“Why wouldn’t we have names?” the girl asked.
“C-Cause...communists?” Sarah asked. “Communists have no freedoms! Or personal liberty.”
“Ohhhhhhh boy,” the man said, shaking his head. “Were you born on Earth?”
“Yeah?” Sarah asked.
He reached across the empty space between them and smacked her shoulder – and Sarah hastily edited her secretions to keep herself from pumping his body with nerve toxin. That was a thing she had to keep reminding herself about. “Welcome to the future, Kappel.” He smiled. “My name is Mikael Chapo. This is Jezebel Fullerene. We’re both second generation Haveners.” He grinned. “Wanna visit our town?”
“You mean...you...your colony?” Sarah asked, slowly.
The two exchanged glances.
“No,” Jez said.
The two of them started to walk with Sarah – though Sarah noticed they both had scrappy looking mechanical suits, neither of them donned them. Instead, they had the suits follow on autopilot behind them, while the two Haveners walked along ridge lines of hills that threaded through the mustard gas clouds of the jungle like mountain ridges. Sarah noticed that the route that the two Haveners led her along was winding and circuitous, which she figured was why they had the suits. Those were direct. And fast. But the winding route gave her time to talk to them – and to begin to get an idea of what the fuck was going on.
“So, a Cardie is one of those...what do they call them?” Jez asked.
“Warfarm, Intelligent General, Model Number blah blah blah,” Mez said, miming a mouth speaking with his left hand as he walked. “They’re hobbled AIs, I think they’re gamma level since they’re not super bright. They strap them onto a nanolathe and nearlight drop them onto Haven every few weeks, since any ship they send gets shot to fuck before it can land biological Commanders. But since they’re hobbled, they’re pretty easy to outfox.” He nodded a bit. “But we do try and take them alive, if possible, since...well...”
“A hobbled AI is just a kid with a gun to its head,” Jez said. “That’s why we call them Cardies.”
“I don’t get it,” Sarah said.
“An old spec fic book had kids being used for a war fighting program against aliens,” Jez said. “It was written by a guy named Card. Ergo. Cardies.”
“Huh,” Sarah said. “Why not call them Wiggers? Like, W.I.G-ers”
Both of the commies stopped and looked at her.
Sarah blushed. “What?”
The two commies started walking again. “So, what’s your story?”
“Right!” Sarah blushed. “So, okay, uh, this may sound kind of weird, but, uh, several million years ago, an advanced alien species began to spread across the galaxy, called the Claw. Their modus operandi is to grab a member of a civilization, then convert them into a hybrid weapon. One that knows all the weaknesses and psychological patterns of their targeted race, and can be used to destroy them from the inside out. It’s been destroying civilizations for years and years, that’s why we’ve never met any sentient aliens!” She nodded. “Anywho, it was observing humanity on Trappist, and it chose me, because I...was...” She coughed. “Anyhwo, I escaped! Before my brain got zonked. That is. I mean, I still got...changed. Obviously. I mean, heh, look at me. I wasn’t born green. That costs extra.” She nodded. “A-And I think I’d have been sued for copyright infringement from Disney.”
Jez made a face at that.
Sarah shook her head and then barreled on ahead. “A-Anywho, my corporation tried to vivisect me. Then an enemy corporation tried to capture me. But by then, I had figured out some of my cool powers.” She looked down at her wrist. “So, uh, I beat Texas Dallas. You know. The Supreme Commander .”
Jez and Mik both looked at her. “Cool,” Mik said, giving her a thumbs up.
“Yeah, great job,” Jez said, nodding.
Sarah felt a bit deflated. Like someone had run up and jerked off into her biological samples before she could scan them properly. “I mean, like, he was...then I beat Sexy Napoleon and Space Belisarius and Kellen Grant! All of them! Like, by myself.” She punched at the air a bit. “Like, wham! Pow!”
“Awesome,” Mik said, smiling.
Sarah flushed. Her hair drooped. “I...I kinda thought you’d be more impressed...” She said.
