Chapter Text
Two months after the Five Minute War, Captain Yeung was chewing meditatively on his last ration bar and considering the options. Nitrogen would be the least painful way to end it all – a peaceful, dreamless sleep. There was also his service weapon, a simple and compact kinetic weapon that used chemical propellant to send slugs through human bodies. That, at least, had a certain long and storied tradition about it. There was also the somewhat more outre and daring method of dropping out of an airlock and letting the thermal wash of his ship, the Hope of Common Humanity, wash over his body.
The news casts from the Earth orbitals were clear – the mass die offs and the firestorms were continuing unabated. The Martian front of the United Near East Coalition was claiming that they had managed to scrape together a functional, long term biosphere...but Captain Yeung’s father had been an ecologist and imparted to his young son that the possibility of recreating Earth’s biosphere on Mars was fast approaching nill, based on current progressions and the tensions separating the UNEC and the NEB – the New Eurasian Bloc.
The fault lines of humanity, drawn in economics and blood, had been tense when he had been young. Captain Yeung had bought into the idea that one could help keep those lines safe by signing up with the Coalition Navy – but in the end, the only thing it had bought him was two, three months of extra time away from the extinction the rest of the human race circled around.
The bridge of the Hope was somber. Astrogation officer Williams was suspended in her microgravity harness and writing another letter back home – the eastern coast of the Americas had been mostly spared from the effect of the triple kinetic salvo in the Pacific Ocean, but the fallout from the atomics and the knock on ripples of the war plagues and the bolides were both working to rip her extended family apart. She wasn’t even sure if they were still alive. Still, she wrote.
But at least she was working on something real. Yeung swung his gaze to his tactical command officer, Hurly. Hurly had the facial appearance and build of a rather cheerful marshmallow suspended too long over a fire, his dark cheeks surrounded by vitiligo and his hair sheered short and curly. He was chewing his knuckles and, again, looking at what he called The Blip.
Captain Yeung put aside the thoughts of suicide. He unstrapped himself and gently pushed himself from his seat to the console that Hurly was strapped into. Softly, he spoke. “Hurly, what have you got?”
“I know you think I’m crazy, Captain,” Hurly said, his Hindi only lightly accented. “But I am convinced.”
“Aliens,” Captain Yeung said, frowning.
“No, not aliens, something!” Hurly said, turning in his seat. He pointed. “Okay, look at the fleet dispo chart we have – here’s us, here’s every BAN bastard out there.” The screen flickered with red and blue dots, indicating the array of siloships, laser destroyers, kinetic drone carriers, cutters, patrol ships, and logistics drones that had been the solar system before the Five Minute War. He tapped a few buttons. “Okay...watch…” He tapped a few more buttons – and things ticked forward, bit by bit by bit. Captain Yeung found himself watching.
And softly, he whispered. “I’ll be gods damned,” he said.
“See!” Hurly said. “The maneuvering burn that the BAN-2 fleet made that got our silo ship to launch? It was made in response to this.” He thrust his finger at a blaze of energy at the edge of the solar system. “I think they mistook it as an atomic attack in the outer system and reacted.” He turned his head back. “And I’ve been collecting data over the past two months.”
“From whom?” Yeung asked.
“From our survivors, a few Bloc captains that have their coms open,” Hurly said, his voice growing excited. “The triangulation data is clear. The Blip is fifty kilometers wide.”
Yeung’s jaw dropped. But he had seen something he was sure that Hurly had seen as well. Their course and the hypothetical line that the Blip had been making – the trajectory it had made in the few pings that everyone had gotten before the billions of corpses had distracted everyone.
The math was obvious.
He turned to Williams.
“Williams,” he said. “Set a course for these coordinates. Five G burn.”
“We won’t be able to get back to E-” She hesitated. “To Mars. Not without getting remassed.”
“Do it.”
Williams was silent. But discipline held. She swept her letter off of her console, then started to program in the information. Yeung kicked off the floor, floating to the chair. He strapped himself in, then tapped on the communication systems of the Hope. “All hands, this is Captain Yeung. Brace for high G maneuvers. Estimated burn time…” He glanced at the quick flash of Williams’ hands. “Four minutes.”
