Horizon | Iera System | Shadow Sea | 2180
(Definition of terms at the end of the chapter)
The hard plastic of the seat under her slams into her when the shuttle hits a pocket of dense air. Kelsey tries not to look outside at the orange plume of flame outside the kinetic barrier, or to wonder if the hairline crack in the seat across from her is indicative of how well they take care of the engines, or...
WHAM!
"Did we just hit a rock?" Nina snarls, reaching up to rub her crests with a massive hand. "Do rocks float here?"
"Not at this altitude," Trini whispers back. "Highest recorded eezo-levitation incident wa-mmph!"
Kelsey claps a hand over what looks like thin air. In her annoyance, Trini's camouflage fades for a moment, and what looks like the faintest outline of a human woman-bald, hairless, and lushly curved-flickers into view for an instant.
"Shh..." Nina reminds Trini.
All of Nina's specialness is swallowed up by the fact that asari don't usually hit ten feet tall, so she can pass through a crowd without alarm-just a lot of stares-because all her obvious hybrid traits hide in plain sight. Huge eyes, silver irises with tiny gold eyes lurking within like the gears in a fine watch. Dark, wet tips on the pads of long, quick fingers, the spooky black frills and fronds hidden under larger-than-normal scales on her arm, neck, and head. Longer and thicker crests don't look strange in the scheme of things. Nina looks asari, and the way that she is around Kelsey now that Kelsey's pregnant-with hers, free to run away together-means that no one wants to get within reach of her biotics, let alone her arms.
So it was Trini they had to hide. Trini's almost right, but the deep, wet, glimmering fissures on her bare head don't look like a human feature, just a bit longer, thicker, or bigger. When she's stressed-or horny-they weep like any asari's would and after the lady at a terminal on Knossos called a medic because she assumed Trini was bleeding, they didn't have much choice. She's kept her hand around Kelsey's waist-thank God for modern maternity fashion-so that she's present even when she's invisible. The day-in, day-out practice Trini has gotten with her camouflage has led to giggly, stupid, clumsy sex in freighter cabins, with her trying to make a smiley face appear on her back to crack them up and Kelsey watching Nina try to distract Trini with her tongue, while curling a big hand around her thigh to share orgasms that Kelsey's swollen body was too sore to chase.
Nina's height has forced her to double over, her head wedged against the shuttles' roof which has less padding than the seats. And the seat's cushion is so hard-used it's formed to the plastic and no softer.
She doesn't have to say it-you think you're uncomfortable?-because she's got the worst of it. They've kept Kelsey almost weightless since the tramp freighter kicked the shuttle loose, juggling her between their biotics and wrapping her in stasis for the worst of it. Trini's got her hand on the back of Kelsey's neck, leaning hard into a meld and playing the greatest hits of the trio's sex life to distract Kelsey, softening her fear of flight and any effects it might have on their little bundle of joy slash being of unknown destructive power.
The sign on the boarding ramp said that this shuttle was not meant for Type III passengers-krogan, elcor, morbidly obese hanar-and while Nina's light enough for her size that the pilot agreed to look the other way about a ten-foot-even asari with biceps half the width of his ribcage, he couldn't do much for her comfort.
Another, smaller bump has Kelsey wincing as the baby registers her complaint with a swift kick. Babies? They didn't dare go to a clinic for an ultrasound, but she'd like to keep it to two or ideally just the oneā¦
She has no idea what's happening in her dreams, every night, when shapeless, quiet presences follow her around or in the daytime, when a flash of warm, wet calm blots out her own senses when the child wakes up and decides her womb is comfy and proceeds to bombard her brain with that fact.
At least she's close. The pregnancy split the difference between asari and human at fifteen months-hopefully, please, Jesus, Mary and Joseph please-or so that walking espresso of a salarian doctor estimated. If it goes more than a month over, she'll strangle him.
"Oof!"
The pilot leans back far enough to speak through the cockpit's open door.
"You said you were here for that teaching job?"
"Yeah!" Kelsey hollers. "Went to college too long, decided to see the sights!"
Hopped a red-eye to see a movie I could've seen at home. Got drunk, got laid, got sober, got drunk, got dosed in a bathroom on Mars and abducted by aliens... Crap. That woman is still waiting for me to bring her Jack and Coke!
Woke up on that station, put in line for 'quality control use'...lucked out. Ended up on a rotation with these two and then all hell broke loose before they could move me along the line.
