The Envoy's Message: Survey Team Eta

 Green lights flashed. Sirens howled discordantly. Renjo flailed impotently for several heartbeats as he floated aimlessly, nowhere close to a holdfast. A bit of junk, smoking, drifted by and he dazedly shoved at it; the reaction pushed him toward a bulkhead.

"Someone turn off the alarms!" An answering groan didn't acknowledge the order, but the silence a moment later did. "What in the gods' eyes happened?"

Turnnanan, a new rating on its first voyage and a treaty-mandated exchange just to complicate matters, scanned its readouts. "We've been holed! Venting on two decks, drive is offline, Navigation is completely scrambled...more reports coming in."

"Condense it!"

"We won't blow up just yet, Commander, but it's not out of the question!"

Renjo, Commander of the Flagship of the Second Fleet of The Dero Trading Partners Territory, growled. Their path had diverged from that of the Ollan Consortium fleet with whom they had been trading blows, years ago. They were much too distantly separated to be exchanging fire now and neither side had opened negotiations on when to resume hostilities yet. What had hit them?

He relayed this to the bridge crew in general. "So where did this come from?"

Turnnanan had gotten a bit more function restored to its displays and was clearly scrolling back through the hull monitors when its display flared white and it recoiled. "Screee! It was an energy bolt coming up from astern!"

Astern? Behind them? What could possibly be chasing them? What would dare?

Dero Trading Partners were one of the, if not the largest commercial enterprises in civilized space. To protect its business territory, the Partners Delivery Fleet consisted of heavy cargo vessels that, in addition to consisting of cargo stacks that could envelop entire asteroids if necessary, also bristled with sufficient firepower to reduce those same asteroids to gravel. Few entities, commercial or military, even considered engaging Dero on any level but trade. It was virtually unthinkable; Dero's reputation was such that the reputation alone was almost enough to fend off any blatant, frontal engagement.

For their own part, the Consortium's fleet was neither as powerful nor as capacious - but their ships were faster, nimbler and shielded to a degree that Dero weapons were not a sure thing. And the Ollans had been sending sales forces into Dero territory for a couple of lifetimes now, and the wretched creatures were proving difficult to rout out. Worse, their prices were good so their customers weren't keen to help Dero in their efforts.

"What is behind us, Nanan?"

"Nothing! Nothing for light-years, Commander. I mean - there is, but it's just that undeveloped world. Got hit in some crossfire a while back but there's nothing important there."

That sounded like it might have more meaning, if he picked at the statement, so he did. "How unimportant is it, Nanan?"

"Well..." Turnnanan read quickly, three eyes on the displays. It was able to assimilate a tremendous amount of information quickly since it could read separate passages simultaneously and compile them on the go. "It says here the dominant sentient species was only marginally space capable. Really primitive, interplanetary only. No significant weapons to speak of. They called themselves 'humans' but when their planet got grazed in our passage it looked like we had upset their climate so much that their evolution was doomed. They didn't communicate meaningfully and no envoys were dispatched. I don't think Corporate intended any kind of compensation since they're so unadvanced."

"So what is behind us? Is it them?"

"I can't see how. Ee?"

Ee had clambered to her pedestal and gotten Navigation back on line. Navs had better 'scopes than the Science station but the two could be interconnected. She had taken control of the telescopes again, however, because no one could disagree that her vision would surpass anyone else's on the bridge; her entire head was a light-gathering organ, lidless and beautiful. "Commander," she hummed, "I see a vessel gaining from astern."

"Ollan?"

"Nnnooo." She moved her head side to side, fixated on the display. "It is an unknown craft. It is vvvvvvverrrryyyy small. Ssssssoooo small. It is beeaauuuutiful." She hummed and wove, moving the image from the scopes around on her tremendous receiving surface, an optical caress. "It is firing. Oooooohhhh, it is firing. Firing. Ffffiiirrrriiinggg. Mmm. Firing. Firing. Mmm. Firing."