The chisel shaped, mushroomed head of the Hope swung herself slowly around as their cold gas thrusters spurted and fluttered. The elegant laser frigate, designed to provide anti-drone and anti-fighter support for any fleet she was attached to brought herself to a new bearing – one not entirely in line with her destination. Changing orbits was more complex than simply sticking your nose in the right direction and burning hard. But burn hard she did, the fusion drive that served as her power system and her propulsion in equal measures cutting a brilliant line of heat and radiation through space. Other ships watched, from their lonely distance.
But no one launched a missile or even sent a query. There was no point, not while the vast farmlands of Earth burned, and the United Nations were calculating the dead by the methane their rotting corpses were creating in the atmosphere. The whole solar system was numb – and for Captain Yeung, it had all narrowed down to this moment, this singular burn.
And five days later, with another equally powerful burn depleting their fuel, and their stomachs growling with hunger, their water rations feeling like lead weights in their bellies, the bridge crtew of the Hope gaped at the screens of their bridge...and at the Blip. Searchlights beamed from the forward turrets of the Hope, jerry rigged up for no one had ever once imagined that they would need to shine this much plain and simple light and swivel it around. Because despite the radar being aimed directly at the immense wall of black material, the Blip remained elusive on every scanner they had, save for purely visual. It drank radar reflections, it swallowed thermal emissions, it seemed invisible to everything save the brilliant white light that swept along the vast, almost rocklike hull.
But…
It was a hull.
The Blip was a starship. But it was also a floating field of debris. The rocky chunk that the Hope was aiming its lights at was surrounded by an expanding field of dark, cold debris. Long coiling whips of metal and fabric, shimmering tubes of blue-white glass, things that radiated enough hard gamma that they were probably being picked up by whatever survived in CENTCOM back on Luna. The debris were spreading around the rocky central hull, which itself, looked to be a tiny fraction of the fifty kilometers that they had detected two months ago. Yeung thought that, maybe, he should have been curious about all the vital scientific data humanity had missed while their telescopes had been aimed at one another and not here.
Instead?
“Think they have food?” Hurly whispered.
The rock that their ship floated before bisected. A thin blue line spread and opened, bit by bit by bit, until the Hope was hovering before a huge, empty space. There was a hemisphere of metal that looked, for all the world, like a landing platform. Their ship had never been designed to land – but the invitation was clear. Yeung nodded and spoke. “Anyone who doesn’t want to come can stay aboard the ship...but...at the moment, we have no protocols, no regulations. Our navy is a pile of scrap, our commanders are either atomic cinders or hiding in bunkers on Mars and Earth. I am going to take a shuttle here...and I am going to see what we can find.”
Hurly and Williams both nodded. The security officer, Chang, flashed a huge grin. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world, Cap.”
In the end, the entire thirty six human crew of the Hope Of A Common Humanity boarded the three shuttles – one was normally robotic and used purely to transport freight, and was able to carry sixteen crew by dint of them reprogramming its flight speeds and safety tolerances while wearing vac-suits. But they all came into the alien ship and landed upon the shelf of metal. The rock closed behind them, sealing the shuttle into the immense hemispherical chamber, locking them in with the pale blue glow that suffused it.
Captain Yeung, for his part, half expected there to be gravity. But, no, it seemed that some things remained constant. The only gravitational force that existed came from mass, acceleration, or could be faked by rotation. He felt faintly comforted by it.
Williams and Hurly were more focused on everything the shuttle’s suite of sensors could give them. “The outside atmosphere...captain!” Hurly sounded dizzy with excitement. “It’s nitrogen-O2, it’s breathable. Fuck! It’s more breathable than Earth!”
That old spacer’s joke landed with the weight of a dead bird. Hurly winced as everyone in the shuttle glowered at him.
“I can step out the door,” Chang said, her voice firm, her hand dropping to her sidearm.
“No,” Captain Yeung said. “I’m starving. I want this over with.”
He shuffled past his crew, to the airlock, and shut the door before any of them did much more than rouse themselves slightly – their fatigue was clear, their exhaustion. He felt the gnawing, biting sensation in his stomach. He was running entirely on vitamin pills, water, and his own bodily fat reserves. He was pretty sure that he would look utterly hellish, if he looked at himself naked in the mirror.
He stepped from the shuttle, his helmet in his hands, and looked slowly around himself. The air smelled antiseptic and familiar all at once – like stepping out into so many space stations and habitats throughout the solar system. It was funny, he felt almost offended. An alien starship should be...grander. He pursed his lips, then called out, first in Hindi, then in English. “Hello? Hello?”
Silence.
He turned slowly around himself. “I...I come in peace.”