Most of the other human women-all the women there-had it worse. Kelsey and two others were late abductees meant to test 'blank slate' situations. As a bit of knife-twisting from the matriarch revealed, salarians weren't sure if a past male partner's sperm affected future offspring, like it does in krogan females. So they hit up lesbian bars on Mars and listened in.
Clean Test 1, her collar's tag read. She never heard about the other two. The gals-all of them-probably need a yearly meet up for the whole mess. Anyone who wants can come cry it out. Someone can bring wine and someone else can bring ice cream.
After the breakout, she got an idea of what was going on outside her cell. The women who had spent years there jumped at tiny noises and were so far gone into the thousand-yard stare and paranoia that some preferred being talked to from the side so they could see forward.
"Sounds like you could do bigger and better!" the pilot jokes. "No offense!"
"Figured I needed a fresh start. Not too many teachers like me anywhere but Earth, maybe Mars. Spread the wealth."
"Planet needs 'em, God knows. Smaller towns just try to keep count. Be good for Horizon to have its own schools!"
"Sorry about the chop! Comes with the rain! Can't farm on a planet with a smooth ride! You all right, ma'am?"
Kelsey nods.
"Yeah. I'm fine. Just..."
She chuckles.
"...little miss does not like re-entry."
"Ah, who does? Don't worry. We'll have dirt underfoot in five, maybe six minutes. Kids deserve dirt, y'know?"
A burst of dark energy ripples outwards from her belly, making alarms ring all over the cockpit. The pilot turns around, stares at the source of the problem, and slams his hand on a large red button between his seat and the co-pilot's. Whatever smoothness the ride had offered before is gone, the audio emulators are roaring-or is that the engines?-and the pilot has dismissed the holo controls in favor of honest-to-God joysticks, dials and throttles underneath.
The pilot curses in Cantonese, Russian, and French in rapid succession.
"She really doesn't, huh? Wish you'd told me she was a biotic!" He calls out. "Plays all sorts of he-MMM!"
He winces, forces a smile, and tries again.
"These old boats aren't hardened for that. Greta's the first brick we humans made, geosync over Detroit. Keel went down six weeks after the War. We still thought biotics was something you put in yogurt," he jokes, patting the console.
"Refinanced. Fixed Greta up as best I could so I could take passengers. She's good for the big five: Life support, engines and stardrive, inertials, barriers, controls. But I'm not made of money. That just brained the flight VI and then skewed the secondary inertial dampener."
"Do this the old-fashioned way..." he mutters.
"Calling Horizon Control. This is Golf-Romeo-Echo-Tango-Alpha, tagged cargo shuttle Five-Two off the MSV Farsider, calling Horizon Control. We're a brick running seed, fuel cells, parts and passengers to Pilgrim's Pride. Somebody dropped a sparkler, and I lost the lace and garters. I need a soft skid for a manual touchdown, over."
"Received, Greta. Welcome back. Patching the Farsider in for orbit-side readings. We have you. Making a splash on the nearest dirt. Red smoke. I repeat, the smoke is red. Forty-one clicks north of Transponder India Eight, twenty-two east. That is four-one-N, two-two-E of I-8. Spot and confirm."
"Stand by...visual confirmed and iron sights dialed in. Much appreciated, Horizon."
"Two minutes! Belts on!" he shouts back.
I am not going to die in this shuttle!
Her lovers pick up the thought through the meld-Nina must have joined in-and two stasis fields form to her skin. Half a dozen rough-edged bubble barriers sprout like puffball mushrooms. Some are Trini's-oily-looking black unlike any other biotics-and some Nina's, the typical silver-blue but thick and when she pushes hard like this, opaque as paint.
Heaven buzzes.
"Shoo."
Heaven also says 'shoo' apparently.
"You know, I usually don't run passengers for free. Or if they're naked."
Kelsey opens one eye, cautiously, certain she's going to see Saint Peter waving a shock-stick at her and telling her to put her boobs back into her dress.
A rainbow-splashed dragonfly-ish thing the length of her goddamned arm is hovering in front of her face.
"Go away," she whispers. "Please?"
It flits curiously around the passenger compartment, smacks its armored beak into the plastic-covered snack bar, hovers over the trash, and lowers a slimy, frilly not going to think about it into the bag before eventually deciding the apple core in the cockpit is all it'll get. It snags it and flies out past the pilot who barely flinches.
