“It’s an island.”
“No. Look.”
Nope, nothing to see here but jagged gray stone. It’s an island.
...Except islands don’t normally leave wakes.
The water along the shore farthest from us begins to roil and seethe, almost as if it was boiling. I can’t help but gasp as a massive triangular head breaks the surface and rises into the air on a thick, elongated neck. Its dark, scaly skin seems to ripple and glitter as cascading seawater catches the morning sun. The creature’s mouth, a monstrous cavern of a thing that could swallow Boston, opens wide and emits a deafening but strangely breathy roar that goes on for several minutes. The air itself vibrates from the power of its bellow. When it at last dies out, the creature closes its mouth and eases its head back into the water. The rest of its body follows, its false mountain of a back sinking until it vanishes beneath the surface.
“You’ve witnessed a very rare sight, cadet,” Dorr says with the faintest hint of awe. “Huumadans surface only to take a breath that will sustain them for up to half a year, then descend into the darkest depths of the ocean to feed. The huumadan we just saw is one of four on this world. It’s estimated to be three centuries old.”
Mind. So. Very. Blown.
“There’re only four of them?” I say. “Are they endangered?”
“They are not threatened with extinction, if that is what you mean. The ecosystem can only sustain a half-dozen huumadans at any time. Any more than that and their food supply would become depleted, and then the species would become, as you say, endangered. When the population becomes too great, the huumadans will turn on one another to protect the species as a whole. General Ezenti claims to have witnessed such a fight many years ago. She says it went on for days and turned the ocean black with the animals’ blood.”
“Wow. Sounds like that would make Shark Week look like the Puppy Bowl.”
“I am going to assume that is a significant contrast.”
“Oh, yeah.”
Dorr grunts.
And then the sneaky jerk tries to blast me out of the sky. Totally called it.
I throw up a shield at the last possible second then rocket away to put some distance between us. Dorr makes that separation vanish in the blink of an eye and takes another shot at me. I veer out of the way and return fire. Dorr takes the hit and shrugs it off as if I’d thrown a cotton ball at him. Oh boy.
I’m on the defensive for several minutes, deflecting and dodging attacks and returning fire as opportunities present themselves — and those opportunities are few and far between. Dorr sticks to my blind spot, above and behind me. I roll over to try to nail him; he corkscrews around to stay at my back. I dive or climb; he shadows me. Needless to say, firing blind is a waste of effort.
Fortunately, I have other tricks up my sleeve. I’m not going to deceive myself into thinking they’ll do much good because it’s obvious Dorr has forgotten more about our powers than I know, but this is an assessment; Dorr wants a sample of what I can do, so I give it to him, starting with a little invisibility. I slip into stealth mode, burst to zip around to Dorr’s blind spot, and let him have it full force. Dorr spins out of control. Score one for the fargirl.
I press my advantage and hit Dorr with — what did Gaartiin call it? The Stinging Orbit. Dorr’s aura grows brighter to better absorb my assault. He’s adapting to my barrage of energy blasts, which means it’s time to change tactics.
My next attack is my newest trick: the gravity pulse, a localized heavy gravity field. I’ve never tried unleashing one at full power, but my theory is that a full-force pulse could crush anyone caught within the field of effect. I’ve also never tried firing off a pulse in mid-air, but I have a solid idea of what it’ll do.
And that’s two points for me. The pulse yanks Dorr out of the sky and pulls him toward me. I send him away again with a close-range force blast, then pull him back, then blast him away again.
“Hold,” Dorr says, not the least bit flustered or frustrated. The man has ice water in his veins. He floats up to me, arms folded, brow knit. “Interesting.”
“Um, okay. Interesting good?” I say. “Interesting bad?”
“I’ve assessed dozens of cadets. Hundreds. Few of them ever dared to attack me to the best of their capabilities. You have no such reservations.”
“You wanted to see what I could do. Way I figure it, I’m not doing you or me any favors by half-assing it.”
Not sure if the euphemism translates, but he gets the gist. He nods and grunts, which I’m learning is his primary means of communication, and says, “I trust you’ll continue to do me no favors, then.”
