---Yukikaze---
---Emiko’s perspective---
“No, no, no, no, no!” I slosh, tipsily “Plasmablades were so easy to reverse engineer we’d done it before breakfast(!) It’s just a length of metal with a miniature fusion core attached and a shaped containment field to keep it from vaporising itself! Containment fields were some of the first tech we were able to replicate, postContact! I had ordered my sword before I even finished officer training!!!… It was translators… I would have given my left tit to be able to communicate with the opposite side or take troops into my unit with whom I didn’t share a language! That and FTL coms… phoning home for orders and to relay intel would have been oh so convenient!”
The gracile, Tshwane woman smiles curiously, just as inebriated, and asks “I don’t want to be… tactless but what was wrong with the mountains of translators you, presumably, could have foraged after any battle?”
Here Thran murmurs “They weren’t designed with the thought that they’d ever be used by deathworlders…” not seeming sure whether to address her girlfriend or me and, so, addressing the floor.
I beam at her “Exactly, girl! Terran neurons are very distinct from those of any gardenworld species. Terran languages are minefields of nuance and idiom… We tried scavenging them, early in the War, they were worse than useless! And, because they required a level of technological development that we just couldn’t replicate, we had to fight the whole War without them!”
A light smile adorns the corners of her mouth at the implied praise ‘well done for knowing that’ which I just gave her.
The only evidence of the absurd amount of alcohol she’s put away is the slight flush touching her cheeks.
In one direction; she is a BIG woman… in many ways (not that that… *ehem* ample chest of hers will be any help, alcohol not being lipid soluble(!))... But, in the other direction; Neanderthals have markedly lower tolerance, per unit of bodyweight, than Sapiens and she has had a lot… It’s impressive that she still seems so sober!
“Hey, Emiko…!” interjects Xon, excitedly, as if she’s just thought of something.
“Yes, Xon?” I answer, an eyebrow raised in amusement.
“You’ve still got it, right?!”
“I’m sorry…? Got what?”
“The sword, obviously!” she answers, rolling her eyes, an exasperated smirk twisting her mouth.
“Oh… my service sabre…? I do still have it… You… want to see it?”
Xon nods eagerly and even Thran looks mildly curious.
“Alright…” I shrug as I get up and make for my wardrobe “…it’s not a plasmaweapon anymore, don’t be disappointed…”
I pull out a 140cm box, lain on its side, which I then bring back to the table we’re sat around.
I set the box on the table and bring my hand to its left side, sliding off the lid to the right.
I reach inside and pull out my pride and joy “This is my sword, Yukikaze…”
Using my thumb, I push the tsuba until the seal that the habaki maintains with the matte white sheath is released, exposing the glossy, black, wootz patterned blade.
Xon’s mouth falls agape, her eyes go wide and an expression crosses Thran’s face that, on anyone else, I would call ‘mild surprise’. On her, however, it looks like astonishment(!)
“No fucking WAAAAAAAAAAAY! For real?!?!?!” shouts the Tshwane.
I smile with a hint of smugness and answer “Yes… it’s one of only a few tens of thousands ever made with a durasteel blade… Afterward, they figured out that, as they cut with heat and not their edge, durasteel isn’t the best material for them… not to mention it would have been prohibitively expensive to manufacture as many as we needed out of durasteel!… The very sensible decision was made to switch to a far more cost effective alloy for plasmablades… as a side effect, I ended up with an extremely stylish katana, probably worth more than a medium sized house for the combination of its rareness and the value of durasteel it contains…”
“I couldn’t be more jealous! That has got to be the coolest object I’ve ever seen!!!” praises Xon “I bet you kicked so much arse with that baby!”
I chuckle “I mainly used it for melting through the plating on armoured vehicles and fortress walls…”
“You say that like you think that sounds less badass!” she roars, mirthfully.
Then another thought seems to occur to her as she stares at my fruitbowl “Emiko… do you reckon, if I threw a peach at you, you could slice it in half?”
I laugh “A peach? You’d find that impressive, would you?”
Seeming to pick up on the fact that I consider what she just asked to be both amusing and a mild affront to my skill, she defends “I’ve got quite a pitch!” in demonstration, extending her long, slim arm (which, like the rest of her, looks like that of a Sapiens put through a taffy puller(!))
I purse my lips, mirthfully, wave my hand, placatorily, and say “No doubt, no doubt but… give me a minute and I’ll give you a much better exhibition than fruit slicing!”
Her left eyebrow flashes upwards “Alright… I’m intrigued…” she smiles “…show us.”
