Vanguard Update

2k words

***

Cadell and the rest of the elevens caught up with the rest of the trainees, the Seargent’s escorting them from one facility to the other. To say the quadrant was big would be too small a word. Every inch of room was used up in full, with only narrow walkways of room dividing the spaces between one building or the other. It was just all sterile metal, however. Rows of soil filled with plants gave the pathways a pleasant touch of colour, and trimmed hedges helped to break up the sightlines, some buildings like the gym or the administration offices had netting strings propped up against their walls, the facades covered in leavy vines to make them look like they’d been plucked right out of a vineyard.

The builders had gone to great lengths to feel like this could have been a campus built planetside. The impressive view of the void and the ring above should have been a reality breaker, but its impact only served to strengthen its scope.

Hunter and Kurtis were just as impressed, having done their training planetside as well, but the Balokarids weren’t nearly so vocal. They tended to linger at the back, keeping to themselves, giving only the occasional glance whenever their touring Seargent pointed out a landmark. Hunter had said they’d arrived very early, maybe they had already been shown around?

Cadell couldn’t help but feel a little annoyance swell up. The novelty of meeting an alien was quickly fading in the face of their disengagement. The five of them had been specially selected as part of a mixed-species unit, that meant working together, interacting, not keeping to yourself.

Maybe he was being too harsh on them. He doubted he’d fair much better, if he had to train on one of their alien worlds with almost no humans around.

They were soon led further ‘upspin’ as the Seargent called it – in reference to the clockwise rotation of the torus – going about a third of the way deeper into the quadrant. Outside of the main military headquarters, the middle section of the quadrant was reserved for training grounds, live fire ranges as well as simulation facilities lining the walls of the hull. Cadell’s colony never had the tech for simulations, and he was eager to find out what sorts of exercises they had in store.

There wasn’t much reason to go further into the quadrant, they were told. Apparently its design was practically mirrored, and there wa little point in touring the far side when they had everything they needed here.

“I trust you can all find your way back to the briefing hall,” the Seargent called, stopping the group to address them. “but for the sake for you slowpokes, you can follow me back if you want. We don’t have any drills or exercises planned for you lot today, so you’re free to wander about for now, but stay within the quadrant, those’re your only orders. You’ll be shown to your bunks at oh-six hundred hours, so report back to the briefing hall by then. Dismissed.”

Some of the other squads took the Seargent up on his offer, following him downspin, while others turned to one another, unsure of where or what they should do.

“I hardly ever got time off back at boot camp,” Cadell mused, turning to Hunter and Kurtis.

“Neither did we,” Hunter replied. “What do we wanna do?”

“There was that recreation centre the Sarge showed us,” Kurtis suggested. “Pretty sure I saw a dartboard through one of the windows, could be fun. It’s not that far downspin.”

“Good thinking, mate. Should we ask… them?” Hunter said, directing his attention to the aliens mulling nearby.

“Don’t see why not,” Cadell said. “Hey, you two,” he added, gesturing at the Balokarids. They turned their amber eyes on him, Cadell suddenly a little less sure of himself. “You coming with us? We’re going to the-”

“Don’t we have more important things to do?” the one with the red feathers interrupted. Her voice was rather soothing, jarred by the odd inflection here and there, as though she wasn’t quite fluent in English just yet. “This is a military center, is it not?”

It seemed the aliens had been listening in, Cadell and Hunter sharing a shrug. “You heard the Sarge,” Cadell said. “No standing orders for today.”

“Speaking of standing. We have been on our feet all day,” the teal-feathered alien pointed out, giving her counterpart a knowing glance. It only occurred to Cadell now that they wore no shoes, their black, scaly feet exposed. It must be a preference.

The red one – he couldn’t remember whose name was which – clicked her beak in what might be agitation, then made an odd gesture with her four-fingered hand. Clearly someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed.

