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jeriendhalRated PG-13 for one nasty word.
When Rufus got back to his flat early that afternoon, Hazel was nowhere to be found. Still feeling discomfited by his conversation with Count Lakewalker, he busied himself examining a spreadsheet of her home district’s budget that had been e-mailed to him by the district administrators. He was still puzzling over the damned thing, debating on whether he wanted to call his sister, Bethany, and beg her for help in explaining it, when Hazel came back. He heard her carryall bag thump to the floor, then looked up as she stepped inside his office.
“Where were you?” he asked.
“I was at the clinic,” she said cheerfully. “Then I went over to visit with my da for a bit.”
His ears pricked up in sudden worry. “The doctor’s? It’s early for your injection, isn’t it?”
“No more injections for me, Ru. Or at least not as often.” She sat on the edge of his desk and ran her claw along the seam of her artificial leg. The curved thigh panel popped open, revealing the myoelectric muscles of her thigh, wrapped around its metal bones and the flat housing of the leg’s control computer. Rufus could also see what looked appeared for all the world to be a tiny refrigeration unit, with a feed line that led up to her stump’s base plate.
“What’s that?” he asked, intrigued.
“It’s an automated drug storage and feed system,” she said. “The clinic installed it this morning. This way I don’t have to stop in every few days to get the placebo injection for my painkiller addiction, its injected automatically by the unit when my leg’s monitoring computer sees that my chemistry levels are off. I don’t have to pay any attention to it beyond getting it refilled every few months.” She closed up the panel and hopped down.
“Marvelous,” he told her. “I wonder if they could something similar for my arm?”
“You’ll have to ask. In the meantime, have you been a good cub and taken your meds?”
“Ah, no. I’ve been worrying over spreadsheets,” he admitted.
Hazel let out a low growl. “You haven’t eaten lunch either, I’ll bet.”
“Didn’t have much of an appetite.”
She growled again and pointed towards the kitchen. “Food! Then pills!”
Obedient, he went to the kitchen and made himself a sandwich, chasing it down with his pills and a lukewarm tea hastily reheated in the microwave. Pills for his ongoing struggle with PTSD, pills to suppress his own addiction to Juno, pills to settle his stomach after taking the first two. If he let himself think too much about how badly off his own internal chemistry was, he could get quite disturbed.
“Done, Mother,” he reported.
“I’m not your mother,” Hazel said, finishing up her own sandwich. She frowned at the thought. “Actually, that does bring up a question that’s been bothering me today. What am I to you, anyway?”
“What do you mean?”
“Six months ago I was just the bitchy vixen you kept bumping into at the clinic. Four months ago I was a vixen panicking over getting her leg cut off. Three months ago I was the vixen you were trying to cheer up by taking her flying. Two months ago I was a friend you let stand by and watch while you attempted suicide in front of the whole bloody Council of Farm Lords. Last night I was your bed warmer. So what am I now?”
He considered the question seriously. Finally he said, “What you are is Haz Elin Swiftfoot. In no particular order you are an honorably discharged military officer, a fellow pilot, the daughter of a male I respect, my dear friend, my support when I second guess myself, and last night a most wonderful and energetic companion. A damned sight more than a mere bed warmer, by anyone’s reckoning.” The portion of his brain still labeled “Farm Noble” felt compelled to add, “You also just happen to be a subject of my House, but that’s really secondary to everything else.”
“It’s not secondary to me. Da was asking why I was smiling so much this morning. When I told him why, his next question was whether I was moving in with you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I wasn’t sure.” She started tapping her tea cup with a fingerclaw compulsively. “Look, Rufus, however much you play the civilian, you’re my lord, mine and Da’s and a few million other peoples’. Last night I hopped into bed with you and was… was…”
“…making love to…?” he supplied helpfully.
“…fucking my sworn liege lord. What does that make me?”
“’Satisfied’ was the goal I was shooting for, so to speak.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “I’m trying to be serious.”
“So was I. What are you getting at, Hazel?”
She rubbed her ears in frustration. “I don’t know what I am. For the longest time I figured I’d be career military. Do my thirty years, maybe find a mate and have some cubs along the way, then get a salute, a pension and a case full of service medallions on my wall. Then I had my accident, got addicted to those damned painkillers and flushed those plans down the head. For longest time afterward I was just a patient. I took my pills, I went to the doctor, and I sat on my arse watching documentaries on the educational channels while Da was at work. Now I’m recovered… now I, um, know you… but now I don’t know where to go next. Should I start bugging you for presents and become a lord’s playtoy, or ask for a salary and become your personal assistant?”
Ah, this was a state of mind he was intimately familiar with. Rufus wondered if she’d ever spent nights staring into the dark like he had, wheels spinning in her head as she tried to figure what she was. “What makes you assume that you have to be my anything, professionally speaking? You are your own vixen. Whatever else you choose to be can be as intimately connected to me, or not, as you wish. Though please bear in mind that my offer to you still stands.”
