Feb. 5th, 2286(Mid-2182 CE)
Milky Way, Exodus Cluster, Asgard System, Terra Nova.
Leaves crinkled faintly amidst the soft sounds of nature as Strayer's boots moved among them, crushing them underfoot into the layer of already rotted foliage and plant-matter. He inhaled deeply of the crisp air, tasting it as if it should seem somehow different from the air he was used to.
Like foreign air was supposed to taste as different to his senses as foreign food. He had partaken of both recently, and in great quantities. He fancied that he could indeed taste the subtleties that stood between the two. He adjusted his burden over his shoulder, a brace of flying creatures, native to the surface of the alien world they had found themselves on. A bird-like creature that had taken a different evolutionary path to the creatures they knew of from Earth.
Leathery wings like a bat, devoid of feathers, possessing thick skin reminiscent of a lizard, and a beak covered in scalelike protrusions. Warm blooded, despite looking so much like a winged reptile.
He adjusted the dart gun he had used to hunt them, being the only weapon they had within the armoury that was small enough not to completely ruin the catch. It had been filled with a mild anaesthetic that Murphy had cooked up for them, and one dart was enough to make one of the vaguely reptilian creatures drowsy enough to literally fall from the sky into the undergrowth below. Killing it was just as easy, as the blade of his recently cleaned trench-knife could attest.
"The hunt has been kind to you, Man of Letters."
Letters spun around in alarm, only to find the grinning face of Follows-Chalk peering out at him from behind a bush, eyes twinkling and teeth shining merrily.
"Fucking hell Chalk," Letters hissed as his heart thudded in his chest as he slid the 10mm pistol back into his hip holster, "Don't sneak up on me like that!"
"I will make no promises to you," Chalk said impishly, gliding soundlessly out from the bushes with the grace of an accomplished hunter of the Dead Horse. He wore nothing but his pants, his oddly splayed feet and bronzed torso bare, save for the harness that held his quiver, bow, hunting implements and catch.
"For warriors who pride themselves for their senses, you do not listen to wind or earth. You rely too much on your Technology," the Dead Horse said, gesturing towards the outline of the harness Letters himself wore, that had his stealth system built into it, along with the Microfusion Breeder that powered it.
"It works," Letters defended his honour instinctively. He glanced enviously at Follows-Chalk's catch, which was two times the size of his own, each pierced neatly in the breast with the shaft of an arrow, that had been cut out with infinite care and attention.
"Not on me," Follows-Chalk reposted, "Old-World, or New-World Magic cannot follow you everywhere. Skill can."
His tribal wisdom suitably imparted, Chalk took a deep breath of the air as he had seen Letters doing, filling his lungs to capacity, his bare chest expanded like bellows. His rippling muscles and tanned skin shifted as he did so, and when he finally let loose his breath, his long hair shifted in the gust from his mouth.
"The air tastes different here," he observed.
"It does. I thought I was imagining it."
The two of them stood together, enjoying the cleanest air either of them had ever smelled their entire lives. A planet untainted by nuclear war was subtlety different in a hundred imperceptible ways. To know it wasn't just imagination was gratifying.
"It reminds me of home," Follows-Chalk decided at length. His mind filled with memories of Zion, and of his long-estranged tribe. The Yao Gai roaring at him from the trees, the shockingly tall canyons filled with rushing water at the bottom and treacherous footing at the top. The killer plants that wrapped vines around your legs and spat venomous acid at you from a distance.
"It doesn't remind me of mine," Letters returned, his mind filled with the rusted walls of Rivet City, eternally creaking and groaning around them. The darkness of the Metro, uniformly grey and drab. The ghouls charging them from the shadows, gunfire reverberating from the walls…
"I miss it," Chalk opined softly.
"Same."
They began walking back, Letters following the surefooted Chalk, who led by a few paces and no more.
"My tribe would laugh at me. Chalk, you go now to the furthest place any of our people have ever been," Follows-Chalk exclaimed in a conversational tone, refraining from glancing back over his shoulder in favour of keeping his eyes on the trail and just throwing the occasional gesture for the Lettersman's benefit.
"You go seeking adventure. Seeking new sights, new sounds. And when you get there, you think of nothing but home. Might have stayed at home to begin with. Save you a lot of trouble, yes?"