And then he blows me out of the sky again.
This is going to be a long morning.
***
We return to the training grounds. The minute I touch down and depower, exhaustion drops on me like a ten-ton weight. My head spins, I crumple to my knees, and I pitch face-first onto the cool, cool grass. Ohhhh, this feels nice.
A pair of boots settles onto the ground near my head. Go away. The grass and I are having a moment.
“The rest of the day is yours, cadet,” Commander Dorr says. “You’re to report to the training field tomorrow with the rest of the cadets, eight hours round.”
“Eight hours round? Is that like eight AM sharp?”
“Figure it out. Now get up.”
“Working on it, sir.”
“Work harder.”
Dorr walks off, leaving me there. Three new pairs of boots appear.
“Dead already,” Pardo-En laments. “Too bad. I was starting to like her.”
“I do not believe she is in fact deceased,” Mells says, “although in her current state, she could easily pass for a corpse.”
“Love you too, Mells,” I say.
Erisia squats down and gives me a sympathetic smile. “That bad, huh?”
“Yeah, well, you should see the other guy.”
“We did see Commander Dorr,” Mells says. “He looked wholly unaffected by your sparring session.”
“You’re killing me, Mells,” Pardo-En says.
“I second that,” I say. Erisia and Pardo-En help me to my feet. This time I stay upright, but barely. I take a few minutes to catch my breath, then power up to join my new friends in the flight back to Training Commons One for lunch. As soon as I fire back up, the exhaustion doesn’t vanish as much as it takes a different form. I sense on some level how tired and sore I am, but the physical sensations attached to those feelings are absent. I just feel...I don’t know. Light. Thin. Hollow.
After a lunch of the same bland glop we had at breakfast, Erisia, Mells, and Pardo-En return to the training field while I head out to meet up with Hef’Mrnan for my shopping expedition. We take a transport to Plaza North, a civilian-run open air mega-mall that accommodates the Vanguardians’ various personal needs, from furniture and decorations for my quarters to new clothes to (oh God yes thank you) real food.
“I recommend always consulting your VA before consuming anything,” Hef’Mrnan says, “to ensure that you don’t accidentally poison yourself.”
“Yeah, that would be bad.”
“Poisoning generally is.”
The transport lets us off in the center of Plaza North, which features a circular park complete with grassy areas, stone benches, and shade trees with thick canopies of lush blue-green leaves. An egg-shaped being sits on a bench, studying an object that, at a distance, could be easily mistaken for a Kindle. A small bobblehead of a being sprints across the park, laughing the whole way and completely ignoring a larger bobblehead’s pleas to “slow down before you fall and hurt yourself!” I sit on the closest bench and take a moment to absorb it all. Ignore the whole aliens thing and I could be sitting in a park back on Earth.
“Cadet? Are you all right?” Hef’Mrnan asks.
“Yeah,” I say distantly.
Hef’Mrnan doesn’t push. “Where would you like to begin?”
I reach into my belt pouch and show him my pho
ne. “The battery’s dead. I need a new one, or a way to recharge this one.”
Hef’Mrnan takes the phone, turns it over in his hands. “What is it?”
“A communication device, mainly, but it takes pictures, plays music, I have a few of my favorite books on it...it’s my only connection to home. I’d really love to get it working again.”
Hef’Mrnan nods and hands the phone back. “I know a place.”
The place in question is a few blocks away, close enough to walk but far enough away that I’m winded before we reach the halfway point. Sensing my need for a pick-me-up, Hef’Mrnan takes a quick detour into a shop that, from the outside, looks like every other storefront on the street, which is confounding since my translator implants don’t help me read the writing on any of the signs.
“That’s going to make things tricky,” I say.
“Consult your VA,” Hef’Mrnan says. “It can translate for you.”
“Oh, cool,” I say. Is there anything the VA can’t do? Aside from keep me awake and on my feet, that is. I present the back of my hand to the writing above the door to the shop and say, “Translation?”
