance in structural members. Those kinetic cannons were dangerous even to the firing vessel, but moreso to their target. Each launched a fifteen kilogram projectile with a huge discharge of electro-magnetic energy. They were pinpoint accurate at ranges inside a thousand kilometres and could cross that range in a matter of seconds.
They were a scalpel compared to the nuclear mace, and they signed their wicked work; Regards, Mr. Newton.
Their navigator must have been accurate, Iskander thought, to bring them in close enough to lay the guns on target this soon after battle was joined. It nodded approvingly to itself, trying to ignore the distant but unmistakable rattle of point defence cannons. Something unknowable rocked the ship. Its eyes snapped open as the lights flickered, breath catching in its throat for a moment. Then they returned to full strength and the intercom blared to life once more to call damage control to a topside compartment, but it wasn't their responsibility, it wasn't their team's job. They would stay down here in the belly, sweating, waiting.
It glanced at the anxious ensign, watched the sweat bead on his forehead, and bit back a sigh. The boy didn't deserve the stress of a command. He needed a good sergeant to make him look good in the eyes of the sailors, and instead he had a gang of surly brutes beside him. Iskander wasn't about to volunteer unnecessarily, either. It had spent long enough playing the experienced sergeant.
There was another rattle of short-ranged gunfire, though it was not followed by the crump-crash of damage and death. A successful intercept, or a miss. No matter, it was less painful.
"Collision Alert, Collision Alert! Brace for impact, starboard side. Away the boarding team! Away the security team! Brace, Brace, Brace!"
The intercom blared loud, cutting through the rumbles and shakes with ease. Iskander pressed its feet into the deck, shoved its back into the seat and tensed its muscles. It had never been involved in a collision between ships before, whether intentional or not. Whatever was about to happen, it doubted that it was going to be fun.
The entire ship jolted, a radiating crunching sound echoing through bulkhead after bulkhead. It went on for far longer than it had any right too, almost a minute of screaming metal-on-metal and fearful vibrations. Eventually, though, it stopped and Iskander could fill its lungs with cold, recycled air. It looked around, suddenly realising just how delicate the little sealed box it was seated in actually was. A sense of imminent death crawled slowly up its spine, a cold tingle of fear that threatened carefully held sanity-
A bell rang, harsh and loud, followed by a flashing light.
"Damcon, Damcon, Starboard compartment six. Away Damcon Team Three!"
Iskander punched the quick release on its harness, immediately pulling the vacuum hood over its head. The others were quickly following suit. It was time to get to work.
The exhausted, sweaty, grease stained creature that had at one point answered to the name 'Iskander Howe' collapsed into its bunk three hours after the battle had ended. It had taken them that long to get a solid seal around the breach in compartment six and enable it to hold an atmosphere again. Compartment seven, the site of the collision, was a complete loss - open to empty space in such a way that it would take days of yard time to make it liveable. Fortunately, six just needed a solid seal and some work with a plasma torch before it could be worked again.
Its hands hurt, its thighs hurt, even its eyes hurt. Hours working in hard vacuum with just recirculated air had made its throat sore. It ached in places it had forgotten it could ache. The connection point between the stump of its leg and its prosthetic was red and angry, irritated by the constant movement. It groaned, rubbing its eyes with the heel of its hands, only moments before it remembered how dirty they were.
They'd been lucky, it thought. The convoy had only had one serious escort, or so it had heard, Navy scuttlebutt working overtime to spread the story of the battle through the ship at the speed of rumour. A single traitor destroyer had turned broadside as the free forces arrived, signalling a clear intent to engage old allies. Comms messages were ignored - Captain Wong had surely tried everything, right? Iskander tried to remember how long it was between the jump exit and the first missile launches, but it was too tired to make sense of things. It just wanted to sleep. They had been lucky, though, really lucky. No Affini. Just traitors. The Affini would have killed them all in short order.
It closed its eyes. It could sleep now, dirty and still wearing ruined working blues, but at least it could just let go of the aches and the pain. It could just drift…
A hand grabbed onto its clothes, hauling a body up after it. It jerked awake, letting out a yelp before a strong hand covered its mouth. Iskander blinked sleep from its eyes, still aching and exhausted. In the dark of the quiet bunk room, with a curtain across the rack's opening, it could barely sleep whoever was now lying on top of it. Sharp eyes stared down at it.