"And though I travel foreign shores, I am never far from home. I carry it always in my heart," Ted spoke, almost to himself rather than to his companion.
"Pretty words."
"Thanks. I don't use them often," Letters quipped blandly, "Everything that comes out of my mouth sounds too much like a cliché to be repeated in polite company."
"I like your words. You sound like a shaman. A wise man."
"You sound like the Courier. Stop. I sound like a failed poet."
Follows-Chalk hummed thoughtfully as they walked, his bow slinging slightly in time with his loping step. "Your mind hurts itself. Mine used to do the same. You should learn to make it stay silent."
Letters glanced sharply at his companion, "Where I'm from, Chalk, we don't talk about our issues. We just sit and stew in them until we die in some no-where hole, surrounded by dead friends and living regrets."
"That will kill you inside, not outside," Chalk observed.
"Life did a good job of killing me inside, already. And it'll take out the rest of me in time. Can we not talk about this?"
"Talk about what?"
"Thanks."
"No trouble."
They continued walking in silence. With his heartrate returning to normal, and no conversation to distract him, Letters started feeling the absence of his fellow Tunnel Snakes more keenly. The lack of the comforting, feather-light touch of a foreign, yet Ohh-so familiar mind against his own was a silent trial upon his thoughts. He had come out into the wilderness with Wilkes, but the lovestruck fool had separated from him at the last moment to shack up with the pilot girl who he spent so much time with lately.
Not that Letters begrudged the sniper his happiness. Not when he was separated from his divorced wife and his beloved son by several thousand light years of intervening space and broken bonds of familial loyalty and love. He wasn't bitter at all.
Not at all…
He sped up his pace, hoping that exercise and a thumbing heartbeat would drown out the sound of his silent discontent. Follows-Chalk, who had been measuring his pace in consideration of his city-born companion, increased his own in sympathy, keeping pace without difficulty. Then, as if by an unspoken agreement, the two broke into a brisk jog, then a comfortable run.
They were both in fighting shape and maintained a run that stopped just short of a slow sprint. Keeping his burden from bouncing up and down with one hand, Letters loosened the front zip of his Tunnel Snake jacket so his chest could breathe and release the heat building up within.
They continued like this until they crested the hill and looked down into the valley beyond. Of all the things that time, and nuclear war had taught human beings, the makings of a good, concealed bunker was ranked high on the list. Currently, construction wasn't very far along. The earth had been excavated and converted by a prototype Mobile Matter Recombinator into bars of pure Osmium, the densest material known to mankind. Ideal for storage and transport of matter on a viable scale. They could condense a mountain down to an ambitious hill, albeit still weighing about the same.
Thankfully, storing and transporting a mountain was an achievable proposition. And since the Forward Operating Base they were building on Terra Nova was just that: A small Forward Operating Base, the displaced earth wasn't so much a hill and more of a 'monolith'.
The two of them hiked down the mountain towards the swath of local vegetation that had been cleared in order to stage the mining equipment and ground operations. Ted's nostrils flared ever so slightly as he caught the scent of another Tunnel Snake on the wind.
It was Silver.
She was with someone. A bunch of someones if he read her emotions correctly.
He veered off with his catch, boots sinking into the earth beneath him.
Idly, he pondered if he could still call soil, earth, when they were not in fact, on Earth? He grappled with this philosophical conundrum silently as he walked towards Silver, Follows-Chalk walking in his wake. His inner contemplation provoked a stab or irritation from Silver, who resented the fact that her mind was suddenly filled with emotional echoes of arguments for and against dual-meanings in Linguistics, when she was trying to hold a conversation.
Letters grinned.
"Feeling better?" Chalk asked him, with a smile.
"I thought we weren't going to talk about that?" Ted re-joined.
A brief pause ensued. Then, "Much better, thanks for asking."
The two Wastelanders eased their stride as the ground levelled out beneath them, the slope previously awash with trees and foliage of unusual colour and dimensions. Not at all what either of them were used to. The foliage on Terra Nova had been a mix of burnt red and a waxy green, intermingled with a dark brown bark that was tougher than stone and twice as rough.