My own voice responds, “Sweet shop.”
“That is going to take getting used to,” I mumble.
“What is?” Hef’Mrnan asks.
“You didn’t hear that?”
“Nnnoooo. Oh, your VA. It uses your nervous system to transmit information directly to your auditory nerves. Only you can hear it unless you instruct otherwise.”
The more I learn about all the things they’re putting in my body, the less comfortable I am. “Gotcha. Anyway, it’s talking to me in my own voice and it’s a little off-putting.”
“Default setting. You can set it to sound like anyone, if you provide a voice sample.”
Really, now? Tucking that tidbit away for later use.
The sweet shop sells gourmet dammas and a variety of snacks and desserty things. Hef’Mrnan suggests a pastry called a crunchy, a petit four sort of treat. My VA says it won’t kill me, so I get a small paper sack of a half-dozen crunchies, which vanish within minutes because oh my God these things are so good. They’re cubes of crisp, flaky pastry that literally melt in my mouth after biting into them. The flavor is like a rich vanilla tinged with a fruity tang. And the dammas here makes the stuff back at Training Commons One taste like dirty dishwater. I tell my VA to remember this place because I am definitely coming back.
Reenergized, Hef’Mrnan and I continue on to our original destination, a tech shop at the corner of second by fourth (Plaza North is laid out in a circular grid for easy navigation. Thank you for that, extraterrestrial city planners). It’s dark, disorganized, and little skeevy, like a low-rent antique store or a pawn shop. Bits and pieces of unrecognizable technology hang on wall racks, sit piled up on tables, and dangle from the ceiling on lengths of chain.
“Quo?” Hef’Mrnan calls out into the ceiling. “Are you up there?”
“Hef’Mrnan! Be right down,” someone responds. Quo climbs down one of the chains with the natural dexterity of the chimpanzee he resembles — a hairless chimpanzee with yellow skin, pop-eyes, and three fingers on each hand. He’s a Simpson chimp. A Chimpson.
Do not laugh. Do not laugh.
“Afternoon, Hef. Haven’t seen you around lately. How are you, buddy?” Quo says, wiping his hands on the front of his stained coveralls before grasping Hef’Mrnan by the shoulders and giving him a gentle shake.
Hef’Mrnan returns the gesture. “Very busy,” he says.
“I’m not surprised. I’ve been hearing the Black End is all riled up again.”
“You could say that. Quo, this is one of our new cadets, CarrieHauser of Earth.”
“Earth?”
“Let me guess,” I say. “Never heard of it.”
“I’ve never heard of any world until someone tells me about it for the first time,” Quo says before giving me a hello shake. “Good to meet you, cadet. What can I help you with?”
I present my phone to him. “My battery is dead. I need to recharge it or replace it.”
Quo examines the phone for a moment. “How do you normally recharge it?”
“I plug it in.”
“You still use direct hardline charging?” Quo says, mildly scandalized. “Okay. Well, let’s see what we can do for you.”
We follow Quo through the shop, which makes the front look tidy by comparison. We pass countless bins filled with assorted components, a partially disassembled engine sitting in a puddle of brownish-red fluid, shelves so loaded with junk they’re about to collapse, and a ginormous ball of tangled wires and cables that should be sitting on the side of a Midwestern highway next to the world’s largest ball of twine.
We arrive at a cluttered workbench butted up against a back wall. Quo places my phone in a clear cylindrical chamber hooked to a braided rope of mismatched cables. He pulls a tablet out from beneath a nest of multicolored wires and gets to work. His stubby Chimpson fingers dance over the tablet. The cylinder fills with light. When it fades, Quo removes the phone and taps the tablet. The cylinder lights up again. As I watch, a shape forms within the chamber, growing from a tiny dot into a thin black rectangle.
“What is this?” I ask.
Quo gives me an Are you serious? frown. “It’s a simple matter replicator — Alliance-standard picotech construction on the molecular level. You don’t have these?”
I laugh. “My race only just started getting the hang of 3-D printing. If you ever need novelty cookie cutters we can hook you up, but we’re years away from anything like this. Are you making a new battery?”