Ee could be like this. When she looked hard at something, she could become introspective and dreamy. Now wasn't the time for it, though. "Can you describe the ship any better than 'small and beautiful?'"

"It appearsssss to be constructed around the barrel of a damaged Director-class cannonononon. Oh, the cannononon is their primary drive. It is a reaction drrrrriiiivvvvvve look at it go. It is beautiful. Such colors. The drive plume is redredredredredshifted so far, so far. But the ship itself, it is blue. Blue. Blue unto blue.

"It is firing. Firing. Mmm, mmm. Firing."

"Turnnanan! Does that ship look like a human craft?"

Ee blew up the image and sent it to Turnnanan's display, where it compared the image rapidly to several others. "Can't say for sure, Commander. There are many elements in common. The scale is right. But..."

wham

Ee reported, "New damage reports, mmm. New. New. Mmm. We are holed again. Close to the first strike. One crewmate is dead. They are holed. Holed, like the ship."

"Ee! Focus!"

"...but nothing in any of the analyses indicated any human capability like this, Commander," Turnnanan finished.

"How the hell do you think they got hold of a Director?"

"Wreckage? We lost five ships on the way through that system. Maybe they found one with the generator still in order?"

"So what are they hitting us with?"

"I have no idea, Commander but it is hitting way harder than anything the Ollans ever shot at us. It even beats our own weapons, it's going through our own armor like,"

wham

A hole, not much wider than Renjo's own foot, appeared in the deck near his foot. At the same moment, Turnnanan's head disappeared in a cloud of gray mist, as another hole appeared in the same moment in a bulkhead beyond it. Air rumbled out through the punctures even as compact patch bots surged out of their cabinets, bearing meteor patches to stem the ship bleeding away all its air.

"...like thaaaaat," Ee said.

"Ee! When you say 'firing, firing' over and over like that, are you being emphatic?"

"Oooh, noooooo," she breathed. "Firing and firing. Mmm. Oooh, more. Firing. They are accurate. Their aim is good."  She observed her display, entranced.  "It is suuuuuch a good pattern.  We are trapped.  We cannot evaaaaaaaaade even at this distance maybe if we had seen them coming sooner.  They are fast.  Goooooood aiming.  Firing."

Renjo fumed. Even Ollan would never dare such ferocious attacks, not on Dero.

These humans must be really mad. Maybe it would be a good idea to advise Dero - and other Ollan ships, for that matter - to be more careful where their stray shots went, when passing through occupied systems. Even primitive ones.

"Firing. Firing. So blue. They are coming fast. Firing."

Clearly these humans had never heard of Dero Trading Partners...and neither did they seem inclined to listen, nor that Renjo would get the chance to tell them.

"Mmm. Firing."

Finders, Keepers: Survey Team Eta

 "So how does it work, Bob?"

"I'm not entirely certain. I can say this much: you can't see it."

"...okay?"

"No, I mean it's like it's unseeable. Not like something that isn't there or an effect that doesn't register in the visible part of the spectrum, it's more like it takes the visible part of the spectrum and cancels it out."

"How is that useful? Is that useful?" Amelie fought the urge to drum her fingers. Bob was on the surface of the planet, ranging in circles from his lander, while Amelie monitored him and conducted larger, grosser surveys from orbit. There were two other landers on the surface, and they were all linked to each other via a small constellation of relays they had established for the purpose. Bob had been the second to report in, after four hours on the surface.

"It appears to be a kind of stasis field."

"And now you're talking science fiction."

"I promise I'm not. It's weird enough that this thing even works, I think I've figured out the power source which, if the way its weight behaves is any indication, might be a microsingularity."

"A quantum black hole?"  She would have to dig into the phrase "the way its weight behaves" at some point, she was sure.

"Yup."

"Okay, that alone would win you some kind of physics prize. But tell me why you think it's powering a stasis field."

"Because I can't touch the unseeable place. I've done everything up to trying to whack it with a hammer and I can't make contact. It's a really thin region, like a nothingth of a millimeter, around what appears to be plain cast iron.