I grin and take out my holopad.
I open up the app I use to shop for nanoforge schematics and begin searching for what I need for this demonstration.
It must have cost a fortune for Tcakqaal to make private nanoforges standard issue on this ship…
There! A little pricey for what it is but it’s not as if I can’t afford it(!) Plus… you can’t put a price on spectacle!
I tap to purchase it and immediately send it to the forge which hums to life. I hesitate a moment but then decide that it’s best to play it safe and, so, send a pair of safety glasses to print as well.
Definitely a good idea, given the quantity of alcohol we’ve all consumed!
A few seconds more of the two girls looking curiously at my nanoforge before I stand to retrieve the object.
I pick it up and examine it a moment before extending it, handle first, to Xon.
“What’s this?” she frowns.
“It’s a pellet gun.” I answer “It should shoot a metal pellet, 4mm in diameter, at a little over 300kmph…”
“And what do you want me to do with it?”
Instead of answering, I smile and walk over to the back corner of the room with my katana, unfold the safety goggles and put them on.
The redheaded and ravenhaired women stare, disbelieving, for a few more moments before Xon exclaims “No… you’re not serious! Not on my best day!!! You reckon you can hit a 4mm ball travelling at more than 300kmph!?”
I smile “Well… I haven’t done it since uni and I don’t think I’ve ever done it quite as close as this… so I can’t promise to get it on my first try but yes, I know I can… this was part of my final exam in kenjutsu, at 17, so it should still be locked in my kinaesthetic memory.”
She laughs (obviously having a little trouble believing), shrugs and rises to take position in the opposite corner of the room, pulling Thran along behind her… as much as one can pull a 1/6th tonne woman(!)
She turns around, effortlessly adopting the weaver stance (despite her intoxication) in a way that screams that she’s had a thousand times as much training as any subordinate I commanded in the War… though she’s never been called on to truly use any of that training in anger.
“So, on your left?” she asks, wiggling the barrel back and forth to indicate that she wishes me to instruct her.
“Yes… actually, one moment…” I say, having just realised that my yukata, though comfortable, was not really designed for martial arts.
I unfasten the obi and drop it to the floor, shortly followed by the yukata itself.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“You’re joking!!!” guffaws Xon, dropping the gun to her hip “That’s what you were wearing before we showed up?!… You were just chilling out in a gossamer black chemise with red lingerie clearly visible through it? Are you a living advertisement from one of those ad cycles where companies are selling everything with sex(!?)”
I shrug “I like to feel pretty… plus we just spent all day at the beach together! My bikini was far more revealing than this!”
“True, it showed more skin, but like Mouse said; it’s the mystery creating the allure! Like, when you’re in a bikini I’m like ‘Yeah, sure, that’s a stomach… it’s sexy… whatever’ but when you put a mostly opaque bit of clothing over that stomach… when you make me feel like I’m catching a glimpse of something I’m not really supposed to see… it becomes 100× sexier!”
I snort and chuckle before raising my sword slightly and wryly asking “You still want to see how good I am with this or are we on to the portion of the evening where we compliment eachother’s underwear(?)”
“Why not both(?!)” she quips but then raises the pellet gun back to shoulder level.
“You want me to count you in?”
I shake my head “Not necessary. Just shoot whenever you’re ready.”
With one last exhale, she squeezes.
Before the trigger is even fully depressed Yukikaze is clearing his sheath. My eyes have already calculated exactly where, in space, he needs to meet the pellet and direct my body to put him there without ever seeing the ball.
My conscious mind has effectively no input into the procedure.
If I tried to visually process where the ball was, then meet it, I would be to late to respond, every time. Instead, I’ve got to intuitively calculate ahead and just trust that my calculations are correct.
*Ping*-*tck**tck**tck**tck**tck**tck* is the sound of the ball hitting the edge, followed by the two parts hitting the wall behind me, then the floor and audibly bouncing.
The two women stand with their respective expressions of amazement adorning their faces, Xon with her eyes wide and her mouth agape, Thran with her lips slightly parted and eyebrows raised.
“Well, I couldn’t see that but… I heard it! I know that you successfully drew that sword and hit the ball, at least!” says Xon, still in bewilderment.
I perform a noto (with a tiny bit more flourish than I really need to) to sheath Yukikaze, turn around and, after a little searching, am able to locate the remains of the pellet.
“Ah. Didn’t manage to hit it dead centre! It looks like about an 80/20 split.” I say, disappointedly, as I examine the fragments.
