Genrenauts: Season One

by Michael R. Underwood

  Which it was.

  Just because science fiction usually skipped most of the flying scenes didn’t mean that you got places instantly. It just means that good storytellers knew when to gloss over scenes. But he’d be there for the whole thing. He wasn’t the hero of this story anymore. He was just the Ambassador’s wheelman, now.

  * * *

  Leah had thought that Bhean was the last hurdle.

  Oh, oh no. The night had just begun.

  After Bhean and the pleasure-dancers it was Seeker De-van storming off to his hidey-hole on the second ring, swearing to never trust the Terrans again. They’d pulled him out of hiding with a highstakes Vrebak game and promises of an early hearing before the Insterstellar Alliance Trade commission.

  And after that, it was Vice-Prelate Janan, who felt unloved after their dinner wallow with his boss. So they rushed back to the restaurant, back to the fake mud, and back to another gray-green Gaan fanning himself and Shirin talking more circles around the massive diplomat. And on.

  And on.

  Shirin and Leah finally turned in at 0400. Leah fortunately spent the last two hours of the evening tapping out their preliminary report to King and Roman after receiving the beam that they’d retrieved the ambassador. First they’d informed Ambassador Laran, then helped Laran get word out to the other principals, and then another two meetings to assure various players that the ambassador was, in fact, coming back. Here’s her picture from their colleague’s ship with a hard time-code, no seriously.

  Leah face-planted on her bed at 0417 knowing full well that she’d have to be up again at quarter till six to be up and ready to receive Ambassador Reed and escort her to the meeting hall so that the grand Assembly could be gathered for the signing of the treaty.

  The alarm came as soon as she closed her eyes. So fast that Leah pinched herself to make sure that this wasn’t some kind of hateful dream.

  Assured of what passed for reality in this sleep-thief of a story world, she threw herself in the shower again until Shirin “ahem-ed” loud enough to be heard inside.

  And so it was, that despite all logic, and motivated only by space station coffee and a reminder that she was making better money than she’d ever seen in her life, that she got back into her diplomatic robes to face the world.

  Epilogue: Let’s Try That Alliance Thing Again

  Ambassador Reed stepped back onto Ahura-3 at 0713 local time, accompanied by King, Roman, and preceded by the two Dark Stars prisoners.

  The prisoners were handed over to Commander Bugayeva, and Ambassador Reed was met by her counterpart Laran, as well as Shirin, and Leah.

  Leah noticed that the ambassadors’ greeting was very, very friendly, and filed that away with the thousand and one other notes she’d have to unload and process once they were back on Earth Prime.

  They proceeded immediately to the Grand Assembly, where, thanks to the last night’s epic bender of diplomacy and distraction, the principals for the would-be Interstellar Alliance were all present, the representatives and their retinues filling a room meant for fifty, with a long table at the center.

  The language of the Alliance was unchanged. It was written out on a two-yard-long parchment, stacked seven copies tall. One each for the member races, and two for the archives—one to stay on Ahura-3, one bound for Terra.

  Ambassador Reed gave a stirring speech, during which Leah fell asleep twice. That she counted.

  But it worked.

  One by one, the ambassadors lined up and signed their names in septuplicate (that’s totally a word), then shook hands and congratulated one another and stood for a zillion pictures.

  Once it was done, Roman gave the signal and the four of them filed out of the room.

  Ambassador Laran met them just outside the docks, still wearing a crown of Gaan flowers that signified friendship or everlasting trust or something. Leah was too tired to check on her wrist-screen.

  “I am in your debt, Shirin. A deep, powerful debt that I hope you will allow me to discharge soon before it weighs too heavily on me. Peace will bring such light into this galaxy that it will blind the agents of darkness.”

  “Speaking of agents of darkness, the mercs said they were hired by the Ra’Gar,” Roman said.

  Laran narrowed her eyes, poker face broken. “Unlikely. The Ra’Gar do not have such influence in this sector. More likely it is another force posing as the Ra’Gar. Regardless, Commander

  Bugayeva’s team will press the matter until the truth is out.” “You’ll keep me informed?” Shirin asked.