The wood was dense, the kind of hardwood that you built ships or furniture out of. It was strange. Hardwoods were usually more common in boreal forests, rather than tropical climates, but on Terra Nova it was an amazing combination of trees that reminded them of Oak and seasoned Pine, with the climate of a South American rainforest.
The fabled Greenlands, where radiation had mutated the abundant wildlife but no warheads had scorched the earth, which turned jungles into environments twice as dangerous as the Wastelands themselves.
Letters walked out of trees and into a wide clearing that had been their initial landing zone on the planet's surface, still pockmarked where the landing gear of the prototype Falcon dropships had touched down. The homing beacon that Engineering had set up as an aid for teleporting was sitting, silent and deactivated in the centre of the clearing.
Not several metres from a roaring campfire.
Give mankind portable heaters, temperature-controlled armour and science-fiction-like suits of synthetic muscle. Give them unlimited energy and resources, enough to build a house for a day and tear it down the next.
They would still cut down trees and use them to create a giant pile of burning wood.
It wasn't even cold. People just had an inexplicably strong attraction towards the practise of burning shit.
Silver greeted him by throwing a lump of charred wood at his head. Naturally, he felt her intention to do so before she did it and dodged neatly aside. Follows-Chalk, with his tribal reflexed, caught the lump mid-flight and tossed it back into the fire, rubbing his hands to void them of the sticky ash.
"Missed me," Strayer chided with smug indifference. He sat down across from Silver, nodding to the rest of those present. Jil Finch was there, Rook's jolly frame and round, communicative face split in a welcoming smile. Doctor Barrisford fiddled with a portable terminal not far from them, coming to grips with the newest tech that the Workshop had handed out.
She didn't seem to be having much success with it. Her pale brow was deeply furrowed in concentration, her thin fingers moving slowly across the unfamiliar controls with deliberate slowness.
"How's it coming, Doc?"
She looked up from her work, clearly noticing him for the first time. Holly opened her mouth to respond, looked past him and saw the shirtless Chalk peering curiously at her from behind the Tunnel Snake, and went bright red. She sputtered for a moment, talking gibberish to the amusement of all present, then hide herself behind the flip-up screen of the terminal.
"Are you well, Wise Woman?" Chalk, ever the concerned and moral bystander, walked straight up to her and hunkered down companionably next to her, face not five inches from hers, with an expression of genuine attentiveness on his comely features.
"Careful, Chalk," Silver joked as Ted pulled up a cylindrical log from the wood-stack and, brushing it off, turned it up next to the fire as a makeshift seat, "You'll get in trouble if Emily sees you."
"Why would Emily be angry?" Follows-Chalk asked, his confusion as genuine as his concern, "Emily is kind and noble. She would want me to help others."
"Not help them into bed, playboy."
"Sleep is good for healing illness. So sayeth the Shamans. Are you ill, Holly?" The tribal placed his hand upon the blushing Doctors cheek, gazing into her eyes in a way that made her legs go weak at the knees. Thankful that she was sitting down; Ted rescued her from fainting into the bonfire by dragging Chalk to sit by him at the fireside.
The ungrateful Doctor looked longingly after the half-naked tribal and tried, unsuccessfully, to return to her work. Finally, her mind full of activities of a worldlier nature, she gave up and closed the portable terminal with a snap.
"You haven't answered the question, Doc," Letters observed as he unshouldered his dart gun, an air-rifle that had found its way onto the armoury. It was nothing more than a collection of old piping and pressure valves, hooked up to a gas cylinder and a makeshift trigger assembly. But it was good for hunting small game if nothing else.
Put a 5.56mm round through one of these flying reptiles and you'd be eating shards of shattered bone with every mouthful.
"Hmmm?" The Doctor grunted, absentmindedly, tearing her gaze away from Follows-Chalk to stare at Strayer across the flickering campfire, "Excuse me?"
"I asked how things were going. How's work? For that matter, how's life treating you?"
He set his catch down on the ground alongside Chalk's, and both men set to skinning and gutting their catch. The sun was still high in the sky, affording them little shade, the humidity making it so that the catch would need to be processed quickly if they wished to keep it from spoiling.
"It has been…" Barrisford paused, wrinkling her nose at the sight of Chalk and Letters butchering the flying reptiles, but taking comfort in the fact that the spectacle was on the other side of the bonfire, the scent of guts and viscera overpowered by woodsmoke.
