Ravana's Shadow (27) (Patreon)

Not everyone was equally supportive of the Institute's brief interruption. 

Kit did not speak to Garrick right away, or at all for the next few weeks. They could have sent messages sooner or done more to answer the increasingly-frantic requests from the asteroid. Kit ignored them, and instead allowed Forerunner to reply with simple status messages. She was not available, but affairs were moving well. No, he would not be given an explanation.

She couldn't keep that up forever. At first, she could justify the delay to herself—there were important meetings to attend, sensor results from the first test to go over, and conversations over how things would be different in their second iteration. Above all, she needed to know what she would tell him when the call finally connected.

Eventually the morning came—another angry message, with his usual blustery demands and threats filling the latter half. If she didn't answer this time, he was going to terminate their authorization to come, just like all the other messages he had sent this week.

"Are you sure you don't want me here?" Jay asked, shifting nervously on bare feet. They were in her office, with Jay lingering near the door. "I've seen the things he sends. You shouldn't have to listen to them all on your own."

She shook her head once. "I'm sure." If you heard some of the things he sometimes says, you would be even closer to decoherence. There was one other colonist in the Institute who could talk to someone like him, and it wasn't Jay. "I'll be out soon, promise."

Jay sighed, then turned. "Okay, Kit. I'll be outside. If you need me, just open the door." It opened for him on its own, then shut again just as quickly.

"Might as well bring him up," Kit said, settling into her seat. She folded both hands gently across her chest, looking as casual and comfortable as she could make herself. "Go ahead."

The window turned back into a screen, darkening where Garrick's video feed appeared. The dark interior of his station had changed during the last few weeks. Cables now stretched along the walls, connecting various work lights strapped to different objects. A few oversized toolkits lay open and ready for him, with a few stray objects floating freely in microgravity.

"Kit. I thought you cared about our relationship. But here you are running away from me. Did you think I wouldn't be able to see the results of your test?"

Kit had never been trained with Wren's kind of diplomacy—she couldn't intimidate through inaction. She tried to copy the way Wren might act anyway, face flat and unmoved. Garrick could get as loud as he wanted or threaten as much as he wanted. "Our successful test suffered a minor setback. I had no time to communicate with you while making iterations to our last test vehicle."

Garrick lifted something heavy from the ground beside him—a wrench, a little rusted at the edges. Strange that it still resembled almost exactly the same tool Kit had used a hundred times. Like a hammer, some designs never needed to change, even across incalculably vast swathes of time.

"I don't think you understand the nature of our relationship, Kit. I'm not just your boss, I'm your god. One word, and your Forerunner won't let you come here. I think we're past the point of pretending you can defy it—you would never have woken me up if that were the case. There are far less elaborate ways to torture me to death."

Kit kept her face flat—but she couldn't quite have the same control over her tail. It rose slowly behind her, until peeking over the edge of her carefully constructed chair. But would Garrick even know what it meant? "I think the misunderstanding is yours, Garrick," she said. She could only hope Forerunner gave her camera a nice dramatic zoom, because she wouldn't be looking very intimidating framed the same way as her enemy.

Garrick needed no tricks to look like what he was—mature, muscular, and huge. He could take one of her colonists and snap them in half. All those tools and parts floating through his habitat could make all kinds of dangerous weapons too, if he wanted.

"We're here to help you. We're answering your distress call. We don't work for you. If you think looking like this means I'll do what you tell me, you're wrong."

Kit was so used to talking to him by now that she barely even noticed the time delay between their messages. Her brain fuzzed them away, with plenty of time to consider exactly how she would make her reply.

"The one with the power to destroy a thing has control over it," he said. "You might have the rockets—your last test leaves that unclear. But even if you do, you should be willing to work for almost anything. A shipment even marginally larger than the material you send to get to me, for example. That would still leave you better off."

She shrugged. "Forerunner, bring up a map of all asteroids and moons in Surya orbit. Eliminate all those with active beacons, leaving only those that would be free for us to harvest. Project them here, please."

He did, creating a glowing halo in the space directly in front of her. The projectors in the Director's office were much worse than the game rooms Abel used for his role-playing game, but they were good enough to make her point. Thousands of little stones appeared here—some large, and some small. 

"I am not transmitting these remarks," Forerunner said. "Of those you see here, spectrographic mineral estimations are indicated by color. Notice none are green—this indicates that any body with the correct distribution of materials and quantity of mass has already been selected for its own Forerunner probe. None were successful, yet all continue transmitting. We cannot harvest these."

There were thousands of smaller bodies, maybe more. Most were little more than specks where they hovered in front of Kit, misshapen blobs highlighted in yellow, red, orange, violet, or blue. "Eliminating those without a confirmed supply of fuel sufficient to direct it back from its orbit to Mara depopulates the orbital field significantly. They may have enough, but uncertainty is unacceptable from a mission like this."

The majority vanished right there, leaving about a fourth of the original objects. Most were blue, with a few yellow. "You wonder why we have not considered a mining mission to any of these. The answer is, of course, a balance of risk calculation. A small probe launched to verify composition is still a great investment. Yet without this, we cannot guarantee any body has the requisite material to construct drives. Ravana, by contrast, has none of these concerns. It contains enough material to sustain industrial activity, of the elements needed to construct any technology we desire."

"Highlight the most promising secondary targets, and show our friend," Kit said. Then she looked back at the camera. Forerunner would know she wanted to transmit again. "We have other options, Garrick. Ravana is our best by kilometers, yeah. But it's not the only one."

She stood up, advancing slowly towards the screen. "We don't age, Garrick. We can spend a thousand years designing the perfect mission to visit each of these, before settling on the one we want. It's not my first choice. But tell me we can't come to Ravana, and I guess it's made. Is that what you want?"

