Winning Peace - Chapter 29 (Patreon)

Ballentine Ulysses Banasiewicz cracked his neck as he hung in the empty space around the closest anti-spinward spar jutting off Ceres and sighed. Really, he should be at home right now, logging into the new Gundam update. After literal years of waiting, the creators had finally issued a content update for Gundam 00 and he was missing a day of launch week to play void ball.

Not that void ball was anything to scoff at. It was fun, after all.

It was just popular and crowded as well.

Ceres was a growing city-station, after all, and kids his age had to find something to do when they were trapped in a giant arcology floating in space. Well, okay not floating in space, but attached to a dwarf planet roughly a thousand kilometers around in any direction. Which meant that the arcology had to be covered in Ahab Wave Generators to give some semblance of gravity because everything weighed about three percent of what it did on Earth.

However, the city's outskirts were intentionally outside the field of the weird physics-bending machines that had been defictionalized from a twenty-first century animated series.

Which, yes, was even weirder than the machines themselves, but they were too useful to turn your nose up at. Besides, everyone pretty much knew Lopez had an odd sense of humor. If he really could make a magic box that poured out gravity waves from dimension N, he probably would model it after an old anime. It wasn't as if he hadn't already done it for the 'minovsky reactor,' too.

“Hey, BB!”

Ballentine's attention slid sideways in that way only homo secundus seemed to be able to understand as part of his awareness moved from the article he was reading on the new gundam release to watch his friend approaching. Given his full name was something of a mouthful, the nickname was a blessing. “Whazzup, Chakul?”

The brown-skinned boy with an elaborate crucifix painted across his suit pounded his fist against his heart twice before reaching out to tap it against BB's own.

“Finally talked Reyna into joining. We've finally got a full carton!” Chakul cried with a grin.

BB felt adrenaline begin to release from within his body and didn't stop it, letting the hype flow. “Fuck! You should have told me! Where's everyone else?”

Chakul tilted his head even as the other boy snapped him a set of coordinates and a vector over their local personal networks.

On the way, then.

“We swapping out places or she taking the empty spot?” BB asked, closing out the gundam article and pulling up the spreadsheet with their team's point values on it even as he cursed his inability to hold more than two trains of thought. At fourteen, he was considered something of a 'late bloomer' in that regard.

“Nah, she wants sniper.” A flash of something uncomfortable was there and gone on Chakul's face before it could fully register. “Y'know, means she won't be in the thick of it as much.”

A fraction of a second's worth of incomprehension, then realization, and the two silently and mutually agreed to push the topic away. “Well, at least we won't have to shuffle. I like playing forward guard.”

Unconsciously, his hand ducked down to slide over his blaster. Even as non-lethal as it was, the low-yield plasma bloom it fired could still do some serious damage to someone not wearing the proper protective gear. The licensing for it had been a pain in the ass and only possible with his parents' agreement. The extendable shield resting on his back was his other piece of gear, able to expand to something like a riot shield in height and width, though that didn't require nearly as much paperwork.

“Hey, you guys ready?” A voice called down the hall, making Chakul and BB carefully turn their heads in the microgravity environment. While the station-city itself might have been built with ahab wave reactors to simulate gravity, this far out on the spars is basically space, and one had to be careful about that kind of environment.

“Bobbi! Destiny! Yo!” BB called back, giving a nod to the three other members of the team he was closest to. Another seven teenagers followed behind the initial two, each of them latched onto the small conveyor on the 'ceiling' of the spar's hallway. Finally, one quiet Indian girl trailed behind them, a complex hand-like symbol on her forehead in red and white.

Snapping off a quick emoji to Chakul, Destiny, and Bobbi, the fourteen year old gently kicked off the wall and floated parallel to one of the 'walls' of the hallway.

“Reyna, hey!” BB called out, lifting a fist as he approached.

The girl's eyes sharpened with interest and she reciprocated as she smoothly released the catch on the track she'd been using. Their fists met and momentum canceled out, bringing both of them to a relative stop.