"When I hit it with the hammer, it makes no noise whatsoever. The hammer just stops. No sound."

"All...righty." She definitely wasn't drumming her fingers now, because she had started tapping notes into her station.

"I know how it sounds. But I found the end of this artifact, I swear to you it looks like a little ring of metal around a hole floating in the air. And I can tell it's iron because my magboots stick to it.

"But the field doesn't actually wrap all the way around it, see? I shine my light into the circle and it's just a black hole, I can't see the bottom. But I can see like a couple of millimeters back from the edge of the circle, the field seems to emerge out of the iron surface, inside and outside, and goes down inside the hole. And that does make a noise when you hit it. But it doesn't make a sound like a little circle of iron, it makes a noise like something a lot bigger."

"I've walked all the way around this thing and it's shaped like a really long pipe, or maybe a bottle. About ten meters long. It gets bigger as it goes toward the closed end. I can feel its shape because my hands run into something and don't go any further, but there's nothing to see, see?"

This sounded too amazing. They had found a cratered battleground above which hugely advanced races had fought a war and, aside from picking through blasted-apart junk that was mostly recognizable in human terms, they hadn't been finding a lot. Granted, the gold scavenged from the aliens' control systems was far from worthless but damn. Thirty-three tons of gold is thirty-three tons. Their acceleration had been cut by nearly a fourth.

Thirty-three tons of gold was valuable, no denying.  Its value as a precious metal was essentially zero anymore; precious metals weren't precious except for the fact that they were hard to come by.  Tons of gold were eminently useful on a practical scale, though it couldn't represent even the tiniest fraction of what those warring races had cost her own species.  Earth, rendered uninhabitable, was merely collateral damage.  Two opposing fleets of interstellar spacecraft hurling energies and projectiles back and forth at each other, losing ships all the while, never slowing down, and so much fire had rained down from Earth's skies that humanity's population had been reduced to just a hundredth of what it had been.  A population of billions, reduced to millions.

The following years - years of endless winter - had reduced them even further.  A few hundred million had become a few tens of millions.  Humanity had been bombed, population-wise, back to the Stone Age.

"So what do you reckon it is?"

"I couldn't say. If I had to hazard a guess right now with nothing else to go on, I'd say it was a gun barrel whose bursting pressure was artificially increased to infinity."

"Infinity?"

"That, or something close to it. I'm telling you, this little circle of metal floating in the air is only about a millimeter thick, if it were something I could grab hold of with my hands I'm pretty sure I could break a piece of iron this size. And hitting it with my hammer should just shatter it.

"But hitting it with everything I had, I got back nothing."

"Huh."

"If it's a gun, I can't imagine how you'd load it, or even if they were loading it with projectiles. Maybe it's a muzzleloader on a grand scale, I don't know. Maybe they pump energy into it from the muzzle and it somehow accumulates until it's time to fire and boom.  Maybe they could turn off the stasis and it's a breech loader. I don't know."

"Okay, that definitely sounds like something we should pick up, if only to try to figure out how it's powered. What would we do with a gun? We're not fighting anybody."

"Oh, I know. But I was wondering what we could do with an engine that had no upper limit on pressure or temperature."

Amelie thought. And thinking about it, thirty-three tons of gold became a small fraction of what her ship and crew would be able to move.

"Grab it." She tapped for general address. "Everybody, wrap it up. Bob found something good and we're taking it home, now."

A Light Snack: The Adventures of Human Gina

 "Oh, man! Something smells great." Gina stopped in her tracks and turned slowly, sniffing. "This way!"

 

Booj, a bulky resident of a moon of a Jovian primary, lumbered behind her. She couldn't pronounce what his species called itself. Alongside him was Erb, a Llobban she had met at something like this system's equivalent of the county courthouse. They had hit it off, she finding the Llobban interesting and kind of funny, and it - its gender still hadn't been determined - being starstruck at having met a celebrity. Gina had never had a hanger-on before, and was simply experiencing the experience for its own sake for the time being. She was famous, after all, and she was still enjoying it.