“’Lady Brushtail’ isn’t something I could ever see myself being. I’m sorry, Rufus. I mean, could you imagine putting me in a dress?”
Actually, most of the time he imagined taking her out of one, but he could see her point. “Haven’t you ever considered regaining your pilot’s certification? I could use some of my lordly influence to get you commission reinstated even.”
She bent her head, staring at the grain of his kitchen table for a long moment. “No,” she finally said. “Being forced to resign was what I deserved. No, what I deserved was to be court-martialed for Conduct Unbecoming an Officer. Instead of justice though, I got mercy, Holy Den Mother and my CO be praised. I just wish I knew what to do next. I want to fly, I know that. Even if it’s in that damned antique deathtrap of yours at an airshow.”
He ignored the slight against his beloved T-6 Harvard, which was still under repair after that last little incident. “I wish I could do more to help you then. I could have given you the chance to fly with me on a mission for External Affairs, if I hadn’t turned them down.”
“Oh? Forgive me, I didn’t even ask you what they wanted. Can you talk about it?”
“Technically no, but since you know the whole story after hearing my testimony before the Council, I think it scarcely matters.” He quickly summarized Count Lakewalker’s offer to attempt to contact the Galapagos and his own reasons for refusing.
Hazel’s eyes widened and her ears flicked back. “How could you turn him down?”
“I told you. I’m not going to get involved with anything that would weaken the GSA.”
“It sounds like the humans are way ahead of you on that score. Wouldn’t it make more sense to stop them before they did something even stupider than before?”
“The humans can’t possibly expect to negotiate their own treaty with the Galapagos, not without the other GSA members behind them. Their drumbeat to war has been shut up quite neatly, thanks to my testimony.”
“So, the fact that they can’t do anything openly doesn’t mean they aren’t going to try something. They weren’t exactly singing their own praises about exterminating the ferin five hundred years back either.”
“Yes, but there's a bit of a difference between attacking a race designed to be passive slaves and one as personally formidable as the Galapagos seem to be.”
“Is there?” she asked. “All right, assuming everything that those three humans with the Gene Mage said was true, just how many Galapagos can there possibly be? Say the Varn starts feeling lonely and starts designing them from his genetic samples straight after he finishes accidentally wiping out his own race. Even assuming he is the universe's greatest genetic engineer, it's still going to take him what, fifty years at minimum to get them just the way he wants? More likely a hundred or two hundred, really.”
“Go on,” Rufus said, wondering where her line of reasoning was going.
“Which gives him somewhere between three hundred and four hundred fifty years to help them build a civilization from scratch, capable of building those warships you saw. Even assuming he had a cache of supplies to retreat to, it was just him, three humans, plus whatever help the Ardies were willing to give him, which likely wasn't much, if anything. Even if you toss in a load of artificial wombs and the urge to rut like a pack of grass chasers in constant heat, you're still going to have to start out small the first couple of generations, because somebody is going to pick up all those diapers, never mind teaching them trans-light navigation later. How many of them could there possibly be?”
“You're forgetting about the creo. They likely would been able to find at least a few willing to follow the Dominion into exile.”
“How many?” she asked. “Especially given that every guild you contacted might just turn around and scream that the Varn were returning and everyone better take cover.”
Rufus ran his tongue over his fangs, feeling as discomfited as when he'd listened to Count Lakewalker's proposal. “Not that many, I think. Perhaps none.”
“So how many Galapagos do you think there are? Perhaps a million or five? If the assumptions are generous? I'm thinking there are a lot less. Less than a million. Maybe less than a couple of hundred thousand. Maybe a lot less than that. Certainly a lot less than, what, fifteen or twenty billion humans?”
“They had four heavy cruisers,” he pointed out.
“And how many more did they show you, beyond those four? And how many of them were fully crewed? You don't know, and they certainly didn't give you a tour of all of them or hand over their navy's TO&E. They put on a good show for your Captain Blake, but was there any more to it than that?”
He was silent for a long moment. “When did you pick up this remarkable talent for intelligence analysis?”
“It just made sense to me,” she said. “Believe me, I had plenty of time to think about what you said to the Council while you were in a coma figuring out whether you wanted to drop dead or not.”
“And if you could think of it, no doubt the Terran Federation could figure it out as well.” He stood up and grabbed the kitchen's comset. “Command: Contact Count Lakewalker, Ministry of External Affairs,” he said into the mouthpiece. After a moment he said, “Count Lakewalker, Lord Rufus here. I'd like to speak to you again about your proposal. Yes, I do realize its merits now. I think finding the Galapagos before the humans do is vital for their survival, as a matter of fact...”
To be continued.