Peace.
Peace. The word almost choked him. When had humanity ever come in peace? The ancient explorers of the Earth had come to new continents to find plunder and rapine. They had raped the land and their people, slaughtering the weak and the helpless for gold and silver, then rubber and spices, then for petroleum and uranium. They had then taken to space...and had they gone to space for peaceful reasons? No. His lips turned as he remembered the once mildly charming fact that early space programs had been more invested in to place ICBMs more accurately – they had militarized space as quickly as they had turned oceans into battlefields. And now the entire human race had immolated itself, leaving ashes and scrap in a dying solar system and a few tin cans.
The soft hissing sound of a door opening jerked his gaze around.
The door was human sized and placed in the wall opposite him. A brilliant light shone from it – and floating in the doorway was a silhouette, their outline hard to distinguish.
Yeung realized, at that moment, that he was looking at an alien.
First contact.
Somehow, the only thing he could think about was how hungry he was. How scared. How hurt. How angry. His hands tightened and he watched as the figure stood there, watching him, invisible and unknowable. Irrational annoyance mounted, and finally, Yeung said: “Well!?”
If he had not been so hungry, he might have been more struck by awe. But, as history would prove, that annoyed well had been the exact thing required to push things forward. With a jolt, the figure kicked off the floor and drifted forward. The light faded and Yeung found himself stunned to see that he was looking at a girl.
The thought that can’t be a girl, they’re an alien was completely eclipsed by how very much a girl they were. Feminine cheeks, curvy form, hips, they were a human girl in all gross details, with the specifics only working to enhance the sensation. She had long, pointed ears with subtle serrations to them, almost as if she had bat-wings for ears rather than the normal curve that a human might. She had a tail. It was long and tipped by a narrow spade, like that of a classic demon. Her eyes had a lantern bright glow them, like a cat catching the reflection of a porch light in the shadows of evening, and they were colored brilliant gold and black. Her skin was a shimmering, glossy green and her hair, which was tied back into a very human pony tale, was pale white.
She reached out and brought herself to a stop by placing her hand against Yeung’s chest.
Her eyes widened and she gaped at him.
He gaped at her.
For Captain Yeung, he had never truly fallen in love. He had had a few harbor flings, the occasional tumble with a fellow officer – but focused on his career and insulated by his command position, his heart had been kept hard and focused for years.
For Yerla, whose name would also be quite famous, she had thought she had been in love. After all, what Devonian hadn’t been in love? Growing up on a ship with fifty thousand refugees and carefully mandated crossings and managed family planning, love was something that happened quite often and by design.
But neither of them had felt anything like this.
“H-Hey,” Yeung whispered.
“Koi?” Yerla said. Which was the Devonian language she spoke’s version of ‘hey.’ And said in the exact same tone.
But the Great Miracle wasn’t that a captain and a xenoanthropologist fell in love at first sight at the end of the Long Night – as the era was called before Terrans and Devonian met. The Great Miracle was that every single member of the Hope fell in love with a particular Devonian by the end of the day – and it wasn’t just because Devonian food was delicious.
It was why, from then on, humanity had a new definition.
And the solar system had a new future.
***
Two Hundred Years Later
***
Leo had obliterated the sixteenth consecutive wave of evil, slavery aliens over the past hour – and he was feeling pretty proud of himself. Tiny traceries of plasma fire zipped and popped across the battlefield, and each line that intersected with a snarling xenobeast produced a huge explosion of gore, colors, and brilliant numbers – 112, 110, 130, and then once, a huge flashing gold and red 245! which meant it was a critical hit. He grinned and tapped a few more times.
“Leo Tangent.”
Leo frowned. Had someone-
He jerked his head up.
Professor Xarkis was glowering at him from where she stood at the front of the class, her pointer aimed at the shimmering diagram of the Arcship. Her ears were perked up and twitching and Leo reached up to adjust his nose filters, sitting up slightly.
“Uh…” he said.
“You are a senior,” Xarkis said, walking forward, her tail lashing behind her back. She snatched his terminal off the desk, looked at it, pursed her lips and shot him a somewhat wry look. “That doesn’t mean you get to completely slack off in history class.”
A few other students snickered and Leo heard a voice hissing behind him. “He’s still single.”
“I heard he dates a human girl.”
