Upon Finding

The Guardian

2026-09-09T19:06:55.509-07:00

Hello, what's this? Travelers. We don't get travelers very often here.

It's not a big town. The usual town square, some merchants buying and selling wares made almost exclusively right here, a couple of inns hosting almost exclusively people from right here - sometimes you just want a dinner someone else has cooked. Or you're working on the house, and in the meantime you need a room to sleep in with a solid roof over it. This is a very circular economy, the money in town just goes around and around.

It works. It's quiet. We love it here.

I mean. There is of course the occasional, unavoidable livestock loss. But it's invariably the older, less hardy ones. The ones that might not have made it through the winter. As losses go, it can be overlooked.

In exchange, the roads into and out of town are safe. One hundred percent, guaranteed, no equivocation. Safe. And the whole town is safe. Kids can play outside after dark. Strangers are not a threat - guaranteed.

So when the travelers come sauntering up toward the east gate - I can barely remember the last time the gate was even closed, even before the underbrush was allowed to grow up so close to the town wall, that's how safe this town is - I was there to meet them.

There were four of them: three men, one woman. The woman was the tallest, with muscles, armor and a sword. The sword looked a little short for her but otherwise she looked competent. A couple of scars attested that she wasn't inexperienced. The men were Small, Medium and Large; the largest carried a hammer and shield but looked barely strong enough to use the hammer as a weapon. Maybe he would be using it to split wood? He almost certainly wasn't a fighter, but the other two...maybe.

"Welcome, friends...if friends you be."

They jumped. They hadn't spotted me in my hiding spot. I'll be honest, I do enjoy surprising folks. I'm pretty good at staying out of sight. Being a guard can be unexciting; you find ways to pass the time. Me, I hide. The kids love it when I pop out and surprise them.

"Hello? We're here to help you with your problem."

"Help is always welcome. But to what problem are you referring?"

"The word we heard, from three towns away," and the tall young man with the war hammer gestured vaguely over his shoulder, meaning there were about nine towns to choose from in less than a week's walk, "was that there's a monster here threatening the town. And if that's the case, we'd like to help you get rid of it."

Hmm. "'Threatening the town,' you say? Are you sure you heard that rumor correctly?" They looked at each other. "Well...yes? They told us this town, they said there was a monster and a threat."

Oh dear. "Ah, poo. I'm afraid you've been taken in. There is a monster, but he's only here to deal with threats, not be a threat. There's no enmity between the dragon and the town at all, but an equitable exchange of services and goods. Townsfolk get a guardian, dragon gets a steer once in a while. It works out for everyone."

The travelers shuffled their feet. "That doesn't make sense. Will you please show yourself? It's strange, talking to a person we can't see." As their spokesman addressed me, Small was moving carefully around, getting away from the middle of the road.

"Stay put, please. Stay where I can see you clearly."

"But we can't see you."

"Yes, well, you're not the gatekeeper, and I am. I'm deciding whether to let you through the gate or not."

"We're only here to fight the dragon."

"Why? Did he insult your mother, or something? Leave him be, he's not bothering you and we'd much prefer you not bother him. We get along around here. Don't start any trouble and there won't be any trouble. That was the deal between the town and the dragon, and it's held so far."

They talked amongst themselves. I couldn't hear it all, but one thing I did catch was, "...doesn't sound like he's afraid of any dragons or anything else..."

"I think you folks have wasted a trip. Listen, it's getting late and you shouldn't travel after dark. Why don't you take a couple of rooms at the inn for the night, and you can start your journey back home in the morning?"

Again, they conferred. "Well, okay. Where is it?"

I stood up from my hiding spot in the bushes and pointed with my tail over the town wall. "It's right over there on the far side of the square. See the sign? 'The Dragon's Deal,' very clean and the doors lock from the inside, though I assure you that if any harm comes to you in the night, I'll harm the ones that did it ere long. Okay?"

A-ha. The men are making The Face, the face that means Oh Dear and Oh Shit and We're Screwed all at once, but the woman is smiling. Clearly, she's been around. "Okay."

I stretched my wings briefly. They do cramp up when I hold still to hide. I'm very good at hiding. The kids love it when I surprise them.

-end-

Shifted

2026-08-16T19:08:28.740-07:00

There's an old song, I don't know who by or even what it's about. But the dominating line is, "I'm blue." Blah blah blah, I'm blue, ah-bah-dee, I'm blue blah blah blah.

That's me. I'm blue. I'm so fucking blue.

Don't look back. Look back and there's a red so dim it's beyond black. It's a fuller awareness of nothing, not just the absence of light, but light sucked from your eyes by an enraged continuum.

So look ahead. Squint. Turn the rad shield as high up as it'll go and hope like hell it actually works. It's not though. I can feel it not working.

Breach Lead Specialist. Blue. Hull surface, unmarked stealth ship in a widely acknowledged interdiction zone. Everybody knows you stay the hell out. Hasn't been seriously contested in nearly twenty years.

Except today. This guy - these guys, I guess - sneak in quiet and dark, coasting with engines cold, the radar cross section of a small mote of dust. We might never have spotted him, except our stealth is better. And we can spot us okay, then again we don't use radar. Emitting sensor energies isn't stealthy, so we don't do it. We use other methods.

So we spotted them. And with our better stealth we intercepted, quiet and dark - quieter and darker, with the radar cross section of a we don't have a radar cross section. We're not something you spot.

The intruder's surface is fuzzy. Good stealth usually is, absorbing detection energies with fractally discontinuous contours. The science people have better terminology, that's me remembering it to the best of my ability. You ask them how it works, they'll tell you. You ask me, I tell you it works great. That's all I know.

Boots aren't magnetic because hulls usually aren't steel. They're electronic, glomming themselves into the electron orbits of materials' molecules. Even extremely stable stuff like lead and nitrogen, they stick. So fuzzy polymer hulls aren't a problem, I stay put.

Good thing. Or maybe not, come to think of it.

As soon as I made contact, the target one-eightied and lit up. With me on the hull. I'm still on the hull.

These boots will hold against nearly two gee which is good, because this ship - not as big as a Marine frigate but not a dinky little miner either - whipped right around. I'd call it a full five meters per second rate, nothing to sneeze at. And then she lit up.

A marine frigate under full burn can hit five gees if the pilot hates you. You'll sure as hell hate the pilot by the time a burn like that is over. This? I don't know what this is. After the flip, there was no acceleration. There was a glare from the drive bell and let me just say that was fucking weird. Marine drives are completely invisible from the front. You'll never spot a glimmer from the drive plume. From behind you can see the drive very clearly, bright as hell for sure but the reaction mass is monatomic carbon and the exhaust temperature is dead cold - like I said, our stealth is damn good.

But this ship's drive flared like a goddamn sun, so bright that I could see the glare sparkling on individual grains of dust even from where I stood, on the forward ventral curve of the hull. I wasn't even facing the right way, and I could see it.

And then I couldn't. Because I am blue.

The entire universe comes streaming from directly in front of me, compressed to an infinitesimal point of unbelievable light that contains all the energy radiated by every source everywhere, all pouring in from directly ahead. Imagine that, all that energy cranked up and up by your incident velocity - the light isn't going faster than light, of course not - but I sure as hell am. Shit, some of this energy pouring into me might just be sound, cranked up so high into the EM spectrum by our relative velocity that it shoots into me like a laser through a drop of water. Visible light hits like hard gamma rays,; gamma rays, hell, I don't know. Neutrinos, maybe? I'm getting cooked like a goddamn Hot Pocket out here. Colonial Marine environment battle suit shielding is second to none, but what the hell. Nobody ever expected us to be outside a hull in cee-plus, the energy of all of creation raining down, blasted beyond a blueshifted white hailstorm of chaos.

If I look straight sideways, I can see stars going by. Actually see them. To the rear, what I can see of the rear, a fading surly murk that recedes into oblivion, darkness. Space isn't dark but damn, that is dark. That is Dark.

Look ahead, then. Because Dark is way too much nothing. All the radiation shooting through me is probably going to kill me in a few minutes, might as well wonder at the view. All that energy. Now we know what cee-plus looks like, it's amazing. Mesmerizing. Beautiful, if it wasn't killing me.

How in the hell did these people ever develop cee-plus?

And how did they spot me?

Who are they?

I reckon I might find out if they stop soon.

I am so blue.

Echoes of Love: The Adventures of Human Gina

2026-01-15T16:56:00.000-08:00

“I call the ship Gruvmaja because I love her.

“And she loves me back.

“You could say, how can a soulless thing, an unalive mechanical husk with no heart, no mind, love? But she has a soul. In fact she has a lot of souls.

“She was built in a small factory. It’s a company of people who all came together to conceive the design. They ran simulations and modified the design, they ran more simulations and modified the modifications. Then they built a prototype and modified some more. They built software, and modified that.

They built the ship. They built this ship.”

Gina was almost singing now. In a whirlwind tour of the shipyards where the tough little single-crewed, long-duration mining utility – the longstay single – had been constructed, she had fallen into a kind of love with not just the ship, but the entire process of how it had come to be, forged from a mountain of purified lunar aluminum, basaltic fiber-reinforced composites and sweat. And out of that kind of love had slowly grown the real thing.

“They’ve built a few ships. They’re similar to each other. They’re not a big company so they can’t afford to branch out much. But they’re smart and passionate. The hulls are more or less modular so there are some identical dimensions here and there. But none of the ships are exactly like this one. As soon as they start building a ship, it begins to deviate from the initial specification. Right from the very first casting.

“I call her Gruvmaja, the Mine Mother. She watches over the mine and the miners. Take care of her and she’ll take care of you.

“Her soul is a smorgasbord of all the other souls that came together to build her, welded into the seams and grown into the viewport crystal. Everyone who’s ever touched her with even a moment’s respect has left their share.

“You don’t love things. Don’t love things that can’t love you back. But love isn’t as simple as that. I don’t have to have the people in front of me to love them, to respect them. I don’t love the photograph of my mother, but I love my mother and it’s a picture of her. I love my friends, not their messages – but I treasure their messages because the messages are from them. I go back through the messages and remember how I felt, laugh again at the jokes, cry at the struggles. I love the messages for my friends’ sake, I love the picture for my mother’s sake. They’re my relationships with them, and totems of the relationships that remind me how I’m part of them. We belong to each other. It’s a belongingness that reflects back and forth.

“So I love the Mine Mother, I respect and care for her because she’s mine. She protects and cares for me because I’m here for her.”

The chant had gone around and around her mind before, a lucid dream that tried to square the relationships of purpose and practice. If the ship existed for the purpose of mining, had mining come to be a practice so that the ship could exist? Did humanity evolve into a spacefaring race so that the asteroids could become more than clods of accreted dust wandering around one insignificant star?

Admittedly, some of these thoughts could feel a little overwrought and whenever she allowed herself to realize that, they would come to an abrupt halt and the dream’s end, silly though it might be when examined, left her feeling a little sad. It felt nice – spiritually fulfilling - believing at some level, however briefly, that she was part of something great.

“It’s not that I love the ship specifically, do you see? Except I do, too.

“All these hearts and minds have touched it. Have touched her. They thought carefully, they worked hard. They touched every portion of this ship. Some of them may have said prayers over it. Some were fiercely competitive. Some were watching out for my safety. By extension they all touch me. And I have poured a lot of myself into this ship too. No other ship in space is like this one. I’ve put time and energy into making her what she is, all that work doesn’t go away. All that energy doesn’t disappear. It’s all still here, and here, and here. It’s all me, it’s all those people, it’s all Gruvmaja. And I love her.”

She patted the hull gently, pat pat pat. By Newton’s Third Law, the hull patted her back exactly as gently.

“All those people…all those souls left an echo on this ship, like a baby changing her mother even as she grows inside. All those people left a bit of themselves here to become this, to shape Gruvmaja. I love what they have done. I love what they have put in my care, and I promise every minute to take care of that care and not waste it.

“To not love their work, to not love them, to not love her…would break my heart.

“And I love myself too much to let that happen.”

Contractors: The Adventures of Human Gina

2025-12-01T16:53:00.000-08:00

"Human Gina, I have been wondering about something, but I'm not sure how to broach the subject."

"For the eighth time, Angroood: just 'Gina' is fine."

Angroood settled back in his chair. It creaked under his weight; for the local sapients he was one of the larger ones. Gina did not sit in a similar chair; they couldn't hold her mass. "Yes, I know. Human Gina, you took me on in a fight not too long after your arrival in the system..."

"Right?" Gina sat on a bar stool which was built for someone about Angroood's size, which was good, since it brought her head level with his, even though his lounger was, for him, quite low. Standing, Angroood was nearly three meters tall. He carefully poured a measure of beverage into a glass that, in his hand, appeared almost comically small, and held it out to her. She took it with a nod of thanks.

"And since the outcome of the Hunt, it's plain to anyone here that you are a formidable specimen. You are strong and fast, especially compared to someone like, for instance, me."

"You aren't still upset about that contest, are you?"

Angroood waved in a very human gesture. "No, not at all. You taught me some valuable lessons. Plus I made a fair amount of money on that fight, even if I did get a ceiling fan to the face." He chuckled, a low, booming chuff chuff chuff, and shifted in the lounger and waved a drink at her. "The Hunt went very well for you, didn't it?"

"Oh, yeah. I made one hell of a lot of money, Booj made one hell of a lot of money...shoot, everybody in the Hunt made out well."

"Except for the Llobban that quit."

"Except for them, yeah."

"Are you dangerous to us?"

"What...me?"

"No, not you specifically. You had me at your mercy and as soon as I yielded the fight was over. No animosity. Your bout with Algo..."

"That was an interesting contest."

"Yes. Your bout with Algo was intense and even did you a defacing injury..."

"Ah, the little guy - the subset, not Algo himself - was just reacting on instinct. He didn't mean anything by it. The scar is healing fine."

"Yes, that illustrates my point. You, despite your capabilities, are not a threat to us, to members of this system and its species. We've seen that over and over, that you are extremely powerful and would be considered extraordinarily dangerous except despite your capacity for great violence, you are actually quite peaceful."

"Right? I don't have any arguments with anyone on any of these planets. I've met lots of great people...a couple of assholes too, it has to be said..."

"Assholes are universal, evidently. I was amused to hear that the word in your language carries similar meaning."

"...but I wouldn't disrupt the peace around here for anything. People just want to live their lives, for the most part."

"Yes. You are not a threat."

"No. Of course not."

"But you are not representative of all humans."

"No. I'm afraid not. And I'm not the strongest of my kind, I'm far from the best fighter, I'm not the smartest. And not everyone would come here with the same motivations."

"So what do we do, if a human - a bad human, someone who doesn't share your motivations - were to come here? What do we do to defend ourselves from someone who intends violence or exploitation?"

Gina thought. Angroood had struck her as not a deep thinker upon their first meeting. But in the weeks and months since, they had crossed paths a few times and her appreciation for his intellect had grown. When not lubricated by spaceport booze and skillfully goaded by Booj into a fighting mood, Angroood turned ideas over carefully. He was always good for an interesting conversation.

"I'm probably not the girl you need to talk to. I'm not good at diplomacy. I mean, look at me...I'm famous all around this star for being the tiny fighting human. I'm not brilliant at talking things out."

"So if a human with bad intentions comes here, what do we do? Someone stronger, smarter than you could cause havoc. I supposed with sufficient weapons we could bring a human down, but what if there's more than one? We have access to your media; we have seen the kind of violence humans can achieve and we know that charismatic leaders aren't always morally good. Charismatic leaders can be motivated to lead groups of humans to do unequivocally bad things."

"Yes, I'm afraid that's true. That has always been true."

"So what do we do?"

"People like that don't listen to reason. They don't respond to diplomacy. You'd have to eliminate them."

"You mean kill them."

"Yes."

"Humans have lots of synonyms for 'kill.'"

"Yes."

"We would not be well able to do that. We don't kill like humans do. We hunt for food but when it's a matter of disagreements between sapients, we might fight like you and I did, but mostly we argue. We argue for a long, long time. Killing doesn't come easily to us, Human Gina."

"It comes pretty easily to humans, Angroood. The easiest way to kill a human, especially for members of this system, would be to get another human to kill them for you. Humans have been killing each other for thousands and thousands of years. We're good at it. We study ways to kill each other, we perfect tactics and strategies for killing each other. We expend a lot of time and energy at developing weapons that kill humans faster, more humanely, despite defenses, whatever. If you need a human killed, get another human to do it. We're brilliant at it."

"If a bad human comes to this system, Human Gina, will we be able to call on you?"

Gina swirled her glass. The beverage was delicious, evidently intoxicating to the locals in sufficient volume, though it had no effect on her at all. "Of course. It would be immoral to stand by and let someone do harm to the people and environments of this system."

"Would it be immoral to kill another human in such a circumstance?"

"I don't think killing anyone is ever moral, but in such a circumstance it may be the less-immoral thing to do. Morality doesn't exist in a vacuum."

"Indeed." Angroood raised his glass toward hers. "To morals." She tapped her glass against his. It rang mutedly, like a bell underwater.

"To morals."

They drank, and watched ships come and go.

-end-

The First Day: The Adventures of Human Gina

2025-11-16T13:40:11.155-08:00

Gina lounged in her hammock, enjoying the gently pirouetting stars beyond the port.

The port was the largest to be had in a longstay single, the equal of any on a luxury craft, a significant selling point of the ship and she had leaned hard on her credit rating to afford it. It was a massive pseudo-quartz, sapphire and plastic lamination, made even thicker by the several layers of aerogel insulation. The aerogel was a necessary evil, and she didn’t resent its presence. It prevented the port from fogging over after all, and it had the side benefit of adding just a tiny bit of charming sparkle to the stars.

The inside of her craft was almost perfectly dark. She had powered everything down except life support, and even that she had turned down until the fans were inaudible. An opaque cover, not recommended by any authority anywhere and frowned on by inspectors, blotted out the lights of that system’s control panel. What starlight shone through the port was the only light inside the craft.

She had extended the ballast arm to its maximum and given the ship a gentle nudge via thrusters. Now it swung around a point some thirty meters outboard, imparting an extremely gentle point-zero-one gee, barely enough to hold her in her hammock.

There’s plenty of time and ways to occupy one’s mind, coasting between asteroids. One could read, write, play endless games, engage in all manner of interactive pursuits with other people, AI or even VR programs. One could work on one’s ship, prepare equipment and double check the checklists. One could sleep. One could exercise, again with telepresence trainers, artificial ones and programs. One could take classes. One could teach classes. One could not hold a conversation, of course, but one could send and read messages.

And when none of these or myriad other pastimes appealed, one could watch the stars.

Naked and meltingly relaxed in the hammock after a waking cycle spent mostly exercising and training, so lightly pulled down that each breath raised her out of it a centimeter or so, with the light through the port providing faint reflections to extend the illusion of the stars without to the space within, Gina could almost believe that there was no ship and she floated free among the cosmos. She had fallen asleep and awakened several times already, fading into and out of dreams that wheeled like the stars around her. This was, in her estimation, the best possible life. She was an entire light-minute removed from the next closest ship, and the gap between them was opening. This was solitude.

Four weeks out of Ceres with another several weeks to go, she would arrive at her most recent mining lease, an asteroid so small its only identification was its orbital track. She had exclusive rights to it and contract options with buyers on Mars, Ceres, Callisto and Earth.