"…Different. I think I'm grateful not to be on Earth, as crazy as that sounds…."
She rubbed her arms, as if it had suddenly become cold outside in the humid, almost tropical atmosphere. More to feel a familiar touch, even if it was just her own.
"…I don't think I could stand seeing the States right now. It was flawed and full of corruption and inequality, full of crime and poverty. But it was ours, you know? I thought it meant more than that. I never thought it was worth so little that someone could just, consign it to be destroyed. Four hundred years or more of perseverance and struggle shouldn't just end in a flash."
"You think it deserved to die with more dignity," Strayer supplied. But Holly only nodded absently to his question, a million miles away in a time utterly divorced from the happenings of today.
"And all those lives," she continued as the rest of them listened attentively to her words, to the backdrop of the knives cutting through flesh, "Everything and everyone I ever knew. Just… gone… And the worst thing is, if the Zetan hadn't kidnaped me, tortured me, kept me in a metal tube for hundreds of years, then I would be dead as well. Does that even make sense?"
Silver nodded emphatically, "Definitely. I used to work for this guy in Megaton, Moriarty. Awful work. Horrible things, that I wish I could say he forced me to do. But if he hadn't given me that job, I probably would have been dead years ago. Starved, died of radiation, killed by raiders. Funny to think that I owe that prick anything, but there it is."
"What did you do for him?" Barrisford asked in a hesitant voice, "Did you kill people?"
"What? No," Silver chuckled at the idea of her previous self being a mercenary for Moriarty, "I was such a scared little pushover back then, I would have made a lousy mercenary. I was a whore."
The Tunnel Snake said this in such a casual tone, a faint hint of the chuckle still lacing her voice, that Barrisford was taken aback by the pronouncement. The Doctor opened and shut her mouth a few times, trying to find something to say that wouldn't offend. "How did you become a medic?"
"I was a junkie," Silver said in the same matter-of-fact tone, completely devoid of any honied phrases to soften the bitterness of the information, "So I knew my way around drugs and needles. When Mr. DeLoria started recruiting for the Tunnel Snakes, he approached me specifically. Said that if I learned real medicine and helped him, he'd teach me how to fight. Really fight, you know? That way, I wouldn't ever need to work for a guy like Moriarty again. Stand with my head held high. Instead of bent over at the waist…."
The medic shrugged, her short, platinum blond hair shivering ever so slightly with the motion. Inspiring as this story was, it seemed to have the opposite effect of what Silver intended. Holly rubbed her tired eyes before running her hands back through her long hair dark hair.
Ted felt a burst of sympathy, that Silver echoed through their link. Rook, always ready to lend reassurance to any and all, rubbed Holly's shoulder comfortingly, "It must be hard for you."
Dr. Barrisford seemed to shrink in on herself at the sympathetic words. "Listen to me. Complaining about this to all of you. You've all had it far worse than me. I skipped out on the apocalypse. You had to live it."
"Don't even think that. You've had a real go of it, Doctor. Don't think less of yourself," Rook squeezed her shoulder firmly to emphasis her words, "We all have our own story. And that story matters. Just ask Letters! Letters, say something fancy!"
Nonplussed by the sudden request, Letters spluttered out, "What am I, your therapist?"
Nevertheless, Letters sighed and tried to come up with something pithy that might cheer her up as he continued work. But his mood was still black from the conversation in the woods. His fingers felt slick with blood as he hooked offal out of the reptile's chest cavity, cutting the flesh that held it in place with his trench-knife.
He didn't feel like sugar-coating anything for anyone. Thankfully, Rook didn't have the same mental connection to him that Silver did, otherwise their kind-hearted radio-operator might have stopped him. But she didn't. And Silver wasn't the type to hold back the harsh, unvarnished truth either.
"A while back I read this book," he began, making Finch smile expectantly at his implicit acquiescence to her request.
"It was called the Gulag Archipelago, by a guy called Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Have you heard of it?"
The smile fell of Finch's face like a landslide. To her recollection, nothing good had ever come from Letters when he started referencing that particular book. Barrisford nodded hesitantly, "Yes. It was required reading in schools before the war. Part of the Anti-Communist segment in our Political Studies."
