"Trust me, Bryan. I know exactly where we're going."
Bryan Wilks silently scoffed as he followed Sticky Hand Jack down the alien corridor of the Zeta, stopping every so often to admire a shelf full of Zetan curiosities. They had been given strict orders not to touch anything without one of the original crew close on hand. To enlighten them as to just what they were playing around with.
In light of this he kept his hands tucked into the pockets of his brown Deathclaw leather jacket, unconsciously stretching it out across his broad shoulders to keep the Tunnel Snake insignia clearly visible and free from creases. The ballistic fibre backing was rough to the touch of his hands, wrapped in fingerless gloves that he wore both casually and out in the field.
Fingerless was ideal for a sniper. He liked to feel the pressure of the trigger beneath his digit as he squeezed down. It gave him a finer sense of the trigger weight. Just how much more he needed to depress the mechanism before the shot fired.
"Hurry up man. We'll miss the show if you don't get a move on," Sticky Hand Jack called out from the end of the corridor. His impatience made itself known in his tone as well as through the metal link that all Tunnel Snakes shared with one another.
They felt each other's emotions like a feeling on the other side of a thin stretch of fabric. Foreign, yet never far away.
Bryan turned away from the shelf and started down the hallway towards Jack. He knew that his partner-in-crime didn't have a clue where he was going, and Sticky Hand Jack knew that he knew. But they had come this far in search of their destination, so they might as well keep on looking until they found it.
Just as he was passing by a metal hatchway, it slid open unexpectedly to emit a small figure hunched under the weight of a large HAM radio set. They weren't looking where they were going, too preoccupied with their heavy burden. Before either of them had time to correct their course, they had crashed into one another.
The Tunnel Snake reacted quickly with a muffled curse, his arms encircling both the staggering figure and the HAM radio, before either could go crashing to the ground. They both teetered on the very edge of balance before he solved the situation by pushing them backwards into the wall beside the open metal hatchway.
Supported by his body on one side and the wall on the other, they were no longer in any danger of overbalancing.
He kept a steadying hand locked underneath the radio set to keep its possessor from dropping it.
And thus, hunched over as his taller body was to keep his arm locked around it, his face was nose to nose with the radio's owner.
A staggeringly attractive blond girl with short cut hair and an appealingly flushed face, panting with shock at the sudden collision with his bulky form and staring into his equally shocked eyes from a distance usually reserved for either wrestlers or lovers.
"Uhh, hi?"
Her voice was breathy, slightly shaken by the unexpected collision and the effort of hefting the heavy radio. His mouth had suddenly gone as dry as bone.
"Hi," he replied in a feeble croak. He cleared his throat reflexively as he adjusted his grip on the radio set and tried again.
"Hi there."
He waited for his usually sharp brain to supply him with something witty to say, as it so often did at moments like these. Bryan prided himself at having a way with women that seldom failed him. Maybe something like, 'Damn, I almost swept you off your feet. I'll have to try harder next time.'
It wasn't what was said that was important, so much as the timing, alright?
Today, however, it seemed like his usually witty brain was either out to lunch or had taken a sick day without calling in first.
The sniper just stood there, hunched over, his head inches away from the blonde girl's face, the two of them staring into each other's eyes as if they expected to find something there. Was it his imagination, or was her face going even redder?
"Wow, you two jamokes gonna kiss or what?"
Bryan and the furiously blushing blond both turned their heads to regard Sticky Hand Jack, who had backtracked back down the hallway when his friend crashed into the stranger. Now, he stood, watching the pair of them with a knowing grin on his face.
The spell was broken. Bryan straightened up with a nervous cough, unconsciously bringing the weighty HAM radio up with him.
Blondie did not see fit to release her grasp and stood there with her back still leaning up against the wall of the corridor, her hands still holding the radio even if Bryan was supporting all of its weight. The difference in height meant she was seemingly holding the Radio up at chest height. Bryan self-consciously smoothed back his high-and-tight hair, before realising that Butch had only recently shorn it down to the length of a crewcut.
He dropped his hand and fidgeted.
"Excuse my friend, ma'am," Sticky Hand Jack said with a winning smile directed towards their new acquaintance, "He was raised by giant ants and we haven't been able to teach him manners, you know?"