“Class,” Xarkis said, firmly. “Leo is doing his best. Right, Leo?” She smiled at him – and he smiled back sheepishly. It wasn’t just that class was boring. Though. It was. It wasn’t like the history aboard the Arc was actually important. It had been all Devi history, not Terran history, and everyone lived in the Terran solar system, so...he shook his head and forced the jumbling scattered thoughts that were buzzing around his head to focus. Or. Well. To kind of focus.
“Right,” she said.
Xarkis sighed, then leaned over, whispering. “Do you need to see the nurse?”
Leo blushed. “No, I’m good,” he said, nodding. The current dosage he was on for his disorder was good. He was also pretty sure he had taken his-
Oh.
Wait.
Right.
Shit.
His cheeks heated as Miss Xarkis walked to the front of the class. She pointed back at the Arcship, and continued to speak. “Now, on the second generation of the voyage, the initial xhum of the Devonian people had somewhat broken down, can anyone tell me why?”
A devi girl named Talla thrust her hand up, while her girlfriend, Melissa, giggled and squeezed her hand. “Oh! Oh! Me! Me! Me! I know!”
Not for the first time, Leo felt...a little…
Was creeped out the right word? It felt really backwards to say it. But it was frigging weird. It was weird! Talla had, for the entire time that Leo had known her, not just shy and slow, but...kinda...he didn’t want to say stupid. But she had never been so peppy and immediately eager to ask and answer questions. And you could have the explanation told to you a million times, that didn’t change the fact it was weird weird weird. And it was weirder still how no one else seemed to think it was weird. Leo fidgeted in his seat as Talla laid out the entire set of issues – how the governmental structure of pre-first contact Devonian cultures had been built around deliberation and debate to a crippling degree, how they were terrible at making actual decisions, and how the immediate and catastrophic faults in the generation ship that had carried them away from their home, Devona had forced the xhum to collapse and for the one in a million Devonian who had actual get up and go to take charge and institute the blah blah blah blah blah.
Leo found that he already had his terminal out again. He shoved it back under his desk and tried to focus. He really did.
Fortunately, the bell rang and history class broke for the moment. As Leo sprang to his feet, Miss Xarkis held up her hand, her tail twitching up authoritatively as well. “Mr. Tangent, stay for a moment,” she said.
Leo blushed and walked over. He hunched slightly, sure that she was going to lecture him about his terminal. Instead, she asked: “Have you, uh...you decided when you’re going to take off those nose filters?”
Leo’s cheeks flushed even harder. “Uh, what do you mean?” he asked.
“I…” Xarkis sighed. “I’m your teacher, and these are personal things that all humans have to go through around your age, and every family is different. But most people don’t wear nose filters through their entire high school career and I just wanted to make sure that...if your family...is...conservative, you can talk about it with me, I just wanted you to know that.”
Leo’s eyes widened. “Oh! Whoa! No! No! My parents are in a quad!” he exclaimed.
“Oh!” Xarkis laughed, holding up her hands. “Sorry, just, I’ve had students from religious families who have a hard time and I didn’t want see you suffering.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay!” Leo said, blushing and hoping-
“Why do you wear nose filters then?” Miss Xarkis asked, casually, turning back to her lecture board to start wiping it off.
“Um...reasons!” Leo turned and darted out of the room before she could ask anything more.
***
Reasons greeted Leo in the bathroom that everyone knew was for hookups. She greeted him with a warm kiss and a soft sigh, her arms looped around his neck. Leo’s eyes closed and he tilted his head to the side, leaning into Gillian as her slender body pressed to his. His heart thumped in his breast, and when he drew back, he whispered. “Gods, I love you, Gill,” he said.
She laughed. “Really? I never would have guessed,” she said, her voice teasing. She had already scissored her legs around his hips, ankles hooked over his rump. Which was, again, a big part of why he loved her – she wa...she was...really...really...really eager.
“So, uh, think we can tell your parents about us?” Leo asked, quietly, his hand reaching up to plant itself above her mirror.
She snorted. “What, and wait an hour for the response?” she asked, shaking her head. “My parents are still at Olympia City.” Her eyes glittered. “Which means my apartment is still emptyyyyy!”
“Pff!” Leo said. “My parents don’t care if we screw so long as we wear condoms.”
“Yeah, but…” Gillian paused.