  “Since you’re not staying, I presume the standard relay will suffice.” “Indeed.”

  “Once again, you have my thanks. Kaylin and my thanks, both.” The Ethkar bowed. To the waist. Shirin led them in returning the bow, just barely shallower. Then Shirin wrapped the woman in a hug, and they made their final farewells.

  Leah passed on Shirin’s message to Bugayeva to get Zoor and Fela compensated for their help, hoping that between them they’d catch any exhaustion-derived typos.

  All four of them were dead tired, so the return trip was very silent. And fortunately, no one threw anything at Leah when she napped the whole way back until the dimensional crossing. It’d be a long time before she could sleep through that.

  * * *

  “Two odd story breaks in as many weeks. I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” King kept muttering to himself as they deplaned, finally back on Earth Prime.

  Leah had Preeti call her a cab, trying not to pass out on the beanbag chairs while she waited. Shirin gathered her things to head home. King collected their reports and left to give his report to the High Council, and Roman wandered off somewhere.

  After white-knuckling it to not fall asleep in the cab, Leah stumbled into her apartment at 4:23, dropped her phone on the couch, and then curled up under her covers to sleep for a day, or until King called to yell at her to come into work.

  Either way.

  Her mind refused to cooperate, still running a thousand cycles a minute, replaying her bizarre and wondrous experiences off-world, traipsing around having diplomatic adventures, eating otherworldly foods, memorizing several novels’ worth of backstory and anthropological data all at once. But it had paid off.

  Leah had two missions under her belt now, and she could barely wait for number three. It was exhausting as any five of the eighteen hells, but this Genrenaut gig was working out pretty well.

  * * *

  Marjana, the youngest nurse, stood watch at the nurse’s station. Even slumped by long hours, she was nearly as tall as Roman. Today’s choice of hijabs was orange, accenting her blue scrubs.

  She nodded as Roman approached. “How was the mission?”

  “We came, we saw, we exploded things. Mallery was missed. How’s she doing?”

  “Recovering and restless. She’s pushing to get back on the rotation immediately. Maybe you can convince her to take some time.”

  Roman lifted a thumb toward her room. “She up?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Mallery’s room already showed her personality. Roman had brought over books and her trophies from her time Off-Broadway. Roman traveled light, but there wasn’t anywhere Mallery went where she didn’t leave a mark.

  In a room with flood lights, Mallery would still be the brightest thing. She was everything his home world wasn’t—kind, funny, and refined. Even clad in scrubs, arm in a cast, and her bottleblonde hair mussed with a serious case of bed-head, she was still poised.

  “Hey there,” she said. “How was the mission? Pull up a chair and tell me all about it.”

  He retold the story of their mission, filled in what he knew of Shirin and Leah’s parts, and didn’t spare the details about the lengths he’d gone to, how deep he’d tapped into his nature to get the job done. How he felt more alive on-mission.

  Mallery reached across the bed for his hand. He offered it, and she squeezed it, reassuring him. He still fiddled and fidgeted as she talked. “You know what you’r
e doing, and you trusted King to look after you when I wasn’t there to do it myself. I think the RPG thing was a bit much, and that probably would have blown up in somebody’s faces if anybody else tried to do it. But it didn’t, and you pulled it out. If we’re going to get through this story story system or whatever the Council calls it, we’ll need to stick together, and we’ll need you to be every bit of your badass self.

  They talked for another half-hour, mostly Mallery updating him on the minutia of the HQ during the days they’d been gone. Even in a hospital bed, she still got all the gossip.

  But still, Roman couldn’t still his mind. He’d been living in condition yellow as long as he could remember. He could jog and read and listen all at once, and all that did was distract him.

  But something was better than nothing. Far better. Nothing would let the memories come flooding through.

  “Em?” His voice was shaking, his defenses down.

  “Yeah.”