“To be fair, we’ve never heard of them?” Jez said. Then she brightened. “So, what are your cool powers?”
“I...do you know what a Commander is?” Sarah asked.
“Yup,” Jez said.
“I’m like that!” Sarah said. “But instead of a nanolathe, I use this.” She focused and extended her wrist tendrils, which writhed around in the air like a small set of snakes. “They inject retroviral agents into a subject and rewrites their biology completely.”
“Now that is fucking wicked!” Jez said, her eyes shining excitedly. “How good are you with it?”
“Welllll,” Sarah said, grinning slowly, her hair flexing slightly. “I happen to know that I can make a mean surface-to-space plasma defense bug. I call them Bob! Butt of Boom! C-Cause the plasma. It. Uh. It comes out of their butt.”
Jez flung up both of her hands, curling her middle and her ring finger down while extending her pinkie and her pointer finger, creating a crude approximation of a bull’s horns. She slammed her head up and down, her arms wagging in the air. “Righteous!”
Sarah felt a bit better. “And once we get to your colony-”
“Home,” Mik said. “A colony exists to extract resources from a planet for an authority back home. It’s inherently undemocratic and immoral to just...set up shop on someone else’s real estate.”
“...you just set up shop here...” Sarah said, slowly.
“No,” Mik said, shaking her head. “We were invited. We didn’t name this place.”
Mik had timed it perfectly. The three of them emerged from a copse of trees and onto a broad flat plateau that rose from the thick, gray-green gasses that fogged the lower jungles. Here, there was something that took Sarah completely aback. Rather than an orderly set up of buildings and starships and corporate logos, the settlement she saw was large and anarchic. Some buildings were sleek. Others blocky. Many of them were covered in greenery and leaves. Several of them were in the midst of changing their shape from one form to another – blocks rotating and slotting and changing position. But standing at the edge of the place, speaking to one another with a casual, relaxed attitude, were a group of humans and what was unmistakably an alien.
“They did,” Mik said, pointing to the alien.
And the alien turned to look at them.
And she was undeniably a Pro-Tas.
***
Sarah sat in the meeting hall of Haven with several guns aimed at her head, her ankles and her wrists bound together, and considered that, hey, this was still a better than the last time she had met a Pro-Tas. Though, really, what she was really kicking herself for was never asking what the Pro-Tas warrior who had found her was named . But if he had survived the destruction of the Excalibur (and god, that made her guts knot with worry), then he’d be able to clear this up. Assuming he arrived in time.
But even that idea was getting a tiny bit frayed as the leaders of Haven shouted at one another.
There were twelve people in the room, each one covered with different symbols. Some had the hammer and sickle, some had roses, some had a black circle with two jagged lines through it and the words ‘Tesla Exeunt’, a few had blacklight tattoos that formed words in a language that Sarah didn’t speak. But it had the same letters as English, so she was pretty sure it was French or Spanish. She hadn’t learned enough of either, though she could swear in Portuguese.
“L'Laya is right!” one of the men with the hammers and sickles said, slamming his palms down on the table. “We can’t take the risk. If she’s been co-opted by an alien organism like the Claw, then she’s ludicrously dangerous. Maybe more dangerous than the corps!”
“We cannot let paranoia guide our decisions
,” the woman with the rose emblazoned on her chest said, shaking her head. “Haven is founded on mutual cooperation and understanding between every faction.”
“Booo!” A woman who was hanging by her legs from a rafter that snaked across the ceiling spoke up. She was dressed entirely in black and wore a kind of cloth mask covering. “Centrist bootlicker.”
“Oh shut up!” the rose wearer snapped.
“Annie’s right,” the guy with the spanish tattoos said, his voice thickly accented with German linguistic patterns. A series of matte black orbs floated around his head like a halo of ominousness. “We can’t listen to the leader of the DSA faction – leader. They might as well be fucking capitalists.”
“I don’t see the entire Action First Front here, Miguel!” the rose wearer said, thrusting her finger at him.
“What are these camera drones chopped liver or something?” Miguel asked, gesturing to the orbs.