 

"Human Gina..." Erb said.

 

"Jeez, just 'Gina' is fine, you know."

 

"Yes, of course. Human Gina, these places are pretty popular. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet. Have you heard their advertisements?"

 

"Dang. You have ads?" She shook her head. "I had hoped being in a completely different star system might get me away from that."

 

"Oh, but the ads are why they're so popular. In fact this one is one of many. The advertisement song goes like this," and he raised his mouthparts and sang an eerie, ululating harmony all by himself, what sounded like three individual parts, as his many tentacles slapped a complex rhythm on the ground.

 

A couple of passersby took up the chant, adding what sounded like a full chorus to Erb's trio, and kept singing along until Erb had finished. That surprised Gina, who had never heard an ad jingle she wanted to hear again, let alone sing on its own merits, and especially not sing along extemporaneously on the street. Booj had been humming in his own basso rumble, too. Her translator made no attempt to parse meaning from the song. To her, it sounded like a traditional joik from her native Sweden on Earth, a sung musical style that didn't rely on words, just vocal sounds.

 

"Great, isn't it?"

 

"I reckon." Gina wasn't a fan of joiking. She looked around but the other singers had immediately lost interest as soon as the song had ended. "Is this really the place? Let's go in. It smells terrific and I'm starved."

 

- later –

 

Erb's four eyes all goggled at her. Booj looked uncomfortable.

 

"This is delicious." Gina tore into the cut of meat, sliced it along the right axis to puncture all the gas cells, wadded it up and stuffed the wad into her mouth. "What did you call it again? Wait," she added. "Translator record. Okay, tell me again." She burped.

 

Booj boomed something that the translator still hadn't worked out. "It is a kind of animal from the primary of my moon. They grow very large, a fully grown adult is about four kilometers long," the translator provided unit conversions automatically. "Fortunately the meat keeps a long time, it takes a couple of years to eat one entirely." He observed her plate. "This one might be gone sooner, though."

 

"Really? How so?"

 

"You have eaten enough food to sustain me for approximately twenty days."

 

"Serious?" Slice, wad, bite, chew, swallow. "I'm only just now starting to feel like I can stop eating. This stuff is not filling at all, you guys. Twenty days, really?" She burped richly. She had been burping almost continually throughout the meal.

 

Beyond Booj, Gina could see something that resembled a handsome Persian rug advancing toward them.

 

"Oi! You!" Ah, a language the translator already knew. "You've been here four hours."

 

"Yes, I have. The food is delicious!"

 

The rug wasn't mollified in the slightest. "You've been here four hours! You have been eating non-stop! You go home now!" It rippled angrily. She couldn't tell exactly where its speech was coming from, or even exactly where its mouth was. If it had a mouth.

 

"Hey, I thought this place was all you can eat. Erb said it was all you can eat."

 

"All it can eat, yes! All he can eat, yes!" The rug indicated Erb and Booj in turn. "Not all you can eat! You eat more than I can afford! You eat the entire undecipherable all by yourself! You go home now!"

 

Gina exchanged looks with Erb and Booj who, despite having evolved a few stars away from Gina and her forebears, nevertheless understood each other without having to say each other. Somehow shrugging its tentacles in a very human way, Erb got up first. "Okay, we're going." She burped.

 

"Thank God," the rug said. Gina wondered if the translator had gotten that right. It didn't sound quite like a unit conversion.

 

"Hey," she said. She grinned slyly at Booj, whose eyes widened. He had come to recognize that grin. "Do you think I could take some of this to go?"

 

The rug flapped. "No! Hell no! You go home now!" It devolved into untranslatable ranting until Booj had also risen to his feet, and all three were headed for the exit. "Wait!"

 

She turned back. "Yes?"

 

"You're famous, right?"

 

She looked at Booj, who shrugged. "I guess."