"Howe?" The body blurted, breaking the silence between them. It couldn't speak with a hand across its mouth, so it just nodded instead. They smelled of sweat and adrenaline and gun smoke. "It's Tiana."
She finally moved her hand, rolling to its side. It could feel her muscles through her thin top, pressed into its side.
"The fuck are you doing here?" It asked, still waking up. How long had it been?
"Just got back from that merchant, was on the boarding team. It's a fucking mess, Isk, it's all gone to shit." she paused, taking a deep breath, "Why d'you smell of ozone?"
"Damage control. Sealed up the ramming breach."
"It's a good smell." Tiana was silent for several seconds, breathing evenly, "you're gay, right?"
"Huh? I…" It hesitated, furrowing its brow.
"It's cool if you are. I'm not gonna be weird about it or anything."
"Oh, uh, yeah, I guess I am."
"Cool." Another pause, breathing. Iskander realised how close they were together, bodies tightly coiled around one another. It was intimate. "Listen, I'm kinda hopped up on all sorts of stuff. Adrenaline, stims, fear. Wanna fuck about it?"
"Y-yeah? I didn't think you- I wasn't gonna-"
Whatever else Iskander was going to say was lost in a mashing kiss and a muscular hand reaching between its legs.
It wasn't the only one, either; there were a handful of so-called veterans scattered around the ship's crew of several hundred. Over the course of the next few months it grew to know them all, by face if not by name. There was Cassidy, a diminutive man who'd been a gunnery technician on one of the first ships to make contact with the enemy. Fariq, a heavy-set communications specialist with his fingers in two illegal stills and three plans to steal extra rations from the commissary and Tiana, a marine who had apparently seen combat in at least three actions and refused to be particularly open about any of them, even when she was only in the company of the other vets.
She was violently attractive, heavily scarred and inked and with a curl to her smile that was half burn damage and half contempt for everyone she ever seemed to speak to. More than once, Iskander found itself staring at her across the mess table, unable to drag its eyes away from the way her face creased when she gave a malevolent grin. She was dangerous, but different from Iskander's kind of danger. She was quick-release muscle and whip-crack violence rather than the slow rage that burned in Iskander's belly. She was hotter than a star, and Iskander wanted her. She didn't offer it even a crumb of attention.
Their little group formed over the course of the next few months, coming together in a self-isolating clique that protected them from the attention of officers with big thoughts and wide-eyed teenagers who considered them heroes. They played cards and drank when off-duty, avoiding as much notice as possible. They watched the steady formation of a truly organised rebel fleet, out in the distant reaches of what was once Accord space, what was now the fringes of the Terran Protectorate. There were other cruisers, numerous destroyers and frigates and even a trio of capital ships; two carriers and a dreadnought that dominated every report on the status of the fleet.
Iskander tried to ignore that it was half the size of a single pre-treaty fleet. It tried to ignore that some ships in the force bore scarring from terran weapons fire. It tried to ignore that somewhere in those months there had been a change in mood. They were all here to hit back at the weeds and take back terran space, or so it had thought, but now it was hearing dark mutters about the behaviour of 'plant fuckers' and other traitors to the cause. Now it was hearing rumours that they were going to strike back at the ones who'd betrayed the Navy and humanity as a whole.
Their first real action as part of the Rebel fleet came not long after. They'd settled into what was essentially a port side routine - keeping everything ticking over and doing more cleaning than anything else - when the alert came down. The ship was manoeuvring to a safe distance to jump, then going directly into combat conditions. All crew were expected to reach emergency stations inside the next 120 seconds, or otherwise prepare for thrust. For the first time since the loss of the Faithful Intervention , Iskander responded to the beat to quarters in earnest.
It probably should have been sad about that. It probably should have felt a whole host of emotions in the wake of such a stark realisation. Instead, it effortlessly compartmentalised the feeling, closed the access hatch it had been working in and pushed off the bulkhead to send itself flying down the gangway at just above walking speed. It joined a main corridor, kicking off the hatch frame and matching its pace to other members of the surrounding crew. It was even back in the same role when at action stations, a member of a damage control team. At least it wasn't in command, this time. At least this time, a failure couldn't be its fault.