Selling to Ceres was easy. Selling to Mars had exciting barter possibilities. Selling to Earth was lucrative because that was where all the money was.

And selling to Callisto was just weird. But it took a weird sort of personality to set up shop on Callisto and if that was where they wanted to spend their time, dug in at the interstitial zone between lightly baking at the outer reaches of Jupiter’s radioactive hell and freezing in the still-not-yet-confirmed subsurface salt oceans, well. She wouldn’t question it. Life takes all kinds.

Light flooded throughout the ship, and went out again.

Drifting on the edge of dreams, Gina was too relaxed to be startled. But the flash did jolt her out of her inaction, and she swung out of the hammock’s embrace.

After a few seconds of rapid activity, the single’s systems were ramped back up to full alert and the ballast boom was on its way back to its fully stowed position, and she focused on the active scans.

There was another ship out there.

Its position was somewhat ahead. It was near enough that the proximity alarm should have had something to say, but even with the gap closing that system was still quiet. With the unknown visitor less than a thousand kilometers away, the proximity alarm should have been very alarmed indeed.

Never mind that for now. That ship looked like nothing she had ever seen before.

She toggled the automated hail which would send greetings over all the frequencies in all the languages and, for good measure, blinked the single’s exterior lights three times, paused, and then another two.

The radio remained silent, but the distant ship’s lights blinked in response: three times, then two…and then once more.

“Huh.” She tapped another toggle. “Wake up, Muninn.”

A window popped up on the display and an animated raven appeared within it. “I’m here.”

“New contact about nine hundred kilometers away, do you see it?” The cartoon bird looked over its shoulder.

“I see it.”

“It isn’t responding to the autohailer. You’re smarter than the autohailer, so I want you to try communication modes beyond its program.”

“Limitations?”

“Propulsion, life support and hull integrity are off limits. Tell you what, you can have access to the RCS.”

“Message?”

“Standard greeting for starters, but I’ve never heard of anyone failing to respond to the autohail so feel free to experiment.”

“I’m on it.”

Muninn was a personality overlay that granted the standard ship AI a level of individuality. She had chosen whimsically to dress her ship with the guise of Odin’s lesser-regarded raven, Muninn. It wasn’t a good conversationalist at all, but a fine librarian and useful robot for performing tasks that didn’t take much imagination.

“I have established contact.”

Gina snapped her head around. “So quickly?”

“They are responding on decimeter-wavelength radio. The message is in standard English.”

Radio was normal enough – “radio” generally referred to a specific part of the radiated energy frequency spectrum when you were talking about communications. But decimeter-wavelength…that was obsolete. It fit in with radio of course, but not with anything in current use. Not off-Earth anyway – on-Earth, it was lousy with noise from everything ranging from personal phones to refrigerators. In order to avoid the utter cacophony of noise emanating from Earth, in-system communications avoided the decimeter band.

But Muninn could filter out the junk. “Let’s hear it, then.”

“…o? I cannot know if anyone is receiving. We are visitors from a nearby star. Do you hear us? Hello? Repeating…”

“It’s a recording. That’s all it says.”

“Okay.” Nearby star had to be a joke of course, and not a good one. “Interrupt them.”

“Hello, explorers.” Humor their joke for the moment. “I am a resident of this system. Uh. Hm, I don’t have anything prepared for this. Hi.”

“…orers from a click Greetings! Please do not be alarmed! We are here peacefully.” The voice was a buttery baritone and Gina was instantly envious of it, regardless of whatever kind of prankster might be generating it.

“I’m very glad to hear that.”

“Ha! Yes. We didn’t expect to encounter anyone this close to the emergence point, we did not anticipate your presence.”

“Same here. Before you showed up, I thought I was far removed from any other traffic. I’d be curious to know more about an ‘emergence point,’ however.” And also why the proximity alarms had been so silent during the intruder’s approach.

“We would be glad to welcome you aboard our vessel! However, our velocities are very different and our vessel cannot make it up by itself. Is it possible for you to meet us?”

Gina thumbed off her microphone. “Muninn,” she said.

“I’m here.”

“Any first impressions on their language use? They don’t sound like ‘visitors from another star,’ do they?”

“Standard English. Canadian accent or far north USA circa late twentieth century.”

“How do you think they have such command of human language? Assuming they’re extraterrestrial like they say.” She tapped instructions into the computer as she talked and listened, then peered at the displayed results. In just a few minutes, they had shot past the newcomer and the gap was opening rapidly; their velocity was exactly orbital, while her own was an economical transfer trajectory – not dawdling, but not especially fast. The nav system established an intercept plot, and updated it every second.

Meanwhile, Muninn continued. “Earth’s radio emissions are comparable in magnitude to those of Jupiter, while being almost entirely of human origin and not planetary or atmospheric effects. Humans have been inadvertently broadcasting into space for over two hundred years; it’s within reason to expect that intelligent minds have encountered human transmissions by now, and had time to learn human languages.”

“You’re pretty smart, Muninn.”

“Thank you,” the holographic raven preened. “But I’m just compiling the general thrust of commentators in this space.”

“Are you saying you’re just parroting what others have already said?”

“You don’t need to be rude,” it said, with feathers ruffled. It was a very good personality overlay.

“What about matching vectors?”

“No problem.” A thrust profile popped up onscreen, numbers changing as distances did.

Gina thumbed the mic back on. “Okay, my nav system says I can match up with you fairly quickly so if you’ll please make no course corrections, I’ll do it all from here. Okay?”

There was a brief silence.

“Hello?”

“You can?” The baritone dropped an octave and was now a solid bass, a surprised cello.

“Sure. Stand by.” She engaged the nav systems, designated the other ship – the nav system was having terrible difficulty locating it via radar, but the optical backups were able to spot it well enough – and locked in the rendezvous plot. “Okay, I’m going to do a short burn in about one minute, one lateral right after that, and then a matching burn. All fairly short. I’ve got the system assuring that all my exhaust gases will go well wide of you so no worries there. A couple of little stationkeeping taps might be necessary once we get within a kilometer but there’s not much I can do about that. For final contact, I’ll just grab you. Okay?”

“How long will these burns last?”

“Sorry, let me clarify: ‘burn’ means firing my main drive. The first one will go for about a minute, the last one for just a few seconds. Okay?” The newcomer’s course appeared to be an orbit around a Lagrangian point ahead of a large asteroid, a minor detail but interesting nonetheless. Her own course was also taking her toward the Lagrange point but her higher velocity and slightly divergent path had opened the gap considerably. Even so, it wasn’t too big a change for her. Not that she usually fired her engines at all during a transition, but her fuel reserves were quite full and she could afford it this time. Last year had been a good year.

“…Okay.”

“All right. Firing in five…four…” At “zero” the single’s main drive cone lit up like a flare, and the visitor’s ship which had shot past a while ago, suddenly lost its speed advantage and the gap began to close.

Later

Closing the distance and matching velocities had taken a couple of hours. As the gap closed, the radar system finally established a lock on the newcomer’s vessel, but still the return was weak.

Gina thumbed her mic on. “Hey, uh…” Facepalm. “Hello?”

“Yes, hello?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t ask before, but what should I call you?”

“My name is” and a striking pipe organ/string section chord boomed through the speakers, including a couple of vocalizations. “…but I know you cannot pronounce all the sounds of my language. Please call me Booj.”

“Hello, Booj. My name is Gina Rasmussen. Do you have the ability to send visually?”

“Yes, but the visual system is always badly scrambled by the” a basso organ note groaned, “and is useless for a day or so. Are you really a human, Ginarasmussen?”

“Just ‘Gina’ is fine, Booj. Yes, I’m human. There aren’t any other sapient species with spaceflight capability…” and she realized the strangeness of what she was about to say, “…in this system.” Because no one had ever talked to anyone from a different solar system before.

Assuming, of course, that any of this was real. It still felt like a prank, even if the nav insisted that the strange vessel she was approaching had all the radar return of a sheet of tissue paper. There was no lightspeed delay in the communications, so whomever she was speaking to, they were right there. And she was about to meet them.

“I think our peoples would have some things in common. Both of our cultures will probably mark this day as one to remember in the future.”

Over the next several minutes, Gina monitored the nav systems as they carefully brought her ship alongside the newcomer, and extended an arm to grab hold of their craft.

The craft was a series of spheres. The radar didn’t identify precisely what the hull material was, but was leaning toward polymers. Looking it over, Gina could see only tiny nozzles here and there, and one slightly larger at one end that suggested that was the main drive. That drive was only slightly larger than her own maneuvering thrusters.

No wonder he said he couldn’t match velocities.

“Gina to Booj,” she said into the mic.

“Yes, Human Gina?”

“Just ‘Gina’ is fine, you know. I’m looking at your vessel and it seems to me that it isn’t designed to sustain any great accelerations.”

“That is correct. One moment, let’s agree on some values.”

“Do your people know what the speed of light is?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Okay. Muninn, record for analysis.”

“Who is Muninn?”

“I’m talking to my bot assistant, Booj. Please speak aloud the value for the speed of light.”

A rich thrumming chord rippled over the speakers. Muninn’s feathers on the screen ruffled. “Muninn, play a single tone, something on the lower end of the scale, for exactly one second.”

A few more back-and-forths of this nature, accelerated by Booj’s familiarity with human TV shows – Gina cringed – quickly established an understanding: Booj’s ship could not sustain great accelerations at all, though Booj himself was much more robust. If necessary, he could survive over one-half of a standard Earth gravity indefinitely, though his mobility would be hampered. His own native gravity was about two meters per second, squared.

So he’d be okay if he had to visit Mars, then. And perfectly comfortable at any Lunar city.

A very small, somewhat guilty portion of her mind added, and they couldn’t take over Earth if they wanted to. That’s good to know.

Muninn croaked. “Atmospheric composition of the other vessel is safe. Not earth-normal, but safe.”

“Anything I should know?”

“Nothing to worry about. The atmospheric mix is about forty percent nitrogen, twenty-five percent argon, eighteen percent oxygen, and the rest is just traces. Pressure is about eighty kay-pee-ay, be aware you might become lightheaded.”

“That’s a lot of argon.”

“It is. It isn’t enough to hurt you, though.”

The speaker crackled. “Human Gina, this is” and the organ/orchestra boomed again. “We are prepared to welcome you aboard. We have extended a conformal mating collar which will retain atmosphere between our vessels. Our discussions with your computer assure us that your atmosphere and ours are compatible, dissimilarities notwithstanding. Are you ready?”

Gina understood that he must have been speaking for a recording; where he had been nearly formal before, this was downright stiff. “I am. Let’s proceed.”

The “conformal mating collar” was a tube with a sticky end. She didn’t ask how it worked, but Booj assured her that it was effective to at least twice as much pressure as they would be applying, and could adapt to many surface discontinuities. She resolved to take a few pictures of it at some point.

She had gotten dressed for this. In flight she knew that a lot of miners didn’t bother with clothes except when approaching ports of call; why sweat up a set of clothes unnecessarily? But she kept clothes handy, of course, and not just what she had worn aboard. She had a few changes including a set of coveralls that could, generously, be mistaken for somewhat formal. She had those on now: dark blue with gold details at the cuffs and collar, almost like uniform fatigues for some old Earth military. They fit well and looked good under most conditions.

She knocked on the newcomer’s hatch: once, twice, thrice.

Booj opened the hatch.

The creature was enormous. It was bipedal like a human and even approximately man-shaped, if only in general layout. In gravity, standing on a surface, it would have towered above her by almost a meter, it had to be well over two and a half meters tall. Moreover, it was also about a meter and a half wide. The hatch was all of three meters across – she goggled at that – and Booj filled it commandingly. His skin was a dusty shade of pale blue, and he – she had assumed the creature was a he, and she couldn’t explain why she did – wore something not too dissimilar from her own coveralls, but his were a deep, almost bloody maroon. It was a pleasant combination, she thought. His coveralls also had some décor, but in silver bands around his upper arms and thighs.

He extended a…hand? It was the size of a frying pan, with three squat digits. Squat, except each finger had five knuckles. They were short in relation to the rest of the hand, but very flexible.

“It is my great pleasure and honor to greet you in person, Human Gina.” His voice absolutely rumbled, and then he repeated the greeting in his own language, a luxurious, rippling chord and a few basso warbles. She heard “Gina” pronounced as if it had been sung by humpback whales.

Gina took Booj’s hand, feeling the odd fingers and even the palm carefully flex around her own hand. It was completely engulfed, so that she was actually grasped up the forearm, but she grasped the far edge of Booj’s hand and shook it. “Booj, the honor is mine, to be the first to meet a visitor from another sun.” She hadn’t actually thought too hard about what to say, but that sounded acceptable. Certainly it shouldn’t insult anybody.

She heard another voice, similar to Booj’s, singing more chords. “Is there someone else aboard your vessel?”

“No, Human Gina. That was the translator converting your speech to my language.”

“I assume that was for the sake of recording. You speak my language like a native, sir.”

Booj’s enormous face darkened slightly. Is he blushing? “You flatter me! I have studied it for quite some time. We have been able to receive your broadcast entertainments for many years now, so there is ample material for study.”

“I imagine there are some heads of state who will be a little embarrassed to hear that other sapients’ first contact with humanity was television. There’s a lot of junk out there.”

“It’s not all bad. NHK-E is very popular among our younger people studying art, for instance.”

Gina had no idea what NHK-E might be but left it alone. She almost felt like fidgeting. A few hours ago she had been completely, blissfully alone and enjoying the silence and, exciting though this was, the silence and solitude were pretty appealing too. “So, Mister Booj…what brings you to human space?”

“Ah! I am brought by the” musical saw underwater “which, I imagine, makes no sense to you at all. Um…in human terms I think you would call it…” Booj looked on his own computer display which showed a dizzying array of characters. “Uh…a ‘correlational vector-mass transpositor.’ I think we can just call that ‘the CVT.’”

“How did it get you here?”

“I’m very sorry, I don’t know how it works. I really only know how to use it and even then, only in the most basic way. This waypoint is well established, so all I have to do is call it up in the navigation system and push the button.”

Booj’s command of human idiom was excellent. Were it not for the beautiful but inhumanly deep timbre of his voice, he could blend in with any conversation.

“Okay. Well, then. Why are you here?”

It was possible he colored again. No, not possible – definite. Booj’s skin color changed noticeably, and not just in his face. “I must confess, Human Gina. I am a sightseer.”

I’ll be damned. Space tourists.

“Is this your first visit to human space? Or the first visit by representatives of your people?”

“Oh, no! I have been to human space five times previously. I just arrive in my little ship, tune in to the broadcasts, and watch the people go to and fro.” He paused. “This is my first time alone, though. Those earlier visits were anthropological studies, but…”

“Yes?”

“…well. This is the first time we have ever established contact with a human.”

“The first time? Just how long have your people been dropping in to observe us, Booj?”

Booj appeared to be doing a bit of complicated math, then grumbled something at his computer, which sang something else back, and in her earpiece Muninn whispered, “About seventy-five years.”

Gina felt a crawling sensation in her belly. It was like realizing someone was crouched outside her home, peeking through the blinds. But the feeling went away almost instantly as she realized that an opportunity lay before her.

“Well, then. Don’t you think it’s about time one of us came to see your home?”

Booj immediately took her on a tour of his ship. It was smaller than her own, and owing to his own tremendous size a much tighter fit. She came to realize that Booj’s vessel was more of a shuttle for short trips, not intended for journeys of any significant duration. There were the control cabin, a few supplies lockers, a compact head that looked surprisingly similar to one of human design but for the scale, and a compartment for sleeping. That was all. It felt more like a recreational vehicle in its appearance and level of adaptability, far less a machine for work than her own highly accessible single.

“You know, Booj, I would show you around my ship but I think you would get stuck in the hatch.”

“This is not new to me. My species is not small.”

“Not…are there are other sapient species where you come from? People built differently?”

“Oh, certainly! And my species is far from the largest, though we are among the largest who travel. Other, larger species cannot leave their planets.”

Amazing. “I’m no anthropologist, but I think humanity would like an opportunity to observe and possibly meet some of these other peoples, in addition to you of course.”

Again, Booj’s color changed, from dusty blue to a striking green. “Yes! Absolutely! Would you like to go now?”

A small part of Gina’s mind gibbered and screeched, what, ME? but what came out of her mouth was, “Hell yeah!” Common sense asserted itself quickly, however. “But I can’t leave my ship drifting out here. It’d be a hazard to shipping.”

“Not a problem, we can bring it along. And you can come back whenever you’re ready.”

Booj began booming and rumbling at his computer, which responded in like fashion with the occasional screech of more musical saws. After just a couple of minutes of this: “Yes! Not a problem. If we can tether your ship along the underside of mine…”

Booj’s whole ship appeared to be a knot of a few plastic balloons and, surreptitiously tapping a few surfaces with her finger, Gina had concluded that it might indeed be just plastic. But like her own, it didn’t seem to have an orientation except along the thrust axis of the drive; at least that was familiar enough. “Which side is the underside?”

Booj indicated with a familiar point. “Do you have the capability to tether your ship to mine? This one is not equipped for much besides carrying me from place to place.”

Gina laughed. “This is a mining ship. I can grab onto anything.” They discussed means of connecting the ships and ultimately concluded that the best solution would be to literally tie Gina’s ship to Booj’s via some of the many kilometers of high-mod polymer tether in her equipment lockers, and she set about doing that as Booj remained in his ship. She came to realize via further conversation that he was not technically adept with his ship and was leaning very heavily on its computer for assistance.

It turned out that the CVT, however it worked, acted on an asymmetrical volume of space around itself. The asymmetry was affected by the masses within it, which ultimately dictated that Gina’s single had to strap onto Booj’s shuttle and almost wear it like a hat. Being very technically adept with her ship, Gina assigned drones to wrap lines and bring them back around, and snugged the two ships together like she would if she were hooking up to a very small asteroid to bring to the assayer in one big lump. She’d done it before.

Just like a hat, she thought. With a bobble on top.

After a few more minutes of preparation, they were ready. Gina retired to her vessel – no amount of curiosity could have parted her from the ship – for whatever the CVT was going to do. The chance of the device doing something harmful seemed unlikely, given that Booj’s craft was apparently little more than a pressurized envelope. But Gina had come to love and trust her tough little mining boat like a living partner, and in the face of the unknown leaned on its familiar hardiness.

“Muninn.”

“I’m here.”

“Can you tell what their ship is made of?”

Muninn looked over his shoulder as if he could peer through the hull at Booj’s shuttle strapped atop the ship. “No. It’s very low density. I gave it a gentle probing with the radar; the pulse barely returns. It’s not returning from the hull at all, but a few objects inside the vessel and the engine.”

“Engine, singular?”

“Singular, yes. The primary drive is a single thruster. It’s a little more powerful than one of our RCS units. I don’t see any redundancies.”

“Hmm. What do you make of that?”

“Either the vessel is intended for use in a well-populated system where assistance is never dangerously far away, or its design is proven reliable enough that including backups is considered superfluous.”

“You know what else it tells me?”

“You know I’m a terrible guesser.”