She and he reflected on that yeah but. The yeah but was two hundred years of culture and history bearing down on their love like a freight train. One of the earliest memories that Leo had was when he had asked why one Mom had a tail and other Mom didn’t. Dad had explained it like so: Terrans and Devonians got along very well. Without Terrans, Devonians had a hard time thinking fast or making decisions. It was why their history was five hundred thousand years long, and yet had approximately the same level of advancement as humanity had in twenty thousand. Meanwhile, without Devonians, Terrans were…
Argumentative. That was what Dad had used to describe it.
Later in life, Leo had seen the shining craters, explored the Euroasian Wasteland, and visited the reclamation projects. And he got it. He understood why the Human Union worked. Basically, the Devi’s Arcship hadn’t worked. They had managed to punt themselves to a fraction of C, coast for three centuries or so, and finally slowed themselves down with magnetic coils and the plasma wind of the sun. They had kicked on the last little deceleration with a spurt of pure antimatter, burning up more antimatter than the entire Terran race had made in their space-fairing history in a single hour. But they had messed up their math. They had come to a stop agonizingly close to Earth, in the grand scheme of things, but far enough away that they would have all starved to death on the much reduced remains of their Arcship.
But that spurt of exhaust had been mistaken by a human fleet as an atomic attack from one of their human enemies, and so humanity had promptly exploded themselves in the Five Minute War – but the survivors had all been the guys in spaceships – spaceships that could carry the fifty thousand Devis to Mars and to Earth orbit. And there, the Union had been founded. Devi terraforming had rebuilt the Earth’s ecosystem – admittedly, with a lot of damage left to fix – and the Union had boasted the single longest unbroken period of peace in human history.
But…
That was just it.
Leo didn’t want to fall in love with a Devonian girl. He didn’t want his hormones to get diddled by alien pheromones, he didn’t want to change. He was in love with Gillian! He wanted to be himself. And everyone acted like he was stupid for even saying it. Or, worse. They didn’t even get what he meant when he tried to explain it. Least of all his parents.
Gillian shook her head, then sighed. “My parents won’t get it,” she said, her voice a bit sad. “But they also don’t have too.” She lifted her chin. “I signed up.”
Leo blinked. He drew back slightly, his hands sliding from the mirror to her shoulders to her hips – she was propped up on the sink, her back resting against the mirror, with the faucet having smoothly retracted in the wall. The sink could react too, to make up extra room in the bathroom, but a certain adorable girl was keeping it from doing so with her body weight.
“You signed up?” he asked.
“For the Union Navy,” she said, grinning.
“The Union Navy? You want to become an astro?”
Gillian blushed and nodded. “Yeah!” she said. “You can sign up too! You’re crazy good at math when you’re medicated, and you’re ripped as hell. You’re perfect for the HUN!”
“What would I ever do in the Navy?” Leo asked, blinking dizzily. He had not really thought much about what he was going to do after school ended – in two, three months, he was going to be out of high school and...well, he had kinda planned on going to college and picking a degree. With Gillian.
Gillian’s brow furrowed. “Why do you want to join the only service in the solar system where you fly atomic rockets and get to blow shit up?” she asked, excitedly.
“Blow up who? There hasn’t been a declared war in two centuries!” Leo said, laughing and shaking his head. Gillian rolled her eyes.
“Rocks,” she said.
“Rocks.”
“And the concept of being stranded in space,” she said, firmly.
“The Union Navy does not blow up the concept of being stranded in space, they do S&R operations, that’s not blowing anything up,” Leo said, huffing slightly. His girlfriend tightened her legs more, grinning wickedly.
“You get to shoot guns in training exercises!” she said, in a sing song. “You get to blow up faaaake things.”
“I can play video games at home,” Leo said. But...he had to admit. There were two big appeals to thinking about signing up to the Human Union Navy. The first was, as Gillian had pointed out...flying around atomic rockets. Yes, there hadn’t been a war in two centuries and the HUN was pretty much entirely dedicated to exploration and patrol services, with maybe...maybe a pirate action or two somewhere out there. But there was definitely an appeal to rocketry. And...it would get him a chance to get out and see the solar system without breaking the bank. He chewed his lower lip, thinking.
Also, Gillian’s there.
“You look tempted,” she whispered.
“It’s a terrible idea to join the navy because a girl dared you to do it,” Leo said, his voice amused.
“No it’s not,” Gillian said, then reached up, her hands gently tangling through his hair, drawing him down. Their kiss was long and eager – and continued, even as a hammering palm slapped against the door.
“Put on your pants in there!” It was one of Leo’s friends, Arjun, calling through the door. “Lunch is almost over!”