“Oh, you hear that, Thran(!?) Just an 80/20(!) She didn’t manage to hit it dead on(!) How lame(!)” laughs Xon, sarcastically, as the three of us return to our seats, I drop the imperfectly split pellet parts where they can see them and she places the gun on the table (a little more forcefully than I suspect she would if she were sober).
Thran looks confused a moment before Xon playfully bends down to kiss the top of her head and clarifies “Sarcasm, sweetie! It was very impressive!”
“I used to be able to hit it dead on.” I smile.
“Yeah, but you said you hadn’t done this since uni? That’s what? 30 years? 32?”
I shake my head “I didn’t graduate until I was older than you are now; a few weeks before my 18th was when the Paloma was destroyed and the War truly began. For… personal reasons, I was in the recruitment office the day of my birthday. I got scouted for officer training. Lost an eye about 4 years in and another 10 months before the War ended… spent about 13 months on the waiting list to get them regenned afterward and only then started thinking about applying for higher education. So it's only about 21 years since I last pulled out that party trick!”
“Oh, shit… Sorry…” she says with an apologetic grimace.
I wave my hand and smile “Ancient history, don’t worry about it.”
She nods appreciatively and continues “Still! The fact that you can do it at all, after more than 2 decades… The fact that you could ever do it in the first place!!! That’s, like, a legit superpower!”
“That’s very flattering. Thank you.” I answer, sweetly.
Here Thran asks “That’s why your eyes are purple?” marking probably the sixth sentence she’s spoken since she crossed the threshold of my room.
“Exactly! They hadn’t perfected regen yet so my hair ended up silver and my irides purple!” I smile warmly, causing her mouth to do that adorable and almost imperceptible upward curl again.
“Oh, wow! I kinda feel bad, now!” says Xon, biting her lip.
“Why do you feel bad, girl?” I ask, mirthfully.
“Weeeeell… I sorta just assumed you purposefully got them modded that way to contribute to the whole…” she splays her long fingers and waves the tips vaguely over my body “…MILF aesthetic you’ve got going on!”
I burst into laughter “MILF aesthetic!? My MY, you’re a brave one!”
“You don’t think you’ve got a MILF aesthetic?” she asks, curiously.
I consider a moment.
“I suppose, as much as one can have a ‘MILF aesthetic’ with the face of a woman in her twenties… but that’s not how I would have thought of it… You’re partly right that my image is somewhat… cultivated… Just as an example, I could have had my eyes and hair put back to normal after Terran regen had been refined, it would have been covered by the UTCM as veteran care, but, by then, I’d sort of grown into them… I’d come to think of them as enhancements rather than blights or mistakes… As I said, I like to feel pretty and so I own and wear a lot of nice clothes (in my defence, I spent the entire War wearing nothing but cold weather fatigues and white painted combat armour so I feel as if I’ve earned the indulgence of wearing nice clothes for the rest of my life(!))… This ‘MILF aesthetic’ is also a useful persona to adopt with gardenworlders, I find. The belligerence of my half-sister, my father and…” I gesture to the photo of my younger self “…her, is all well and good if you want to intimidate a gardenworlder into doing what you want but, if you want to charm them, you need to be… well, charming(!)… That’s a lesson I learned while I was commanding the occupation of Vissitrith.”
Xon, looks thoughtfully at me, tapping her long index finger against her chin.
Eventually, she enquires “I’m sorry… did you just say you commanded the occupation of an entire planet?… I mean, I’ve never heard of that one so I assume it’s not like a major hubworld but still… you can’t have been more than, what, 25!? How did that happen!?”
I give a mirthless smile and answer “It’s a lot easier to get promoted in a total War. Often the only qualifications necessary are ‘are you nearby?’ and ‘do you have a pulse?’…”
“You forget ‘are you the kind of badass who can cut bullets in half with her sword?’(!)” shoots back Xon with a wry cock of her eyebrow.
I wobble my head consideringly “I’m not saying I wasn’t a good soldier… but a good soldier is not necessarily the same as a good Commander…”
“You still managed to command your way into a planetary surrender… not bad for a ‘not necessarily good Commander’.” counters Xon.
“A fair point…” I allow “…it may not have had everything to do with the fact that, of the people in that photo, a quarter were dead within the year and more than half would not survive the War.”
“Holy shit! For real?” cries Xon, looking to the crowd in horror “I’m so sorry! That must have been really hard for you.” she laments, sympathetically.
“It certainly wasn’t easy… but you do sort of go numb to it after a while… Well, I did at least!… Anyway, as I said, ancient history.”
“Do you talk to them, still?” asks Thran, softly.