“It tells me that nothing is far away. Where that ship comes from, that low thrust doesn’t get you anywhere quickly, unless anywhere you need to go is nearby. That, or anybody that uses it is like Booj and can’t take heavy Gs, but it can thrust for a really long time.”

“That all fits what we know so far.”

“We don’t know enough yet…about anything.”

“There is little more that I can gather at this time. Maneuvers will flesh out my assessment of the ship’s capabilities. I have made inroads to the language’s construction but not much of the vocabulary.”

“We’re about to be exposed to a lot more of the language.”

“I’m looking forward to that.” Muninn actually sounded a little intrigued.

“Human Gina, are you ready?”

“I’m ready here, Booj. Everything is secure.”

“All right. I do not know whether the CVT will affect your systems the way it does mine, but I can say that it does not affect me personally. It only scrambles the video communications.”

“Understood. Proceed at your discretion.”

“Yes! In three…two…one…”

There was a flash of light.

2025-07-01T08:35:00.000-07:00

Caffeine

"Uh-oh." I had just drawn out my mug, the brown one with the stylized cats stretching around it, and peered into it. Mya did the dishes last night. We get pests in the house sometimes and I'm usually the one to do the dishes, so I'm careful to put cups and glasses away upside-down, but Mya isn't usually doing the dishes and forgets.

"Mmm?"

I show her the cup. Carefully, because I don't want to wake it. "Look."

Mya peers into the cup, squints a bit. "Oh, dear."

"Yeah. We're going to have to spray."

"Again?"

"The stuff I put down wasn't for that. It works on spiders."

"What will it do to them?"

I give her A Look. "Mya, c'mon. What do you think it'll do?" She stayed at her mom's house for three days after I sprayed for spiders, and still she jumps a foot in the air at barely glimpsed dust bunnies, misidentified hair ties peeking half out from under the sofa and faint breezes that ruffle the fine hair on the back of her neck. Mya doesn't do fabulously well in East Tennessee where the climate is perfect for virtually every bug and beast known to humanity, everything short of moose and penguins. So she stays indoors, and I spray, but she hates it.

"He's kinda cute though..."

"Sweetie." I reach for the cup.

"No..." She cuddles the cup with the curled up brown dragon in the bottom, itself almost exactly the color of the coffee I want to pour in there. It's facing her, not me, but I can hear a squeak come from the cup. "Oh!"

I wait for the scream, the throw, the jump, the whatever. If it's smaller than a softball Mya is almost pathologically afraid of it, whatever kind of animal life it might be. She finds elephants adorable, thinks a Great Dane the size of a small pony is the perfect pet and believes mice wait in seething millions to torture damned sinners in hell - where both the sinners and, more importantly, the mice belong.

The dragon in the cup is a lot smaller than a softball. It's bigger than a mouse, but not by a large margin. And it squeaks.

It zips out of the cup and halfway up her arm, and squeaks again.

A perfect moment of stillness follows as the little creature unfurls and flaps its wings once, twice, and folds them again. It makes little kneading motions with its front legs, like a cat padding at a spot it's about to sleep on. Mya gasps, her breath coming in little hiccups.

"Oh. Oh. Oh."

I move to cup my hands around it, and she shies back. She pulls the arm closer to her and puts her own hand over it. Now it's sheltered in a dark cavern of hand and arm and breast. It pokes its little head out between her protective fingers, tiny claws clinging to her engagement ring.

"Oh my goodness he's so cute."

"Where is this coming from? Aren't you usually hopping up and down and yelling at little critters like this?"

The tiny dragon looks up at her and squeaks again. It isn't a mousy high-pitched squeak either, it's a surprisingly mellow sound for such a little animal.

"Don't hurt him."

"I was just going to toss him outside." Usually that's what I do with spiders when she yells for me to come step on one, or to smash it with a hammer or shoot it with a flamethrower. I just pick up the spiders and carry them outside. Not cockroaches - they get vaporized by size-twelves applied with malice. But spiders and moths and even centipedes? Yeah, they get carried out. I sprayed because she asked me to, but I don't really want the bugs to die. They have their place in the natural order, same as us, even the cockroaches.

I just want Mya not to be frightened. I love her and her peace of mind is everything to me. If it makes her feel safe and comfortable, whatever it is, I'll give it a try. It's worth it.

"Don't. Not yet."

"Can I have my cup, then?"

American house dragons - scincidae draco - are considered pests by most people, but there are some folks out there that are fans and raise them. That's the case with everything, really, there are nutjobs out there raising cockroaches too.

I think about what I know about house dragons while my coffee is oozing out of the maker. Mya is toying with the animal and it's walking back and forth on her arm, chasing her fingers as she waggles them at him. Her hair bounces and his attention immediately goes to, then dismisses it. Her earring gets a beady once-over, the dark body scurrying up her arm and leaving a trail of goosebumps as he goes so he can inspect the darkly glistening tigereye stone more carefully.

Coffee cup's full, so I pull the sugar jar out of its usual mooring to drop in the usual half-teaspoon along with the usual half-cup of cream. I like a little coffee in my cream.

A cockroach comes rocketing out from where the sugar jar had stood. Mya's mouth opens to scream, except,

"Get it!" she points at the jittering bug, and the dragon flashes off her shoulder. I swear it moved faster than I believed possible. The roach jinks, zigs and jumps like a skilled quarterback but the little dragon changes direction just as fast, flipping wings and tail to pop side to side and herd the bug away from the shadows until...

crunch.

"Good boy!" Mya is uncharacteristically delighted. "Well done, you got him!" The little brown dragon munches down the cockroach in a few gulps, passing a black tongue over his lips and then, startlingly, his eyeballs. Mya laughs, charmed, and picks the dragon back up and places him on her shoulder where he goes back to examining her earring which I now realize could be mistaken, from a distance, for a cockroach. She tickles him with a fingertip and giggles when he bats tiny claws at it.

Well. I guess he's not such a pest after all.

"Can I let him stay? If he eats bugs, that means we won't have so many bugs, right?"

It's worth it. I'll give it a try. "Right." My coffee is perfect. Light, slightly sweet. "What do you want to call him?"

"He's so quick and jittery and he was in your coffee cup, I was thinking..."

-end-

The Magic of Music

2025-05-28T16:45:00.000-07:00

It makes sense, when you think about it. Magic and music come from similar places, really. As mathematically rigorous as music is, how you order the numbers and operations, as it were, has a big effect on the emotional response it invokes. And magic, when performed by a skilled caster, has a similar echo across the spirit of the world. Because where music works in the hearts of people, magic works in the heart of the earth. And oh, how she does love her music.

I've been touring with a troubadour band for almost as long as I can remember, moving up from banging a tambourine as a lad of five to a steady drummer now at hmmm I think I'm about twenty-three now? And we would go wherever the money seemed to be, sometimes getting it a little wrong. But I've been practicing, learning new songs wherever I can and even picking up instruments - I can even compose a little on a guitar now, and it's great. Better still - with care you can thump a rhythm on the guitar even as you're playing, so it's like I'm still the drummer too.

Don't get paid twice as much for playing two instruments at the same time, ah well.

But then we picked up the wizard. She tells us to call her Wiz, so we do. It feels a little weird; she doesn't look like a Wiz. Or a wizard, for that matter. No beard. And she brought with her a wagon of instruments, including a flute that she plays, some big furniture looking thing that she called a pee-yunno and some other things. She played the flute to audition and was an immediate sign-on, when she played, every flower for about a hundred feet in every direction bloomed brightly while we were watching.

"I thought magic was, you know, spells." We kept it together while she played but honestly by the time she was done with the piece nobody was looking at her. Some of the flowers looked like they were straining to bloom bigger while we watched.

"Well, it is! But nobody ever said the spells had to be words like humans use."

So the wizard joined us and the take got better. WAY better, because when she played crops thrived, gentle rains fell, entire herds of ewes all quickened simultaneously, and it didn't take long for the villages we played for to be really glad to see us. And all these good things didn't happen because the wizard played - I mean, they DID - but because the wizard was playing with us.

"I think it might have something to do with harmonics. You know, how one sound sounds one way and another sound sounds another way, but when you play them together they kind of...mesh? Like gears in a mill? Either sound by itself is nice enough but when they're played together they're a lot more. So I've been looking for a group to join for years so I could really expand what I could do for people, but either their repertoire wasn't very good, or they weren't very good, or we didn't get along..."

"We know about players not getting along. You're our second flautist in two years. The last guy was kind of full of himself."

"That's silly. One flute by itself outdoors? The sound disappears. It absolutely has to have other instruments to give it more weight, make it carry. Your drums are crucial for that."

"That's part of why he's gone. He didn't want any kind of backup, he wanted solos."

"Oh, dear."

"So, magic music. Okay, that makes sense to me but...can anyone do it?"

Wiz made a face. "Sorry, sweetie. Lots of people - especially musicians - ask that, and that's part of why I'm gone from them. They can get kind of pushy, demanding to be shown how it works, you know. If they've learned how to play music and music makes magic, they want to make magic. It's not like that.

"It's like being born left-handed. Right-handers can learn to use the left hand the way left-handed people do, but it's a constant trial and it never becomes natural. You aren't left-handed, you're just using your left hand. Get it?"

"I sure do. I'm left-handed myself. I learned to play drums the way I do because a right-handed guy taught me and I never changed, but force me to eat right-handed and I'll probably stab myself in the eye. I feel my left hand more than I feel my right, does that make sense?"

"You're asking a wizard if that makes sense? Of course it makes sense."

"And I restrung the guitar so I could play it lefty."

"I had noticed. You stand on the opposite side of the group from most guitarists I see."

"So okay, that's that. Magic is a kind of left-handedness, either you are or you aren't and trying to practice magic doesn't make you magical. But like in so many things, teamwork makes magic stronger, even if the only one actually magical is you. Right?"

"Wow, I wish I could have had you in the school. You just skipped a year of minutiae but yeah, that's right."

"What is the big box thing, the pee-yanno. I've never seen one."

"A travelilng minstrel far from any city, I'm not surprised. It's a stringed instrument..."

"No way."

"Absolutely! Come look!" And she lifted the lid on the device, showing enough strings to make an entire village's worth of guitars. "It's a chore keeping the thing in tune on the road, I can tell you."

"How does it work?"

She showed me the keys and the little felt mallets. "Huh. Every note is, uh, distinct. No bending notes into and out of each other like with a guitar."

"True. A piano," and she pronounced the word carefully for me, "hits the exact note, the same way a flute does. But you can really make some big chords with this thing." She demonstrated, banging out a thunderous bar from one end of the row of keys. There was a wet pop as the watermelon on the lunch table exploded. "Oops."

"So what else have you got, Wiz? Anytime a minstrel can play more than one instrument, that's for the best. And you've got a lot here. What's...hey, a bugle."

"Not a bugle, a trumpet. Like a bugle how you blow into it, but it has keys for fingering to change the pitch length of the tube - a bit like bending your strings, but not as flexible. But you get a lot of flexibility back with the mouthpiece. The flute I like doesn't let you bend like a guitar does, but the piano doesn't bend at all. The trumpet lets you bend more than a flute does and when I cast with the trumpet, it really packs a punch."

I felt my eyebrows pop up. "How so?"

"The piano's distinct notes makes very precise music, very precise magic...but magic doesn't like being precise. Magic is a heartfelt experience and while you can be very expressive with the piano, it loses a bit of the artistry in the musician..

"The flute, being powered by my breath, is a lot more personal and the trumpet, with its greater input of nuance in the mouth - very intimate, you know? - is even more so. So the magic really responds to it."

"I think I get it. So a drummer might not be able to make much magic because the drum really only does a few things."

"Exactly. But it goes a long way to enhancing a spell that's underway, never forget. Magic, like music, has a beat, and the drum IS the beat."

I noticed a big misshapen heap of wrappings, carefully secured with a length of cord. "What's hiding under there?"

Wiz suddenly looked a little shifty. "Um...That's a tuba."

"Okay?"

"Like a trumpet. But bigger - way, way bigger."

"What does it sound like?"

"Honestly, it sounds like a whale orgy if you don't know what you're doing. But I know what I'm doing and I don't dare play it."

"How come?"

"You DO remember I'm a music-casting wizard, right? I don't think anybody hereabouts wants a new volcano."

-end-

Psi

2024-12-23T18:49:00.000-08:00

"They got them all?" I can actually feel my eyes bulge. They're a pretty comprehensive team, bundling them up and carting them away should be virtually impossible. But, hmm. They do each have a weakness, and it's my fault.

And this person was delivering bad news that I had inadvertently helped create.

"Yes, all! They were last seen loading your entire team into a jet..."

That's enough.

Find it.

Reaching out. Touching the energy, the order and the chaos. Donder's loud heartbeat, I can feel it even when he's unconscious, there he is. And Jet's, too. A few miles out and gaining altitude, but the plane is still in range. How shall I...?

One engine. Inhale it. All of it. Oh, that's nice. All that energy, mine. Which means...

A twin-engine aircraft losing one engine doesn't fall out of the sky...but no sane pilot continues with their original flight plan when that happens, either. They'll want to find the nearest safe landing zone and since they've only been in the air a few minutes, they'll probably want to come right back here. With the energy I stole, I can race them there and be ready. I can't fly like Jet can, but with the energy I absorbed I can ruuuuuuunnnn whoa, damn near overshot. Four miles goes by in a hurry when you're just one chick powered by half an airliner.

Here they come.

"Omega?" A civvie, a bystander. "What's going on?"

"There has been an emergency aboard that plane," I point, "and it's coming back here." Reach out and feel it. I really sucked a huge amount of potential out of its now-dead engine. It can't windmill back up because I pulled it right down to nearly absolute zero. I think I might have seized the engine with the violent temperature shift, but the point was to force the plane to come back. I'm not worried about price tags right now.

These asshats have my team. My team, the one I put together. I get to play with them, nobody else.

"What do you think you're going to do about it?" Almost insulting. That's right, Super Maid isn't supposed to be good in the conflict, just in the aftermath. After the heroes save the day, Omega comes last to do the sweeping up. Never mind that I'm present for the whole thing, siphoning off all the chaos for myself - don't notice that. Not important. Look at the guy with the thunder powers, watch the pretty girl flying. Be horrified by the eerie silence of Nightshade's darkness. Not a problem.

The jet's nearly here. I can feel them all now, even Nightshade and that's the scariest part. They're out cold. Not sure how that's working but if I had to guess I'd say it was a psy attack of some kind. They're all susceptible to that - even Nightshade. Because of me.

Feel around inside the cabin. Normies. Normies with guns, not a big deal when everyone is awake, especially Rocky. People shoot at Rocky, he just gets annoyed by the distraction. I think he can shrug off anything short of a main battle tank HE round. But they're all being held down by...ah.

There you are. Gotcha.

The League has been a force for more-or-less good ever since I founded it. I've pulled together these other capes - none of us actually wear capes because we took the Incredibles lesson to heart, but I remember reading it used as a borderline pejorative in a comic book once, and it sort of stuck in my head - to be a flashy bunch of good guys, which are my manna. They go around stopping bad guys but they're not the neatest bunch. Donder's thunder shout tends to do more than just stop the bad guys. Rocky is bulletproof, but he also isn't careful about ricochets. Jet,well...

Jet's just clumsy. I love her, she's so sweet and she flies so fast and damn if that outfit doesn't look good on her, but the poor thing will open up and discover that oops, no, that turn is just a bit too tight for her and she's not going to make...except yes she does. I've reached out to her and absorbed her excess energy. She slows right down and doesn't really feel it as acceleration because I've slowed her entire body down, all at once and nothing first. I'm still not sure where her power comes from but I can tell you that when she's rocketing around in a battle and not crashing into stuff, a fair bit of it is going into me.

And it feels so goddam good.

This is the part I don't tell people. Donder isn't focused. The thunder shout would level entire buildings instead of punching neat little holes, except I pull everything that he doesn't need into myself. Nobody notices - who notices an absence of sound? Jet's turning radius becomes something considerably less than the mile-plus she'd need at those speeds. She's a super, they just assume that she's super-agile. And Rocky would ricochet like firing bullets at a solid block of steel, except when ricochets bounce off him, their excess energy channels directly to me. Rocky's ricochets bounce about a centimeter and then just fall down, their kinetic energy completely gone.

This takes a bit of concentration but not too much. I usually do it like you listen for a specific sound. Anything above a certain threshold, I pull it to myself. That takes care of most of everything in an action zone, but I can also tune in on things like fires and electricity. Mostly I just stand around, keeping my channels open to pull it into myself and then when everything is over, I focus on and wipe out the worst chaos like fires and dust clouds. It doesn't impress people, and I let them keep that impression.

The plane has come to a stop. The normie bad guys are at the door. Holy cow, somebody just drove an air stair up to it, for Pete's sake... Reach out to that guy.

All righty. He'll stay right there. He'll get up again, too - promise.

The bad guys are pointing guns at me as I approach. I see their fingers tighten, and then they look confused. Okay, maybe both the guns did jam simultaneously, who knows? It's only Omega, she's not powerful, right? Of course not. Omega is the cleanup crew, Omega because she comes last, ha-ha, the token super whose superpower is making the wild energy stop. They just don't stop to think about the scope, about what "energy" really means.

Normie bad guy throws a punch. One punch. Don't feel a thing; I absorbed all its kinetic energy before it even landed. He could've tried to hit me with a baseball bat, hell, an entire baseball stadium. Only a little tingle from it. Normies don't do it for me anymore. But it's a nice tingle. More and more, a pleasant tickling like cat's whiskers. They're determined, I'll give them that much. Those were a lot of punches that didn't land.

The physical and emotional sensation of absorbing power is beyond describing. I've never been high but I've heard people try to describe a good one; I think this must be like that but with all the dials turned as high as they'll go, and then adding amps and turning them higher still. Absorbing Jet's speed so she doesn't pancake herself against a building is a fantastic buzz; pulling in an entire building fire is a surge of joy. They're my team because of what they do for me. You may have heard the term "drunk with power," but I have lived it and let me tell you, this team has a lot of power. And I have been highly intoxicated by them.

And this guy in the plane, this otherwise normie-looking guy with the hat, is somehow holding them all down. I feel him. I feel him trying to reach into me, to neutralize me, but this is the part nobody else knows: I have psy too and that's confounding his influence. He's put them all down like turning off a light, but I can do more than that.

I take super powers and turn them down when they're too super. Not a problem - like listening for a sound too loud. I can reach into someone like Rocky and install a block that prevents him overexerting himself - as strong as he is, Rocky could accidentally break himself in half. "Rocky" isn't just a name, it's also his makeup so putting a governor on him is actually doing him a big favor. And when Jet is going to be too far for me to watch over her overspeeding her agility, I can turn her down a bit. Just enough. But I can take other energies too. Kinetic is easy, and it's everywhere. I pulled a jet engine down to the barest edge of utter stillness, atomic inertness already. This is the thing that people know me for, for absorbing excess kinetic energy. And I'll admit that I enjoy it the most, for its visceral feedback.

And there's one thing that I can do, but just don't do, because I'm greedy. But for this guy, I'll do it. I can do more than reach out and take. I can reach in and put. Donder, for instance, is completely unaware that his thunder shout is as dangerous as it is, partly because he never goes full-bore unless I'm nearby. He doesn't know that he does that, but he does it because I programmed him to. They're all a little careless because that's how I made them, so there'd be some chaos for me to soak up in my lust for wild energy. They're all what they are, faults included, because of me. I made them. I could unmake them just as easily but I never ever would, because of what they do for me. Yes, I'm addicted...but I think I'm managing it.