“You were still chosen to rep for them!” The rose wearer said.
“Guys?” Sarah asked.
“I say we put it to a cross factional vote,” the guy with the Tesla insignia on his arm said. “Each faction votes their own way-”
“Or we can direct action the alien bitch,” the black clad woman said, still dangling. “She arrived in a frigging battle ship, I say we punt her into the sun before her friends show up and step two of their evil as shit plan happens. Do you really think the pukes who nuked the Chicago commune would hesitate to work with the fucking Tyranids?”
“Can I just-” Sarah tried to get a word in edgewise – but that had brought out a new line of shouting. The shouting devolved when the girl who was hanging from the ceiling – Annie – dropped down and started to punch Miguel in the side of the head when Miguel, his face red and his tone growing more blustering, admitted to the leader of the DSA faction (whose name had yet to be called out in the furor) had a point. Sarah closed her eyes. But before she could tear herself out of her restraints, a hissing roar filled the room and shut everyone up.
Sarah snapped her eyes open and saw the Pro-Tas woman had one of her arm-mounted energy blades activated and snarling. She had been standing in the back of the room – in the shadows. Sarah honestly wondered if it was a Pro-Tas trait to simply be hard to notice, or if it was just because they were being compared to humans. Though, right now, she was comparing L'Laya to the male she had met. Like him, she was tall compared to a human. But where he had been broad shouldered and bulky, she was more svelte and thin. Her face was all bony ridges and smooth planes, but she lacked the mouth covering cloth that the male counterpart had. For a few seconds, Sarah thought she didn’t have a mouth. But she saw it there, a very thin line that expanded out into two other lines, like a Y, indicating some kind of...mandible.
But L'Laya didn’t open her mouth to speak. Instead, her voice came from the translation orb that hovered slowly around her – like her male counterpart, though hers was considerably more dinged and dented with age. “I am convinced that the hybrid is safe,” she said, her voice sounding remarkably British for a space alien.
The bickering humans all looked at her.
“Why?” the rose wearer asked.
“I have been watching her,” L'Laya said. “In the time it has taken us to have this argument and debate, she could have infected the entire room with any number of biomorphic viruses. You would have all been so much biomatter to her.” She cocked her head. “Instead, she has shown something that no subordinated hybrid would ever show.”
“What?” Annie asked.
“She’s been showing complete and utter confusion,” L'Laya said. “Hybrids are used to understand their entire culture before they are used to then destroy it. A hybrid that worked with the Eye would not only know you, she would also be able to manipulate you more effectively into fighting one another, or siding with her.”
“How do you know she’s not manipulating us now?” Miguel asked, subtly elbowing Annie away from him.
“Simple,” L'Laya said. “Any hybrid manipulation would be to get us into this room, so she could work. That was why I was ready to kill her.” She chuckled, softly, her translation orb bobbing. “Instead, she has been trying to get a word in edgewise for the past five minutes.”
Every faction leader looked at Sarah.
Sarah gulped.
“I was just going to ask,” she said, slowly. “What the absolute fuck are any of you fucking talking about? I thought you were all communists!”
Every faction leader exchanged a glance with one another.
Then every single faction leader, at the same time, began to shout an explanation at Sarah as loudly as possible – their conversations overlapping and flowing over one another like a river. Sarah thought that was bad. Then they started to shout at one another as their explanations rammed into one another like trashbergs hitting cargo ships. Soon, Miguel was trying to get Annie off his back as Annie shouted: “How dare you call me an ancap, you piece of shit! Ancaps are just feudalists with extra fucking steps !” And, between every word, she punched him in the side of the head as he wheeled around and around and around, trying to get her off him.
Sarah sighed.
“Forget I asked,” she muttered to herself.
A cheap plastic chair flew past her shoulder and shattered apart against the wall.