"In it, Solzhenitsyn talks about how the NKVD rounded up political prisoners and dissenters in the Soviet Union. Back when the Red Menace was just beginning, and Russia was still the focus of the Communist Revolution. He talks about how they herded the prisoners, starved them, confined them, mistreated them, hurt them. You'd think that he would present the prisoners as victims, right? That they are the ones in the story you should feel sorry for. Support them, come-what-may. But he also talks about the wrongs perpetrated by the prisoners themselves."
The Lettersman's hands peeled the rough skin back from the reptile's lolling neck, a wet, ripping sound. Wet fabric being torn to shreds, a sickening sound. He was using the almost-decapitated head as a grip, by which to peel off the skin from top to bottom.
"He says that over time, the honest prisoners we're sold out by their fellows. The generous prisoners were taken advantage of and stripped of what they needed to survive. The courageous were killed when they attempted to stand up for what was right. The people who told the truth were murdered, to keep them from speaking up. Until there was nothing left but the zeks. The scum. People you would entrust with a single bottle-cap."
He set aside his first reptile, fully stripped of skin and organs that now lay in a horrid heap at his feet. Letters picked up the next with bloodstained hands, the handle of his trench-knife slick with red. He looked up at Barrisford, who found it more difficult to look away than she did to hold his gaze.
Holly felt ever so slightly ill, be it from what he was telling her, or the sight of his gutting his catch.
"That's why you're so rare, Holly. Because it's been two-hundred years of the Archipelago. Two-hundred years of the Wasteland. The good people died first, Doc. You look at us, thinking that we deserve more sympathy than you because we lived through two-hundred years of the Apocalypse?"
He smiled sadly, slitting the belly of his second reptile and letting both the guts and the blood spill out over his hands in a wash of gore.
"No, it was two-hundred years of participating in, not living through. Silver knows," he pointed at the medic from across the fire, "She knows the score. She says, 'I wish I could say that he forced me to do it.' But Moriarty didn't force her to take a job sucking dick for caps, or to spend those caps on Chems. No-one forced Moriarty to run his Bar, or his business. No-one forced me to steal shit so I could waste my life shooting up drugs, or to ruin my marriage and leave my son to be raised by his single mother once I kicked the habit."
He peeled the skin off the second reptile with a harsh tug, the whole covering coming away to expose the raw, ugly flesh underneath.
"Equally: No-one forced Old Man Lopez to turn my life around, or the Wanderer to give Silver there a second chance. But they died and we're still here," he said in a cold voice, "The worst of us survive, the best of us die. But you?"
He laid aside the carcasses and ran his thumb over the flat of his knife, feeling the slick metal underneath his fingers. "You're a good enough person. No, none of that!"
Strayer held up one bloody finger to stop her from even thinking the contrary. His eyes were devoid of any doubt or note of deceit.
"Take it from someone with blood on their hands," he stated from behind his bloody, extended digit, "You've done nothing wrong. You have no black mark on your character. You are a true victim of circumstance. What happened to you wasn't because of wrongdoing, it was happenstance. So as far as I'm concerned you deserve more sympathy than the rest of us."
Rook cleared her throat dangerously from the other side of the fire. Realising that he needed to bring it back around, Letters stamped his foot on the ground, "This is New Earth. Terra Nova. The future is bright for the human race, for the first time in centuries. Once this Expedition is all over, you can go anywhere, do anything, be anyone. As bittersweet as it is, losing everything means that you have nothing holding you back and nothing holding you down."
Letters nodded his head significantly, letting the silence stretch out to accommodate the depth of his statement. Jil, who had been looking thunderous at the distinctly dark and uncompromising message he had seemed to be espousing to the traumatised woman, seemed slightly mollified now that he'd taken it to a more hopeful conclusion.
"Jesus, Letters," Jil groaned out loud.
"Don't start with me, Rook. You asked for this," he retorted.
"I said say something fancy, not fucking depressing. Could you be less of a Debbie-downer? Maybe just beat yourself with a whip in private? What's it called: self-flagellate?"
"And I deserve plenty of sympathy," Silver said in mock-offense. She grinned widely, displaying her still serviceable, albeit timeworn teeth. Letters could feel what was coming through their connection and his mouth twitched at the edges from the shared amusement.