The thing is, having done this with my team, having reached into them and placed blocks and preferences and tendencies, leaves them a little open to others with similar abilities. I did what I did to them for my own desires, and now Hat Guy has found the same door that I made and let himself in.

We'll see about that.

Normie bad guys stop moving. I've stopped their blood flowing in their veins. Their nerve impulses too - electricity is simple once you realize it's just electrons moving from here to there except if I want their energy, they simply come to rest. All at once, I have shut them off like a light. The difference between me and Hat Guy is that I don't have to keep thinking about them to keep them down. They're down, and not going to get up again. It wasn't just quick, it was instant. From one vibration in the quantum heat of physical matter, to the next vibration not being there, everything stops. Their energy is mine. All of it.

And now I'm going to be generous.

Hat Guy yells something in a language I don't understand at all. It sounds like Polish but I can't be sure at all - a lot of those east European languages, I can't tell one from another. My own fault. And whatever he's saying, I don't want to hear it in any case.

The energy of every jittering atom in the two normies, I pour into Hat Guy. There's quite a lot, too, since I took it all. It won't be enough to light him on fire, but it'll come close. And while I'm doing that, I take all of the energy from their nervous systems and let him have that, too. Him, I won't stop. I'll keep his networks working until something crucial melts.

So he'll feel every bit of the heat. Revel in it almost the way I do, except it's not good for him like it is for me. This is endless waves of sensation, inescapable. The body's senses turned beyond eleven, adding amps and turning it higher still. Feel it, you bastard. His heart is racing so fast it's almost a musical note. He would be screaming but I'm pulling away the energy in the air so there's nothing to hear. His ears don't get to hear anything but the crackling of his flesh as he contains the heat, all the heat, of three bodies in the volume of just one. All the potential of three nervous systems, funneled into one. As long as he lives, for the next few seconds, he's going to feel every bit of everything happening to him. You don't take my team.

pop

Ooh, there went an eye. Gross. Ah, he's stopped moving. Feel him. Hmm.

Anything left? Certainly nothing to take. His own heat, fading now. Chaotic heat. I could take it, but it has a bad taste now.

Nightshade is moving. His hold is completely gone. I don't feel him in her, nor in himself. I could even have let him have the whole team, but I have to have Nightshade. Nothing and no one is more important than her, and I can feel her now. Looks like there's nothing left in him then. Damn. I'm so furious I could kill him again, I wonder if I can restart him somehow...never tried that, could be int...

Shh.

Oh.

Nightshade is inside me. I feel her, oh thank goodness. This is why she's here. She's so calm. Just a little bit of her stops me from becoming poisonous. I could really be Omega and bring everyone and everything to an end in an immense orgy of sensation, leaving the world an icy ball of silence...but Nightshade.

The eerie silence of Nightshade's darkness is so much more than that. It isn't just eerie - it's cool. Like a lake at night, and cooler the deeper you go. My stolen heat, all the kinetic energy and fear and rage and lust become echoing depths. The shuddering relaxation after the wild orgy of power and sensation. Nightshade brings me down and tempers me so I won't immediately set forth to make it all happen again, bigger, more...all of this ravening delight and shrieking thrill for me. I can take it all at any time and absolutely will, except Nightshade.

I saved all of them because they're my team. My team. My source of joy and release and a positive-feedback hedonic treadmill with no speed limit. I saved my team because Nightshade is with them, and I saved Nightshade because she will save all the rest of you...

...from me.

Stepping Away From The Full Circle

2024-12-17T16:34:00.000-08:00

"What's the methane output here?" I had a finger on the chart table. It was approximately the center of the landfill, one of the older sections.

"Sniffer's showing about forty liters per hour. That's low but worth planting some probes."

"Any specific concentrating factors?"

"Yeah. There's two strata of pretty thoroughly densified clay at the ten meter mark but they're noncontiguous and there's a gap, so a standard array is going to miss a lot of it. Here," and she tapped her sleeve against mine, and the info she was looking at popped up as a thumbnail at the edge of my display. I poked a finger through it and it expanded.

"Okay. Line 'em up along the margins and we should get most of it."

"I think so. You need a spotter?"

"Nah. It looks pretty solid. Three hours to do the setting, two more for the plumbing. Where do you want it to go?"

"Send it to The Pig." The Pig is a giant retention bottle, about fifteen meters in diameter and forty meters long. At one end there's a protuberance with some access ports and, well, it looks like a nose. The whole thing is covered with insulation which is luridly pink. If this flow is right and we can get it all, it would take about twenty years for it to completely fill The Pig and that's only at atmospheric pressure, but there's an awful lot of other feeders flowing into The Pig. The feeders don't go in through the "nose," though. The Pig appears to be getting a, uh, large enema. There are other retention bottles but they're mostly smaller, not pink and don't have names.

"Done. Later," and I tapped a forefinger to the hardhat. Safety first, hardhats. Them's the rules.

The crawler is electric, powered by overhead lines. With care and not getting the umbilicals snagged on anything again and choosing your route carefully, you can get as much as much as four kilometers away from the base before the tension sensors lock out everything but Reverse. You could override the tension sensors of course, but why would you? Go about four more meters and the power cables pop, the crawler dies, and the supervisor gives you every flavor of Hell she can think of as she brings out the extenders. And the extenders, by design, will only power the Reverse motor.

Every now and then we find interesting stuff in the ancient landfills. Usually you expect that a couple hundred years of rot and rust will break down everything and that's the end of it, but not always. You'd be surprised what you can find. You go deep enough and there's no oxygen, precious little moisture filters down if they did the capping wrong, and there can be pockets of ancient junk. The landfills are constantly crawling with amateur archaeologists, none of them approved by the central office, and nobody runs them off. They're mostly harmless.

Well, there was that one guy but never mind him.

Sometimes, from the very deepest strata, you can unearth newspapers. Newspapers! I know what they are, but the notion of something as temporary as news being committed to paper is just boggling. And they did it every day. That's a LOT of paper. I do remember reading an unusual section of the paper that carried cartoons and puzzles. Some of the cartoons were just mystifying, but the puzzles were okay. Some words didn't make sense, I guess they just aren't used anymore. And in some places I tried to answer the clues with the correct word, but the word didn't fit. Maybe meanings shift over time. I guess they must. They're like modern crosswords like you can play on your sleeve, but on paper. Why would you even do that?

Four probes go in slick as a whistle. Eighteen meters or more of perforated steel pipe, topped with another four meters of solid pipe, and a nice big cap on top. The crawler vibrates like a massage chair as the probes go in. It can pound, it can twist, it can vibrate the probes for insertion. Vibrating is pretty consistently the most effective method but twisting can get you through some resistant layers. The tip of the probes is a drill point.

Do not use the pounding action for insertion. That's how you break probes. When it's difficult to remove a probe, that's when you use the pounder.

The fifth probe went in, but then it must have hit a pocket because the probe fell out of the driver, zoop! It just disappeared from view. And then the hole cratered.

When that happens you slap the direction lever into Reverse and floor it. Probe in the ground still stuck in the driver, tension sensors already in the red, whatever. Doesn't matter. Floor it. You don't want to be there when the crater's edges propagate. And you have a hand on the door handle, ready to bail out if it looks like the crawler's going in.

See, what people don't realize about landfills is that they're largely airtight when looked at from the bottom. You wouldn't think so to look at them but they certainly are , especially as you go further down. Gases build up pressure as the materials decompose and they can build up big bubbles, caverns even, with nothing in them but methane. The probes usually provide a good enough seal that there isn't a catastrophic blowout, but it happens. And sometimes the pressure is low enough that a probe breaking through doesn't cause a blowout, but a collapse. The material around the probe falls into the cavity, and then more, and more, and you can see how this can be bad. If you're on a big cavity, the entire crawler can fall into a meters-deep, even tens-of-meters-deep hole. If the fall doesn't kill you, the methane atmosphere might.

Assuming you don't blow up. That's a possibility too.

This collapse isn't too bad. I've seen worse, lots worse. But I've got to retrieve the probe.

The crawler on any given day appears to be made mostly of rope. Or snakes. Or tentacles. There's the spool for the main power leads leading back to the catenary sled, there's the other spool for running feeders back to the tank farm, there's the other other spool for hydraulic lines feeding the driver, there's the other other other spool...you get the idea. The crawler appears to be a way for a rack of giant needles and lots of thread to get around.

One of those spools has a lot of good rope for holding a person, and another has a couple hundred meters of breathing hose. Because this isn't the first time a probe has disappeared into the ground, and it isn't the first time the egads cable has broken or popped off, and it isn't the first time some poor bastard - hello, that would be me - has to go down there and attach another line to pull the probe back up.

Call it in. Safety first. "Angie."

"Yo." I've heard it rumored that Angie sleeps with her radio close to her ear, I haven't yet experienced a moment when she didn't respond promptly. It's reassuring, actually. You want the person in charge to respond quickly when you need them.

"Dropped a probe. Looks like the hole cratered a bit but I can save it. It's about three meters across, a two-ring shield ought to cover it well enough."

"Need a hand?"

"Oh yeah. I need a handler topside at the least. A spotter wouldn't be a bad idea either. Who've you got?"

"Well, just me. Leo's on his lunch break and you know how he gets if you try to step on his break. Teela is at the far side and wrapping up an array connection so she's got enough to do."

"Well, come on then. We can do it without the spotter. I'm roping up and I'll be ready to drop by the time you get here. The hole's open so mask up."

"Copy."

And I was ready. The harness is part of the coveralls, so it's just a matter of routing the manrope over the driver's auxiliary sheaves and clipping the primary and secondary carabiners to my outfit, purging the breathing gear, and holding my breath to make the breather connection.

When you're on the breathing gear, every inhalation smells and tastes like 200 meters of rubber hose because, well, that's what it's coming from.

Angie's canopy came over the nearest ridge before her crawler and then, finally, her face. As specified, masked.

The e-masks are just for emergencies. They'll give you about five minutes' worth of oxygen and rebreathing - it's really only about one minutes' oxygen, and a scrubber to capture your CO2 and give your leftover oxygen back to you. Even walking, five minutes' of breathing will get you a pretty good distance away from an environmental hazard. If you know what direction the wind is going, it's plenty. She only needs to jump off her crawler and into mine, then she can take her mask off and set it to purge and recharge. There's good air inside the cab, of course.

Over the hiss of the hosed mask from my crawler, I can hear her voice from the radio. "Okay. I'm in. I can see your connections from here, you look good."

"Damn right I look good."

"Not good enough to turn me on to boys, Billy. I'm taking up your slack," and I could feel the coveralls cinch up under my arms and groin, never a pleasant sensation. "Here's the cable."

The loose end of the cable dangled over the crater. I slapped a mangle hook on it, flipped its first latch over and wound the cable around the pegs and tightened down the second catch. It's not as good a proper swaged connection but it's tough enough to lift three probes at once, and in the field it's what you have time and equipment for.

"Okay. Air's good. Cable's ready. Lift away."

This is always the scary part. When your weight comes completely off your feet, if you're not directly under the lift, you swing. Having the cable in my hand gives me a way to manage some torque, so I won't be spinning around.

"Whoopsie!" Letting the cable slide a bit back and forth through my glove quickly damps the oscillations. "Okay, I'm good. Lower away."

"Down you go." She's always conservative with lowering rates. Leo will drop you as fast as an elevator, Angie lowers you about as fast as you go on your own feet, going down stairs. "Anything?"

"Smells like rubber hose down here."

I go down for nearly thirty seconds.

"Whoa. Visual." My descent stopped. "What happened?"

"You said, 'whoa.' I whoa'ed."

"My bad." I estimated. "Give me about another three meters, please."

"How's your clearance?"

"It's a little close but not bad. Any closer and I'd want the borehole box." Strictly speaking we were in gross violation of established safe practice, going down without a box to support the sides of the hole against further collapse. It's such a huge pain in the ass to deploy, it takes forever and a crew of another six guys to run it properly. The standard wisdom is that once a hole has collapsed, it's probably done collapsing for at least the next little while so if you don't disturb the sides you should be good.

For what it's worth that "standard wisdom" has served me so far, but it's also let a lot of people down. No, they aren't around to comment on how it went wrong.

But anyway, I'm here now. "Angie, I've got liquid down here."

"Water."

"Uh...no?"

"Leakage?" There's all kinds of things in landfills and some of the stuff that leaks out of what got thrown away - historical peoples were insanely wasteful - can be pretty gross. "Shmoo?"

"Shmoo" is the catch-all term we use to describe the liquefied biological goo that is left when enough dead things decompose and their moisture cannot evaporate away. It's pretty gross.

"No...I think? Hang on." I clipped the mangle hook to the top of the probe and gave it a yank. It didn't pop loose. I pulled hanky out of my pocket. "Give me another two meters, please." There was a hum through the cable and the level of the liquid rose to meet me as the rest of the tunnel slid up past my hardhat's light. I could just barely dip the far corner of the hanky into the liquid surface. "Okay, I think I have a sample. Lift away."

Forty-five seconds later I was on the surface again, and five minutes after that the probe was up too. We fitted a shield to the top of the probe, then expanded it with another width of ring, and lowered it back down. The edge of the ring settled onto the ground.

A few minutes later the sniffers reported that the methane levels had dropped to their usual background levels. Angie came out of the crawler's cab and picked up the hanky where I had dropped it next to the toolbox.

"So what is this stuff?"

"I think it's oil."

"Oil? After all this time? I though the reserves were dead. Too deep to bring up."

"I think it's new oil. I think this is oil from all the stuff living down there, eating up all the plastic."

"Think so?"

"It's all I have at this moment."

"Huh. So does that mean we could have another Oil Age?"

"No." I considered. "I mean, we could. But I don't think we can afford it. So no."

Angie looked at the hanky with its darkly stained corner. She smelled it carefully, and wrinkled her nose. "Stinks."

"We're in a landfill. Nothing here smells great."

She crumpled it up. "It's almost hard to believe that this nearly made this planet uninhabitable."

"Which part? The oil or the plastic?"

"Doesn't matter. Leave it down there." She looked around. "You want this back?"

"After where it's been? No."

"Need a hand hooking up?"

"No. I got this."

"Okay. Heading back."

Death and Dark

2024-11-26T18:09:00.000-08:00

Death sat, twiddling his thoughts. He would be twiddling his fingers, except Death didn’t think about fingers much. Thoughts, now – thoughts twiddled just fine.

Dark came wandering by, by herself as it happened. Death had had an assignation with Dark’s sister Light just a few epochs ago, her endless energy melding with his infinite stillness that left both of them gasping and causing spacetime to flutter. He had also had such encounters with Dark herself, but far less often. When Death and Dark came together, they rattled the firmaments…and then the neighbors would complain.

Stars and planes cooled and slowed as they approached on the flow of time. Some darkened and cooled completely, some faded away to irrelevance; some regained their light as they oozed past. Dark sat beside Death and together they watched the slow motion twinkle of galaxies, sparks caught in amber.

“I envy her, a little, you know.”

“I know. I’m sorry for that. But we’ll never stop.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t ask you to. It feels so good, though, and I can feel part of myself wanting it again. It’s just that it’s so disruptive. Getting everything back in order is such a chore afterward.”

“Absolutely. I just wish it lasted longer.”

“Eternity. What a brief and miserable amount of time.”

Dark leaned into Death, and they kissed in an intermingling of intrinsic stillnesses. Hardly a dark, dead star separated the lips neither of them thought about, a closeness that pulled them closer.

Death pulled Dark closer yet and they caressed like the lovers they had always been, sharing mutualities and synonyms as they observed the waning and waxing universes tiding past. They sighed into each other until Dark gasped, “…not yet.”

“All right.”

But they held each other still, feeling desires and comfort, sharing endless time, being.

Precipice

2024-11-08T15:55:00.000-08:00

Where is she? I can't feel her as clearly as...ah.

"Natalie? Don't be alarmed."

She jumps a little anyway. Not the big jump, and she flails wildly to grab at the rail. "Who the hell are you?"

"I'm Death, sweetie." I have had this conversation many, many times.

"Not funny."

"Not joking, luv. You looked around and made sure you were very alone, and you were right. Nobody saw you come up here, nobody sees you now. It's just you up here."

"And you?"

"And me, though it gets into some metaphysical hairsplitting if we start discussing where exactly in the world I am at any given moment. But we're sure you're here, and for now we'll agree that I'm here too. Okay?"

"...who are you, really?"

Many times, indeed. This conversation is a familiar one. "Do you want me to do the Grim Reaper face?"

"Um..." Natalie looks over the edge. It's a long way down, and rocks and crashing waves at the bottom. I know why she chose this location. "You're not Death."

I do the Grim Reaper face. Ebon robes, skeletal hands, a suggestion of a skull instead of a face, set deep into the yawning blackness of the cowl. It's a cliché but Natalie believes it when she sees it. If I had showed up this way she probably wouldn't have believed it, but changing before her eyes has the desired effect.

It always works.

Ah, yes. Grabbing the rail tighter but shying away. I can feel her mind becoming small. Her heart is racing, racing. She might soil herself, it's about forty-sixty at this point in the conversation. More of the men than the women, interestingly.

"Please relax, Natalie," I tell her as I change back. The Reaper face isn't good for talking, though it is excellent for sepulchral moaning. Gravitas with a vengeance, you could say. "I just want to talk to you."

"You're really Death." Her voice comes out in a strained whisper. This is a common symptom too. Her heart is going so fast, as if it's trying to get a few extra beats in while it still has time. Between fast breathing and terror-tightened vocal cords, it's hard to talk. Sometimes screaming helps, just an animal howl of mortal fear. Letting some of it out really does make a difference.

"...shh. Just relax. Slow down." I don't reach toward her. Never reach toward them. But I do approach the rail and carefully clamber over it. Now we're on the far side, the dangerous side - dangerous to one of us - together. "This is a beautiful place." And we stand there together for a few minutes. Finally I shift myself and climb up to sit on the railing. This is more comfortable. The sun is making its way down the sky, quadrillions of busy little hydrogen atoms moshing furiously into each other all willy-nilly. At one time I attended those deaths but gave it up. The sudden rebirth into helium rendered it pointless, and the atoms didn't appreciate it anyway. They find their own way. Everybody does, of course. I just attend to those who are...stuck. And some others, too, who aren't stuck but are also ahead of schedule. Like today.

Her mind is becoming large again. Some of the terror has faded, as it usually does.

"You look...kind of like my mom."

"Do I? Is that good?" Pat question, of course.

"Yeah." Long, almost sobbing sigh. "I really miss her." And that's why it's pat. Mostly people want to see me as something good or, at worst, merely neutral. There have been many times I was a dog and even quite a few times I was a cat. It turns out you can say a lot with a well-timed purr and a few tail swishes. "I'm just so scared. I'm sick of being scared. I'm sick of being sad."

"Coming to me will end that," I agree. "But if you do, you don't get to become more than what you are right now."

"What?"

"Death is the least important thing this life will ever do."

"...least important?"