Gillian broke the kiss, turning her head. “Fuck off, Arjun!”
The bell rang.
“Arjun does not tell a lie,” Arjun called through the door. “Arjun is deeply offended.”
“Stop with the fake ass New England accent too!”
Despite her words, Gillian did unhook her ankles from around Leo’s rump and pushed him away. He felt an almost physical pain at being separated from her and he could practically hear his condoms squeaking to him from his backpack – use me! Unfurl me! Plunge into your girlfriend’s waiting-
The door opened and Arjun threw his arm around Leo, drawing him away from Gillian with a grin. “We have some PT!” he said. “See you later, Gill.”
“Later Arjun,” she said, waving. “And remember what I said. See the universe. Blow shit up!”
“What was that about?” Arjun asked, drawing his arm away from Leo as Leo took out his terminal, tapping on it with his thumb.
“Gillian’s thinking about joining the spacy,” Leo said, somewhat distractedly. He had thought that the Union Navy had, once or twice, fought pirates and he was pretty curious about it. He tapped at his terminal, his thumb swiping left, right, up, down as he started to navigate through options and type in words – the auto correct managing to finish half his sentences in twice the time it would have taken to simply use his other hand.
“...the spacy?”
“Space navy. Spacy,” Leo said, frowning. Huh! It seemed the Union Navy had, at least once this year, done a hostage rescue operation. Something called the New Humanity Movement had hijacked a liner, taken every Devi off it and had threatened to starte...oough. Executing them. He shook his head. “What kind of an asshole would-”
He rounded the corner and slammed into something slender and light. Despite the fact he outmassed whatever he had hit by a significant degree, he still ended up tripping over something slender and snakelike that coiled instinctively around one of his ankles, even as he tossed his terminal up into the into the air and tried to catch whoever he had run into. But he hit the ground instead, skidding as his backpack split open along a zipper, scattering papers and binders everywhere, while Arjun let out a soft ‘ooohh, ouch!’ as he watched them sprawl there.
Leo pushed his arm under him, propping himself up and saw that he had run into a Devi. She was slender and blue – a light, icy blue like the water around the ice caps. Like that water, her skin was speckled with tiny golden glints, as if she was reflective water. They were freckles. Devonian freckles. Her ears had a red tint to their edges and their ridges were darker blue and they connected smoothly to her head, framed by dark, dark red hair that tumbled around her face, while her lantern bright eyes were, like most Devonians, a curious mixture of gold and black, reflective and shimmering like a cats. Looking into those eyes, Leo felt his heart lump in his chest – and the buzzing uncertainty and the disconnect in his brain felt like it had just...snapped into place.
He could just…
Do stuff.
Stuff like…
“Hey,” he whispered.
“Hey,” she said, quietly. “Take a picture, it lasts longer.” Her sharp teeth flashed and she bit her lower lip.
“Hey, everyone! Everyone!” Arjun called out, excitedly. “Leo’s bonding! Leo’s bonding!”
No, that’s stupid, I have nose filters, Leo thought as he found he couldn’t look away from the devi girl, his smile widening more and more.
“...oh shit, Leo is bonding…” Arjun whispered, while other students hurried over, some of them pulling out their terminals to snap pictures, giggling and laughing to one another. Leo blinked, then lifted his head.
“I’m not bonding!” He exclaimed, then stood up, taking the devi girl’s arm in his, hauling her to her feet, her tail snaking around his inner thigh and squeezing against him as she leaned in to nuzzle against his neck, shivering.
“Yeah, yeah, why would they ever think we’re bonding, while you’re holding my hand like that,” she said, her voice still playfully sarcastic. “So, anyone want to loudly announce my name so he can learn it, or...should…” She leaned in and whispered in ear, sending an electric jolt up his back. “...Midnight.”
Leo had once watched his girlfriend, Gillian, do a strip tease to the song Tearing Up Those Rats by Kinetic Bolide. It had been, quite possibly, the most erotic thing in his entire life. Right up until this moment. Midnight. Wow. He was in love with Midnight. Midnight the Devonian. Midnight. What a name. Midnight. Wow. Okay. Wow. He...he…
His hand lifted to his nose – but his eyes had already spotted the nose filters he wore.
Laying right over there.
Oh.
Oh no.
“So, uh, should we go somewhere private to talk?” Midnight asked.