Trini is wriggling into a long T-shirt out of their upended luggage. Nina is covering her giggling with the back of her hand.
"Nicholas, right?" Kelsey croaks.
He laughs.
"Nash. Folks never think I look like a Nash." He snaps his fingers. "Knew I should've bought that cowboy hat!"
"Three thousand credits enough for you to not report us?"
"Let's just say I'm waiting for an explanation, for the time being."
"Go ahead, run our IDs again. We're clean. Some people after her," she gestures at Trini. "Aren't. Time to put down roots, obviously."
He jerks to the side and spatters a tiny-but apparently far worse-bug against the hull with a heavily-scuffed, positively antique datapad.
"That was close," he mutters.
"Obviously. Thought you were gonna pop on the way down. My copilot's better at in-flight first aid but she's out with her own right now. So kid brother's gotta pick up the slack."
Kelsey puffs. There are definitely two babies, because she's excited and terrified and relieved right now and she's barely managing to be relieved on her own. They've gone back to old-fashioned tumbling around and physically bumping into her insides.
She gestures between herself, Nina and Trini, opening and closing her mouth.
"Obviously, we..."
He smiles.
"That part, I got. It's nearly the 2180s, right? Family's whoever you let in at two in the morning. Simple as that. It's the fact that rather than a third ticket, there's a naked person in the next seat over. I'm having a hard time getting my hard old head around that."
"Figured a colony that kept to itself was best. Not too big, not too small. Not corporate, so it isn't crooked. Ad said Horizon needed a teacher and I've been around. Learned early that Mormons stick together but you end up with a three-road town with missionaries and kids that speak nine languages. I'm a good fit."
Nash chews on the inside of his cheek for a moment.
"And you figured Asari-zilla here would be spooky enough to keep anyone in spaceports and customs from getting too close. And whoever's up your collective butts is after Miss Tricky here, not either of you two."
"Exactly," Trini interjects. "No one sees me, no one has a reason to risk tangling with Nina to double-check."
"NINA?"
"Why does that seem so odd to everyone?" she grumbles.
"Never mind this old man. Don't get out of my chair much. Not up on what the popular names for baby girls were a hundred and fifty years ago on Thessia."
"And civilian cloaking suits are expensive," Trini huffs. "Some batteries and holo-circuit latex paint from a costume store, not so much."
He raises a spray-painted metal mug with 'touchdown beer' written on it using smudge sticks for a map board. He brings it halfway to his lips and then stops.
"Aw, he-MMM! Don't let her hang around pilots. We swear too much. Aw, heck. That's why you two each tipped sixty-five percent, isn't it? Three passengers, standard ten percent."
"We're not thieves," Trini chortles.
Nash takes a big sip of his beer.
"...And would you look at that? Now I'm not sober enough to take off. Thank God and contract lawyers for mechanical failure clauses and early delivery bonuses. Pervert who hired me will have to come get the cargo here and pay for the privilege. Hundred and ten credits, ladies. Not that I'd sell you out. Not on my life. But I do need to pay the fee for hosing Greta off after an unexpected splat like this and I didn't get a story I could tell anyone. So let's split it fifty-fifty?"
"Deal."
Nash taps his omni-tool to answer a pending call. Before he can speak, the volus does.
"Earth-clan! Love-hiss!-ly to he-hiss! hear from hiss! you. Looking for-hiss!-ward to your juic-hiss!"
"See?" he whispers, hand covering the mic.
"Take the peaches," he adds, nodding at the snack tray. "Won't be good by the time I take off."
"Mala!" he chortles. "How the heck are you?"
Kelsey waddles out of the kitchen, kept upright by Trini's powerful arm. This part of the colony was founded by Californian and Utahan members of the Church of Latter-Day saints and a few of their neighbors. This meant that in addition to veritable swarms of children for Kelsey to teach-and amateur teachers-in-training who desperately need a degreed mentor-there were multiple tourist-trap kiosks that sold cowboy hats, which quickly provided Trini her disguise. And their first tourist, judging by the discount.
"So that was the kitchen. We have the master bedroom upstairs, three children's bedrooms, two bathrooms. Since you're an educator, let's call that space downstairs a study. And this is the parlor."
"Huh," Nina muses, casting her eyes upwards at a ceiling that she is not colliding with-a rare luxury for her-and grinning.
"Trini?" Nina asks.
"How wonderful that you're staying here with your best friend!" the realtor gushes. "I take it the father..."