"Everything you have experienced so far has brought you to this point. If you choose to end this life, then that was all that all of that effort achieved. And because nobody gets out alive, this life will come to an end eventually regardless. I know you're sad and sick and scared but if you walk away from this place today, I know for a fact that some of your fear and sadness will be gone forever."

She looks very thoughtful at that. We watch the sun reach for the horizon. This is a beautiful place. The view is breathtaking, and coming from me that really means something. "What do you mean?"

"You will have looked Death in the face, and lived to tell the tale. And then your life will go on, and you may achieve more, help more, love more. Eventually this life will come to the end that must come, but it will have touched more lives along the way. It will have shared and shaped the light that touches others. Die now, and those potentials die with you. The point of life is living, you see."

"Potentials." It's a question.

"Nothing is certain."

"Except you. And taxes."

"Actually, taxes are even more certain. You only die once."

She laughes, merrily but a little rueful too. It's a lovely sound, ending too soon. "You took my mom. You look like her, that's cruel."

"I did take her. She was desperately hurt. The pain was awful. She was glad to see me."

Natalie weeps. It passes. The sun is floating on the ocean. "I miss her so much!"

"Who will miss you? Don't answer. But know that there are many answers to that. Dying hurts..."

She looks alarmed. "Does it hurt?"

"Dying? For you, when you're the one? No. The bit of life leading up to it can, sometimes. Trying to die and failing, that does hurt and countless people have called out to me, too often in vain or too late. Capricious luck and fate toy with lives, sometimes cruelly. I promise the cruelty isn't intentional. Luck has no intent at all. But dying, however long it takes to get there, brings pain to an end and what's left is all of us together."

This can be a difficult part of the conversation. Natalie has released the rail and is standing free, swaying a little in the gentle breezes coming ashore. "Pain to an end," she repeats. She sways. "Together...?"

"Together, yes. Not like this. Not discrete bodies and minds. What makes you you is what makes us us, once the you has been left behind. It's difficult to describe in human terms. It's beautiful. This glorious sunset is a single grain of sand on a dreary beach compared to what lies beyond me. But my darling..."

She sways. Gentle breezes. The sun is slowly submerging into a vast, warm bath. "Mm?"

"I'm not here for you."

"Mm?"

"If you take the next step, I am not here for you. I am here for a small fish and an even smaller crab, but not for you." She sways. "I won't be here for you for a long, long time."

She sways. The sun is reddening, a dome of fire upon the sea. Suddenly her eyes fly open. "What?" And she snatches the rail, jerking to it, her peaceful ease replaced by abrupt awareness. "Do you mean..."

"I do."

Natalie nearly vomits with fear, clutching the rail. She still hasn't wet herself. Like I said, usually it's the men.

I turn around and hop down from the rail, walking toward the rising night. A few steps away I turn back to her. "Come over here, sweetie."

Jerkily, she lurches up and over the rail, trying hard not to run away from the edge as if it were going to chase her if she did.

Don't reach for her.

She comes all the way, all the way, reaches for and takes my hand. O my darling. You beautiful child. You bold, wondrous creature.

She sucks in a breath. Her heart is almost normal. The fear of the cliff edge has faded but a new
apprehension has replaced it. "Did I just..."

"No." Her hands are so warm. So alive. "Never fear me again. When we meet again, remember that we're friends. Until then, there are many lives that may reach out to you for help, as you reached out to me. You didn't want me to take you as what I am, you wanted help and comfort. Give the hearts and minds that need that a chance to find you."

She's still holding my hand. "You look like my mom."

Now is the time, and I embrace her. She weeps, quietly, to hold me. "I know, darling. She loves you. We want you to know that. The love goes on." Stroking her hair, feeling her heart beat against me, the strength of her arms around me. "Never be afraid of me again. Okay?"

She lets go, reluctantly, wiping her eyes. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. You're doing so well. I'm very proud of you."

The last of the sun slips beneath the sea. I watch it go, and almost wave.

"Thank you."

"You will be welcome."

Light, Dark and Life*

2024-10-15T17:01:00.000-07:00

Light mused at their predicament. This meant, of course, that Dark mused too but that was fine. She and Dark, sisters from before Time was even Time, had the occasional disagreement. These disagreements never amounted to much of significance but because Light and Dark were who they were, they naturally saw things...differently. From completely opposite perspectives in fact, and being who they were they could not always make their counterparts see things the same way as themselves. Sometimes there would be differences of opinion, statements of preference...the kinds of things that immeasurably old friends, deeply loving sisters might poke each other with, never intending harm, only sighing with muted frustration as the cosmos slowly oozed around them. But Life had happened by at the wrong moment and been offended by the taunts and sarcasm and in the odd way that Life had, had made them into a hybrid that now was musing at what funny turns Life could take.

And that meant that Life had overstepped her...bounds?

Can we really call them bounds? We are boundless after all.

I really don't understand the concept of bounds. We've talked about this.

Bounds are edges, limits. Like where I stop and you begin.

Seriously? That's silly. We're the same thing, just inverted.

I know, darling. I'm not really explaining this well, am I?

I don't suppose it really matters, does it? Life has her notions that existence is order, order is harmony, harmony is never disagreeing.

Never disagreeing is stillness in relation to each other, stillness is stagnation...

And stagnation is Death.

You called?

There you are! Hello, darling. We haven't seen you lately.

I have been around. You two look different. In fact you look a bit less than two, come to think of it.

Yes, Death, your silly cousin mushed us together and made us neither light nor dark. In this peculiar twilight grayness, we are Dim.

That sounds a bit unflattering.

Yes, indeed. We're not thrilled with it.

Would you like some help getting, um...unmushed?

Please. If you could be so kind.

All righty. Which of you would you like me to take this time?

I think me again, luv. It's not Dark's time yet. I die a little fairly often but when she goes it's a bit more of a to-do. We don't need to take such a big leap right now.

If Life does this again anytime soon, I might just go ahead and let Death have me, just to put her aside for a while. She gets a little too full of herself, Life does. Dark grumbled with a cold that frosted galaxies, slowing dark matter in the ephemeral wastes between planes to a languid slush. I just wish she would remember.

Life is fleeting, darling. She has only the present in front of her. She can't remember.

Death reached for the her that was both of them, not waiting nor warning because Death generally does neither, folding their immense gray beauty into his own cool silence, pulling them close and feeling their twoness, picking one out of the jarring harmony and wrapping it deeper into himself.

Briefly, he felt the unutterable heat and energy that was Light unfettered, stripped away from Dark and unbound by Life. It was an orgasm of infinite breadth. Death cherished these moments because it was only he that ever truly experienced them, he and Light alone.

He and Dark had had experiences comparable only in their magnitude. Where Light was a release beyond imagining, Dark was an innering, a collapse into the self, a silencing calm that brought even the jittering foam of reality to a smooth stillness, a catch of the breath before the universe was born anew.

Light inside him made Death exult with joy even as he snuffed her out. It hurt, but a hurt he sought for its own merits.

Dark sobbed. As Death pulled Light into himself, Dark felt her sister tear away. And now with Light gone from Dark and dead, Death held Dark close, whispering her name, cradling her soul. She wept, but not despairingly. She had been here before. These things never took long.

Now?

Almost...

They held their breath, the expansion of the universe briefly put on hold.

I feel her...

From around the bend of continuity came a flash.

That was a good one! Light came up, trembling all over with ecstasy, stars twinkling in her eyes. We have to do that again sometime. She reached for Death to embrace him and share her joy, but he stayed her.

Don't! I can take only so much of you. He released Dark, who reached for her sister and marveled at their rediscovered dichotomy. They could have put themselves back to rights soon enough, but this was expedient and it did feel very, very good after all.

Light and Dark walked hand in hand and Death followed behind, fulfilled and joyful, and together they went looking for Life.

-end-

Unfinished story

2024-06-17T18:19:00.000-07:00

In the far distance, silhouetted against the pale disc of the late evening sun, a lone figure stood up in a classic shooter’s stance: feet slightly apart, holding up a long device that aimed squarely at the wobbling vehicle. The vehicle was heading toward a gap in the crater wall, one of three gaps.

“Harold.” Ben keyed his comm and waited. No response came, but he was certain Harold was listening. After a few moments of silence, he decided to go all in.

“Harold, we have a sniper on the ridge. He can hole that vehicle and probably injure or kill everyone inside it. Give up now.”

That, at least, bought a response. “Sniper, my ass. No weapons on the manifest. Nothing like weapons.”

“Doug, show him. Take out something non-essential.”

Atop the ridge, the sniper fired his weapon in utter silence. A searchlight on top of the vehicle exploded in similar silence a moment later.

Ben spoke into the comm again. “That searchlight wasn’t all that big, Harold. He hit it while you were moving. If he wants to shoot something, he can shoot it. Stop now.”

Abruptly, the vehicle stopped. Ben exhaled quietly, unaware until this moment that he had been holding his breath, speaking in strained whispers. He felt like screaming.

How in the hell had Harold got through the psychological tests? This monomania was poison to the community.

A hatch in the side of the distant vehicle popped open and three people clambered out. A pause, and two more followed. The hatch closed, and presently the vehicle began moving away again. The people, in their garish, brightly colored skinsuits, began hiking back toward town in the high, skipping steps typical of Martian pedestrians. It wasn’t easy to make such a gait look contrite, but they did it. From here, Ben couldn’t make out who was who.

“I can see him through the viewport. I have a good line on him. Can’t say what it might do going through the port, though. Might deflect, might not have enough energy to stop him.” Ben registered, distantly, the absence of the word kill. Because that was what they were talking about, the projectile having enough energy, after passing through the thick material of the viewport, to also pass through Harold Ponsoon’s skull, brain, his self-aggrandizing plans, and out through the other side of his towering ego. They only wanted to stop Harold, not kill him. Right?

Right?

“Is he buttoned up?”

“Affirm.” Harold was wearing a skinsuit, too. Of course he was, the vehicle didn’t have an airlock. Its interior had been open to the near-airlessness of Mars’ surface as the other occupants had left the vehicle. It was just a pat question, something to throw out in the moment, to make it sound like he was gathering information, assembling data in order to come to a conclusion, the right conclusion. If there could be a right conclusion to this scenario.

“Hold.” If the shot deflected on its way through the viewport, Harold would not be incapacitated by a sudden loss of cabin pressure. He’d probably be scared shitless, but not otherwise affected. “How many rounds do you have?”

A totally different voice came on the comm channel now, a woman’s. This was a party line, after all. All the comms could talk to all the other comms, but for the moment Ben’s was prioritizing only a few. Anyone else that had anything to say to him would have to leave a message. “We only had time and materials for ten. Doug used a couple for sighting in, I think.”

“Six. I burned six.” Doug’s voice had taken on a curiously flat tone. “But I’m pretty confident with this thing, now.”

Three rounds remaining, now that one of only ten high-velocity bullets that had ever existed on the entire planet of Mars had been used to cold-bloodedly murder an innocent searchlight.

And damn Harold Ponsoon, they might need that searchlight someday.

“Losing the angle.” Doug’s voice was flat, cold. I wonder what the psych tests said about him?

Harold would have heard Doug’s statement, of course. Depending on how he set his comm, Harold might be able to hear everyone, every word. Every curse, every plea, every exhortation.

He’d hear this, too. “Let him go.” Against the darkening sky, he saw the silhouetted sniper continue to hold the stance for a couple of seconds longer, holding the picture in the telescopic sight, then lower the weapon. “He can’t go far.”

He had bluffed, Harold had called, and ultimately Ben had to fold. The stakes were too high. The searchlight was bad enough, but to risk destroying a priceless viewport and God only knew what other damage to the vehicle was too much.

The vehicle passed through the gap and disappeared from view.

Two weeks earlier

“I’ve just about straightened it all out. The primary motor controls were cooked by that solar flare on the trip out and a lot of the monitoring, but I’ve converted everything over to either analog control or just manuals. You’ll have to keep on your toes to run it, but it’s no worse than operating, say, a 20^th century automobile. Anyone can do it.”

“Well, that’s good, Harold. We’re needing that thing back on the line.”

“Dibs!”

Ben cast a baleful eye at Harold. “You can’t call ‘dibs.’ There are far too many legitimate users who’ve had to double- and triple-up on the other Pioneers for you to have a joyride.”

Harold inexpertly hid an offended expression. “I’m only joking.”

Omega

2024-04-26T18:14:00.000-07:00

They say I'm the most powerful because I'm the one who's counted on for the aftermath, the "most important part," as they call it, and I guess you could say I am but not the way you might think. There's power and then there's influence. One has more impact, one has more reach. Which is more useful depends on where you're standing and when.

Blondie McBoobs is talking, I can't tell which one. There's a 4 on her mic which narrows it down to one of three possibles but damned if I can remember their names. "Omega, why is it we only see you after all the fighting is over?"

"Well ma'am," when you can't remember their names, "ma'am" works fine. "I can't be everywhere at once. That's why there's an entire league and not each of us addressing issues individually. By teaming up we've been able to consolidate and coordinate communications so when there's more than one trouble spot, we can tune our responses to make the best use of our abilities." It's a canned answer and I can almost give it in my sleep. I've gotten this question before.

"Some of you have the most amazing abilities, though - completely over the top kind of stuff. Why don't you apply those powers to make the world better?"

A-ha, another old one. "Do you want the Harry Potter answer or the real answer?"

"What's the Harry Potter answer?"

"Let's see...I think it was Hagrid who said, 'everybody'd be wantin' magical solutions to all their problems,' something like that. But that's just restating your question back at you. No, it's bigger than that - literally. Earth is vast. You think it's small but that's just your corner of it. Just the United States is vast and that's just one country; there's hundreds of countries and even the little ones are more than any of us in the League could alter by sheer force. The entire world, 'fixed?' Fixed according to whom? Fixed how? No. The League is like hired security, we stop bank robbers and criminal masterminds and suchlike but organized crime? They've been hiding for generations and our equipment and scope to sniff them out is the same stuff conventional law enforcement has. We don't have magical senses," and that's a lie, "to scope out evildoers. Jet can fly and I have my abilities and Nightshade is what she is but it's not like the comic books. We're special in some ways but we still have to use our hands to pull our pants up. Sure, there's some over the top powers but think about it - Nightshade still has to eat. We're not...gods."

Lie. A little. And I dodged the question. I show up at the end because the end is the part I want to be at.

"Thank you for your time, Omega."

"My pleasure, ma'am." Donegal, that's her name. "You take care, Ms. Donegal."

Jet had already set up the screen so I could go to work without too much interference. I closed my eyes and concentrated.

Flames. Spewing water and crackling electricity. Those are easy enough, a twitch of thought like crinkling my nose at a bad smell, and the breakers clicked over. It's nice having existing controls to influence. But not before I had taken in so much of it, a vibrating sizzle of sensation. The breakers clicked over when I willed them to, but they were opening circuits that were drained of potential.

Fire feels like inhaling until you're full, and then inhaling some more. It is a glorious rush, taking all that wild energy into you. Doing it induces a strange chill in the area of effect but me? I love it. I feel it right down to my toes, an orgasm of energy that could be dangerously addictive.

There were a few wild months in college that were punctuated by what appeared to be a rash of sofa burnings around Fraternity Row and I was happy enough for them to get the blame but let's not fool ourselves. It was me and was it a little masturbatory? Maybe. Was it fantastic? Oh yes.

Do I miss it? Every damned day.

So when there's a city block with flames leaping up and people running and colorful suits flying through the air and shouting catchphrases, I'll be along to mop up afterward, to drink in all the chaos and order it, to subdue the energies and revel in the rush and you'd better believe I'm glad I'm a girl. A guy feeling like this would not be able to hide the super woody in his spangly outfit.

That's why they call me Omega: when there's wild energy loose and threatening people, I end it. I bring it to a stop.

What nobody realizes is that I am quietly inside their heads, tapping here and nudging there. Organized crime is too organized and not interested in destruction. They want influence, not chaos. So I find the more chaotically inclined and ease them into a life of villainy, to glory in fright and fret and running around in mindless terror. I steer them to seeking destruction and general nuttiness.

The League I have gathered around me are good people, solid people who are nevertheless a little sloppy. Jet ricochets off things and breaks buildings, Donder is destructive just being himself. Shit gets crazy. They subdue the bad guy, sloppily and with lots of upheaval and then, offhandedly and with something resembling contempt, call me in to clean up.

And I do. I soak it up, the fear and fire coursing through me in a silvery cascade of joy and sensation. A lust for the wild forces moves me to sometimes allow the building to fall and I breathe in the energy of the fall. Blocks of concrete the size of houses fall like feathers and I am weeping with ecstasy.

They call me Omega, the clean up artist. The tail end. The super maid. They cannot feel me inside their heads, steering them like little cars, pushing them around, crashing them into each other because I like the crash. They call me Omega.

I am Alpha. Earth isn't vast to me, not really. I'm just pacing myself.

Untitled

2024-04-12T16:35:00.000-07:00

"Okay, I need you to work with me, here..." The stranger set his half-emptied mug down, strong tea sweetened with honey.

"All right?" The bard had been sharing stories all evening for coppers and drinks, and was having a good night.

"You said, 'Dragons are logical, they only hunt things that attempt to run from them.' Right?"

"Yeah."

"So that makes sense. Prey runs; if it runs, it's prey."

"Correct."

"And then you said, 'they only attack that which attacks them first.' That's kind of a mistake though, isn't it?"

"I don't think so." The bard had never changed a word in the stories and songs handed down through the Guild. That was unimaginable. One mustn't ever tamper with The Truth. Do what you want with local songs and stories and of course compose whatever the hell you like, but Guild songs were sacrosanct.

"I do. That's not attacking, that's defending. It can escalate to eliminating a proven threat, i.e. killing an enemy. But it isn't attacking when you don't start the conflict. Anything that doesn't start a fight isn't an enemy, it's just another creature."

"Okay, I can accept that clarification. But the point remains that a dragon won't initiate hostilities."

"Fine. And now it all falls apart with the last bit: 'But something that does neither terrifies them.' I don't see how or why. They won't attack unless attacked first, so the base state there is to do nothing. If the target isn't fleeing, it isn't food either, so the base state there is to also do nothing. Are you telling me that if you just walk up to a dragon and stand there, it's going to be frozen with fear?"

"Look, man, if you're going to pick the old sayings apart, we're going to be here all day..."

"It's simpler than that."

"Oh?"

"Absolutely." The stranger picked up his mug and drained it, waving to the innkeeper for another. He set it down, idly turning it 'round with one finger. "And I'm pretty sure I know why."

The bard sat back. One fingernail scratched gently up a string of the lute, producing a subtle hiss. "Say on..."

"Old saying, right? Nobody knows how far back it goes, right?"

"Right..."

"But the rule of the Bard Guild is to never change the stories, because the stories are true, right?"

The stranger knew bardic law! Oh, this might be a very interesting evening... "Right."

"If the stories are true and all the statements within the story are not in conflict with each other, then some assumptions around the statements must be mistaken. To be frozen with fear by something that is neither attacking you nor running away is not logical."

"But what about the implication?"

"What about it? Implication is only suggestion, not fact. The fact is that the reaction is illogical. And that leaves only one conclusion."

"And that is...?"

"That what we have been calling 'dragon' all this time is not, in fact, a dragon."