When Rufus got back to his flat early that afternoon, Hazel was nowhere to be found. Still feeling discomfited by his conversation with Count Lakewalker, he busied himself examining a spreadsheet of her home district’s budget that had been e-mailed to him by the district administrators. He was still puzzling over the damned thing, debating on whether he wanted to call his sister, Bethany, and beg her for help in explaining it, when Hazel came back. He heard her carryall bag thump to the floor, then looked up as she stepped inside his office.
“Where were you?” he asked.
“I was at the clinic,” she said cheerfully. “Then I went over to visit with my da for a bit.”
His ears pricked up in sudden worry. “The doctor’s? It’s early for your injection, isn’t it?”
“No more injections for me, Ru. Or at least not as often.” She sat on the edge of his desk and ran her claw along the seam of her artificial leg. The curved thigh panel popped open, revealing the myoelectric muscles of her thigh, wrapped around its metal bones and the flat housing of the leg’s control computer. Rufus could also see what looked appeared for all the world to be a tiny refrigeration unit, with a feed line that led up to her stump’s base plate.
“What’s that?” he asked, intrigued.
“It’s an automated drug storage and feed system,” she said. “The clinic installed it this morning. This way I don’t have to stop in every few days to get the placebo injection for my painkiller addiction, its injected automatically by the unit when my leg’s monitoring computer sees that my chemistry levels are off. I don’t have to pay any attention to it beyond getting it refilled every few months.” She closed up the panel and hopped down.
“Marvelous,” he told her. “I wonder if they could something similar for my arm?”
“You’ll have to ask. In the meantime, have you been a good cub and taken your meds?”
“Ah, no. I’ve been worrying over spreadsheets,” he admitted.
Hazel let out a low growl. “You haven’t eaten lunch either, I’ll bet.”
“Didn’t have much of an appetite.”
She growled again and pointed towards the kitchen. “Food! Then pills!”
Obedient, he went to the kitchen and made himself a sandwich, chasing it down with his pills and a lukewarm tea hastily reheated in the microwave. Pills for his ongoing struggle with PTSD, pills to suppress his own addiction to Juno, pills to settle his stomach after taking the first two. If he let himself think too much about how badly off his own internal chemistry was, he could get quite disturbed.
“Done, Mother,” he reported.
“I’m not your mother,” Hazel said, finishing up her own sandwich. She frowned at the thought. “Actually, that does bring up a question that’s been bothering me today. What am I to you, anyway?”
“What do you mean?”
“Six months ago I was just the bitchy vixen you kept bumping into at the clinic. Four months ago I was a vixen panicking over getting her leg cut off. Three months ago I was the vixen you were trying to cheer up by taking her flying. Two months ago I was a friend you let stand by and watch while you attempted suicide in front of the whole bloody Council of Farm Lords. Last night I was your bed warmer. So what am I now?”
He considered the question seriously. Finally he said, “What you are is Haz Elin Swiftfoot. In no particular order you are an honorably discharged military officer, a fellow pilot, the daughter of a male I respect, my dear friend, my support when I second guess myself, and last night a most wonderful and energetic companion. A damned sight more than a mere bed warmer, by anyone’s reckoning.” The portion of his brain still labeled “Farm Noble” felt compelled to add, “You also just happen to be a subject of my House, but that’s really secondary to everything else.”
“It’s not secondary to me. Da was asking why I was smiling so much this morning. When I told him why, his next question was whether I was moving in with you.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That I wasn’t sure.” She started tapping her tea cup with a fingerclaw compulsively. “Look, Rufus, however much you play the civilian, you’re my lord, mine and Da’s and a few million other peoples’. Last night I hopped into bed with you and was… was…”
“…making love to…?” he supplied helpfully.
“…fucking my sworn liege lord. What does that make me?”
“’Satisfied’ was the goal I was shooting for, so to speak.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “I’m trying to be serious.”
“So was I. What are you getting at, Hazel?”
She rubbed her ears in frustration. “I don’t know what I am. For the longest time I figured I’d be career military. Do my thirty years, maybe find a mate and have some cubs along the way, then get a salute, a pension and a case full of service medallions on my wall. Then I had my accident, got addicted to those damned painkillers and flushed those plans down the head. For longest time afterward I was just a patient. I took my pills, I went to the doctor, and I sat on my arse watching documentaries on the educational channels while Da was at work. Now I’m recovered… now I, um, know you… but now I don’t know where to go next. Should I start bugging you for presents and become a lord’s playtoy, or ask for a salary and become your personal assistant?”
Ah, this was a state of mind he was intimately familiar with. Rufus wondered if she’d ever spent nights staring into the dark like he had, wheels spinning in her head as she tried to figure what she was. “What makes you assume that you have to be my anything, professionally speaking? You are your own vixen. Whatever else you choose to be can be as intimately connected to me, or not, as you wish. Though please bear in mind that my offer to you still stands.”
