Gravity's Embrace: A weekend of UGH.
25,115.
This weekend was not a good one for writing. I mean, okay, I've passed the halfway mark, so yay, but it was a struggle. I think it's because this is where I had to stop writing about two people hanging out, and had to further the plot. (Also being ill, but eh.)
On the plus side, I at least know where the next 10K words or so are going. That's the most planning I've had all NaNo!
Scene 1
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Scenes 3-5
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Scene 8
Scenes 9-10
Scene 11
Scenes 12-13
Scenes 14-15
Scene 16
I woke in the light gravity of the moon, feeling like I might float away from the bed if it weren't for the arm draped over me. It was warm under the covers, and I was happy to just lie there for a while. I could feel my towel was still in place, and charitably assumed Areatha had flung her arm out while sleeping, rather than that it was deliberate malevolence.
My peaceful morning (insofar as the word can be used when the view from the window was the same unchangingly-lit lunar landscape) came to an end with a knock on the door. I pushed at Areatha's arm, struggling to sit up, and had just managed when the door rattled open.
"Not interrupting, am I?" Pete Miller said, bounding straight in. He threw a wink at me. "Not that I imagine your lady friend would mind… morning, ma'am."
Areatha sat up, yawned, and tugged her unbound hair vaguely forward to cover her chest. The move was more symbolic than successful, but she seemed satisfied. "Good morning," she said with a smile, draping her arm deliberately across my shoulders. "Are we late for breakfast?"
"Uh, no, ma'am." Miller glanced away for a second. "Sorry about barging in, folks. We've gotten into the habit up here; I didn't mean anything by it."
"I'm sure that's quite all right," Areatha said, her tone cooling a little. "Do we have time to get ready?"
"Uh, yes." Miller looked across the room towards the coffee pot. He took a half-step towards it, then glanced at the bed and reconsidered. He stepped back, leant against the doorframe for a second, then straightened up again. "I'll, uh, wait outside." He stepped out, disappeared round the corner, then returned a moment later to pull the door shut.
I turned to Areatha, eyebrow raised. "You were mean to that poor man."
Areatha snorted. "That 'poor man' shouldn't make assumptions." She pushed the covers off and bounded out of bed, flying clear over me to land close to the bathroom door. Her hair flung out behind her like a hero's cape, then swirled around her nude body as she pirouetted to face me. "Wanna come brush my hair?"
"I'll pass, thanks." I clambered more sedately from the bed, and looked over at the rack of coveralls with a grimace. "I'm going to see if I can make those things comfortable."
Areatha winked at me. "You could always go naked."
"No." I crossed the room, hearing the door rattle shut behind, and braced myself in front of the plasticky clothes. "Right. Deep breath."
By keeping my towel on as a very old-fashioned loincloth, and laying a second across my shoulders, I was able to keep most of the scratchy fabric off my skin. There was nothing I could do about my legs, of course, and my arms were probably going to be rubbed raw, but I at least looked properly-dressed, and could move about without crying.
The bathroom door reopened, and Areatha emerged. For the first time, she had willingly done something with her hair other than simply leaving it down: she had acquired a large number of white ribbons, and used them to turn her hair into what was almost a loosely-woven poncho. She had drawn the longest portion to the front, providing almost complete coverage below her neck, while the rest was a white-and-black lattice that at least provided an illusion of coverage.
She grinned at my stare, and executed a slow turn. "Like what you see?"
"It's very… original," I said. Then I frowned. "Wait. Are those bits of my jumpsuit?"
She reached up and brushed a finger over one of the ribbons. "You weren't using it any more, right?"
I gritted my teeth. "I was waiting for it to dry," I said. "That was the only wearable clothing I had."
"Oh, you'll be fine." She bounced across the room, swung the door open, and peered out. "Mr Miller? There you are! We're all set…"
Scene 17
Breakfast turned out to be coffee, served under the sign of the fish-tailed woman. There were pastries laid on as well, but they were a clear afterthought.
Miller ordered our drinks in some strange language; when they came, we took them over to a table at which an elderly woman already sat. "Morning, Carol," he said, pulling out a chair for Areatha. "As promised - here they are."
"Oh." Carol put her mug down and leant across the table. "Wow. The legendary CLS Exeter St. David. Wow."