“Yes no! No! Yes! That is, uh...uh…” Leo shoved her away from him. It was a single spastic movement, a convulsion that hurt almost as much as slamming his knee deliberately into the wall. He turned and he ran, as fast as he could, forgetting his backpack and his nose plugs and even his terminal. He simply fled, his heart hammering in his chest. He rushed past several students, ducked past a confused looking teacher, then rushed out the front doors of the school and into the blinding brilliance of the sun shining down on the park-like downtown of Neo Frisco. He turned and started to run down the sidewalk, his jaw tight, his heart punching against his ribcage.
No. No. No! I’m not bonding! He thought, fiercely. But now that the immediate rush of being near Midnight was past, he found it harder and harder to deny it – because, well, the rush wasn’t fading. The exposure to her had poured into his brain and started to change him. He slowed, gasping, after he couldn’t run any farther. He fell half forward, putting his hands onto his knees, his head ducked forward. He gasped heavily, his eyes half closed, sweat pouring down his cheeks, dripping off his chin.
“Fuck,” he whispered.
“Are you all right?”
He looked up. A devonian man was walking down the street with a pair of big bushy purple dogs on a leash, who walked over and started to sniff at Leo’s shoes. Leo sniffed and shook his head. “No,” he said, unable to stop himself.
The man’s ears tilted down in that unique devi way, his tail pausing in its slow lashing. “Do you want to talk about it?” He asked, taking a seat at one of the benches that were pretty standard on Neo Frisco’s streets. A few auto-cars puttered by on the roads, while in the distance, the rumble of trains and suborbital launches both echoed across the city’s soundscape. Leo thumped down onto the bench, wheezing softly – and despite the jumble in his brains, despite the tears beading at the corner of his eyes...he was still having an easier time thinking coherently than he normally did on his pills.
The devi paused. “Human break up?” he asked, sympathetically, his tail coiling around the park bench, while his dogs started to sit down and sniff more at Leo’s shoes.
Leo nodded, mutely.
The devi man sighed. “That’s hard,” he said, shaking his head. “You know, I’ve had a break up or two in my life, and as scary as they seem, they’re not that bad.” He smiled, warmly. “Not bad enough to run that fast, like you’re being chased by a Leafari.”
Leo blushed, hard. “W-Was I really that panicky looking?”
The devi man grinned at him. “A little,” he said, holding up two purple fingers, indicating with a very human gesture just how close it was. A human gesture. Leo reflected on how human these days meant terran and it meant devonian – the two races had been unified for two centuries now, and he was only now wondering which of them had come up with ‘use tiny space between fingers to indicate the amount of something’ first. Or had both of them come up? Both had invented using a middle finger to insult people, he knew that.
“Wait, devonians break up? I thought-” Leo stopped. “You were dating other devonians.”
The man nodded. “Yup,” he said.
“I don’t want to break up with my girlfriend, though,” Leo said, quietly. He realized he was speaking more to himself than to this kind stranger, but he kept going. “I don’t want to be a...a tiny fling, like, people treat terran on terran relationships like they’re silly little childhood crushes you get over. But this thing with Gillian and me, it’s real!”
The man nodded. “Sounds to me like you have to go and talk to your girlfriend and your bonded.” He hesitated. “At the end of the day, we humans get along best when we don’t just rely on the biological. We use our words too.” He grinned. “...now, uh, you should probably get back to school before you’re declared truant.”
“Yeah. Thanks.” Leo sniffed. “Um. Who are you?”
“A random guy walking his dog,” the man said, then grinned. “I’m Terrka. And I’ve run into this kind of thing before – but...from the other end. So, next time you see someone upset, ask em whats wrong.”
“I will,” Leo said. “Leo.” He held his hand out and Terrka took it, shaking it. The funny thing, now that he wasn’t wearing his nose filters, Leo felt...the same sense of calmness and contentedness that he had felt while cuddling up to Midnight. He knew, faintly that bonding required specific chemical interactions created between specific individuals – there were, of course, lots of complications and weird finicky bits, but...the practical upshot was that there was one or two devonian for every terran, and vice versa. But every terran and every devonian had a lesser effect on the other...and…
It really was positive.
He smiled, wryly. “Thanks,” he said.
“Think nothing of it,” Terrka said – then waved as Leo turned and headed back to school. When he got there, he found that his job was made immeasurably easier and infinitely harder – because Gillian and Midnight were standing out front, glaring at one another, and looking ready to start the first war in two centuries. Over him.
Great.