He took a long time to answer. Kit couldn't tell exactly, but it felt like the video staring at her was somehow on loop, giving her a false view of his calm and discipline. There was a brief jump in the image, and he was sitting slightly to the other side, his tablet computer now perched on his legs. 

"I want my colony to live. Ravana could be something great. It could be everything you built and more."

She shrugged. "I'm not offering you that, Garrick. Sorry the universe screwed you over. Maybe if things were different, you would be the one rescuing us. You could fly down with your fleet of starships and adopt the helpless orphans on my colony. Give us all good homes, or whatever. But that's not what we're doing. Go back on your word right now, and we'll just design another mission. Go back on your word once we get there, and we'll spend a few months harvesting enough of your asteroid to build a return vehicle, then leave Ravana exactly as we found it."

"You're immortal," he said, sagging in his seat. "Assuming you can even make it here, what do you care?"

"We care, because I devoted all the resources of the Institute to saving you. It would have been a year by then, probably another year before we get back. That's a year of personal risks, a year of sacrificed research, and a year of materials squandered." 

Kit made it back to her seat and settled down inside it. "So don't waste your time giving me more orders. Don't bother treating me the way you think I look. Ask yourself, Garrick. What do you value more: the hypothetical future of your colony, or the lives of your friends? What do you want?"

He folded his arms and glared. If he was trying to say anything, he must not be transmitting it, because none made it through the connection.

"You want me to start treating you like equals, Kit? You want to be on a team? That's a change for both of us. No more weekly reports, no summaries of decisions that shape whether I live or die. No more talking to me when you feel like it. I'm there in every meeting. I get to see your data, make suggestions. If you want an equal, start treating me like one."

That silenced her for a long time. Garrick wasn't wrong about any of that, of course. Kit couldn't bring him into meetings directly, because of the way he talked. He was always angry, always demanding. If he was even capable of positivity, Kit hadn't seen it since their first conversation. Right when he learned the nature of his rescuers. 

I can't tell him that. That would just fill Garrick with confidence about her colony—her best and brightest were so mentally unstable that a few mean words might make them break down. 

But why should they be resistant to treatment like his? Their world was better than that and had been for longer than any civilization Kit had left behind.

Kit sat up, meeting his eyes. "If I do that, I want this to be the last time I get threatened, or you try to bully your way into changing our deal. Ravana's mass in exchange for your survival and joining us as equal citizens. Imagine those terms carved into metal and welded to the wall behind you."

He grunted. When his mouth moved, Kit imagined he was saying a great deal—most of it profanity. Was Forerunner filtering that out, or had he just muted himself?

That was an idea...

"Yes," he said. "Those are the terms. But you have to start acting your part. We're in this together. It's my life on the line with every test that fails, or strategy you try that won't work. You have no idea what you're doing."

She laughed, as loud and mocking as she could. "Garrick. My team has forgotten a thousand times more about space exploration than you ever learned. Every single member has more advanced degrees than you have years of life. I don't want to mislead you—I'll bring you in on what we're doing. I'll make you a member of the team, like you should've been. But that doesn't mean you'll be leading this mission. I'm still in charge. I will consider what you have to say, but the decision is still mine. You're a prospector, I have rocket scientists."

This time she could make out something of his reply. "You have grade-schoolers," along with more of that anger. Frustrated or not, it wasn't a refusal. Maybe they were finally getting somewhere. 

"Any other restrictions I should know?"

"I... one." Kit stood. "Your communication is... my people would probably call it 'barbaric'. I happen to be a barbarian too, but they aren't. I'm going to make my Forerunner parse everything you say when you're talking to them. I can listen to this, but my people don't have to."

If she did that, Kit wouldn't have to be the only one to deal with him. Other members of her staff could do that, albeit filtered down to make him less intimidating.

“Guess I don’t have a choice,” Garrick answered. “I’ll take what I can get.” He thumbed the screen in front of it, and the display went dark.

"Signal terminated," Forerunner said. The screen went black, leaving her alone with her window. "I am quite impressed with your ability to bluff. Even at your greatly reduced index, you were able to pressure him."

Bluff? Kit tilted her head to one side. Her tail twitched, as she ran through the implications of everything they'd just agreed in her mind. Every meeting from now on was about to get a lot more annoying. But Garrick was right about one thing, no matter how frustrated she might be to admit it. She hadn't been treating him like a real member of her staff.

Maybe if he had the involvement of one, he would rise to their standards of behavior in other ways.

"Lucien told me I should've been a wolf when I got here," she said. "You refused, made me a squirrel."

"That is correct," Forerunner said. "Lucien's judgment was based purely on your origin. They mistakenly believed that any human from the ancient past would be barbaric, violent, and dangerous. We have no wolves, so their reputation among the Institute has grown somewhat... exaggerated. They genuinely believed it was a good fit—this was no insult against you."

"I know." She stopped in front of the mirror, touching one hand on where Garrick had been minutes before. "I want you to write a program, one that can take his audio and video input and filter it into something... a real colonist might say. Make him look like us too. Don't you think a wolf would be a good fit? I want to accurately capture how intimidating he is, without actually making him..." She gestured vaguely at the window. "Like he is. You know."

"I believe I do," Forerunner said. "This is possible. For official records, I am required to preserve the original transmissions as well. But I could present this modified version to the members of your staff, if that is your order."

"It is," she said. "He wants to be included, so we'll include him. Make sure Sam stays in touch from now on. You can tell him I ordered the filter constructed to make things easier for us. If you think Garrick is trying to work his way around the filter somehow, just terminate the signal. If he wants me to treat him like a member of the Institute, he gets to start acting like one."