“I am. It’s not that impressive, really.”
“Says you.”
The process takes maybe two minutes. Quo pops the case on my phone, switches the battery, and hands it back to me. “There you go. If you ever want me to replace the casing with something less fragile, let me know.”
I hold my breath as I turn on the phone and brace for something to go catastrophically wrong. I mean, the battery is alien tech, and my phone was made by Apple. It’s not like I’m trying to plug an electric razor into a European outlet.
The screen comes to life. My wallpaper, a picture of Bruce Springsteen singing his heart out, comes up and is quickly obscured by a mosaic of app icons.
“It works,” I say in a near sob of joy. “Quo, you have no idea how much this means to me. Is it cool if I hug you?”
“All I did was replace a battery,” he says, but it’s not a no, so I give him the hug.
“How long will the charge last?”
“Ten years.”
“Ten years?”
“Give or take. When the charge runs low, expose the battery to the sun for a minute or so.”
“Wow. I have friends back home who’re going to go nuts when I show them this.”
“Ah, you probably shouldn’t do that,” Hef’Mrnan says. “The Alliance has rather strict policies about sharing technology with less advanced worlds.”
Oh, right, that whole Prime Directive deal. Yeah, I should make sure not to take anything back with me. Pissing off individual aliens is bad enough; that last thing I need to do is put the entire planet Earth on the Alliance’s crap list.
We leave Quo’s place and head deeper into Plaza North to begin requisitioning everything I need to make my stay on Kyros Prime more comfortable. Getting stuff for my quarters is easy. I buy a thick, heavy comforter for my bed and an extra pillow; a small table and two chairs (one for me, one for a guest); and a mirror and some indulgently plush towels for the bathroom. That should start me off nicely.
After that, it’s off to buy some non-uniform clothing. Earth could definitely take a lesson from Kyros Prime because all clothing is made to order using the same technology that made my awesome new phone battery. At every clothing boutique I visit, the outfits are on display for me to examine, and when I find something I like, they take my measurements and create the clothes on the spot. Everything fits perfectly; no wonky
or inconsistent sizing whatsoever.
Best of all? Every skirt and pair of pants I buy has real, functional pockets. Take that, Earth fashion industry!
(Side note: if Hef’Mrnan is any indication, men here find clothing shopping every bit as boring as human men. I find these literally universal consistencies, as trivial as they are, comforting.)
With the clothing shopping done, I step onto the street intending to head back to that sweet shop to load up on crunchies, only to find Commander Do waiting for me — Commander Do and a pair of Vanguardians wearing matching no-nonsense frowns.
“Commander,” I say. “Something wrong?”
“Very much so. The retrieval team has returned with the Nightwind.” She steps up to me and fixes me with a hard look. “Perhaps you could help me understand why one of my people is dead.”
SEVEN
Commander Do doesn’t share any information with me until we arrive at the Dock, a facility floating in low orbit over Kyros Prime that serves as a way station for passing travelers, a staging area for Alliance ships, and a dry dock for repairs. The centerpiece of the Dock is a space station, a jumble of interconnected cylinders and spheres that defy all my Earthly conceptions of form and function. Starships of varying sizes and configurations are parked around the station, each secured within its own massive hangar-like structure. The Nightwind is at the far edge of the Dock, well away from the other ships or the central station. We enter the Nightwind’s berth through an airlock, and once we’re inside, Commander Do tells me — orders me to follow her up to the hangar bay’s control room.
“Commander, are you going to tell me what this is about?” I say. “Or is there a reason for this dramatic buildup?”
She stops and narrows her eyes at me. “Tread lightly, cadet. One of my people is dead and I do not take lightly the loss of anyone under my command.”
She’s quiet again until we arrive in the control room. Lt. Maasuur stands before a window the size of a movie screen that looks out on the Nightwind. Vanguardians zip about its exterior like fireflies, sometimes in the company of a small pod-like ship.
Action Figures - Issue Seven: The Black End War Page 6