"Let's see you suck a whole bag of strange dicks and if you don't feel like sympathy afterwards, then we can talk. I once sucked off a Cultist of Atom! The inside of my mouth glowed for a week afterwards!"
Both Rook and Letters roared with laughter, their mood brought entirely back around by the good, dependable joke. Silver laughed alongside them, more amused than them by her own wit. Follows-Chalk looked between the two of them like a meerkat, expression confused and eyes blinking. Holly wasn't sure if she should laugh or be horrified, but the laughter was infectious enough that she settled on a nervous chuckle.
"I wasn't sure whether the lumps in his sack were tumours or his balls!"
Rook lapsed into a coughing fit, clutching at her sides, while Letters patted Silver heartily on her shoulder, his spirits now truly renewed.
Doctor Barrisford looked disappointed in herself for laughing at that last joke but laugh she did; and felt better for it. Follows-Chalk, meanwhile, took a pouch from his belt and coated the butchered carcasses liberally with a mixture of dried herbs, salt and spices common to the Dead Horse.
"Man of Letters," he said as he caught up skewers and forked sticks from the heaped pile of firewood and kindling near the deactivated transmitter, "If you and those of the Snake have the beans with you that produce the bitter drink that makes the blood sing, I would trade it for meat. We will eat and drink together, yes? These flying Geckos taste well with the herbs of my tribe."
"Coffee beans? Sure, we got coffee beans," Letters agreed and motioned to Silver and Rook to hunt through their backpacks.
In moments they produced a small yet robust metal coffee pot, a number of metal trail mugs and a small sack of coffee beans straight from Harold's greenhouse aboard the Zeta. Freshly roasted and still smelling strongly of their natural, delicious scent.
The atmosphere of their little commune turned distinctly relaxed, friendlier and warmer. The Lettersman let Chalk bury his nose deeply past the lip of the small sack and inhale with gusto; they all shared in his satisfaction when he withdrew and started roasting the meat over the open fire.
At length, Barrisford mustered enough moral courage to put voice to her thoughts.
"I think you're all good people," she remarked as the coffee pot began to sing in the background and the moisture from the roasting meat sizzled in the flames below, "You don't scare me like some of the others. You've been kind to me. And if people are products of their environment, I think you're the good ones out of a bad bunch."
"Kind of you to say, hon," Silver remarked as she poured out measures of the coffee and started passing them along the line.
"I'm serious. Some of the others really scare me; but you guys make this whole nightmare bearable."
"Environment be damned. Morality shouldn't be considered a matter of convenience," Letters muttered.
"Just take the compliment and shut the hell up, Letters," Rook hissed back, pressing a mug into his hand and shushing him with her free hand.
"So, gossip time," Rook chirruped brightly as she settled down and fixed Holly with a penetrating stare and grin, "Who are these guys who scare you?"
"Ohh… I don't want to talk behind anyone's…."
"Never mind that, hon. The scariest ones around try hard to be scary. If they found out you found them terrifying, they'd probably like you more," Silver allayed her fears with an offhand motion and winked at her slyly.
"So, spill. Who's the monster?"
"Well…."
Holly looked left and right before whispering in a low voice, "The Wanderer terrifies me."
"Ohh hell, Holly. He might look scary but he's no more threat to you than one of the Workshop's new robots."
"Didn't one of their prototypes tear up the Cargo Hold a few days ago?"
"Details," Rook dismissed this with a wave, "That was a programming error. Could have happened to anyone."
"And the fact that you wrote that erroneous line of code makes no-nevermind to you?" Letters said, grinning as Jil was overcome by a sudden look of discomfort.
"Sticky is a lying bastard! Don't believe a word he said about that. He made that change while my back was turned!"
"Why would he do that?"
"….so, he could steal one of those new Scout Drones from Engineering! Where do you think he got Supersly?!"
"He told me you got it for him."
"And you believed that?" Rook gazed at him in disbelief, "Are you going to believe Sticky of all people; over me?"
"Considering that I can feel it whenever he's lying. Yes."
Rook huffed in discontent but lapsed into an embarrassed silence. Silver looked back at Holly, who had settled into watching the familiar banter between them with a smile.
"Who else are you afraid of?"