“Ballentine,” Reyna smiled. “It's good to see you again.”

He shuddered theatrically, sliding a hand through his black hair. “Call me BB, please. I don't need those assholes remembering I have a full name.”

The brown-skinned girl giggled, then sighed. “Thank you for that, BB. I have been... nervous. I am not sure if I will work all that well with the team.”

BB rolled his eyes. “Don't mind that, Reyna. We're just a group of floaters that play for fun. It's not like we're trying to place in one of the Leagues or anything.”

Reyna inhaled deeply and nodded, firming her expression. “Yes, yes... that is true. Besides, it will give me a chance to test out-” She waved vaguely at the back of her head and BB's eyes widened.

“No way! They finally let you get it?” He asked excitedly, trying to crane his neck to look behind her.

Reyna blushed and, with a careful twist of her body, allowed BB to look at the base of her skull where a shiny new set of metal plates covered the junction of her spine. “It doesn't look weird, does it?”

“Pfft, No! It looks shway. Totally shway.”

Turning back around, Reyna grinned bashfully. “Thank you. It's made moving about in microgravity much easier already, but I want to give it a real... I think the phrase is, 'trial by fire'?”

BB nodded. “Yeah, that's it. So, what'd you end up getting? I don't recognize the model, but I'm not an expert.”

He could just snap a shot of it and do a reverse-image search, but that kind of thing was a social faux-pas. It was, weirdly enough, okay to do to strangers, but more than a little rude to do to an actual conversation partner when you could just ask them about their new pants or watch or whatever.

“An Ahb Pathway Guide,” Reyna announced, her grin widening to shark-like proportions.

BB felt his eyes widen reflexively and another surge of adrenaline coursed through his body. “No fucking way!” His eyes cut left and right, taking in the rest of the team milling about as they waited for the field to open up and get in their launch carton. When he spoke next, his voice was substantially quieter. “That's mil-grade, isn't it?”

Reyna nodded, still grinning widely. “Part of the deal my dad and I made. I'm old enough to go into the next cadet class, so I signed up. That makes me military, so he pulled a few strings.”

BB whistled lowly and clicked his tongue. “Lucky! That'll give you a serious edge, though. Cyberware like that's way better than even what the rest of the team's hind-brain can keep up with.”

Reyna's expression flickered at the reminder, but hardened again in an instant as she smoothed a stray line of hair over her left ear. “I owe everyone a lot for letting me on the team, I know, but...”

There was an awkward moment of silence before a voice called out from further down the hall.

“Hey! What's with the kiddie group?!”

BB stifled a groan, then released it when his eyes confirmed what his ears had already told him. A group of white-suited older teens with purple-black birds etched onto their uniforms. Numerous other members of his team did likewise with a few curses thrown in for good measure.

“We've got the field reserved, Jet!” Chakul called, sliding forward and pushing BB and Reyna back just a bit to cancel his own momentum.

Jet 'Black' Ostermann rolled his eyes as his team squared up against BB's own. “Yeah, look brats, the slot was open until a half-hour ago. We need the time, so back off. The Ravens have a match against the Paladins, so we've gotta' practice.”

 “Hard vacuum,” Chakul replied with a smooth disregarding wave of his hand, saying the words with the same vitriol one might say, 'eat shit' with. “We signed the slot and need to break in a new player. Find another field.”

“This shit is why Mel should be team lead,” one of the Ravens sighed, a Korean-looking girl who seemed entirely fed up with the conversation already, the smart-tattoo of a dragon on her face pulsing an angry red-purple. “She'd have just gone ahead and snagged the field.”

“Stow it,” Jet snapped, turning his head back to his team angrily before looking back to the younger kids. “Who the hell is you new play-”

His eyes snapped to Reyna, and BB felt himself instinctively move between them, even as Reyna herself put a hand on his upper arm to prevent him from doing so entirely.