Chapter Two: Sarah Gets a History Lesson
By the time Sarah and the faction leaders were outside and the meeting had come to its conclusion, the sun had begun to set. Twilight on Haven turned out to be uniquely beautiful. The clouds parted, the sky turned to a deep, deep black, and the sky became set with a billion stars. Sarah found herself looking at those stars and contrasting them against the skies of Earth: Steel, and when it wasn’t steel, the color of a vid-screen tuned to a killed channel, when the corporation in question had begun to jam out anyone who might have not paid their vid bills. The static they pumped out was deliberately designed to be ugly and irritating and it came with this awful screeching noise…
It was nothing like this crisp clearness. The only thing even remotely similar was night on Trappist-1a, but that had a place of overwhelming work and crushing drudgery, building towards the construction and deployment of a biosphere destroying phage. NovaDyne had wanted to turn the planet spanning jungle into so much mulch that could be burned off, scraped away, and then the strip mining of exotic materials and radioactives could begin.
Sarah shuddered at the memory – lowering her gaze to the faction leaders. The rest of the population of Haven had come out. It looked to be nearly five hundred people, with nearly that many drones floating around. She wondered if those drones represented people who hadn’t been able to make it, or were just here to take pictures. Each one was a unique design: Some were orbs painted to look like gaping eyeballs. Others were small bundles of flowers, the petals disguising their ducted fans. Others still were more sleek and technological looking. They buzzed and whipped through the air, their camera lenses panning over her body.
Sarah, once more, was forced to remember that she was still naked. She crossed her left arm over her breasts and dropped her other to cover her sex. It was one thing to be comfortable being naked around her friends. It was another thing entirely to be filmed while strutting around nude.
The Pro-Tas L'Laya stepped forward to stand before the collection of Haveners. “The deliberations have been completed,” she said, her voice carrying clearly as her own translation dome whirred around her head. “Sarah Kappel has been allowed to stay, provided she does nothing to endanger the community. She shall surrender the right to privacy and the right to the public maker until she has proved to be a stable member of our community. Now that that is done with, we shall close the evening’s conclave with a quick Faction Check.”
“Faction cheeeeeeeeck!” Someone shouted from the crowd. Chuckles filled the air.
“As per the Articles of Haven,” L'Laya said, clasping her long, gray fingers together, interlocking them before her chest. “Sign
ed by every member of our community, all members of all factions are allowed to move between factions at will at this moment. To ensure coercion is not allowed, please, close your eyes, to allow any who wish the privacy of their convictions.”
Everyone bowed their heads.
Sarah blinked, slowly.
A single woman who had a rose headband opened her eyes in the midst of the eyes closed, head bowing scene. She glanced left. Then she glanced right. She tugged the headband off, tucked it into her pocket, then shuffled over to stand beside someone wearing a black ski mask over their face. L'Laya, who was watching this with an unreadable expression on her alien face, inclined her head. “The faction check is complete. Everyone, go have fun.”
Everyone lifted their heads, then broke up, chatting.
“What the fuck is this place?” Sarah asked.
L'Laya looked at her, then chuckled. “This is Haven, Dr. Kappel. And I believe you need a history lesson.”
Sarah nodded. Then, quietly. “A-Also, I need to find my friends? They crashed in escape pods as well...”
“Ah, yes, of course,” L'Laya said. She held up her arm, then touched the golden bracelet that ringed around her gray wrist. Her fingers tapped out a few commands and then she spoke into the bracelet. “LFL: Need someone to find a way to find a group of people, scattered around the planet. Sarah’s buddies. Contact me via PM if you’re interested. Thanks. Lesser than sign, three, lesser than sign, three, lesser than sign, three, LL.”
The bracelet chirruped and the message floated in the air for a moment, displayed holographically so that L'Laya could check it over for typos. She inclined her head, then said: “Send.”
“What does LFL mean?” Sarah asked, her brow furrowing, her head spines drawing close around her scalp.
“Looking for Labor,” L'Laya said. “Now, the history lesson-”
“Wait, you’re not putting a price on it?” Sarah asked. “Like, that should be at least a minimum wage contract gig, like...maybe six UN credits per hour, if you’re splurgy. What’s the local script here? Havenbills? Havenbucks? HavenCredits?”
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