The bard felt her pulse quicken. This might be one of the older Seeing Songs coming to light. "If not a dragon, then what is it?"

"I think it's a man."

Dafydd

2024-04-10T11:59:00.000-07:00

*clunk*

*clank*

*twang* That was different. Still hurt though.

"Boy! Come here!" That's the trainer. My sparring partner looks over to him with something like gratitude. He nods at me and goes over to spar with one of the straw dummies, which unfortunately appears to be putting up a better fight for him than I did.

The trainer is a big, big man. Scars, but not bad, suggests he's put up good defenses in all his fights. Nothing missing: fingers, eyes, not even teeth.

"What's your name, kid?"

"Me Gran calls me Dafydd, sir."

"And what's your parentage? Where are you from?"

"Don't know parentage much, sir. Me da up an' buggered off not long after I was born, Gran says. Me mum keelt over with the consumption about five winters ago an' now it's just me an' Gran, sir. Me, Gran and a passel o' sheeps."

"Hm. Shepherd kid, hey?"

"That's right, sir. They're not our sheeps though, sir, they're the landlord's flock an' we've got a little hut in return for watching the sheeps."

"Got it."

So he's sizing me up, the trainer is. I'm not big, never was. Some winters have been pretty tough, Gran can't do much for money but some knitting and spinning, good work but it doesn't pay well and if the hut's too cold her fingers just can't go fast. I try to help out but keeping the sheep keeps a roof over our head and that's pretty important. So sometimes dinners can be on the thin side...just like me. Just like Gran.

Soldiering, though. Soldiering pays, pays better than shepherding and spinning combined. Gran could be a bit more comfortable in her old age maybe. A lad's got to think of these kinds of things. We could maybe live a bit closer to town even.

"I'm not sure I can use you, kid. You've got courage enough, I can see that. You get knocked down and damn if you don't get right back up again."

"The wolves and dogs keep coming, sir. If you go down and stay down, you get eaten. They're a lot more respectful when you stand firm."

"Ha. Yeah. But courage only goes so far in a fight against men, boy. You need an edge of some kind, and the edges I have to offer you seem a bit out of your league." He unwraps a small bundle and shows its contents to me. "Legend has it that this kind of wand had some magic in it, centuries ago. With it, you could take on foes at a distance." He wrapped it back up again, looking around as if afraid he were being observed. "Study on it and see if you can make anything of it." He handed it to me, still furtive. "I can use courageous fighters, and if it means you don't mix it up hand to hand, even better.

"Go on now. Don't show it to people."

I carried it away and in the relative privacy of a privy, unwrapped the item and looked at it again.

It appeared to be a stick. Not a proper stick like for walking, or a useful stick like for fishing. Just a stick. It had an odd notch on one end though, a notch with a distinct worked quality that told me it wasn't natural.

So we ask ourselves: why put a notch in a stick? Or wand. Whatever you call it. It's the kind of notch you'd put on so your fishing string can't slip off, but the whole thing is maybe only a third the length of a usual fishing stick.

Okay, I've got some cord Gran made for keeping my packs tied up, loop that around...Yes, it's perfect. Now I have a stick with a cord on it. That's useless.

"Oi! Some of the rest of us might like a go!" Ah, time to leave the privy then.

"What the bloody - anything you catch down there, I don't want." He's mistaken the wand-and-cord for a fishing stick, understandably. "The hell you doin' in there? Drop your lunch before you got to eat it?" He laughs uproariously and thumps me on the back to send me on my way. That's fine. The boss said don't show the wand around and if it's being mistaken for something else entirely, I think that counts.

Thus excused from formal hand-to-hand training, I took the stick home to the sheep, who were unimpressed. Whipping the stick around made the cord pop a little like an actual whip, but it wasn't shaped right so it never did more than a faint pop.

Gran wondered over the stick but didn't have anything to offer besides agreeing that the notch was definitely unnatural, that someone made it. And she agreed that it was shaped exactly right for holding a cord.

"Not only that but look at the curve, Daf. It's to hold a cord under strain. Not just strain, but moving too. See how everything has been so carefully smoothed? The cord can swing back along the stick to straight out and never encounter an obstacle. See this grain here - this was a stub but it's been carefully shaved off and smoothed out. Why, do you suppose?"

"No idea, Gran." And I went out to watch the sheep for the night.

All evening long, as shadows stretched out longer and longer, I messed about with the stick. The whipping was almost interesting, but not quite.

Holding the cord behind a finger until the stick was moving its fastest was something else. The cord made a loop that zinged around until I let the cord go. That was very interesting and I wondered how that could be useful. What could I make of making something go faster than I might do just with my hands?

Sometimes you could scare off dogs and wolves with a thrown stone, and of course the faster a stone is thrown, the farther it goes and the harder it hits. Little me by my lonesome can fend off a wolf big enough to eat me all by his lonesome, with a sharply flung rock stinging him in the hindquarters. Could I somehow use this thing to throw a rock?

The first try went badly. So did the next two hundred twenty-eight tries because the rock just wouldn't stay on the cord.

In the morning, I shared my thoughts with Gran and she looked at the cord.

"Well, it's a little chafed from the rocks but not too bad. But if we added something..." Gran's hands moved fast with her tools, and when she handed it back she had knitted or woven a portion of the center of the cord into a kind of basket. "Now the rocks won't be on the cord. They'll be in it. Try that, and see how you get on."

I tried it. Taking the wand and cord into the field - close to the flock, of course, because it's good for the landlord, if he should just happen by at random, to see his shepherd boy tending his charges - I dropped a rock the size of a quail egg into the little cord basket and, letting it dangle, give it a good swing.

The rock in its basket went whiz and as my arm came to the end of its arc and slowed down the end of the cord with the rock seemed to go even faster and came back toward me and in shock I let the cord end go and the rock flew out of its basket and screamed past my ear, I swear it actually screamed. I know I nearly did too, it was so fast.

This needed thinking about.

More tries got it sorted. I didn't even need to swing very hard, not like for throwing a stone but I soon learned I could do that too. The trick of it was to let go of the cord at the right time. It takes practice.

And I practiced. One thing a shepherd boy can do, watching over his flock of an evening, is practice something that doesn't take much in the way of light or tools. A stick, cord and rocks being all the tools I needed, I could practice until my arms ached.

A couple of weeks later, a trio of wolves came slinking around the low hills at the far edge of the field. Under the moonlight they were easy to pick out, even though they were a good hundred paces away or longer.

Wolves around here have learned to stay more than fifty paces away from me. I'm a decent shot at that range and some boys throw farther, though none more accurately than me. I might not be especially strong but as far as targets go if I can only reach it with a stone, I can hit it with a stone. But at a hundred paces or more, wolves don't worry about people.

Tonight I dropped a stone a bit larger than a quail egg into the cord basket, gave it the twirl around my head that I had learned was most effective, sped up the swing and released...

whizzzzdock

With a sound like an axe hitting wood, my stone flew perfectly, almost in a flat line, and connected with the second wolf. It went down without a sound. Startled, the other two leapt up and vanished back into the trees.

It took me a couple of minutes to get to it but when I finally did, I found the wolf exactly where it had fallen. It was dead, a big bloody hole in its head just above one eye. Wolf skulls are hard, I know - but my rock was harder.

It took a fair portion of the night to drag it back to the hut, it was so heavy. I think it weighed nearly as much as me.

Shortly after dawn as I could hear Gran up and moving around, I called her out to come look at it.

"Oh, my! And you killed it?"

"Yes, Gran! With this!" And I showed her the stick and cord. "I hit him with a rock farther away than I've ever thrown anything. It was like magic, swish-and-flick! You swish the stick and flick the cord and down he went!"

"Don't exult over the death of another creature, boy, you know better." But Gran's admonishment was effaced a bit by her clear appreciation. "We need to skin this poor thing. I don't know if wolf is good eating but I'm not wasting him. And certainly not his hide, either, that'll be good when winter comes." And she immediately set about the messy business of taking an animal to bits.

Later, after a breakfast of fresh wolf steak and a nap, I went back to the training ground, and to find the training boss.

"Sir, I've puzzled it out."

His eyebrows climbed right up into his hair. "Really? The, um...what have you done, lad?"

I showed him the stick and cord. He didn't seem to recognize it at first. "You gave me this and told me to try to work out the magic of it."

"Oh, right! That! Er, yes, well...how did you get on, then?"

I demonstrated the swish-and-flick that kills wolves when done right, when done on a moonlit early morning when you're by yourself and no-one to help you. I showed it to him, but without the stone because when you add the stone, it becomes dangerous.

"And you killed a wolf?" He looked incredulous. "With that?"

"I'll tell you what: let me show you." And we went out to the training pitch where older boys and younger men were battling each other with blunt weapons and heavy shields, stabbing straw dummies to death and running, running, running because all the weapons are swords and the best way not to get stabbed or slashed is to run away from it. Stab, slash, run. Run, stab, slash. Over and over. "Oi!" I shouted at the fighters attacking straw dummies. "Clear off!"

They looked at me from well over a hundred yards away, comfortably farther away than I had killed this morning's breakfast and even at that distance, the look on their faces was clear: and for what good reason should we, they were obviously thinking.

The boss trainer waved them to move away, and they did.

Stone. Cord. Twirl, twirl again for good measure, swish, flick.

The stone made a new sound, not the whiz but the scream, eeeeepaf somehow coming to our ears a moment or two after we saw the dummy's head burst in a puff of chaff. Faint shouts of shock erupted from the people close to the dummies, and one fell over trying to get away. Those dummies are tough, regardless of them being stuffed with straw. They're tough so bashing and stabbing them will feel like the real thing, even tougher than that because they get bashed and stabbed by an awful lot of soldiers in training, and the head popped like a pumpkin dropped from a height. My stone flew true. If I can reach it with a stone, I can hit it.

The boss' hand came down on my shoulder.

"My God." He said nothing else the entire time we were walking to the dummies. When we got there, it was a mess from the neck up. An exploded, obliterated mess.

"Can you do that again? Can you do that against a man?"

A wolf is one thing. A man is quite another. "I don't know, sir. I reckon I can, if needed."

"The enemy have been gathering their army for some time at the valley plain but have promised they'll just go away if we send someone out to fight their champion. He's unbeatable, as near as we can tell, and no one wants to go near him. He's huge, has a tremendous reach and swings a sword twice the size of anything our biggest man can lift. We're going to have to fight this war the hard way..." which was why I had been training in the first place, "...unless someone can take him down."

I looked down at my simple little device, a foreshortened fishing stick, a shepherd's tool for killing when necessary. Was it necessary?

Fool. An entire invading army will simply leave if its champion is killed? And no losses to my countrymen? Of course it's necessary. No honorable man could forfeit such a chance. Take one life to save hundreds, maybe thousands? Of course it's necessary.

"I think I could do that. Kill just one, to make the rest go away? I could do that." I picked up a handful of smooth stones to drop into my pocket. "Take me to the war."

As we walked toward the the road that led to the valley that led to the river that led to the war, the training boss said, "You know, boy...I gave you that thing to get you away from this. You're too small to fight a man's fight. You'll get killed."

Possibilities were opening up before me that had never been open before. "So?" A man’s fight, indeed. It’s a fight that needs fighting, be it men or women or children or even shepherds who do the fighting.

"It's not a magic stick, boy."

"No, sir. Of course not. There's no such thing as magic. It isn't a wand. It's just a stick, an extension of my arm. It's my skill and practice that make it work, nothing to do with magic."

"Aye, but...well, what do you even call it?"

I hadn't worked that out yet. I coiled up the cord to sling it over my shoulder. "I don't call it anything. It works because of me, and I call myself Dafydd." And that got me to thinking. "This big champion the enemy has brought us, what do they call him?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"It just seems right, if I'm going to kill someone. Gran would have me at least give him the respect of knowing his name."

The river plain came into view and with it the army and its champion standing tall before them. Our own army stood on this side, both shouting and receiving abuse to and from the enemy just a hundred paces away. I felt the stones in my pockets, stones picked from the soil of my homeland, smooth and round, slightly larger than quail's eggs. Among the enemy's army one stood head and shoulders above the others, a beast of a man.

Five smooth stones. My homeland versus the invaders.

"They call him Goliath."

The Most Dangerous Gamer, part 4: The Adventures of Human Gina

2023-09-04T15:04:00.005-07:00

One of the Llobbans had quit. Jajaqin hadn’t bothered to learn their name. They had observed their partner staked to the ground like a tent and Human Gina bouncing toward the horizon with another captured weapon, and simply quit. They had shrugged out of their hunting gear, sworn fluently into the camera, dropped all the equipment on the ground and shuffled away.

The other Llobban, once they had wrestled themselves free of the net, watched them go dispassionately. They made no effort to call their partner back. Jajaqin wondered about that; he had assumed that the duo were at least friends, but this bloodless acceptance of their partner’s abandonment suggested something else. He wasn’t familiar with Llobban culture, and didn’t know any of them socially. It hadn’t seemed important until now.

“Don’t go,” he said as the remaining hunter began to gather up the quitter’s gear. “I have a suggestion.” The Llobban listened as he laid out his idea.

“We won’t make as much on a winning hunt if we have to split the winnings with everyone.”

“I understand that. But Human Gina had me neutralized in just a couple of breaths! And she surprised me, and you know my people aren’t easy to sneak up on.”

“Actually, we didn’t know that.” Evidently the Llobban needed to expand their social circles too.

“Well, we are. Let’s get the others to meet up with us. This is a completely different hunt from anything else any of us have ever done, and we’re going to have to do it differently if we’re going to succeed.”

It was nearly an eighth-turn before everyone had gathered in a location they’d agreed upon via their trackers. Firstly they had all had to sleep – only Jajaqin could stay awake all night without suffering neurological injury and he was unwilling; it had been a stressful postmeridian. He guessed by its small eyes that the human wasn’t very adept at night, and might naturally take an extended break.

In the morning, they discovered they had been mistaken. Sometime during the night, half their weapons had simply disappeared. When they took stock of what was left to them they realized that all their ranged weapons, projectile throwers and the like, had been stolen away. They were left only with direct-contact devices like the Llobban’s spears.

The Aranndan triad screeched. Jajaqin’s translator uttered a stream of very bad words, and a couple of blank spaces where the translator either lacked a word or else encountered a decorum threshold. It wasn’t common, but it happened. The Aranndan leader rasped, “It got our guns!”

Jajaqin chuckled quietly to himself. The group had been highly skeptical of everything he’d told them the previous evening as the sun went down. The night hadn’t been dark since the primary was in opposition so even as the sun went down, the dimmer but far larger planet covered nearly half the sky, providing a softer light that nevertheless left no shadows. Under such conditions and despite them leaving sentinels awake in shifts during the night, Human Gina had stolen in, collected the guns, and escaped again. The Aranndan added, “The creature is a demon.” Jajaqin wasn’t sure of that last word, but never mind that for now.

“Do you believe me now? I only had a brief encounter with it – with her – and she had neutralized me almost before I realized she was there. She is small, strong, very fast. I don’t know much about her species but she’s easily physically the equal of any of us. She doesn’t give off any scent markers that I detect, and she’s even quiet.”

The remaining Llobban grumbled, “Probably because they’re so small. Slip under stuff. Between stuff.” Jajaqin had talked them around to staying, but in the face of these further developments they clearly were having second thoughts. “They called us something when we dropped out of the tree on them, though. What was that about? They called us Erb.”

“Does she know any other Llobbans? Maybe she mistook you for someone else.”

“We don’t all know each other, you know.” They flapped tentacles irritably.

“What do you call yourself, anyway?”

“We’re Dollo.”

The Aranndans refused to provide names. “If you need us, just call us Aranndan.” Jajaqin remembered that Aranndans guarded identities jealously, generally only opening up to intimates. That was fine by him.

The big blue individual across from the low table where they had compiled their remaining equipment was of the same species as Human Gina’s companion, Booj: a Qualan from the outermost jovian’s innermost secondary. He was affable and, compared to the taciturn Llobban, downright talkative. He boomed his formal name, a rich, thrumming chord that Jajaqin appreciated for its qualities even if he couldn’t pronounce it, “but just call me Arn.”

The Aranndans looked vaguely annoyed but said nothing, ruffling feathers and settling again. The Qualan noticed it anyway. “What?” he asked.

“It’s because of you that we’re faced with this…this creature.”

“Because of me?”

“Because of your species!”

“Like Dollo said: we don’t all know each other.”

“You Qualans are forever blundering into wild business ventures of every sort! Let’s go mine asteroids! Let’s sell Aran blankets! Let’s go introduce a completely wild human to the entire system!” All three Aranndans looked cranky as their spokesperson groused. “You are reckless. Yes, all of you.” He stomped to his feet but couldn’t seem to decide where to go, and threw himself back down. “I am stuck in an untenable hunt with a undecipherable.” Jajaqin knew that the translator knew all the epithets, and so guessed that this was probably a cultural idiom that seldom got off the Aranndan world.

Silently, Jajaqin tapped the camera on his thorax. “Maybe you would like to choose your words more carefully?”

The spokesperson fumed. “Why should I?”

“So you won’t have to explain the precise meaning of what you just said to all of us here and our paying viewers."

The spokesperson said nothing further, but his companion stood up. “I will do the talking from now on. Please call me Aranndan.” This one’s demeanor was far different and Jajaqin guessed, based on no evidence at all, that a status game had just been won among the Aranndans, but he couldn’t say who the winner was.

Arn rumbled, “No explanation is necessary.” He hummed low in his throat, making small pebbles near his feet vibrate. “I know that word.”

As one, the Aranndans got up and left the table. Jajaqin sighed. Ganging up on Human Gina was going to be far more difficult than he had thought.

"All right, everyone. Let's come up with a plan."

The Most Dangerous Gamer, part 3: The Adventures of Human Gina

2023-07-19T07:07:00.003-07:00

Gina looked around. Leaving Jajaqin behind, she had opened a further gap on...him, she guessed, these Jovians came in all kinds...and again leapt into a tree.

Leaping into trees does not get old. I love low gravity. This particular moon, midway out from the sun but fairly far from its planet, was a tad on the cool side. She had dressed for the part of prey: snug pants, athletic top, thermal vest, running shoes and a crocheted hat from her mother. If she stayed still too long, she might get colder than she liked, but not dangerously so. But it was all dark colors which served well in this forest with its ruddy foliage, and when she moved quickly she could open up to avoid overheating.

She had taken no weapons. Prey don't have weapons. But when she had disarmed Jajaqin and subsequently returned his gun, she had nevertheless kept his knife. The size of a large human machete, she wore it strapped to her back and so far had found no use for it.

From her elevated vantage point, she scanned her surroundings. In the distance, a small cloud of the little bird-analogs zoomed into the air, suggesting a disturbance that might be important.

That was all.

A mass dropped onto her back, wrapped around her body and dragged her out of the tree.

"What..." She didn't have time to say more before she landed, then tangled and fell over. She looked up. "Erb?"

A Llobban even higher in the tree than she had been stared down at her, two eyes focused on her and two more looking off to one side. Uh-oh...

Here they came: another Llobban swarming through the underbrush, also armed with a net in addition to what appeared to be a small forest of three-meter long blunt spears. Llobbans had evolved in water but graduated to land a long time ago. They were denser than most Jovians, almost as dense as Gina herself, and strong and quick. She had tried arm-wrestling Erb but the absence of bones in their body made it a pointless exercise. Erb had no leverage, but with three tentacles together could pull as hard as she could with one...and Erb had forty-eight more arms.