“Oh for fuck's sake,” Jet groaned, rubbing at his head. “Go eat vacuum! You're not eating one of our training slots to break in some bio-reg planet-side bitch?”

Ballentine's eyes widened even as Reyna's did the same for entirely different reasons. “Take that back you fogey!”

The conversation stilled as various members of both teams turned to look at the two teens from where they'd been sizing each other up. Jet, red in the face, floated forward and grabbed at BB's suit, his mouth in an open snarl. “You take that back, you vacuum-packed piece of shit!”

“Fuck off!” BB cried back, right in his face. “You act like a fogey, you get called one! You're acting like one of those dipshits that started the Short War!”

Jet's eyes widened and he turned, slamming the smaller teen into the wall of the hallway. “That's fuckin' it! I'm spacin' this brat!”

“The fuck you are.” One of the Ravens floated forward, a girl with a buzz cut that was either a natural purple or dyed recently enough to cover her roots. “Lay off, Jet. They had the reservation and you crossed a line talking shit like that.”

“The stars I did!” Jet spat, turning to glare at the other girl. “You just-”

“Oi! I know you little fucks ain't startin' shit on my spar!” Both teams looked over to where a man in an orange space suit stepped out of a doorway holding his helmet next to his hip. “I got two teams here and only one registered. Which one of you are the Jabberwocks and which one of you are Fuck Off?”

“They are, but we're asking for a throw out.” The short-haired girl stated, turning to the referee.

BB sighed at that bit of slang common to try-hards. People thought it was funny because 'throw down' was old-school slang for a fight or match, but in space 'down' didn't exist. So you threw out, as in 'out the airlock.'

Hah. I'm dying here, sis. Just... kill me now.

Well... more like 'estranged half-sister,' but their parents hated it when they talked about that.

“Yeah, let's throw out and show these assholes what for!” Chakul cheered, looking around at his team, who cried out with enthusiasm.

…

Reyna took deep, calming breaths as she flexed her muscles.

Baseline.

She'd never thought a single word could burn as badly as that one did.

It shouldn't be an insult! It's the way we were born! Flesh from the Earth as a throne for the mind of man!

That was her heritage and she wouldn't dishonor her mother or father by changing the very blood they'd given her.

That said... the smart-lenses highlighted the vectors the quaffle and bludgers were traveling at, the latter moving independently under their own power as homing algorithms plotted courses for intercepts with the players. Reyna's new cyberware kicked in and plotted out all possible vectors in patterns of decreasing likelihood while simultaneously interfacing with the exo-suit she was wearing and painting avoidance routes. It took into account the floating buoys littering the arena, the size of the enclosed space, and the various other players marked on her IFF feed as well as their weapons and likely attack angles as she was going to pass them.

It was an immense amount of data and variables to compute, especially in real-time.

Considering that the thing that was doing all those computations was a machine the size of her fist mounted onto the base of her skull, that continued to amaze her. The fact that the interface feeding all of this data into her brain wasn't frying her frontal lobe was perhaps the biggest miracle of them all.

The thrusters on the back of her suit fired, then fired again in precise succession, sending her into a spiral pattern dive that followed a long arc around the field. One of the more widespread implants simultaneously delivered a cocktail of chemicals designed to keep her inner ear from enlisting her stomach to join in a rebellion.

I'm so glad Jainists didn't come out against cybernetics. It's bad enough having to wear a monitoring bracelet for super-rabies, space would be almost unlivable if I couldn't at least have a few basic pieces of hardware.

The thought was pushed to the side as images were relayed to her tracing one of the bludgers following her. While moving, her Pathway Guide plotted an intercept course between her plasma sniper rifle and the oncoming projectile. Giving the suit a split-second to compensate for the counterforce, she fired. A lance of light in the darkness shot forward and impacted it. The shot didn't do any damage, but the clean hit reset the targeting algorithms within and the orb spun off towards another randomly-selected individual.