 

"Would you take a picture with me so we can put it on the wall?"

 

She was still enjoying it. "Sure."

 

And she burped again.

Character: The Adventures of Human Gina

 "I think it was the ships."

"Explain your statement, Booj."

"Well, Human Gina, it's like this. Humanity is still pretty unadvanced compared to us."

Gina nodded. In terms of bulk Booj was vast but his mass was considerably less than that of his drinking partner. "We had noticed. The vessel I attached to for the first lift here made mine look like a pushcart.

"Where I'm from it's a fairly advanced ship but it barely even compares to the lowest-tier vessels you people use. You've got the jump on us in terms of vessel development."

"Go on."

"So I made my technology freely available to you and your people, seeing how I didn't think we had anything to hide because we had nothing worth hiding. Not compared to your catalyzed fusion reactors, not compared to your photonic drives. Against that level of technology, we're pretty backwards. Our ships are your museum displays."

"It is convenient however. Since I fitted your ship with a proper reactor, you've gained a tremendous amount of range and consumables storage capacity."

"For which I thank you..."

"Well, you have made me pretty rich in a short period of time."

"...but the real kicker is the CVT. A doodad that picks me out of space in one place and puts me in another? Absolutely amazing."

"Don't ask me how it works."

"I won't. But against all that, it just makes sense that your people, everyone in this whole system, wouldn't expect much of humans."

"Until you put this on the nets for everyone to watch." He indicated the wall with a nod.

"Right. Until you saw some what we are, where we are." She waved at the viewer, where an old recording of human athletic competition was playing.

"Well, you are not very fast swimmers."

"Compared to...?"

"Oh, the Llobbans for instance. They're not the fastest I can think of but they swim in liquid environments at about ten meters per second." Gina could hear whatever increments Booj actually spoke in his own language, but the translator provided the conversion smoothly. "I think your fastest human swims at about three meters per second?"

"Nearly. Humans aren't made for swimming. We do it because it's fun, but we're not well adapted for it."

"And there are many other sports in which you participate. Individual racing is common here too, that's all very normal. When your recording first starting playing, the runners were unimpressive until the message went out to remind everyone what kind of gravity you humans run under. And even then some of us would consider humans kind of fast."

"Sure. All manner of jumping and running competitions, the various field competitions like javelins, hammer throw."

"Yes. These. These are exactly what I was talking about. What you call "field competitions." Those are incredibly dangerous."

"Dange...Booj, I made you rich by fighting people for money."

"Yes, but that's just fighting."

"I don't take your meaning."

"Your field competitions are based on how humans used to make war. Not just fighting after too many drinks, that's normal enough. War, Human Gina. You make games out of how you used to practice to kill many of your own kind."

"So?"

"Your sports are modified war training. The javelin is a thrown spear - just throwing a spear is unheard of in these worlds, did you know that? Hunting is by snaring, not stabbing and definitely not with a thrown pointed object. The strange device the human whirled his legs around..."

"Pommel horse."

"...yes, that. It's a development from your ancient solders training to mount a riding beast quickly. So they could get to the war faster so they could kill more of your own kind!

"We thought you harmless because your ships are unimpressive. Now we think you are somewhat less harmless, because you are not peaceful. I have watched you in action, and come to the conclusion that an angered human, even one utterly bereft of weapons" - where, Gina wondered, had the translator learned the word bereft - "is a significant threat to anyone in its path. You, Human Gina, have been an interesting person with whom to become acquainted, but your people cannot all be like you, peaceful and amenable."

"I'm not actually that peaceful. I just like you, Booj."

Booj paled noticeably. "What if humans in general don't like us?"

Gina sloshed her drink. They didn't put ice in drinks on this moon, but whatever this stuff was, it would go down better if it were colder. "Well...we might learn a new sport."

The Diva and Her Daughter

Sheila is going to be six years old in two weeks, and I cannot imagine how much I like this kid.