I blinked, caught halfway down onto my seat. "Uh. What?"
Carol coloured slightly and sat back. "Sorry," she said with a sheepish grin. "It's just… I've heard so much about you. And what you did - it's amazing. An inspiration to us all."
"Oh." I felt Areatha's gaze burning into me, warning me not to mess this up right at the start. "Uh. It was nothing, really."
"Now don't you come over all- modest," Carol said, her gaze flicking to Areatha in her instant of hesitation before the last word.
Miller chuckled and took a sip of his coffee. "This here's Carol Shepherd," he said. "She's our head of Venti-Energy Physics."
"High-Energy, Peter," Carol said pointedly. "Honestly, how many times?"
Miller flapped a hand. "She's from the Bear Republic originally," he said, "that's why she talks funny."
Carol chuckled warmly and turned back to me. "I can't wait to show you what we've done," she said. "We've managed to partially replicate the field effect - in prototype only, you understand, but-"
"Carol!" Miller held up a quelling hand. "No business talk over breakfast, please. I'm sure our guests still have too much blood in their caffeine circulation for this."
I laughed politely - though he seemed worryingly serious - and lifted my mug. Over its rim, I glanced sidelong at Areatha. She seemed amused by the whole thing, but she had to be as worried as I was about how we were going to keep up the pretense that we knew what was going on.
After the meal was over, Carol led us down to her lab, talking animatedly the whole time. "We've spent literally days scrutinizing the footage from the battle over the Pentarchy. It's obvious the Montenegrins didn't have the first clue what they'd stolen, but even so: to take out five Mongolian ships before they had to surrender? That's nothing short of a miracle."
She seemed to expect a response. Luckily for me, Areatha stepped into the breach. "It's a miracle the Montenegrin Neo-Ambrosian Republic even managed to find the Golden Mongolians, you mean. God, those people are useless! If it weren't for their fusion plants, we'd be happy just to forget they exist."
Carol glanced at her. "If they're so useless," she said, more than a little snap in her voice, "what does that say about you? They did steal his," a nod at me, "ship from right under your noses, right? I'm not misremembering?"
Areatha's eyes narrowed slightly. "They didn't manage to keep it, though, did they?" she said pleasantly. "So I stand by my opinion."
Carol's expression modulated into a glare, and Pete Miller stepped into the breach. "It doesn't seem like anyone can keep their hands on the CLS Exeter St. David," he said with a forced chuckle. "Maybe the ship's just cursed."
"Hey," I objected. "I was that ship for three years, I think I did a good job."
Carol beamed at me. "And even though you never knew the field generator was there, you've more than made up for it since," she enthused. "Listen, I've been dying to know: when you went up against the Tsar's ships, did you know Boeing's fighters were on their way to support you? Or did you really have a plan to take them on all by yourself?"
I did my best not to look like a deer in headlights. "That's for me to know," I said in my most conspiratorial voice, "and you to try and deduce."
Carol pretty much simpered at that. "It was amazingly brave either way," she said. We stopped in front of a door, and she spun the wheel and pushed it open. "Welcome to my lair."
I followed her in and gave a low whistle. "Impressive," I said, and meant it. "I've spent a bit of time in R&D myself, but this blows anything we had out of the water."
"The glories of Cascadian technology," Carol said, with the enthusiasm of the true convert. "Not even the Mongols can hold a candle to it - or an electric arc light." She smiled at her own joke, so I laughed politely - which turned her smile into one of absolute joy.
"I don't know if you've seen any of the blueprints we sent down to PortVanSea," she went on, and I shook my head. "Well, like I said, we've partially replicated the field effect. We… actually, come on down! I'll show you."
I followed Carol down the ladder, aware that Areatha was behind me, and Pete bringing up the rear. The lab seemed to be cut into the Lunar regolith, the walls partly made of grey rock. It was vast, stuffed with high-tech kit, and in the centre stood what I suspected I was here to see: a tangle of screens, wires, emitters, and even less comprehensible components, linked to the base systems by a thick bundle of cables.
"It's not very pretty," Carol said, coming to a stop just this side of a thick yellow line painted on the floor, "but it does the job." She looked at me almost shyly. "Do you want to see?"
"Carol," I said with absolute sincerity, "I would love to."