"Yeah, sorry about crashing into you. And backing you up against the wall. I was just trying to keep you from falling," Bryan added. He ended up trailing off lamely, once again hypnotised by the fading blush on her cheeks. Her skin seemed porcelain-white underneath the untimely rush of colour. The face of someone who spent all their time under artificial lighting.
His own skin had a healthy tan. Or as tan as you could reasonably get on the East Coast.
"Yeah, sure."
Her voice was faint. Bryan wondered if he had crushed her up against the wall a bit harder than he intended. "You okay? I didn't hurt you, did I?"
"No, Wilks. She's fine," Sticky answered on her behalf with another knowing look.
Bryan looked to Sticky then back to the girl. Then he realised what was going on. He was unusually slow on the uptake. Usually, he was keyed into this sort of thing from the get-go.
The girl had the hots for him. It was the blushing that clued him in, along with Sticky's knowing looks. The two of them had frequented too many bars with just such activities in mind for him to miss the signs for long. But instead of trying to be his usual charming self, his rush of calculated and witty repartee stuck in his throat.
God damn, she was really pretty.
"Ummm, I'm Sally!"
The blond girl seemed to realise that she wasn't saying nearly enough to satisfy social niceties and erupted in a sudden introduction, just a few decibels too high and in a higher pitch than her normal speaking voice. Her ivory skin took on a pleasing flush once more and Bryan's own introduction died in his throat.
What was his name again?
He was sure he must have known it a few seconds ago.
Feeling his partners stupefied state of mind over their connection, Sticky covered for him as all good wingmen do.
"The big jamoke is Bryan. Bryan Wilks. He's a Tunnel Snake, same as me. Though you probably could tell from the Patches. And I," he said, pausing for dramatic effect, "am Sticky Hand Jack."
He proffered the titular hand for a polite handshake. Sally looked at it. Contrary to his name, it didn't appear to be all that sticky.
"Sticky Hand?"
"It's because I'm a pickpocket," Sticky Hand Jack pronounced proudly.
"And definitely not because you masturbated too much as a child," Bryan added, still somewhat in a daze.
"Hey man! Why you gotta do me like that?"
Bryan flushed when he realised what he had just said. He checked to see Sally's reaction, fully expecting her to be horrified and disgusted. He needn't have worried. She had flushed again, this time from shocked amusement. She had one hand clamped over her mouth to conceal the wide grin spreading underneath.
Wilks felt his heart grow a few sizes. Hot damn, he'd made her laugh. Score!
Sticky gave him a sideways Look.
Bryan shot back a silent burst of feeling that seemed to convey that his sacrifice wouldn't be forgotten. Sticky wryly accepted the assurance. A good wingman knew when to play the heel for his friend's benefit.
"Me and Bryan were looking for the cockpit. Observation deck is crammed full of everyone trying to get an eyeful of the fireworks. We figured that no-one would have thought to try looking out the cockpit window."
"They didn't think of I because you can't," Sally replied, regaining something of her composure now that there was a concrete subject to discuss. She still glanced at Bryan every so often, causing the sniper to glance aside bashfully each time.
He cringed inwardly. 'What, you've hunted Deathclaws at Old Olney but now you can't meet a girls eyes? What wrong with you?'
"We won't cause no trouble, honest," Sticky said with his most winning smile.
"Ohh, it's not that I don't trust you," Sally added hurriedly, quickly trying to amend what she suspected was a misunderstanding, "You wouldn't be aboard if Chauncy didn't trust you. But the cockpit window is at the front of the ship and the Observation Port window is on the bottom. The Zeta is rotated to give Observation the best view. The cockpit can't see what Observation sees."
Sticky's queue of wheedling replies and coxing statements aimed at getting his way died on his lips. "Damn," he muttered, "I didn't think of that. You sure?"
"Pretty sure. I am the pilot after all."
Sally replied with a knowing grin that did interesting things to her expression and to Bryan's brain.
He had remembered his name but now he'd forgotten how to breath. Was that normal?
"You're the pilot, huh? Damn," Sticky said with an infectious grin, "How much training did you have to do to get a cushy gig like that?"