  “Tell me a story?”

  Her carriage shifted immediately. This wasn’t the first time, far from it. She squeezed his hand again, then let go and retrieved her eReader.

  Roman closed his eyes, grabbed the sound of her voice and held tight, a life preserver in the choppy tides of his unease. He’d hold on, for her, for himself, for the team. He wasn’t made for this world, but he’d learned to love it, even if he’d never quite feel at home.

  END EPISODE TWO

  Episode Three:

  The Cupid Reconciliation

  Chapter One: The Comedienne Returns

  Leah Tang hustled into Genrenauts HQ at nine-o-eight AM and snuck her way to the ready room, exhaling in relief at having escaped King’s anal-retentive time-cop powers.

  Strangely, no one else was there. This time of day at the team’s ready room in Genrenauts HQ, the team would be in morning relaxing mode. The ever-multitasking Roman de Jager should be kicked up one table over, leaning back in his chair to an audiobook or leaning forward over a comic. Team lead Angstrom King would be pacing, a tablet in hand as he pored over reports. And Senior Genrenaut Shirin Tehrani would be reclining in the book nook, speed-reading a biography or history text.

  Instead, the room was empty.

  Leah left her bag and tablet on the table and stalked the halls. They weren’t in Ops. Preeti and the other operators whiled away on their multi-screen displays, the big wall showing data feeds from all around Earth and from beyond, data recorded on various trips and sent back by scouting missions. The team wasn’t where they usually would be, but she’d only been on the job for a few weeks, and maybe there was a monthly meeting or something that she was missing? Something she’d forgotten when she collapsed after swordplay night?

  Leah froze, struck by a thought. She checked her work email and saw nothing about a meeting, just the same assortment of forecasting and scouting reports.

  However, she did have a text message, from Shirin. Shirin was older, basically the mom of the team, but in practice, she was more like the cool aunt who always had good stories.

  “Come to Medical.”

  Continuing, Leah rounded the corner and saw a crowd. The whole team—Shirin, dashing badass Roman, and King, the alternatingly stern and thoughtful Team Lead—clustered around their injured teammate Mallery York, freshly out of a medical gown and back in skinny jeans and a gauzy top, one arm in a cast. Leah had only seen the woman in her recovery room, wearing a gown, looking far less stylish than she did in the team dossiers.

  All together, they looked like a totally odd but comfortable family of choice. Which made Leah the new foster kid—not yet adopted, still feeling out her place in everything.

  Shirin noticed Leah come around the bend and waved her over. The team parted to give Mallery a clean view.

  Mallery was just a hair taller than Leah, taller still with heels. She had bleach-blond hair in a progressive bob, and the kind of skin that looked like it would burn in the shade. Heels already? Leah thought, shuddering. One of the things that was not in the regs was a requirement to wear heels (unlike some jobs she’d had). Leah wore flats to work. And at home. Everywhere. But no, Mallery went straight from infirmary socks to three-inch heels.

  Shirin made the introduction. “Mallery, I don’t think you’ve properly met our new probationary agent, Leah Tang.”

  Mallery’s face went from bright to incandescent. She threw open her arms, adjusting for the awkwardness of the cast. “Probie! Welcome to the team. Sorry I wasn’t in any condition to give you a proper welcome earlier, what with the being shot and all.”

  So, if she’s back on-duty, do I still have a job? Leah asked herself, even though King and all of the paperwork said that the position was ongoing, pending review after six months. Leah had been hired partially to sub for Mallery, and she was just settling into the role, but here Mallery was…

  “I’m glad you’re on your feet again,” Leah said, politeness winning out. “How are you feeling?”

  “Ready to climb the Great Wall, if it means getting back to doing something useful. I love reading and all, but we didn’t join the team to become literature professors, right?”

  Mallery talked fast, accentuating speech with one hand, the other arm held in a fixed position by her cast.