"Ishmael Ashur. Desmond Lockhart. And that giant green man… what was his name?"
"Fawkes? He's a bit unstable, sometimes; but that that is hardly his fault. R&D is working on reversing his…. condition. The rest of the time, he's a sweetheart," Silver said reassuringly.
"Condition? Turn him back into a human again, you mean?"
"No, no…. Fawkes is turning into a Behemoth. It happens to the oldest Supermutants on the East Coast."
"That doesn't sound good," Holly stated, her voice heavy with concern.
"It isn't. The Vault 87 strain of the FEV destabilises with age, running out of control and causing wild increases in size and strength. And equal and opposite damage to the mind. But R&D will help him. You'll see. As for Ishmael and Desmond, they are cold bastards, admittedly; but they wouldn't hurt you."
"Are you sure?"
Silver considered it for a moment. She and Letters exchanged glances. The Lettersman, in his capacity as the primary record and bookkeeper for their squad, also maintained lines of communication with some of their Tunnel Snake's information network. He waggled his eyebrows and made her aware through their link that he couldn't tell her for certain, one way or the other.
"Reasonably?" she hazarded.
Holly was far from reassured but took the Tunnel Snake medic at her word to avoid an argument. "What about that old man with the grey hair and sour face that comes in and out of the Science Wing, occasionally?"
"Jericho?" Silver sucked in a breath and looked skywards.
"Yeah, it might be best if you followed your instincts on that one, sister. Steer clear of Jericho."
"He's more dangerous than Mr. Ashur or Lockheart?"
"Not more dangerous, per-say. I wouldn't be sure who would win in a fight between the three of them," Letters said in a considering tone, accepting a few skewers from Follows-Chalk as the tribal took them off the fire, "But Jericho isn't the same type of dangerous."
He took a bite as he considered his answer, passing another few skewers down the line to Rook and Silver. He laid down his coffee mug to do so and was careful not to knock it over with his foot. Rook wasn't so lucky and slopped some of the hot liquid on her leg. She grumbled as she juggled the skewers and mug.
"Ishmael and Desmond would kill you if it became expedient to do so. Since we're all on the same side, that's unlikely to ever happen. But Jericho? He's a mad motherfucker. He'll kill you just for annoying him. And after R&D botched that surgery of his, just looking at him wrong can set him off."
"Botched surgery? What happened?"
Silver swallowed. She had been present at that surgery. Taking part in the capacity of a nurse as Doctors Dala and Weston Lesko altered both Toshiro Kago and Jericho as test subjects for Project Preliator.
"Well, it wasn't exactly botched," she said after a long pause, "Toshiro and Jericho volunteered to be test subjects for R&D to work on some of their new procedures on. Experimental stuff, you know? Like those new shunts at the base of the brainstem and some of the bone-reinforcements and muscle grafts. Jericho is getting on in years, so when the eggheads told him they could practically turn him young again if he volunteered to be their lab rat, he jumped at the chance."
"What went wrong, though?"
"Nothing. Not really," Silver said again, before rubbing her brow and admitting in a low voice, "The experimental muscle graft we implanted in him uses a composite interweave laced in with the subject's muscle fibres to increase strength, endurance and speed. It's bio-organic, so it replicates into new muscle. What we didn't know is how much pain it causes as new muscle forms."
"Apparently, it feels like you're being stabbed with a thousand rusty knives from the inside out. Constantly," Letters enlightened her.
"That's horrible! No wonder he looks so angry all the time. How does he even walk around?"
"Say what you want about Jericho; he's a tough old fuck," Letters allowed grudgingly, "Still, he got what he wanted. He's stronger than a man twice his size and once his body finishes reversing the aging process, he'll have the physique of a man a quarter his age. Toshiro didn't get the same implant, which means he isn't in as much pain, but his muscle implant is just a gene-modification. No great structural difference between his muscle and an unmodified mans, aside from greater density. It's an offshoot of Lesko's research into the FEV."
"Well, I feel so much better," Holly said stiffly, "So all I have to worry about is one unnaturally strong psychopath who might kill me, simply for opening my eyes at him."
"Trust me, Holly," Letters said with a cheeky grin as he blew on his skewer to cool it down, "Around here, that's a good day."