Beaming, the elderly scientist turned to a nearby computer and began tapping in commands. "We'll go for a 80:20 alignment, with inverted polarity… there we go." On the device, lights began to blink, ranks of them shading from blue into the far violet. "And I think the new modulator will make for a good demonstration… yes." The lights all flashed once in unison, then held a steady glow. From the heart of the assembly I heard a throbbing whine that rose rapidly in pitch until it passed beyond the limits of human hearing. Then Carol stepped back and gestured. "Voila."
"Uh." I studied the device. "It's very… nice?"
Behind me, Areatha scoffed. "Honestly, why did we ally with you people? Obviously she's got a demonstration planned."
Carol's lips set as she glanced at Areatha. Then she smiled at me and picked up a pistol from the desktop next to her. "Do you want to do the honours?"
"Uh." I held up my hands. "I don't actually want to shoot her-"
"Oh for God's sake." Areatha pushed past me and grabbed the gun from the scientist's hand. "I assume you don't want me to aim right at it."
Carol sighed and waved vaguely at the wall across from the machine. "Anywhere beyond the yellow line."
"Gottit." Areatha raised the gun, one-handed, and sighted along the barrel. "Um… okay, it's been a while, hang on…" She fiddled with the pistol for a second. "Right, safety is off. We can edit the fumbling out in post." She took a deep breath and extended her arm again. "And… blammo."
The gun's retort echoed around the underground chamber, and I flinched back, blinking against the flash. I hadn't quite managed to clear my vision when Areatha handed the pistol back to Carol and strolled up to the line on the floor. "It's impressive," she said, "I'll give it that."
I walked over to join her. The bullet hung in midair, perfectly stationary, directly over the painted line. It was slightly scorched around the base, but not in any way deformed. I did my level best to keep my astonishment from showing on my face.
The whine descended into hearing again, and I glanced back to see Carol working the controls. She made a flicking gesture with one hand, directing me back to the device, and I turned again in time to see the bullet begin to drift downwards. It picked up speed, at what I judged to be an increasing rate of acceleration, until it finally hit the floor under a full 1/6th gravities.
I looked at Areatha, my eyes wide. Then I schooled my expression and turned back to Carol.
"We haven't been able to recreate the anti-laser effects," she said, gesturing with one hand. "I think that's what made it look black - a complete momentum-damping field for light." She wiggled her hand side to side. "Not sure, though. But it'll stop anything in our armament - actually, I think anywhere in North America - stone dead."
I - somehow - managed to nod thoughtfully, instead of staring at her in shock as I tried to absorb the sheer magnitude of what she was saying. The old sci-fi hallmark of the deflector shield had been the holy grail of military research since the Twentieth Century. Now here it was, in front of me - and from what the Cascadians were saying, it had been invented by my country, and installed on my ship.
The silence had gone on too long. Carol was looking concerned, Pete almost suspicious. I needed to say something intelligent, to justify their faith in me… "What about nukes?" I blurted out. "How does it hold up to nukes?"
Carol frowned for a moment, then her expression cleared. "Oh, your Celtic League uses them, doesn't it? That depends how they're set off. It won't set off a contact trigger - the field saps momentum, it doesn't exert a force on anything - but if they have a stand-off range… hmm." She half-turned, prodding at her screen. "I don't think we've tried that."
"We don't keep nuclear weapons in the base, Carol," Pete said gently.
"... fair point." She shrugged at me apologetically. "We've tested it over a range of particle masses and speeds, and I guess it would stop about half of what comes out of one of your missiles."
I nodded slowly. Reducing a nuke's effective yield by half - even if all the hard gamma still got through - would be game-changing if these people decided to attack the League. The battle with the Dutch had shown we hadn't yet got our system into general deployment, and-
There was a cough from behind me. "How about people?" Areatha asked softly. "Can you put a person inside?"
Carol glanced at her, then turned her gaze on me. She'd apparently adopted a policy of pretending Areatha didn't exist. "The field is asymptotic at the boundary," she explained. "It reaches infinite momentum sapping at the outside edge, but drops off effectively to zero further in. People aren't affected by it."
"Hmm." Areatha stepped over the line, bent over the device, and peered at one of the screens. "Not quite what I meant." She turned and gave us all a placid look. "Is it time for lunch?"