  “I hope Roman hasn’t been giving you too much trouble,” Mallery said, placing a friendly hand on Leah’s elbow. “He loves to play with the newbies. I remember when I was new, he stole the batteries out of everything I brought into the office and replaced all of the romance novels on my eReader with spiritual self-help books. Serves him right that I spent the next month boring him to death with love languages.”

  Leah let the woman plow ahead, slightly awed. Some people were animated. Mallery was Pixar 3D IMAX.

  “Fair’s fair,” Roman said.

  King cleared his throat. “That’s enough reunion. Let’s get back to work.”

  Mallery chattered at Leah every inch of the way.

  “How are you liking the job so far? I was so overwhelmed my first year. The reading lists, the training, and the missions. My first one, we went to the Noir region, and I was so excited to get to dig into the wardrobe. But newbies never get to dress themselves, so I got the stodgy spinster outfit. It was a gag, though, since I needed to be the Femme Fatale; we were getting a detective out of the bottle so he could solve the case, you see…”

  And on she went. It was like she’d been storing up all of the words from several weeks of inactivity, and had to get them all out now.

  Or maybe this was how she was all the time.

  Leah took the conversational backseat, happy to let Mallery drive, sharing experiences from her days as a probationary Genrenaut. Leah tried to commit the pranks to memory, hoping to avoid or maybe turn the tables if Shirin or Roman tried to pull them out again.

  Being the butt of every joke as the low woman on the org chart wasn’t the most fun part of the job. On the other hand, it was a damn sight better than getting the side-eye from lifers at her last job, who suspected her of being an affirmative action hire. All for a reception job. Thanks, Simmons & Sains!

  “So, tell me about your missions. I saw the reports, of course, but it was always so exciting for me to talk about my first missions. Did you really distract a gunslinger with a totally improvised bit on your first trip out? I was such a bundle of nerves my first mission. You should have seen me in that dress.”

  Mallery counted with her fingers, accentuated by a playful wink. “One, because it fit like a glove—Shirin is a miracle-worker—and two, I was so struck with stage fright, I might as well have been a freshman auditioning for a top ten theater program.”

  Mallery took a breath, and Leah jumped right in like it was a game of double Dutch, taking her turn.

  “It was the only thing I could think of, really. The baddie had a hostage, right; I peeked through the kitchen door and saw Maribel, our heroine, all stalemated with the Black Hat, and I knew I wasn’t a good enough shot to be sure not to hit his hostage, so I rem
embered that her brother had been using the stairs by the kitchen and made my way around.”

  Leah caught herself matching Mallery’s speed, talking like someone was pumping the oxygen out of the room and she had to talk fast while there was still time. She stopped herself, then resumed at a slower pace. “I took the carafe of lemonade with me. I knew I was going to do something with it. I didn’t want to just toss the thing at him; he’d probably flinch and shoot someone. I needed him distracted, so I just reached into my improv quiver.”

  “Improv quiver, I love it!” Mallery said, slapping her uninjured hand on her hip.

  The rest of the team settled into their places in the rec room, and Mallery joined Leah at her table.

  “Are you a coffee drinker?” Mallery asked.

  “Only always.”

  “Great. Make us some coffee, and I’ll think up some more tips for you before King whisks us away to some meeting about the socio-narrative implications of declining crop yields in Fantasyland or whatever.”

  Leah chuckled to herself as she made the coffee. Making coffee had fallen to her at her last job, and the one bit of continuity was both reassuring and disappointing. The last time she’d been anywhere near the top of an org chart was college, as captain of her improv comedy troupe. Of course, senior year was marred by the epic drama from when JD dumped Karen, then proceeded to try to sleep his way through the rest of the troupe. She’d had to boot him after he made a handsy pass at her after a Saturday performance.

  So, that was a bonus to being on the bottom of the heap—other people had to do the firing, make the choices on behalf of the whole team, take the flak for a split-second decision.

  King, however, came off as flak-proof, stainless steel in a pressed suit.

  Leah was practicing the art of watching coffee brew when King walked into the room, holding his tablet like a conductor’s baton.