“Show us this ‘rec center’,” the teal one eventually said, though the other crossed her feathered arms pointedly. Cadell considered saying they didn’t have to come, but this was the first time he’d even heard them speak, and he didn’t want to give them the wrong impression.

With that, the five of them made their way through the winding paths. There were plenty of people out and about, some of them stopping to stare at their giant alien cohorts in awe. The Balokarids reactions were mostly nonplussed, though Cadell could see their discomfort from a mile off. Maybe that’s why the red one was so against the idea of winding down?

The recreation center was built into the façade of the giant hull flanking the side of the torus, the group arriving before long. Apart from the sign beside the door and the windows, it wasn’t much different from the rest of the station buildings, but that soon changed when they stepped through the automatic door.

Cadell’s nose immediately filled with cigarette smoke, the haze visible above his head like a fog, the vents built into the upper corners helping to circulate the air. His boots touched carpet for the first time since boarding the station, the material scratching and fading around the spots were a couple dozen tables and chairs furnished the long room. To one side was a small row of arcade and claw machines, and beyond them were a couple pool tables, and dartboard lanes as well. On the other was a bar and a hole where one could see a kitchen in the next room over.

“Hot dog, they’ve got a bar here?” Cadell remarked, watching the dozens of bottles glint in the yellow lights overhead.

“What, didn’t you have one back wherever they recruited you?” Hunter asked.

“We had this little restaurant, but if we wanted decent grub or something to drink, we had to leave base.”

“You’ll just have to make up for lost time then, won’t you mate?” Hunter laughed, clapping him on the shoulder.

“Unwise,” one of the aliens said, Cadell turning to see it was the red one. Her eyes swept the room curiously, but if she found the room strange or interesting, she didn’t show much more of a reaction. “Getting drunk on your first day in the quadrant is a foul look. If you humans care about that, of course.”

Cadell couldn’t help taking that as a slight, but he wasn’t about to let that get in the way of interacting with her. “You’ve got a point, uh… what was your name again? Kazlu, right?”

“No,” she sighed, as if he’d made an error that even a child wouldn’t make. “She’s Kazlu, I’m Samiha.”

“Right. So you guys have alcohol too, huh?” he asked, trying to break the ice. “Looks like our species has something in common. Is brewing a big thing for Balokarids?”

“We prefer to produce substances with… far more practical uses,” the alien, Samiha, replied, though she chose not to elaborate further. “The number of fermenters among the Clan are few.”

“Beer’s a pretty big thing all over the Reaches,” Cadell explained. “I’d wager almost every planet or colony has some form of distillery or other. Us humans can’t settle anywhere without it,” he joked.

“Charming.”

Whatever local time it was on the Hub, there weren’t too many people in the recreation center, a pleasantly low murmur whispering through the room. Hunter moved off to the bar to get some water, and when he came back, they pulled up some chairs at a vacant table. The Balokarids elected to stand a small distance away, eyeing the comparatively tiny seats with frowns on their beaks.

“So, Kurtis, you and Hunter know each other pretty well,” Cadell began, addressing his human counterparts. “You both from the same colony?”

“Yeah, Whitlamites through and through,” Kurtis replied. “Met him in basic, poor kid couldn’t figure out north from south, and ever since I helped him out he’s stuck with me.”

“I remember it a little differently than that,” Hunter said, raising a finger. “Who’s the one who got the grids mixed up, and we ended up ‘capturing’ the wrong hill?”

“We never heard the end of that one, did we?” Kurtis laughed. “How ‘bout you, Cadell? Where’re you from?”

“Grew up on Manildra.”

“That explains why you didn’t have a bar,” Hunter remarked. “Manildra’s nowhere near anything and it takes a bloody long time to get there. How many people in the colony? Couple thousand?

“Just under ten thousand, last I checked, and we’ve got all the space in the world. Breathable air, plains filled with game. If it weren’t for the Bone Knockers it’d be a real paradise. The ground’s are real fertile so we c-”

“Wait, what the hell’s a Bone Knocker?” Hunter asked.