“The survivors? Yes.” I point to Fang “Do either of you recognise this gentleman?”
They both squint at the wolfman before Xon goes “OMG! Isn’t that…” she snaps her fingers, struggling to remember “…I forget his name but like fourth in charge of the UTCHC.”
I nod “Well done. Of course the Humanitarian Corps don’t go in for strict hierarchy but you’re right that he’s (de facto) in a position of some seniority. His name’s Fang ‘Doc’ Lowell, by the way. He and I regularly still chat over holo… And that…” I point to the heavy featured face of the 10,091st’s best sniper “…I don’t expect you’ll recognise him, Xon, but Thran…?”
Thran’s mossy, dark green eyes squint at the photo “That’s… Hrom ‘Hush’ Rivers…” she says in a low voice “…he… he’s one of the Neanderthal community’s representatives to the Kurultai on Yanga Dala… my home…”
I nod enthusiastically “Yes, he is… He and I had a fling after the War… It was actually here, as it happens, on Neonesia… After we were, finally, withdrawn from Vissitrith, we were housed in a compound next to the military hospital, here. We were both waiting for them to crack Terran regen, he was waiting for his tongue, I was waiting for my eyes. We spent a tonne of time together because I needed a set of seeing eyes until I got my temporary cybernetics and he needed someone to translate his words for anyone who didn’t know morse… things naturally progressed… We ended things after we got our respective body parts back and it became apparent that our plans for the future were not compatible with eachother’s… but it was an amicable separation. Like with Doc, I still talk to him regularly. ”
Xon smirks “You’re sure you never ordered him to keep you warm on what, judging by your uniforms, must have been some… very cold nights on campaign(?)”
I return the smirk “You’re damn right I was tempted to grab a hold of him while we were still active duty, especially on those most… hopeless days where it felt like the War was just not winnable, but… I mean quite apart from the ethics issue of a superior engaging in a relationship with her subordinate… there was just the pragmatic issue of it being a distraction and compromising both of our fitness for duty… It was only after we were discharged that we were really free to have that kind of relationship.”
“You’re saying it wasn’t distracting to have someone under your command who you were so attracted to?” queries Xon with a cocked eyebrow.
“Oh, hell no! I’m only saying it was less distracting than if I’d acted on it!”
She shrugs “Sounds like you were denying yourself for no reason, in my opinion…”
“You’re entitled to your opinion…” I say, letting just the slightest hint of edge into my voice “…now, how about a subject change?”
The tall woman splays her disproportionately lengthy fingers, raises both eyebrows, twists her mouth and gives a slight nod, indicating that she’s willing to drop it.
There’s a moment of silence before the deep voice of the stout, taciturn Neanderthal asks “I… want to be clear; I’m not unhappy to be here but… why do you need a bodyguard, Mistress Miyazaki?”
I give a tiny sigh, resigned that I’ll never get this woman to just call me ‘Emiko’, then answer “That’s… actually an ODR regulation I helped to draft: Gardenworlders… for all their many, wonderful, plus points… are, as a rule, absolutely terrible at assessing risk… So, we thought it was a good idea for those with the significant job of assessing the viability of species to join the GU to have some protection from a deathworlder who’s trained in threat assessment and neutralisation… The fact that I’m not a gardenworlder and am in fact a deathworlder combat veteran does not mean I get to break the rules I helped to write(!) Plus, party tricks aside…” I smile at Thran “…I know which of the two of us I’d back in a fight(!)… There’s precisely no way I’d be a match for someone so physically powerful, with such deft combat skill and, not to mention… gallantry!… I saw the footage of you getting the Lanatkser Prime Minister to safety during that assassination attempt on Nova Italia… I believe that armour of yours, in the Lanatkser colours, was a ‘thank you’ gift…”
Here Xon cuts in “So that’s how you could afford a triple thickness suit of durasteel! Why wouldn’t you just tell me you got it as a thank you for heroics!?”
Thran looks down, abashedly, and murmurs “Didn’t want to brag…”
“It’s not bragging to truthfully answer a question!” laughs Xon “When you refused to tell me, I assumed you must have got it from the Yanga Dalan mafia or something!”
Thran’s light tan skin turns a vivid red.
Putting my hand on her shoulder, my heart momentarily skipping a beat at the feel of the iron hard flesh beneath my fingers, I smile apologetically “I’m sorry I revealed something you’d have preferred to keep hidden, Thran… but your girlfriend is also right that it doesn’t make you a braggart to own your accomplishments…”
Face still bright red, she smiles at me and my heart skips another beat.