I know, I know. You’re supposed to love your kids, and I do, I did before she was ever even born. But I like her too. You know how sometimes people don’t really seem to like their kids much? Take care of them, maybe even love them, but don’t really get along with them? It happens. You see it, and it’s sad. It happens.

I got out of my old line of work so I could try to learn to like myself again. I did too many things I didn't like, too many things that weren't good. But the income was great and I thought I could shelve my misgivings for a sufficient paycheck. Not so much, as it turns out. You spend the money and it's gone but the self loathing, well, that stays with you no matter now much you make. I didn't like myself. I wasn't doing anything good.

When we found out we were going to have a baby, that was that. I quit the old job and didn't look back. I still didn't like myself but when the baby came out I looked into those eyes and as much as I loved my partner, that was nothing compared to this little squirming mess, this toddling laughter, this sprouting girl, this clever, delightful child. I loved her. And I liked her. And innocent of everything I have ever been, she likes me.

My kid loves me. That’s great and all, but she likes me too, and that’s like a sunrise that never ends. She likes me even after a swift swat that she richly earned, yelling at the top of her lungs in the grocery store. You don’t do that, especially not when I’m examining a carton of eggs, young lady.

“Sudden loud noises are very bad in public places. You can startle someone, maybe even cause them to hurt themselves or drop something fragile.” She nodded. I had to buy the carton of eggs and a couple more besides, they were ruined and it was our fault. I pointed that out to her, that we would have to pay for something but not get the good of it – a terrible waste of money and even of the chickens’ time who had laid the eggs.

The lesson stuck, good behavior was restored and we got back on good terms after a half hour or so of contrition.

So in line at the bank, even though the line isn’t moving that fast, I’m not worried about any outbursts.

“Are all these people here for the same thing?” Sheila learned to talk at a young age because we didn’t use baby talk with her. She’s always tested very highly for language use.

“More or less. Going to the teller is for when you want to put in or take out cash, or cash a check or money order. If I was just moving money from one account to the other, I could do it on my phone.”

“What’s a money order?”

“It’s a special kind of check. You don’t have to get it at a bank, you don’t have to have an account to get one.”

She’s walking very slowly around me, heel to toe, to give herself something to do. When she comes around in front of me again, she very neatly pivots, and begins another lap going backward. As she begins to recede behind me, a large hairy hand wrapped all the way around her neck and lifted her clean off her feet, and she disappeared from view.

Shocked, I whipped around.

I couldn’t easily describe him. He had a ball cap on and sunglasses, and had pulled a bandanna up over his lower face. The oldest, cheapest kind of disguise, but it’s effective.

Caucasian. Late twenties to early thirties. No hair showing below the edge of the cap: flat top or bald. Long sleeves, so no identifying marks to be seen. Average height, average weight. Maybe a little on the muscular side but not distinctively so. Blue jeans and a plaid shirt, which in this town narrows him down not at all.

If he gets out, he’ll disappear.

The gun in his right hand is small, but then again they don’t need to be big. It’s a conveniently compact snubby, just the right size to drop into a pants pocket, which is how he got so far into the bank in the first place.

How’d he get past the metal scanner? Ah, an unarmed accomplice came in first. Good grief, they just unplugged the scanner, how straightforward can you be? And two more buddies with more guns, yep. A pretty comprehensive crew. What’s the tactic here? What is the exit plan?

Sheila, duh. An adult hostage might not be enough, but an adorable little moppet? With a gun of any size to her head? Tellers freeze every time. Security guards do what they’re told. Bellow at the tellers, no alarms. Customers, don't be heroes. Nobody move, etcetera. The usual stuff to assert your dominance and try to keep control on a potentially chaotic situation. It usually works. Not always.

Don’t ask how I know that. I’m not proud of it.

“Hey, you. Put her down.” I keep my voice steady in times like this. You’ve got to keep calm even as you feel your heart racing, your vocal cords tightening.

Bad guy yells at me to shut up. I almost can’t make out the words, my hearing is going. It does in stressful moments like this. It’s an automatic reaction.