“’Lady Brushtail’ isn’t something I could ever see myself being. I’m sorry, Rufus. I mean, could you imagine putting me in a dress?”
Actually, most of the time he imagined taking her out of one, but he could see her point. “Haven’t you ever considered regaining your pilot’s certification? I could use some of my lordly influence to get you commission reinstated even.”
She bent her head, staring at the grain of his kitchen table for a long moment. “No,” she finally said. “Being forced to resign was what I deserved. No, what I deserved was to be court-martialed for Conduct Unbecoming an Officer. Instead of justice though, I got mercy, Holy Den Mother and my CO be praised. I just wish I knew what to do next. I want to fly, I know that. Even if it’s in that damned antique deathtrap of yours at an airshow.”
He ignored the slight against his beloved T-6 Harvard, which was still under repair after that last little incident. “I wish I could do more to help you then. I could have given you the chance to fly with me on a mission for External Affairs, if I hadn’t turned them down.”
“Oh? Forgive me, I didn’t even ask you what they wanted. Can you talk about it?”
“Technically no, but since you know the whole story after hearing my testimony before the Council, I think it scarcely matters.” He quickly summarized Count Lakewalker’s offer to attempt to contact the Galapagos and his own reasons for refusing.
Hazel’s eyes widened and her ears flicked back. “How could you turn him down?”
“I told you. I’m not going to get involved with anything that would weaken the GSA.”
“It sounds like the humans are way ahead of you on that score. Wouldn’t it make more sense to stop them before they did something even stupider than before?”
“The humans can’t possibly expect to negotiate their own treaty with the Galapagos, not without the other GSA members behind them. Their drumbeat to war has been shut up quite neatly, thanks to my testimony.”
“So, the fact that they can’t do anything openly doesn’t mean they aren’t going to try something. They weren’t exactly singing their own praises about exterminating the ferin five hundred years back either.”
“Yes, but there's a bit of a difference between attacking a race designed to be passive slaves and one as personally formidable as the Galapagos seem to be.”
“Is there?” she asked. “All right, assuming everything that those three humans with the Gene Mage said was true, just how many Galapagos can there possibly be? Say the Varn starts feeling lonely and starts designing them from his genetic samples straight after he finishes accidentally wiping out his own race. Even assuming he is the universe's greatest genetic engineer, it's still going to take him what, fifty years at minimum to get them just the way he wants? More likely a hundred or two hundred, really.”
“Go on,” Rufus said, wondering where her line of reasoning was going.
“Which gives him somewhere between three hundred and four hundred fifty years to help them build a civilization from scratch, capable of building those warships you saw. Even assuming he had a cache of supplies to retreat to, it was just him, three humans, plus whatever help the Ardies were willing to give him, which likely wasn't much, if anything. Even if you toss in a load of artificial wombs and the urge to rut like a pack of grass chasers in constant heat, you're still going to have to start out small the first couple of generations, because somebody is going to pick up all those diapers, never mind teaching them trans-light navigation later. How many of them could there possibly be?”
“You're forgetting about the creo. They likely would been able to find at least a few willing to follow the Dominion into exile.”
“How many?” she asked. “Especially given that every guild you contacted might just turn around and scream that the Varn were returning and everyone better take cover.”
Rufus ran his tongue over his fangs, feeling as discomfited as when he'd listened to Count Lakewalker's proposal. “Not that many, I think. Perhaps none.”
“So how many Galapagos do you think there are? Perhaps a million or five? If the assumptions are generous? I'm thinking there are a lot less. Less than a million. Maybe less than a couple of hundred thousand. Maybe a lot less than that. Certainly a lot less than, what, fifteen or twenty billion humans?”
“They had four heavy cruisers,” he pointed out.
“And how many more did they show you, beyond those four? And how many of them were fully crewed? You don't know, and they certainly didn't give you a tour of all of them or hand over their navy's TO&E. They put on a good show for your Captain Blake, but was there any more to it than that?”
He was silent for a long moment. “When did you pick up this remarkable talent for intelligence analysis?”
“It just made sense to me,” she said. “Believe me, I had plenty of time to think about what you said to the Council while you were in a coma figuring out whether you wanted to drop dead or not.”
“And if you could think of it, no doubt the Terran Federation could figure it out as well.” He stood up and grabbed the kitchen's comset. “Command: Contact Count Lakewalker, Ministry of External Affairs,” he said into the mouthpiece. After a moment he said, “Count Lakewalker, Lord Rufus here. I'd like to speak to you again about your proposal. Yes, I do realize its merits now. I think finding the Galapagos before the humans do is vital for their survival, as a matter of fact...”
To be continued.
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no subject
Hehehe, what a good talk can do to ones opinion... =)
Great story... Looking for the more to come :)
mjkj