It made it to the ready bay in seventy seconds, after their Ensign, but before a couple of the other regular sailors made it. The small man with glasses nodded at Iskander as it buckled itself into a jump seat. He looked so pale, Iskander worried for a moment that he might pass out any second.
"Are you okay?" It asked once it was secured. Its vacuum hood was loose in its lap, pulled from a hip pocket, ready in case of decompression. "Sir." It appended when it remembered the teenager outranked it.
He looked up, fixing his eyes on Iskander, and for a moment looked like a frightened boy.
"Yes, Sailor, I'm fine. Just-" he paused, clearly searching for an excuse, "running through checklists in my head."
It rolled its eyes as the rest of the damage control team finally arrived, four others hauling themselves into seats as the ten-second warning sounded. They settled in silence and Iskander put a hand on its hood. It wouldn't do for it to go sailing across the cabin.
The engines kicked with a distant thump and the rattle of hull girders that flexed under the sudden g-load. Iskander was pressed back into its chair, a weight on its chest as cushioning gave just enough that it wouldn't hurt. The mismatched weight of its prosthetic tickled its brain as something out of place, but it put the thought to one side. Finally, after just a short burn, the acceleration stopped, and they re-entered free-fall. Before Iskander could restart the conversation, it was interrupted by the ship-wide intercom.
"All hands, all hands, this is the Captain. We are underway to our first detached operation as part of the Free Terran Fleet, accompanied by the destroyers Fubuki and Spider . We have received intelligence that a relief convoy is moving unescorted towards one of the outer colonies. If it is captured, it will feed the fleet for months to come. We will be engaging whatever escort they have, before moving to capture the merchants before either the traitors or the enemy have time to respond. This is what we have trained for. This will be the first victory on the road to Terra. Our spirit is indomitable. Thank you."
Iskander settled back into its g-couch and tried to ignore the uncomfortable feeling gnawing at its belly.
They exited the jump directly into combat. Guns ran out, and missile tubes swung open. The massive rail guns that punctuated the bow of the lethal cruiser charged slowly, exotic matter reactors dumping massive amounts of energy into capacitors that would soon unleash a vicious cargo. Elsewhere, small amounts of waste heat were run through steam turbines, generating additional power before the glowing coolant was exposed to the void along massive, rapidly unfurling radiators. An Accord cruiser ready for battle was an intimidating sight, a winged dart ready for brutal action against whatever it found.
Iskander saw none of this. The damage control compartment was sealed against decompression and otherwise buried deep in the hull. Instead of seeing, it could only hear and feel instead. The first launches, massive ship-to-ship missiles, vibrated the ship's ribs just so, made them flex just a little as they absorbed the force of rocket motors capable of accelerating a warhead across thousands of kilometres. Long range targets, then, something that would require the course correction and intercept capabilities of multi-warhead nuclear torpedoes. It felt itself settling into a sort of dissociative fugue state, allowing the feelings of naval conflict to wash over it. A shudder went down the ships' spine as the forward rail guns fired one after the other, timed from port to starboard with slightly randomised delays so as to avoid the risk of resonance in structural members. Those kinetic cannons were dangerous even to the firing vessel, but moreso to their target. Each launched a fifteen kilogram projectile with a huge discharge of electro-magnetic energy. They were pinpoint accurate at ranges inside a thousand kilometres and could cross that range in a matter of seconds.
They were a scalpel compared to the nuclear mace, and they signed their wicked work; Regards, Mr. Newton.
Their navigator must have been accurate, Iskander thought, to bring them in close enough to lay the guns on target this soon after battle was joined. It nodded approvingly to itself, trying to ignore the distant but unmistakable rattle of point defence cannons. Something unknowable rocked the ship. Its eyes snapped open as the lights flickered, breath catching in its throat for a moment. Then they returned to full strength and the intercom blared to life once more to call damage control to a topside compartment, but it wasn't their responsibility, it wasn't their team's job. They would stay down here in the belly, sweating, waiting.
It glanced at the anxious ensign, watched the sweat bead on his forehead, and bit back a sigh. The boy didn't deserve the stress of a command. He needed a good sergeant to make him look good in the eyes of the sailors, and instead he had a gang of surly brutes beside him. Iskander wasn't about to volunteer unnecessarily, either. It had spent long enough playing the experienced sergeant.