"None," Sally replied, warming up to Sticky in the same way that everyone did to the artful dodger, "I was a kid when I was taken off Earth by the Zetan. Me and my family. My family died and I spent a lot of time sneaking around the Zeta, learning how to use all the cool alien doohickies they left lying around. I learnt enough to fly the ship, too."
Sally didn't seem to retain any of the emotional hurt people usually bore from having their family die before their time, Bryan noted. He knew the feeling. His own folks were long dead and buried.
She seemed to remember that she had been doing something when they had run into one another. Casting her gaze towards Bryan, she caught sight of the HAM radio set and blushed again as she opened and closed her mouth without managing to get a single sound to emerge. Bryan wondered whether she was finding it as difficult to talk with him as he was finding it to talk with her. Was this love at first sight?
The very thought made him scoff at himself internally. He'd been with a lot of girls. He'd relegated love-at-first sight to the long list of other myths that seemed to surround the interactions between opposite sexes.
Then again….
"If you want we can walk and talk? You got somewhere you need to be?" Sticky asked diplomatically.
"Yeah," Sally admitted with a nervous smile and a nod of confirmation, "I got one of those new Commlinks from the Workshop in Engineering, so I thought I would put the HAM radio I was using up until now back into storage. The storage locker we've been using on this level is just over there," she indicated another metal hatchway similar to the one she had exited before slamming into Bryan.
"Hear that, jamoke? Or were you still too busy making goo-goo eyes at the lady?"
Bryan sputtered a string of denials followed by a hasty amendment that he had indeed heard. Sally looked confused, then inordinately pleased. His heart skipped a beat involuntarily.
She looked at Bryan, grinned broadly, and then took off. She positively bounced down the hallway, twirling around like a ballerina with so much overflowing energy within that she couldn't help but spin like a top. She paused in the midst of her twirling to shoot Bryan another sunny grin that seemed so positive and hopeful, Bryan was surprised it didn't reflect of all the shiny surfaces and blind them.
"This way. Bring the radio with you and help me stow it away. Please?"
Sally added the last hurriedly, realising that she had gotten so carried away in her rush of spirits that her manners had slipped. "My momma always told me to say please and thank you," she added, somewhat at random.
"Yeah," Bryan finally found his tongue as he trailed after her, "My pops said the same to me."
Sticky gave that taller figure of Bryan a surreptitious dig in the ribs with his elbow and inclined his head towards Sally's retreating back with a look that spoke volumes even without their mental link. Get in there man, you've picked up girls before. What's got into you?
Bryan returned the nudge with greater feeling, digging his elbow into the shorter man's ribs through his Tunnel Snake jacket and glaring sideways at his friend whilst channelling some of his reticence and irritation through their link. He made a few Red Chinese hand signals to hammer home the point, "Friendly target. Do not engage!"
Sticky raised an eyebrow and gave him a look that suggested that, yes she was indeed a friendly target. That was kind of the point. In fact, the friendlier she could be induced to be, the better the experience would be for both of them.
Bryan clipped him around the ear.
Sticky Hand Jack dodged the blow, knowing it was coming before Bryan threw it, falling back a few paces to gaze consideringly at his buddies back. He grinned, broadcasting his smugness at Bryan's back with a knowing leer. He raised an eyebrow. "Going sweet on her already? You've known her for all of three minutes," Sticky murmured.
It seemed that his buddy, Wilks, who had always been even more of a player than even Sticky could claim to be, was crushing on the girl.
Bryan felt his smugness and turned his glowering gaze back over his shoulder to fix Sticky with a look that could curdle milk. Don't fuck this up for me, man.
Sticky grinned back and shot back his own Red Chinese signals in a flurry of twisting and twirling fingers. "I got your six."
"Here we are!"
Reassured by his friend, Bryan turned back to Sally and her bright smile, who had slid open the metal hatchway to the storage room and was standing beside it with her hands clasped behind her back, which itself was leaned up against the edge of the hatchway.
Bryan strode up to her and was about to go in to place the HAM radio upon the desk he spied between numerous wall-mounted shelving units, when he realised that the way she was leaning in the hatchway meant he would have to brush past her. He coughed and cleared his throat, hoping she would recognise his predicament and step aside.
Ordinarily he would just go on past.
Probably even use the chance to loom over her a bit to highlight the disparity in their respective statures, press up against her a bit, flash her a winning smile and a wink.