“For your sake, put her down and run.”

Whatever response he makes, he’s yelling it and it contorts his face so I can’t read his lips. Not a sound is making it through, now. Oh, wait – I was able to lip-read that word. Pottymouth. He’s waving the gun at the tellers, at me, and back at my beautiful little girl and his finger is inside the trigger guard now. I didn’t expect him to have any kind of discipline but he did, at least at first. But that’s slipping already, a bad sign for us and him and especially Sheila. For her part, she isn’t struggling wildly, just hanging onto his arm and trying to loosen his grip. Her eyes lock on mine.

“Sheila. I won’t be mad. I promise. This is one of those times we talked about. No spankings this time, no time outs.” 

She looks at me with the face that means are you really sure? And I tell her, as clearly as I can with just my eyes, Yes.

And now, just mouthing the word because I know she has gone just as deaf as I have, tell her: “Go.”

Sheila is very smart for her age, but kind of on the small side. The bad guy is holding her by pressing her to himself with his whole arm, one hand around her neck. She can’t really make any noise past that constriction. But at go, Sheila stops struggling to free herself, and whacks one chubby little fist as hard as she can, into the man’s groin, and fast. Once, twice, three times and then oh my darling child, she grabs and twists because I taught her that it doesn’t really matter how big a guy is, if you have a clear shot at that spot and nothing to lose, you might as well take it.

She still hasn’t seen one in the flesh. I mean, c’mon. She’s not even six yet. Probably have to have a talk about anatomy after this though, to explain why and how that trick works.

Bad guy lets go, understandably. Sheila lands on her feet, takes a deep breath, and as the bastard is starting to raise his pissant little pistol at my beloved baby, she shrieks.

My ears have tightened up as hard as they’ll go, and even so some of this sound gets through. For a moment, my vision goes blurry. That happens sometimes.

Everybody stops what they’re doing. I can see some of them scream in reaction, trying to block their ears before more of the sound can hit them. I can feel the reverberations of energy thrumming through my head, usually though it’s a lot more focused than this. Sheila is raw, unalloyed power given voice, and oh boy what a voice.

Bad guy has slapped his gun to the side of his head, he couldn’t drop it fast enough to block his ear so he’s got the weapon unwisely clamped up there, essentially useless. The others, farther away, are still stunned but not disabled.

Expanding on her successful attack earlier, Sheila aims her voice at her bad guy’s groin and shrieks again.

Bad guy stiffens in a way I’ve never seen before, like his entire body has become a funny bone whacked with a baseball bat. He would scream but he can’t get the wind. Sheila draws breath to hit him again, but I tap her sharply on the shoulder. She looks around at me.

No, I mouth, backing it up with some simple Ameslan, which we’ve been practicing since she was old enough to cry. He’s had enough. Don’t hurt him more than you have to.

Again, she responds with the are you really sure face.

He’s had enough.

All of this takes place in about four seconds, maybe a little more. Bad guy’s partners are starting to get themselves back in motion but it’s not fully coherent yet and I still have a little leeway.

Sheila didn’t come by her ability by chance.

I bark at the bad guy nearest to the tellers. He has some customers near him too, so he’s the most dangerous at this moment. The bark is a skill I’ve worked at for years, a sonic blast with a broad effect. It’s crazy hard to do but when it hits just right – it has a sweet spot – you can shatter someone’s teeth.

Unfortunately, when there are sweet spots that usually means there are dead spots too, and this guy is closer to a dead spot. I shocked him pretty good but didn’t put him down. But he’s stunned, and I follow that up with a crescent kick to the side of the head. Take it easy, don’t want to kill him. Things get complicated if you kill somebody.

Again, don’t want to talk about it.

No, not me personally. But I was there.

Bad guy number three is still down, and the security guard has recovered enough to advance on him and even gotten a cuff on one wrist. He seems to have that under control.