“Oh, they’re nasty little buggers. They’ve been a real nuisance since they developed a taste for cow meat. And human meat, too. Sometimes it took three or four shots from my rifle just to bring one down, and they usually hunt in two’s, so you can imagine how hard it was protecting the ranches.”

“Bone Knockers is a cool name. How’d they get it?” Kurtis asked, Hunter shooting him a worried glance, as if he didn’t want to know.

“They’re actually called Keratosopsi Arktos, because they kind of look like grizzly bears, only they have horns on their faces, and their flexible enough they can use them to make this little noise that sounds like, well, I hope I don’t have to explain it. Sometimes you see one with a bone impaled on its horns, too, so the name’s more of a double meaning.”

“Well, thanks for the nightmare image, mate,” Hunter mumbled, his face going pale. “Do I want to know how big these things are?”

“Maybe… four meters long and half as tall? So not that big, really.”

“Should not have asked,” Hunter said, his eyes wide as he pictured such a creature.

Cadell turned to the Balokarids, wanting to involve them in the conversation. “How about you two? What planet are you from?”

“You don’t know?” Samiha asked, folding her arms pointedly. “How could the Kith’sla pair us with someone so… ignorant?”

“Come on, Samiha,” Kuzla, the other Balokarid, said. “You heard them, they aren’t from around here, and we’re probably the first Balokarids they’ve ever interacted with. They wouldn’t know.”

“Know, what?” Cadell asked.

“We’re from Dur’shala,” Kuzla said. “It is… was… our colony planet. The first one ever created by our species. Me and Samiha are part of the first generation colonists born there.”

“Don’t leave us in suspense,” Hunter said. “Tell us about it.”

Kuzla touched the underside of her beak, considering for a moment.

“Dusty,” she said. “The air was oxygen-based, but it was also particle-based, as I liked to call it. The grains lining the canyons would rise up in perpetual duststorms all the time, except for the rare day or reprieve here and there. I still can’t wash some of it off me, see?”

She held out her arm, using her other to point at her coat. Cadell leaned in, but nothing on her shining teal feathers stood out to him.

“I don’t see anything,” he said.

“Can’t you see how my feathers sparkle?” she asked.

Cadell did. He thought they were just iridescent like that, shining whenever the light caught it at a certain angle, but after careful examination that wasn’t the case. He could see very faint, tiny particles of orange sand nestled in the stems of her feathers, sparkling to give her that certain shine. Samiha had them too, he noticed, her rusty coat glittering as she adjusted on the spot.

The surly Balokarid noticed him staring at her, and she frowned at him, turning around to look out the window.

“Oh, I see it!” Hunter said. “Kind of looks like cinnamon. Shiny cinnamon. How long did you say it’s been since you left this Dur’shala?”

“Almost one of your years,” she said, the smile on her beak faltering.

“And it’s still on you? Bloody Hell, and I thought sand was hard to get out. Just how sticky is it? Can I touch it?”

Kurtis elbowed him hard in the side. “You can’t ask her that,” he chided.

“What? All she has to do is say no.”

Kazlu’s smirk returned as she watched them interact. “Sure, but don’t go complaining when you try to wash it off, Hunter.”

Kazlu pushed the chair closest to her aside, the humans watching as she crossed her long legs and sat on the floor. Her height was so immense that she was now almost eye-level with the three of them, the alien leaning her arm on the table towards Hunter.

With only a hint of hesitation, Hunter reached out, and slid his index against her coat. It came back shiny with dust, nearly covering his whole fingerprint. There was a lot more baked into Kazlu’s feathers than Cadell would have guessed.

“Geez, you need to find some better conditioner, mate,” Hunter laughed, but when he tried to wipe his finger on his jumpsuit, he wasn’t laughing anymore. “Ah, crap, it won’t come off! What is this stuff?

“I did warn you,” Kazlu chuckled, watching as the substance made a mess of his uniform.