She trails off.
"Hmm?"
"Oh, that dreadful attack on Terra Nova last month. You mentioned a lump sum payment. More than a few widows cash out into the colonies to keep the legacy safe."
"Not exactly. But he is no longer with us."
Little salarian fucker deserved it. Glad he bled before the reactor blew.
"Ah! Well! Our community welcomes all. We do have a multi-faith worship space across from Temple, and besides that limitation, all residents can visit any municipal building!"
I think I had a singing greeting card as plastic and insincere as her once...
Trini changes her grip on Kelsey's hand and deepens the meld.
Twelve o'clock, Kels. Wooden cabin across the empty lot.
Yeah?
Eezo-reflective paint. Invisible to non-biotics without an omni-tool program. Pride Flag.
"We'll take it," she and Kelsey say at once, synced up by the meld.
"Splendid. And, ah..your other roommate..."
Your poor thing, Kelsey thinks. I am going to short circuit your brain.
Despite the fact that moving nearly tips her over and leaning is a terrible idea right now, Kelsey manages to get her hand around Nina's hip.
"Nina will be staying with her daughter and both her bond-mates."
Grinning like a shark, Trini taps on her omni-tool and the banking program 'chings!' with the transfer of funds from Mordin's anonymous account.
"We'll expect the deed by courier," she purrs. "Electronic, hard copy, and read-only data storage."
"Ah, yes. Of course. Welcome!"
The realtor turns to flee and Kelsey jerks her head at Trini, who slams the front door shut with her biotics-that slippery black must look like the devil's fingertips to this woman-before dropping a charcoal gray barrier across the foyer.
"I'm not going to hurt you," Kelsey promises. "But we are having a little chat because I've been here before, with people like you. And this time, it's going to go differently."
"Before you run out there and tell people you saw Goody Proctor dancing in the forest, consider this: Pilgrim's Pride needs a teacher badly. You have eighty students from all over Earth speaking God knows how many languages. Your faculty is four twenty-somethings with no formal training in pedagogy. I'm su-"
"Oh, heavens!"
"Peda-g-o-g-y. The academic study, theory, and the skill of teaching."
"Oh, yes. Ah. That's a relief!"
Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and all his carpenter friends...save me from tightly-wound Protestants.
"Luckily for you, teaching across language barriers was my doctoral specialty. I'm sure your current staff are good kids doing their best, but if your children are going to compete as adults for good jobs or off-world jobs, they'll need class sizes of twenty or less with teachers trained up to Earth Education Ministry or ideally Systems Alliance educational standards. It's years of hard work, but I can do that. That's what I'm offering."
"I can walk to the school from here-once I can walk at all-and I'm due before end of harvest, although you really should look into year-round. Robots exist for crop weeding and the benefit of smarter kids pays off when it's time to pay for elder care."
"But keep in mind that with a three-minute skycar ride over an apple orchard and a babbling brook, I'm in Tangiers Stellaris, teaching professors' and artists' kids. Maybe a dozen kids, starting from halfway there rather than nothing. Pilgrim's Pride got nothing out of the deal and I got cheap housing and either way, you'll have to look at us being queer, being alien, and raising our kid."
"And killing tomatoes," Nina adds. "What is it with those? Never can keep 'em alive."
"Yes, well! Good Lord knows I'm not much of a gardener myself!"
You've never met a tomato! Kelsey teases through the meld.
I read it on the extranet. Everything on the extranet is true, right?
"I'm not asking you to be Portland or San Francisco. You wouldn't know how to be Thessia. I've lived in Mormon-heavy towns before and grew up in a place packed with people making assumptions andpanicking like you are doing right now. So I've got an idea of what to expect. As long as no one pervs around in the bushes or shouts at us, I'll call it a good start. I'd love to be embraced by the town for what I am: A human being no better or worse than any of you."
"What I require is civility."
"I am one of two credentialed teachers and three PhD's on...the...entire..planet. Yellowridge City has one teacher. I can name my price in any city on this planet, but I'm taking your offered rate plus childcare because I like marigolds and thistles and you've got some in the park. My professional dick is way bigger than your religious dick or whatever's jammed up your ass. And if you think you can put together enough Bibles, prayer circles, witch-dunking chairs, torches and pitchforks to hurt my feelings, or scare me or make me ashamed..."
She steps up right to the edge of the barrier.