Number four. The unarmed one at the scanner. He was farthest from everything, and sound intensity is inversely proportional to the distance from the source NOW IS NOT THE TIME, LES. He was farthest, he’s still moving.

Aha. Not unarmed. That’s a knife, didn’t set off the scanner though. Ceramic, then, or something weird like high mod plastic. I’ve seen some pretty good plastic knives, the ones that come in MREs could probably be filed to lethal sharpness, lord knows they’re tough enough.

He’s poised to throw it. Probably not plastic, I guess. Plastic wouldn’t be heavy enough to throw well.

“Don’t.” He may not be able to hear me. He was farthest, who knows. “Don’t throw it.”

He waves at the door, like he’s going to back out from it.

“No,” I say. “Give up. You’re not getting away.”

He rears back, almost comically like a cartoon villain, winding up for a throw. He takes way too long at it.

Amateur.

I hit him with a Kaplan, a variation on overtone throat singing that I never heard of before I saw a guy on YouTube doing it, singing two tones simultaneously. And where throat singers have control normal people just don’t, I have the kind of control that throat singers would kill for.

Well, maybe not kill. Killing complicates things.

A Kaplan blast has a sweet spot too – a whole bunch of them actually – and just as many dead spots, but with a quick trill you can move the sweet spots in and out from you. Get the control right, and you can have the wavelengths overlap at their greatest potential exactly where you want.

So I dropped the maxamp zone right on his hand and shattered the knife. Yup, ceramic. A metal blade would probably have just gotten crazy hot – done it before – but this was as effective.

A Kaplan takes a lot out of me. It takes a lot out of everything else too, because I think I shattered a couple of the guy’s fingers and pulverized a bit of the wall behind him. Extra sweet spots, remember. I was winded. But the great thing about a Kaplan is that it’s pretty directional. Aside from the wall and fingers, hardly any collateral damage from that tightly focused blast.

Sheila tugs on my pants. My ears haven’t loosened up yet so I have to lipread: Do you want this?

It’s the pistol Bad Guy #1 had. To her credit, she’s holding it by the barrel, fingers nowhere near the trigger.

Ameslan: “Put it down.”

I pulled a bandana out of my purse and picked up the weapon, wiping it carefully where her fingers had touched it, and brought it to the security guard who was snugging cuffs onto the fourth, last bad guy.

First bad guy was still not moving, but he was breathing. There was a dark stain at his groin and I had to wonder how much damage Sheila had done to him, whether she had ruined his capability to sire children, whether that would be a bad thing for future society. Many thoughts go through your head in a short span of time, deep thoughts of rights and responsibilities and redemption.

The guard looked up at us. “You’re her, aren’t you? The Diva.”

I nodded. My hearing was coming back.

“I thought you quit, after…”

“I did. I’ve been paying for it ever since.”

“They said it wasn’t you that actually did it.”

“It wasn’t. But I was there, I was part of it.” The last of the ringing in my ears was just about gone. But I was getting hoarse. Well, that’s how these things go. “But I couldn’t ever go back after that. I’m trying to make amends.”

“Are you okay? Your little girl?”

“She’s fine.”

Sheila twinkled at the man in the most insufferably charming way. “I screamed really loud!”

“You sure did, kid.” He looked at me. “You did a good thing today.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re okay by me.” He looked at his smartwatch. “Cops usually respond here in under three minutes and it’s been nearly two. Beat it.”

“I thought these bozos said no alarms?”

“They did, but they didn’t say it to me. I pushed as soon as I saw the scanner go down. Seriously. Scram.”

“They’ll fire you.”

“Ha. Not hardly. Out of this uniform I’m the branch manager. Go.” He unlocked the door and urged us out.

We went outside, climbed onto our bikes, and began pedaling away at a regular pace. Sure enough, about thirty seconds and a block later, two police cars came screaming from the other direction. They didn’t even slow down to examine a mom and her daughter on their bicycles, laughing and riding on a lovely summer afternoon.

Maybe I did do something good.