That done, Reyna spun on an axis and brought her rifle to bear towards a pair of heavy gunners armed with rotary plasma cannons. Again, she was thankful that they couldn't fire anything close to what was necessary to penetrate the electromagnetic corona around her suit. If they had been able to, either weapon could have easily burned her in half with a clean hit.

As she lined up the first shot, she cleared her mind with long practice.

A central principle of Jainism, her family's faith, was the absence of desire to do any harm to any life. Part of her, the most human part that testified to her natural blood, spoke to her of holding grudges for what their team leader had done. She released those urges with a calm exhalation and the first shot. She would not allow them the satisfaction of her breaking her vows for them.

Her father's decision to go into the military had been a strange one, seemingly divorced from their religious doctrine. He'd been a logistical master, though, which had spared him ever holding a firearm outside of training.

She, Reyna, would perhaps not be so lucky.

Already there were whispers of potential First Contact and she was studying meditation to more stringently keep herself in a state of calm and objective reasoning. It was still wrong to hold evil in your heart by the intention to kill, but the doctrine of self-defense, of virodhini himsa, allowed one to strike down a robber, murderer, or other criminal. Within the duties of her life as a soldier, too, there was udyogini himsa, or violence beholden to her occupation that was unavoidable. In decades past, where humans fought each other, scripture had been used to denounce the latter, but now when the armed forces were exclusively a peace-keeping body and ready to defend their species...

Reyna dived right, moving behind a buoy as a volley of fire traced her position.

A private chat icon opened up on the edge of her vision. A flex of her ocular focus made it legible.

BB: You really going to go military?

Reyna: I think so. Good benefits. Like the cybernetics.

BB: Next cadet tour is six months from now, right? The one to the training station on Jupiter?

Reyna: Ballentine...

BB: It's BB, and don't worry. I'm just thinking, considering my options. I've seen some of the morphs the military has, though. I get what you mean.

The admission brought a shiver up Reyna's spine. Morphs ran against everything her faith had taught her and held no appeal for her on a personal basis. Cyberware was much more dependable anyway. Ballentine was a confessed bio-prog, though, and she would respect his desires. The miracle drugs and treatments dispersed by the new government of humanity had kept him and his family safe and she didn't dispute that. It was his prerogative to embrace them.

She also saw how he looked at her, though.

The thought came to her in the darkest hours of her sleep cycle. BB would, if rendered free of the constraints of a civilian life and granted the military's library of war-morphs, turn himself into a monster. One in physical form, if not mental.

Could she accept that in a husband?

Her mother and father would be furious, she knew. A promise to produce 'baseline' children who would have a choice in the path they followed would curtail some of the rage, but not all of it. She would be setting a poor example for her younger brother and sister, too. And whatever the unborn child her mother carried was.

Reyna's tongue darted out, tasting sweat. That was something different than the sims. They only produced that level of fidelity when set to the highest tolerances.

Reyna: Talk Later, Play Now.

BB: Gotcha.

Reyna threw out a host of decoys, her last set, and spun the other way to launch herself to the far side of the field. Out of the corner of her eye she saw her team's score increase again, her teammates making good use of the Ravens' dysfunction.

Distantly, Reyna imagined Ballentine as something like a great hound. Something with silken fur and fierce jaws, intelligent eyes that belied its bestial form, powerful hind legs made for thrust-running, and-

A glancing blow caused her left arm to freeze up and she mentally berated herself over the lapse in focus.

Still, yes... it seemed as though she would have to burn that bridge when she came to it.

~~~

Good News/Bad News

Very obviously, this should have been a Nexus Event chapter. I ran into a little bit of a block on an important conversation for that chapter, so I set it aside and worked on the next WP chapter.

Which is what you see before you now. (Duh.)

Anyway, still working on the NE chapter, but it won't be out till I'm satisfied with the dialogue. We'll see how long that takes.

Either the next WP chapter will feature First Contact or the one after. Pretty much done with the teching chapters. Until then, rock on, stay awesome, and thanks for the support as always!