That kind of stuff.
He knew it worked. It had worked many times before. The girls he went after tended to like that kind of stuff. The whole, hardened wasteland operator angle had a lot of traction, especially with his Tunnel Snake insignia displayed proudly upon his back.
But absurdly and to his great confusion, the very idea of doing it with this random girl he had only just met filled him with an almost choking sense of anxiety and embarrassment.
She raised an eyebrow, challengingly, daring him to do it. She knew what she was doing, he guessed, with some surprise. Her eyes were filled with a mix of emotions that his sharp eyes could discern.
Mischief.
Excitement.
Anticipation.
And something almost like his own anxiety.
"Fangs out, brother," he heard Sticky mutter behind him, almost inaudible to his more-than-human senses.
And he did it. He sidled on by her, looming just like he always did, albeit with a smile that was less casually suggestive, and more cautiously optimistic. Sally's face broke out in another bright flush against her unnaturally pale skin, turned white from almost a decade onboard ship; but she maintained her smile. Her face was unturned towards him as he edged past and he had a made impulse to drop that radio and cup her ridiculously cute face in his hands and steal a kiss or two.
He looked quickly away, surprised at himself. He completed his task of stowing the large, bulky radio set and exited the storage room whilst keeping his gaze studiously turned away from Sally, who herself had edged out of the hatchway and leaned up against the wall with his face looking down at the floor as if contemplating the nature of the universe.
Her face was as red as a cherry tomato.
Sticky just struggled to stop himself from busting a gut laughing at the two of them. Marshalling himself enough to prevent his amusement from showing, he addressed Sally with his expression carefully schooled to avoid making her self-conscious. Tunnel Snakes were almost always together. If she was going to spend time with Bryan then he needed to make sure she was comfortable with him, also.
Bryan would thank him for it.
"Well, I guess we should get back to the teleporters; if we hurry up we can catch the show from the Observation room. We can probably find space even if it's bound to be stuffed to the gills with the rest of the crew."
"Latchkey will have saved us a space, just in case," Bryan speculated with more confidence than he felt in the third member of their unofficial trifecta. The three of them formed a sort of unofficial subgroup in the Tunnel Snake cadre, being of similar interests or temperaments.
Latchkey shared his sense of fun and games with Sticky, while Sticky and Bryan shared a liking for the pursuit of the opposite sex. Though for the life of him, he couldn't remember seeing his friend quite like this. He was acting more like he did around those he wasn't interested in; more withdrawn and silent. The looks he kept sharing with Sally told another story.
"You want to…. come with?" Bryan asked Sally, pausing in what was for him a quite telling lack of confidence.
Sally nodded automatically with her eyes aglow with delight at being invited. But then her face fell. "I suppose I really should get back. Toshiro is watching the bridge for me until I get back. He doesn't know how to work anything in there….
Her voice trailed off, before her eyes caught the disappointment that Bryan was doing a poor job of hiding. At which point, she made her decision. The young pilot reached for her ear, intending to turn on her radio and call down to Engineering, maybe beg Somah to cover her shift in the pilot seat while she went with the two Snakes to the Observation deck.
As the Commlink flicked on the voice shouting in her ear loud enough for all in the hallway to hear sent her hand clapping against the side of her head in shock and pain.
"Go please yourself! Your dick glows in the dark you jumped up flashlight!"
Sally switched the Commlink off as hurriedly as she could, then stood with her hand lifted to the side of her head as her brain caught up to what she had just heard.
Then all three of them fell about laughing. The kind of laughter that could easily kill those of weaker constitutions. Bryan and Sticky were trapped in a kind of feedback loop. Whenever one managed to stop laughing, the other would send them back over the edge through the mental link. And Sally, upon seeing their helpless predicament, couldn't help but respond in kind.
"What the fuck was that?" Sticky wheezed like a deflated accordion as his laughter finally died away, leaving his face as red as Sally's had been a short while ago, and his breath coming in gasps.
"Fuck if I know," Bryan replied in a high-pitched voice, his face twisted with the effort of holding the mirth at bay.
Sally was too busy clutching at her ribs to offer anything intelligible to the proceedings.
"I think we she get to the nearest Teleporter," Sticky managed to get out between the giggles that threatened to emerge once more.