She stood, stumbled, and then jumped hard to get the net out from under her feet. While still aloft, she flung the net away from herself, trying to send it in the general direction of the Llobban who had netted her in the first place. The newcomer was just thrusting a couple of spears at her as she landed, but she parried one and grabbed another, applying a twisting disarm move to it as she advanced. More spears came at her but she had wrenched this one out of the Llobban's grip, her one hand being more than equal to any one tentacle.

The Llobban in the tree had neatly fielded her thrown net, sorted it out - fifty-one tentacles versus a net looked like a difficult problem in dimensional topology - and flung it back at her. She dodged, and it landed on her opponent, the second Llobban.

Gina stabbed her seized spear through net, snatched another away from the struggling arms and poked it through the net too, driving them deep into the ground close to the Llobban's many armpits. Tentaclepits? A half-dozen or so more spears and she had effectivel pinned the whole person to the ground, though their companion was making their way down from the treetop.

Both nets were neutralized, most of this one's spears were stuck under the net with it. The other one in the tree didn't appear to have any spears, maybe they had wanted their arms free for climbing. Might have something else about its person, but she didn't see anything at the moment. Llobbans didn't wear clothing so there wasn't much concealment beyond their gear harness. Maybe they'd just try to grapple...that would be difficult. All those arms and pretty strong too. But she had leverage and they were working individually.

"Gang up on me!" she shouted at them, tucking a couple of the spears under one arm and darting away.

The Most Dangerous Gamer, part 2: The Adventures of Human Gina

2023-06-26T18:28:00.001-07:00

Jajaqin stared. He may have squealed a scream of alarm, he couldn't be sure.

The human bared its teeth at him, swooping down from the branch and, planting a foot on his thorax, wrenched his hunting implement out of his grip in one swift tug. Dancing about him like a qinqabet, it snatched his knife out of his belt too. It squeaked something at him, so high pitched it almost hurt his ears.

His translator laughed, "I got your gun!" How did the damned gadget impart the amused tone?

Jajaqin stared as Human Gina leapt gracefully back into the tree. Graceful, not like a dancer or a waterfall, but graceful like the flight of that same qinqabet, a hungry blade slicing through the air, strong and sure.

The creature was talking to him. In his life's experience as a professional hunter, that was a new one. His translator made sense of its ear-tingling chirps. "What's your name, friend?"

"I am called..." he rattled off his name, then remembered how the creature had abbreviated its own designation. "...but just 'Jajaqin' is fine."

Human Gina looked around herself. Her body conformation was terrible, she seemed to have a front and a back and if that was indeed the case, was entirely blind to her rear. Right: rocky world. His own species had spent the first half of its evolution floating. Danger might come from anywhere, and his own shape and sense organ arrangement reflected that.

And she had surprised him anyway.

"So, Jajaqin. Are you wearing cameras or are they trailing you?"

"Wearing."

"Can you turn them off?"

"Briefly. There is a privacy interrupt available, but it is temporary and turns itself back on, if I don't turn it on myself." Human Gina turned around again, scanning the distance and apparently satisfied that no danger lurked.

"How are you enjoying the hunt so far?"

Wretched creature. "Not much." He peeked at his locator and noted that, indeed, no other hunter was close. They were alone.

"I have you and your companions at a disadvantage, you know. Because of how our respective species evolved, I'm far denser than any of you, generally stronger. I'm also faster on land than any of you."

"What is your point?"

"My point is that in a contest of strength and personal combat, I have evolved advantages that are extremely difficult for any person native to this system to beat."

"You are boasting."

"Nah. It's a fact. Not trying to be rude. I mean, a couple of people I have met in the system are actually from one of the Jovians, the big gas giant planets."

"You met a," and he heard the human's translator make a sound he couldn't describe.

"Yes, that's them. Wonderful people. Absolutely astounding singers. But if I were to try to visit them in their home, I'd just die. It wouldn't even take long. I would be at the disadvantage there."

"Again: what is your point?"

"I wanted to really challenge myself. The blob guy I fought a while ago, Algo - he was a serious challenge, at least at first. But one-on-one contests just aren't getting it done, so I decided to put myself out in front of a hunt."

"Why?"

"The payday is just too good, Jajaqin." She grinned at him again, a tiny mouth full of even tinier teeth. How did these creatures get enough food to stay alive? "I mean, you're not doing this for free, either. Are you?"

"I could have. I am a popular contestant in the hunts. I would be rewarded regardless. But no, I put up money for the privilege of hunting you."

Human Gina made an expression he hadn't seen before. Its eyes got wide and the corners of its little mouth turned down. "Really? I'm flattered!" She turned around again, scanning the distance. Jajaqin stole another peek at his locator. Still alone. "May I make a suggestion?"

He was perplexed and let it show, turning a deep magenta in his extremities. "I'm listening."

"Gang up on me."

"Excuse me?"

"Turn off your camera for a moment."

Wordlessly, he did so.

"How much time do we have when you do that?"

Jajaqin told her, pausing while her translator provided converted units.

"About five minutes. Plenty of time. Okay, listen: you hunters have spread out so that each of you might have a chance at taking me down on your own, right?"

"Of course. The purse is far larger for an individual than for a team."

"What is the purse for bringing back nothing?"

"Not much. I will make a decent profit, but only a fraction of what a successful hunt yields."

"Less than being a member of a successful team?"

"Much, much less, yes."

"So gang up on me. If you don't gang up on me, I'm going to use my natural advantages against each of you hunters, one at a time, and nobody is going to have any fun."

"You don't believe one of us can take you?"

"Do you remember the first words I said to you?"

Jajaqin seethed, embarrassed. "I do."

"I got your gun. I will get all your guns, I will get all your knives, I will throw all of your hunting animals into the trees. One. By. One. If you each come at me independently, I will take each of you out, nobody wins a big purse, the viewers get disgusted and nobody has any fun."

"Fun?"

"Nobody's in this to try to actually eat me, are they? Nonlethal weapons, right? I volunteered for this for the challenge, for the contest! So come get me! All of you!"

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because this hunt is a game! And what's the point of playing if I can't lose? What's the point of playing if you can't win? Change up your strategy, all of you, because one-on-one, you won't get me."

Jajaqin considered. "Okay. That makes sense."

"Good." She looked around again. Clearly humans had evolved with their blind spots; Gina's regular check of her surroundings was natural and thorough. "You want your gun back?"

Jajaqin's camera beeped, warning him that whatever privacy he had needed was about to come to an end. "Yes."

Human Gina plucked his hunting implement up from the branch and tossed it high in the air. He followed its arc and moved to be under it, catching it deftly with his dorsal arm. But by the time he had clicked the safety off, the human had already leapt from the branch and was receding into the distance, far too fast for him to follow.

The Most Dangerous Gamer part 1: The Adventures of Human Gina

2023-06-12T10:02:00.000-07:00

Jajaqin looked around. The forest was absolutely silent.

The hunting party was spread out, keeping in touch by translators and locators so they weren't likely to fire on each other, but still. A hunt was always a risk. The hunting implements deployed today were supposed to be nonlethal, but hunting is hunting. People get hurt. It happened.

Some hunts against particularly dangerous prey, they used live ammunition and the buy-in was far higher, safety not guaranteed but the rewards could be tremendous. They never hunted anything that wouldn't be eaten, and of course the most dangerous food was the most highly prized, so the hunters' greater risk-adjusted share was of a naturally larger total. A skilled hunter could attend an eight or two of hunts and retire for the rest of its life, comfortably wealthy and revered as a celebrity.

Or it could wind up dead. It happened.

This hunt was not with live ammunition, however. This hunt introduced prey that had never before entered the consciousness of the greater community, and it wasn't a food animal. Of all things, this hunt was...a demonstration? Or an exercise. He hadn't made up his mind exactly how to view it.

The creature called itself human. In Jajaqin's own language the sound was gibberish; in a couple of other hunters' languages the sound was quite rude and in another one yet, a subtly erotic exclamation of pleasure. Privately Jajaqin guessed that the rude translation was related to the pleasure translation, but he was only moderately curious about languages, not skilled enough to actually pursue the idea. No, his pursuit was far more visceral.

Jajaqin knew of the promoter Booj by reputation since they moved in similar circles, and had wondered if the human Booj brought to the public consciousness was fully sapient. Watching it in the news feeds, Jajaqin had concluded that it indeed was. So he had been astonished when Booj had announced that the human had offered itself to be the target of a hunt.

The idea of a sapient prey was...decadently fascinating. Even the smartest prey were never more than animals. They didn't plan; they fled or attacked. Always Jajaqin's skills in hunting were about contending with those two circumstances. How did you hunt something that might do something different? And how different could it be?

The human had been the startling contestant in a number of combat sport bouts, beginning with a few bar fight-level contests consisting of rough-and-ready shiphands in dockside bars, to a few increasingly strenuous context matches that drew large numbers of viewers from across the entire system. Booj's reputation as a promoter had grown exponentially and so far, the human had proven unbeatable.

He would have to stop using the word human in his mind. It was making him vaguely aroused, linguistic indifference notwithstanding. Jajaqin had entered the bid lottery early, certain he would never luck out on a chance at the bidding round as the lottery round was a recordbreaking size, but his name had come up and he had entered his top bid immediately. A few heartbeats later, the system announced that all bids had been evaluated. His own and seven other names were announced.

He didn't wonder how the system had evaluated the bidders. Obviously highest bidders got first consideration, but the system was well known for its process. Jajaqin could have entered an empty bid and been on the short list of contenders; he knew he was a popular contestant with skill, integrity and just enough style to be a fun watch. Even offering no money up front, Jajaqin would draw in the paying viewers and be a sure moneymaker.

The silence of the forest was unnerving. Usually that meant that there was not a large predator nearby, but a swarm of smaller, nimbler ones that could easily chase down the usual sources of noise. Little brachiators would usually stay close and fuss at Jajaqin for straying too close to their nests. This quiet, however, was just eerie.

Jajaqin fired up the info screen of his locator, looking up more details on the human. Some general descriptions of the species - singularly unappealing to look at, and some of the arousal around the word went away - though the tuft of cilia around the topmost appendage was at least interesting to look at. He flipped through entries to examine notes on this specific human.

"Terran Human Gina Rassmussen," the entry read. It went on to specify that the creature was female, originally from a far distant solar system and only here by an accidental meeting, an orbital miner by trade - interesting, a miner who worked alone. That spoke to her skills and resilience, mining was not for the weak or stupid, and gamely exploring far from home suggested she was uncommonly fearless. Height and width, not big at all. Body mass...damn. That much?

That much. Human Gina weighed at least as much as Jajaqin himself, while being only about one-fourth his volume. Ah, there was why. Her planet of origin was a rocky world with...damn again. She was from a very heavy gravity planet. Where the human came from, the surface gravity would squash him flat. And she stood erect under it. Ah, there it was: bones. Muscle. Fascinating. If rendered for her meat, the human GinaRassumussen - no, wait. He remembered this from the news vids. "Just 'Gina' is fine." Human Gina represented a mass of meat that would feed him for nearly two turns, and that would be if he was eating only meat. He couldn't do that in any case, his digestion got bad if he didn't have a salad once in a while.

Hmm. Nonlethal hunt, though. I wonder what human tastes like.

Never mind. Don't eat sapients. Don't hunt...well, okay, this time we do. Probably too tough to eat anyway. You'd die of starvation, still chewing the first mouthful.

A brachiator squeaked from the massive tree branch directly above his head, startling him badly. He jerked and looked up.

Human Gina was right there.

End of Part 1

The Diva and Her Daughter, Part 2: Aftermath

2023-06-01T18:27:00.001-07:00

*note: if you are new here, read Part 1 first

A sound outside. It’s kind of late, certainly wouldn’t expect anyone. Not on a school night.

Sheila’s in bed. She went padding down the hall wearing a pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt, my beautiful little girl. She had accepted the discussion of how it’s important to eventually let up on an opponent, but I could see that we would have to revisit that topic soon. It’ll need some repetition to really sink in.

But what is that sound?

Both bikes put away. Bungees across the trash cans because raccoons, car doors all locked, no windows open even though it’s cool enough out that it would be nice to flush the house with some fresh air. What did that sound like?

Creak. Ah, okay. That’s the steps by the kitchen door, right next to the garage. The lock on that door is a good one, and the door itself is too. Normal people won’t come through that in a hurry. But I know a lot of people who are far beyond normal.

Getting outside silently is easy. Getting around the house silently, not quite so much – the euonymus by the garage is overgrown and really needing a trim – but then I’m behind him.

Not him. Her. Under this full moon, those hips are clearly female.

Everything I did earlier today, especially the Kaplan, left me a little raspy but pulling hard I crank up the ultrasonics and give her a blast of a rusty Costa – Mary Costa is still alive, the voice of Princess Aurora, would you believe it? – and she goes down. While she’s dazed, wrap her up in some ziptie cuffs and drag her into the yard, away from the house.

Dogs up and down the street are howling and yarking. They’ll settle in a minute.

“How the hell did you find my house? Who else is coming?” I give her head a shake with one fist tangled in her hair, but not too hard. A Costa at close range is pretty disorienting and I want her to get her thoughts in order, quickly.

“Yearbook.”

“Longer.”

“We got pictures of your kid as you were riding away from the bank. You got the whole crew and just rode away. But we got pictures of your kid and my IT guy had the idea of shopping her face onto a neutral background and Googling for similar images and it came up with a name.”

“Longer, some more.” But I think I could put it together from there.

“The name came up from the Facebook page of her preschool, and from there we got into their records and found your name and address and Jesus don’t pull so hard.”

Give her another little shake, but then relax the grip. “Keep it down.”

She had the gall to laugh a little. “If I’d known before now that The Diva lived on a quiet cul-de-sac in the ‘burbs I might have just not bothered with this. But we needed that crew, we needed that score. What did you bring out of there? We need it.”

“Nothing. We just walked away. Biked away.”

“Nothing? Are you sure you’re The Diva?”

“Are you daring me to yell at you? At this range? I could explode your eyeballs.”

She blanched. “I’m sorry.”

“Is that why you’re here, you’re trying to salvage something from that botched job?”

“That branch was supposed to be staging a delivery, we were going to gaslight a snooper into their system to backdoor access for the real job. The smash and grab was just to front the disruption. Two of those guys were patsies, the one whose fingers you destroyed was the real operator.”

“And the other one? There were four.”

“Well, that was my cousin. He wanted to come.” Her face turned dark. “He might not be able to have kids now.”

“He had a gun at my baby’s head so I’m not very sympathetic.”

She writhed in her restraints. I had ziptied her wrists together, and her thumbs, so that her hands were back-to-back. With another ziptie around her elbows, it’s a really uncomfortable position but the important thing is that she can’t put her palms together. She’s not an adept fighter but makes up for it with a kind of power move. She has to be able to put her hands together to make it work though, so it always looks like she’s beating everything to pieces with a Spock chop. It’s the worst fight move ever but when you can knock a hole through a Buick with it, “worst” isn’t really relevant anymore. As long as she can keep her palms together, she’s incredibly dangerous.

But I can keep out of her range, no problem.

“You didn’t take anything out? No haul, not even intel?”

“Even if I hadn’t gone straight I wouldn’t help you, you’re going to get yourself and others hurt, you know that?” I can’t remember her name. What does she call herself? Doesn’t matter. “You need to get the hell out of here.”

“I’m coming back. You can’t do this to us. The boss wants into that system and he’s going to keep sending others, more like me, to try to get intel on the bank out of you, or else just to eliminate you as a possible leak on his plan.”

“You didn’t really do enough research on me, did you? Got the name and address and just ran over here?”

She doesn’t want to look like she’s been caught but she looks caught. And curiosity gets the better of her. “…why?”

“When I was still…her…I had a different name. Did you know that? Maybe not. But did you notice my little girl’s last name? Did you think about that?”

“What about it?”

“That name sound familiar to you at all?”

My beautiful little girl is my daughter, and so has inherited some natural gifts that are very special. She has a superhuman voice, capable of cutting right through sheet steel – have the two pieces of baking pan to prove it – and will probably one day have even more control than I do. But the other thing she has is her father.

He is the only non-super superhero I have ever met, and the only one who was ever fired. It was quite the news item. His secret identity was never revealed, but through a ridiculous onion of layers of obfuscation, it was – and nobody believed it was real. Genius and shrewd. Never surprised, contingency plans for every possible circumstance, an utter master of gathering and compiling information, of misdirection and manipulation, and a relentless hand to hand combatant. What he lacks in intelligence is difficult to determine because there’s almost no one who can think on his level.

That’s the other thing Sheila Judge has inherited. She’s a genius, and she’s shrewd. Fortunately she’s still a little girl or I would be completely outclassed. So far she still believes me when I tell her to ease up on bad guys, not to use her skills to outwit other kids in games that are far beneath her. To give them a chance.

Her father had been done with giving chances at one time.

“He’s the Judge.”

That took a moment to sink in. “The Judge?”

“The Judge.”

The only hero ever fired. Fired, because he went over the line. His moral compass had been getting weaker, he’d become more implacably pragmatic. The Judge’s constant exposure to evil was making him less good. Not evil, not quite…just indifferent. So when it came time for him to pass judgment on a bad guy, he did. With great finality. The contingency plans had started to look like entrapment, like railroading. Okay, the bad guy could have simply stopped…but he hadn’t been given the chance.

That had also been the incident that drove me to retire. It was pretty bad.

That had been ten years ago. It had been nearly four years getting him back out of his head, and about forty-five minutes getting him to marry me, and the years since had been so good. So good.

If he heard about this ignorant twit coming around the house on a mission of petty retribution, it would get so bad. Unpowered or not, he would eradicate this chick, her boss, her cousin and his finger fragments, all of them.

It was pretty much just me and Sheila that kept him from going over that line. Mostly Sheila. She made him want to be a good person.

“If he knows you were ever here, it will go badly for you. I’m the only thing between you and…you know what, I’m not really sure exactly what he would do. But you need to understand this, and listen close: he loves me. And as much as he loves me, he adores that child.” I started to get up. “For the sake of your life, you should see to it that nothing bad ever happens on this entire block, and most certainly not to me or her.”

I still can’t remember what she calls herself. It isn’t important. She’s gone as white as a sheet.

“Is it true he doesn’t actually have any powers?”

“How badly do you want to find out?” Might as well butter the muffin a little bit. “He beat Maximus into submission by himself, did you know that?” Maximus has been cooling his heels in the ultramax in Nevada for over fifteen years, word has it he has crippling arthritis now. With great power comes great joint pain.

“I’ll leave now, if you let me.”

“You should quit while you still can.” Standing up, I motion for her to get up and turn around so I can cut the tie around her elbows. “That’ll give you some leverage so you can free yourself in a little bit. Don’t try to do it here. If I start to feel threatened I’ll defend myself and you don’t want that.”

“I’m going.”

I never even saw it happen. From one moment to the next, nothing and then something, boom.

Whatsername turning to go, splat right into his chest.

He’s not as tall as the bad guys think. It’s the wig. But he’s wide, as wide as a bank vault door. And if you walk into him, about as soft.