There was another rattle of short-ranged gunfire, though it was not followed by the crump-crash of damage and death. A successful intercept, or a miss. No matter, it was less painful.
"Collision Alert, Collision Alert! Brace for impact, starboard side. Away the boarding team! Away the security team! Brace, Brace, Brace!"
The intercom blared loud, cutting through the rumbles and shakes with ease. Iskander pressed its feet into the deck, shoved its back into the seat and tensed its muscles. It had never been involved in a collision between ships before, whether intentional or not. Whatever was about to happen, it doubted that it was going to be fun.
The entire ship jolted, a radiating crunching sound echoing through bulkhead after bulkhead. It went on for far longer than it had any right too, almost a minute of screaming metal-on-metal and fearful vibrations. Eventually, though, it stopped and Iskander could fill its lungs with cold, recycled air. It looked around, suddenly realising just how delicate the little sealed box it was seated in actually was. A sense of imminent death crawled slowly up its spine, a cold tingle of fear that threatened carefully held sanity-
A bell rang, harsh and loud, followed by a flashing light.
"Damcon, Damcon, Starboard compartment six. Away Damcon Team Three!"
Iskander punched the quick release on its harness, immediately pulling the vacuum hood over its head. The others were quickly following suit. It was time to get to work.
The exhausted, sweaty, grease stained creature that had at one point answered to the name 'Iskander Howe' collapsed into its bunk three hours after the battle had ended. It had taken them that long to get a solid seal around the breach in compartment six and enable it to hold an atmosphere again. Compartment seven, the site of the collision, was a complete loss - open to empty space in such a way that it would take days of yard time to make it liveable. Fortunately, six just needed a solid seal and some work with a plasma torch before it could be worked again.
Its hands hurt, its thighs hurt, even its eyes hurt. Hours working in hard vacuum with just recirculated air had made its throat sore. It ached in places it had forgotten it could ache. The connection point between the stump of its leg and its prosthetic was red and angry, irritated by the constant movement. It groaned, rubbing its eyes with the heel of its hands, only moments before it remembered how dirty they were.
They'd been lucky, it thought. The convoy had only had one serious escort, or so it had heard, Navy scuttlebutt working overtime to spread the story of the battle through the ship at the speed of rumour. A single traitor destroyer had turned broadside as the free forces arrived, signalling a clear intent to engage old allies. Comms messages were ignored - Captain Wong had surely tried everything, right? Iskander tried to remember how long it was between the jump exit and the first missile launches, but it was too tired to make sense of things. It just wanted to sleep. They had been lucky, though, really lucky. No Affini. Just traitors. The Affini would have killed them all in short order.
It closed its eyes. It could sleep now, dirty and still wearing ruined working blues, but at least it could just let go of the aches and the pain. It could just drift…
A hand grabbed onto its clothes, hauling a body up after it. It jerked awake, letting out a yelp before a strong hand covered its mouth. Iskander blinked sleep from its eyes, still aching and exhausted. In the dark of the quiet bunk room, with a curtain across the rack's opening, it could barely sleep whoever was now lying on top of it. Sharp eyes stared down at it.
"Howe?" The body blurted, breaking the silence between them. It couldn't speak with a hand across its mouth, so it just nodded instead. They smelled of sweat and adrenaline and gun smoke. "It's Tiana."
She finally moved her hand, rolling to its side. It could feel her muscles through her thin top, pressed into its side.
"The fuck are you doing here?" It asked, still waking up. How long had it been?
"Just got back from that merchant, was on the boarding team. It's a fucking mess, Isk, it's all gone to shit." she paused, taking a deep breath, "Why d'you smell of ozone?"
"Damage control. Sealed up the ramming breach."
"It's a good smell." Tiana was silent for several seconds, breathing evenly, "you're gay, right?"
"Huh? I…" It hesitated, furrowing its brow.
"It's cool if you are. I'm not gonna be weird about it or anything."
"Oh, uh, yeah, I guess I am."
"Cool." Another pause, breathing. Iskander realised how close they were together, bodies tightly coiled around one another. It was intimate. "Listen, I'm kinda hopped up on all sorts of stuff. Adrenaline, stims, fear. Wanna fuck about it?"
"Y-yeah? I didn't think you- I wasn't gonna-"
Whatever else Iskander was going to say was lost in a mashing kiss and a muscular hand reaching between its legs.