"...I promise you that you can't. You have no clue what I've been through before I left Earth. What I've been through in the last six weeks would make your perm catch fire."
"I'm a big girl. But kids are innocent. So if your kids hate on each other, I will shut that down, parents' wishes be damned. And if I ever I hear that one of your kids breathed hatefully at my daughter..."
Kelsey snaps her fingers: Loud, crisp, and impossible to ignore. Day three of student teaching.
"I'm gone. I'm teaching quantum theory in Arabic over tea or maybe I'm eating day-zero offworld chocolate because Yellowridge is where freighters dock. And I'm hanging a Pride Flag off every flat surface of this house. And I'm wearing a T-Shirt from whatever school you drove me to while I'm in the garden or walking to the skycar. And most importantly for you, I'll mention how you, or John Smith, or Brigham Young, or who-fucking-ever hurt my baby girl's feelings that they recommended I try a different job."
"Town lost, they know why and they're back to asking for a professor of education for a small colony located fuck-knows outside of protected space. And you're still stuck with me. You have everything to gain if you can mind your manners. And a lot to lose-entirely at your children's lifelong expense-if you can't."
"So please, think of the children. Do we understand each other?"
"Yes," the realtor squeaks out.
"Splendid. Well! Glad that's over. If I can work the oven, maybe we can have dinner sometime this week. Bury the hatchet in hash browns. Nina?"
Warpfire instantly melts the lock out of the front door, leaving a hole as precise and right angle as the module was. Trini drops her barrier, and the realtor flees like a possum on fire.
"Really?" Trini huffs. "I didn't trust the pre-installed lock either, but not all queer ladies love going to the hardware store!"
I write various things for various sites including AO3, and others (see my profile).
If you want to know more, I have a Tumblr (alephthirteen-writes dot tumblr dot com) that ties it all together-every site I touch, I link there in a pinned note-and I also I post musings and ramblings about my various headcanons, characterizations, character and trope rants both for and against, and follow fanartists I like.
For detailed entries on all, see the Systems Alliance Officer's Codex ( tinyurl dot com slash me-codex-hum )
'brick' or Jaluus or 'Jollies' - Piloting term popular in the frontier for an ultra-heavy cargo shuttle (100-200 dry weight, 700-1600 tons wet weight) because of the appearance of the most common model. Terribly ugly but terribly sturdy, faster than pirates, fuel-efficient and low-maintenance. Jollies are the mainstay of commerce for smaller cities, colonies just starting out with lightweight export goods, and any other groups that can purchase a Jolly for the same cost as fuel administrative expenses of hiring the heavy freighters.
See "Jaluus-class Shuttles" under "Industry & Technology" in the Systems Alliance Officer's Codex
'dropped a sparkler' or 'sparkler' - Human pilot's euphemism for a biotic-related systems failure. Early human ships were not prepared for even the slightest slip of control from biotic passengers. Rather than single the biotic out-likely the only biotic on the flight-pilots used this term during maydays and chatter with the tower, since a 'sparkler' was also an high-powered omni-tool extension used for welding and wire splicing.
'iron sights' - A wildly popular early omni-tool program for pilots was 'IronSights' which used the pilot's omni-tool-by regulation, never linked to shipboard systems-to draw patterns of constantly updating light on the cockpit glass or screen. Derives its name from the simple, raised metal bars used as weapons sights of rifles in the 19th and 20th centuries.
'lost the lace and garters' - One of many non-standard piloting terms referring to the loss of 'fancy' instruments like audio emulators to 'hear' space, in-cockpit hard light controls or projections, and Virtual Intelligence (VI) autopilot, and so on. Protections are built into the engines, hulls, dampeners and parts themselves, such that the ship will not allow itself to crash or tear apart in deep space, but such protections do not exist for landing, docking, and relay approach.
'making a splash' - Civilian pilots and control towers operating in human areas use this to refer to the use of smoke-producing flares to mark runways for instrument-less craft or bad weather landings. They do this since "popping smoke" is a Systems Alliance Marine Corps term for using smoke flares to marking landing zones, locations for air support or orbital bombardment, so on a colony where remote areas might contain civilian runways, military training grounds and weapons-testing sites, this can be a life-saving distinction.
soft skid - Either continually watered dirt runways, purposefully dug ponds of shallow water, or on developed planets, long basins of impact-cushion gel for 'hard' landings which rely on the pilot, not VI-assisted calculations to come to a full stop and require a softer medium to collide with.