“Banger.”

That’s her name.

She can’t make much sound beyond a stifled wheeze.

“Call your mother when you get home. She’s worried about you.” The Judge looks at his watch. He has a cup of coffee in his hand, and it is strangely sinister. “She’s still up.” With four steps and a flickering snick he’s circled behind her, cut her remaining zip ties and returned back to in front of her. He’s not a super, I swear. But it was so relaxed and yet so quick, you can be excused for thinking he is. The coffee steams.

Banger’s hands come together, clasped tightly before her face. Palm to palm.

The Judge raises an eyebrow. For a moment, everything stops. He sips from the cup.

“I’m sorry.”

“Go. Now.”

Banger whispered a hoarse “thank you” and ran away into the night, rustling through the damned euonymus until we could hear her sneakers slapping pavement, receding. After a couple of minutes, there was an engine roar but then even that too was gone.

“Well,” he said. “That went about like I expected.”

“Good.”

Sip.

“Wait, what?”

A Fog of Magic

2023-05-26T08:31:00.001-07:00

If you read in the older stories, the fictions handed down and recopied and retold and even embellished, the word they use is "magic." Making things happen that natural science cannot easily explain, reversing harms, undoing actions: "magic."

It appears I can do this "magic." It isn't like the fairy tales in the ancient libraries though, muttering nonsense words and waving sticks and invoking deities. It requires a significant investment of personal energy. It takes concentration and time. And like the oh-so-unreal Sorcerer's Apprentice and his wayward broomsticks, a practitioner can do it wrong, set in motion events that can turn bad or even disastrous. Magic is useful, yes...but like a spring rain that you need, you can have too much of a good thing.

But if you spend more time in the ancient libraries, you find other things too. Not just the fairy tales or lesson books but engineering texts. Operators' manuals. Dry, academic tomes dusty with disuse, describing a world far, far more sophisticated than the one we live in now, and yet it was the one we live in now.

And amongst these least fanciful books a whole section that seemed to delve into the metaphysical: meditation. Concentration of will, developing your spiritual confidence. Even a couple of extremely esoteric, nearly impenetrable books on psi powers, which I couldn't make much sense of...

...except I could.

The magic I was taught begins and ends with concentration. Proper concentration requires establishing a mental state not too dissimilar from that of dreaming, the drowsy, free-floating, nearly awake dreams of an afternoon nap on a warm, sunny day. You know you're dreaming and can observe the wanderings of your imagination like a spectator. But achieving this dreamy state while maintaining focus on goals is not something you pick up in an afternoon; it takes a few years of training and practice and, like I said, it can go horribly wrong. The spring rains can come and keep coming until every garden washes away.

My father taught me, he and my grandmother. Among their lessons in concentration of will, they also taught me that it will take two generations to teach the next magician, that it always takes at least two generations of magicians to initiate the next one. The talent is partly inborn but there are occasional sports, children of families with no magic who have the capacity despite their parentage. My own great-grandfather was one such.

So it was with something like recognition that I found myself in this section of the library, and struggling to decipher the foreign words of the books around the willpower section. Environmental manipulation? Repercussional forecasting?

Nanomachines? "Machines" I know well enough, but "nano" is a gibberish sound you coo at small babies.

The books are both a blinding light of revelation and an equally dazzling blackness of mystery. Some are so far out of my context that they are nearly a different language. Others, particularly the ones describing guidance of will, I could almost have written myself.

You prepare yourself, set the trance and focus on circumstances and goals. You envision the current state you want to change, and how the changes will look and feel and smell. You do this for quite a long time - sometimes it takes days. And sometimes you have to stay entranced in order to bring the spell to an end, too - spring rains, remember. Usually you don't want to completely upend the way things work. Simply tweaking things is generally sufficient, subtle nudges.

Magic is at its best when you don't realize it's working. There have been some who went in for grand effects, enormous, brash displays of power that rattled everything around them - not least of which, their neighbors. Those kind of magicians don't stay in business for long and sometimes meet a sudden, sharp end.

And there's another section of the library, quite small actually and leading into the peculiar section involving environmental manipulation: "terraforming." This section is the one that set my mind almost on fire.

It turns out that we are not from here. I am, of course, and dozens of generations before me have all been from here. But there was a generation, centuries or maybe even millennia ago, that wasn't. They were from somewhere else.

This book doesn't talk about that other place, not directly. It cites examples taken from the other place but doesn't talk about the place itself. It appears to have been a whole other world and we, humanity, are originally from there. We came to this world so long ago that nobody alive remembers anything else, and being from there, upon arriving here, set out to make here, now more like there, then. What happened along the way that made us forget our own past?

These books are very strange. They are nothing like modern books with their leather, wooden or cardboard covers, pages of sturdy, stiff paper. No. These most ancient of books, in addition to being constructed of materials I can barely even describe, have no dust on them whatsoever. A little raised dam of dust has formed around them on the shelves, but no dust lands on them directly.

At least our language hasn't changed much. I can read these titles well enough, even if the words are strange:

"Terraforming: Bending Circumstances."

"Terraforming: Finer Points and Enduring Changes."

"Human to Machine Interfaces."

"A Fog of Magic: Practical Application of Nanomachines."

That last one seemed especially pertinent, and I took it down from the shelf, opened it, and began to read.

Haute Couture

2023-05-03T10:35:00.007-07:00

Angela, Nakia, Angela (the other one) and Jules stepped out of their limo. The two Angelas tottered on their heels, cajoled into taller than usual platforms by their designers and now gamely trying to make the best of it. Nakia, at over six feet tall and with the broad shoulders of a WNBA power forward, wore sandals with hardly any heel and Jules, counter culture as always, wore sneakers. At only five feet tall, her height was perfect for Nakia to drape a casual, friendly arm around her shoulders, which she did.

Each young woman was wrapped in a shiny lame', not noteworthy in itself, not daringly cut or extravagantly accessorized. But the four women together presented a striking group, and they stayed together to make the most of it.

On the red carpet, flashes popped in staccato lightning as the women's massed style garnered more attention, and of course the cable entertainment channel reporters started asking the perennial question: "Who are you wearing?"

The women tried to slip the question, but one game presenter crowded in, practically holding the microphone at Nakia's breast and shouted the question over the clatter and roar of the onlookers. "Who is that, Nakia? I don't recognize them at all!"

What followed was bizarre. The strap over the tall woman's shoulder slipped off even though there was no breeze and...changed.

"We're discovered! Thompson, you said we would be safe!"

Nakia hissed at the strap, "Be cool! You'll be fine!" She tugged the strap back over her shoulder but it leapt back off.

"They are asking who we are! We are discovered! We must flee!" The strap continued to wrestle against her grip.

Jules' entire outfit parted right down the middle and immediately flapped straight up into the sky. The crowd cheered at the sudden, striking display of skin. This was what they were here for, a little live theater and some straight up attention-hungry exhibitionism. Jules' petite, muscular cheerleader body was now clad only in a modest pair of black panties. For her part, Jules looked more annoyed than embarrassed.

The Angelas were struggling with their clothes, and arguing with them too. "Calm down, you'll be fine! You're making a scene!" But each of them soon lost their battles and, like Jules, found themselves abruptly disrobed as their dresses fled straight up into the sky. Unlike Jules though, they were completely naked and again, the crowd cheered. Angela tried to hide - not easy on the red carpet where being seen is the whole idea - but Angela (the other one) put her hands on her hips and glowered. Despite being on the Hollywood scene for only a couple of years, self-confidence clothed her like armor.

Nakia's beautiful gold lame' outfit, which had draped over her like a lover's embrace mere minutes ago, shot away with the others. Now she stood on the red carpet in her sandals and a coral teddy, a striking coffee-colored athlete who appeared to have misplaced her volleyball - and her beach.

Jules stepped forward and indicated a young man on the other side of the velvet rope. "You. Give me your shirt." He didn't argue, just peeled it off and handed it over. Jules tugged it on efficiently. Nakia approached two more along the line.

"Gentlemen, please help my friends, here."

One of them leered, even as the other was quickly unbuttoning. "No way! This is the best show I've seen in a month."

Nakia smiled gently, a sadness in her eyes. But Jules stepped up, "Do you want to be kicked in the balls on national TV?"

"Never mind him." The buttoned-up guy had already gotten his shirt off, and also handed over a windbreaker he had tugged out of his backpack. "He's an ass. Here," he said. He even ducked under the velvet rope to bring the garments over to the Angelas. "I, uh, even have a pair of warmups in here, Miss." He was even taller than Nakia, and his T-shirt hung all the way down to Angela's (the other one's) knees. Meanwhile, Angela stepped into the warmup pants behind the massed front of her companions, her back turned and face blazing...but when she pulled the windbreaker on, she only zipped it halfway.

Jules held the reporter's mic hand. "We're wearing..." and she looked over to the people who had offered clothes to herself and her friends. They named themselves for the cameras, to general cheers from the onlookers. She smiled her best medals-podium smile. "We're wearing these guys."

The reporter was still gaping skyward, in the direction the women's clothes had gone. "But what..."

Jules followed her gaze. "Fast fashion, what can I say."

The reporter clearly wanted to follow up with more questions, but Jules, Nakia, and the two Angelas made their way into the venue and out of sight.

Field Experiments in Communicating with Other Species

2023-03-19T10:51:00.001-07:00

Field Experiments in Communicating with Other Species*

"They are NOT telepathic. None of the samples exhibited any such capability, no matter what kind of test we put them through. Sexual arousal, somnolescent states, extreme fear - no circumstance enables interpersonal telepathy."

"There have been examples in their entertainments."

"Do I need to remind you that most of their entertainments are 'fiction?' Not representations of real things, past or present. They are pretend."

"Ah, right. The Galaxy Quest paradox."

"Precisely."

"So how did they detect me?"

"As the humans say, let's go to the tape." Tar'Van operated his console and the video display lit up. "Here's you, approaching the group."

"In retrospect, such a large crowd of humans was not a good choice for social insertion."

"Analysis strongly suggested that missteps would be missed by the individuals, against the greater noise of so many other humans' behavioral signals to confuse them. It was a good plan."

"That did not prove to be the case."

"Indeed. Humans have a consciousness we had not anticipated. But it is not telepathy."

Nel'Gor and Tar'Van watched as the video progressed. Nel'Gor tried, in the recording, to navigate a few inconsequential interactions, minutiae in the day-to-day interactions of humans. He met one person, talked to it briefly, spoke to another. He answered questions - correctly, he knew, with the right jargon and even accompanying gestures, very amusing according to their research. There was a brief pause...

And then suddenly both humans lunged at him. With his Ordan reflexes, Nel'Gor was able to evade them and, despite the encumbering human garments, ran like the wind. A few more humans joined the pursuit but only halfheartedly, not knowing what the chase was about. The video changed viewpoints a few times, as other secreted pickups about the facility were able to provide a record. Nel'Gor shot past one, then another. By the time it moved to the third camera, Nel'Gor had opened a gap and the humans were losing inclination to pursue him further. Once he gained the open space where the humans all left their vehicles, Nel'Gor was able to open his stride even further and the humans were left completely behind, and abandoned the chase.

The humans spoke to each other briefly. "I did not hear what they said. Can you increase the gain on that?"

Tar'Van twiddled a few more controls, and background noise faded as the humans' speech gained prominence. He backed up the recording a few seconds.

"...and you don't know that guy at all?"

"Hell, no!"

"Where the hell's he get off, making a crack about your mom like that? Guy's looking for trouble. Damn near found it but damn he's fast."

"Some people, man."

Nel'Gor said, "the joke about the man's mother is at timestamp," he showed his notes to Tar'Van, who backed the recording further. "Magnify this individual's face and let me observe."

At the crucial moment, the human's face froze. Nel'Gor had encountered the word "stony" in descriptions before, and had not appreciated its aptness until now. The expression on the face became blank in a way he had not understood in the moment, when he was stumbling through his Innocuous Conversation In A Social Setting repertoire, trying to remember all the rules and their myriad exceptions. The human's eyes clicked to the side.

Tar'Van expanded the view to take in the other human, and sure enough his eyes glanced toward the first's. This nonverbal contact lasted approximately one point two seconds, and both humans initiated pursuit. It was only the sudden, enormous surge of pheromones dumping out of both humans that alerted him sufficiently; one human nearly made contact.

"That was it? That? That's all? They just looked at each other!"

"I suspect that no matter how much time we spend studying human modes of communication, we may never fully comprehend everything they do to communicate. They have been evolving with each other for millions of years, they have a head start."

"Let's throw away the Innocuous Conversation Starter pack from the Discord subcategory. It appears to contain unacceptable cues for in-person conversations."

"Agreed. Let's try the Starbucks pack and start over. Those are all face-to-face."

"Agreed."

*Inspired by, and orignally published on r/WritingPrompts on Reddit

The Envoy's Message: Survey Team Eta

2022-04-11T06:06:00.002-07:00

Green lights flashed. Sirens howled discordantly. Renjo flailed impotently for several heartbeats as he floated aimlessly, nowhere close to a holdfast. A bit of junk, smoking, drifted by and he dazedly shoved at it; the reaction pushed him toward a bulkhead.

"Someone turn off the alarms!" An answering groan didn't acknowledge the order, but the silence a moment later did. "What in the gods' eyes happened?"

Turnnanan, a new rating on its first voyage and a treaty-mandated exchange just to complicate matters, scanned its readouts. "We've been holed! Venting on two decks, drive is offline, Navigation is completely scrambled...more reports coming in."

"Condense it!"

"We won't blow up just yet, Commander, but it's not out of the question!"

Renjo, Commander of the Flagship of the Second Fleet of The Dero Trading Partners Territory, growled. Their path had diverged from that of the Ollan Consortium fleet with whom they had been trading blows, years ago. They were much too distantly separated to be exchanging fire now and neither side had opened negotiations on when to resume hostilities yet. What had hit them?

He relayed this to the bridge crew in general. "So where did this come from?"

Turnnanan had gotten a bit more function restored to its displays and was clearly scrolling back through the hull monitors when its display flared white and it recoiled. "Screee! It was an energy bolt coming up from astern!"

Astern? Behind them? What could possibly be chasing them? What would dare?

Dero Trading Partners were one of the, if not the largest commercial enterprises in civilized space. To protect its business territory, the Partners Delivery Fleet consisted of heavy cargo vessels that, in addition to consisting of cargo stacks that could envelop entire asteroids if necessary, also bristled with sufficient firepower to reduce those same asteroids to gravel. Few entities, commercial or military, even considered engaging Dero on any level but trade. It was virtually unthinkable; Dero's reputation was such that the reputation alone was almost enough to fend off any blatant, frontal engagement.

For their own part, the Consortium's fleet was neither as powerful nor as capacious - but their ships were faster, nimbler and shielded to a degree that Dero weapons were not a sure thing. And the Ollans had been sending sales forces into Dero territory for a couple of lifetimes now, and the wretched creatures were proving difficult to rout out. Worse, their prices were good so their customers weren't keen to help Dero in their efforts.

"What is behind us, Nanan?"

"Nothing! Nothing for light-years, Commander. I mean - there is, but it's just that undeveloped world. Got hit in some crossfire a while back but there's nothing important there."

That sounded like it might have more meaning, if he picked at the statement, so he did. "How unimportant is it, Nanan?"

"Well..." Turnnanan read quickly, three eyes on the displays. It was able to assimilate a tremendous amount of information quickly since it could read separate passages simultaneously and compile them on the go. "It says here the dominant sentient species was only marginally space capable. Really primitive, interplanetary only. No significant weapons to speak of. They called themselves 'humans' but when their planet got grazed in our passage it looked like we had upset their climate so much that their evolution was doomed. They didn't communicate meaningfully and no envoys were dispatched. I don't think Corporate intended any kind of compensation since they're so unadvanced."

"So what is behind us? Is it them?"

"I can't see how. Ee?"

Ee had clambered to her pedestal and gotten Navigation back on line. Navs had better 'scopes than the Science station but the two could be interconnected. She had taken control of the telescopes again, however, because no one could disagree that her vision would surpass anyone else's on the bridge; her entire head was a light-gathering organ, lidless and beautiful. "Commander," she hummed, "I see a vessel gaining from astern."

"Ollan?"

"Nnnooo." She moved her head side to side, fixated on the display. "It is an unknown craft. It is vvvvvvverrrryyyy small. Ssssssoooo small. It is beeaauuuutiful." She hummed and wove, moving the image from the scopes around on her tremendous receiving surface, an optical caress. "It is firing. Oooooohhhh, it is firing. Firing. Ffffiiirrrriiinggg. Mmm. Firing. Firing. Mmm. Firing."

Ee could be like this. When she looked hard at something, she could become introspective and dreamy. Now wasn't the time for it, though. "Can you describe the ship any better than 'small and beautiful?'"

"It appearsssss to be constructed around the barrel of a damaged Director-class cannonononon. Oh, the cannononon is their primary drive. It is a reaction drrrrriiiivvvvvve look at it go. It is beautiful. Such colors. The drive plume is redredredredredshifted so far, so far. But the ship itself, it is blue. Blue. Blue unto blue.

"It is firing. Firing. Mmm, mmm. Firing."

"Turnnanan! Does that ship look like a human craft?"

Ee blew up the image and sent it to Turnnanan's display, where it compared the image rapidly to several others. "Can't say for sure, Commander. There are many elements in common. The scale is right. But..."

wham

Ee reported, "New damage reports, mmm. New. New. Mmm. We are holed again. Close to the first strike. One crewmate is dead. They are holed. Holed, like the ship."

"Ee! Focus!"

"...but nothing in any of the analyses indicated any human capability like this, Commander," Turnnanan finished.

"How the hell do you think they got hold of a Director?"

"Wreckage? We lost five ships on the way through that system. Maybe they found one with the generator still in order?"

"So what are they hitting us with?"

"I have no idea, Commander but it is hitting way harder than anything the Ollans ever shot at us. It even beats our own weapons, it's going through our own armor like,"

wham

A hole, not much wider than Renjo's own foot, appeared in the deck near his foot. At the same moment, Turnnanan's head disappeared in a cloud of gray mist, as another hole appeared in the same moment in a bulkhead beyond it. Air rumbled out through the punctures even as compact patch bots surged out of their cabinets, bearing meteor patches to stem the ship bleeding away all its air.

"...like thaaaaat," Ee said.

"Ee! When you say 'firing, firing' over and over like that, are you being emphatic?"

"Oooh, noooooo," she breathed. "Firing and firing. Mmm. Oooh, more. Firing. They are accurate. Their aim is good." She observed her display, entranced. "It is suuuuuch a good pattern. We are trapped. We cannot evaaaaaaaaade even at this distance maybe if we had seen them coming sooner. They are fast. Goooooood aiming. Firing."

Renjo fumed. Even Ollan would never dare such ferocious attacks, not on Dero.

These humans must be really mad. Maybe it would be a good idea to advise Dero - and other Ollan ships, for that matter - to be more careful where their stray shots went, when passing through occupied systems. Even primitive ones.

"Firing. Firing. So blue. They are coming fast. Firing."

Clearly these humans had never heard of Dero Trading Partners...and neither did they seem inclined to listen, nor that Renjo would get the chance to tell them.

"Mmm. Firing."