Bryan nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Now that all his nervous emotion had found an outlet, he turned his grinning face upon Sally and nodded his recognition, "It was nice meeting you. We should do this again some time."
Bryan's attention seemed to sober her somewhat. Still smiling radiantly, she returned the nod, "Sure. You know where to find me. I need to get back to the bridge. Will you be in the Observation room for long?"
He paused. Ordinarily the answer would be yes. Tunnel Snakes didn't like being away from other Tunnel Snakes, so wherever they went, so too did he. But the thought of being alone with Sally seemed like an acceptable price to pay for a bit of discomfort on his part.
"I'll find you," he said definitively.
Sally seemed slightly surprised at his forwardness but grinned back.
"It's a date," she repeated from the pages of a book she had read once, her face alive with another iridescent blush.
With that, they parted.
Sticky didn't break the silence that reigned between Bryan and himself as they made their meandering way to the Teleporter and keyed in the code for the Observation deck. He knew exactly what his friend was feeling, tied as they were through their shared genetic modification.
He hadn't felt anything like this since that brief period, so long ago, during the beginning of the Metro Campaigns. Letters had still been married to Angela back then. The feelings that seeped through their mental link when Ted looked at those crinkled pictures of his wife were pretty similar to what Bryan felt when he looked at Sally.
Bryan's feelings were less mature of course, less refined. Hells, he'd only just met the girl. They didn't know a damn thing about each other. He looked sideways at Bryan, who felt the look through their link and glanced sideways to meet his eyes.
"Shut up," Bryan mumbled.
"Didn't say nothing," Sticky replied.
"You were thinking it."
Sticky hummed in agreement.
The teleporter spat the two Snakes out in a room offset to the side of the hallway leading to the Observation room. A veritable chorus of echoing voices drifted up the hallway towards them as they made their way towards the source of the noise.
It resolved itself into comprehensible words, the resounding chant of numerous voices slowly counting down from the number ten. The two Snakes reached the door as the count reached a booming, "Three!"
Within the Observation room, the entirety of the crew was gathered, barring a few notable exceptions. They were clustered around the Port inlayed into the floor, a veritable wall of backs that blocked the view of the outside space from the new arrivals.
Sarge, Letters and Latchkey looked backwards as they registered their presence, shooting them business-like nods in the case of the two squad leaders and a wide, companionable grin in the case of Latchkey. The Tunnel Snakes converged and slipped into place next to their fellows. Latchkey and Sarge, both relatively large men cleared enough space for their friend without comment.
"Two!"
The cry continued among those assembled around the Observation Port. Bryan and Sticky both had time to see the floating globe that was Charon, Pluto's largest moon, drifting through space in the shadow of its larger companion. They had arrived just in time for the fireworks.
"One!"
There was a delay.
A very slight delay as the trigger signal travelled the distance between the Zeta and Charon, and the light from the distant moon reached them soon after. They were orbiting Charon at a considerable distance, so what they were seeing with their bare eyes was in fact, time-late.
And as they watched from the safety of the Zeta, Charon erupted in a chain of simultaneous explosions. Dust clouds of vapourised moon rock and flying shrapnel several kilometres long were blasted away as nuclear munitions, cobbled together by both the Wanderer and the Courier's considerable talents, concealed within natural and unnatural fault-lines detonated.
Chunks of space rock careened away, some to be caught in Pluto's nearby gravity well and plumet down to the dwarf planet's surface. Others drifted off away from the planet without slowing down, consigned to drift off in space until they were either added to the drifting asteroid belts by the gravitational pull of the sun, or begin a lonely voyage out into the depths of space in-between star systems.
Some small few shot off on collision courses with significant solar bodies. Those headed for the Sun were ignored, as those would fall into the giant star and be consumed. Others were also ignored. But some, heading towards Earth in particular, became the targets for the main gun of the Zeta, which picked them off in the first game of interplanetary skeet shooting.
A trail of green death streaked through the vacuum of the void and turned a wildly spinning asteroid to space dust. And as spectacular a sight as that was, all eyes found their attention torn between the vibrant green death ray, and the massive structure revealed to them as Charon cracked apart like a gigantic cosmic onion being peeled apart.
The Mass Relay, the gateway to the galaxy, had been uncovered.