Third down and long. Down by two. Fourth quarter with no timeouts and under three minutes to play. Standing on the sidelines, Benson read blitz. Two of the Flying Injri’s linebackers shifted forward subtly. It was a small movement, but enough to tip Coach Makhlouf’s hand on the play.
<Blitz. Blitz. Blitz,> Benson said into the open plant link he shared with the rest of the Mustangs. <Scratch the run, we’re throwing hot. Shift left. Leave Hillman uncovered. Cha’ku.> Benson paused long enough for the Atlantian to make eye contact. Ze didn’t have a plant. Great strides were being made mapping the Atlantian brain, but not enough was known as yet to make the technology compatible for their new allies. So Benson’s voice was being routed into a small com inside zer helmet. Benson couldn’t afford to be misunderstood on the play.
<Cha’ku, forget your route. Run to the empty spot Hillman leaves open. Can you do that?>
<OK coach,> the Atlantian receiver said. Which was less reassuring than it would have been if “OK coach” didn’t comprise ninety percent of Cha’ku’s conversations with Benson.
The offensive line shifted left. Under center, Boswell called for the snap before the defense could make any adjustments. The millisecond the ball left the center’s hand, the blitz of defensive linemen came. Bodies far, far bigger than anything that had been allowed to exist in two hundred years onboard the Ark slammed into each other. Irresistible forces meet immovable objects with a thunderclap. Hillman, intentionally left uncovered to Boswell’s right where the Mustang’s star quarterback would have a clear line of sight on the charging linebacker, came streaking through the gap like a charging Dux’ah and leveled a shoulder in an all-out effort to sack the QB, kill the drive, and force a punt to essentially end the game.
Just as Benson had hoped.
Miraculously, Cha’ku had actually understood Benson’s instructions and ran to the patch of turf Hillman’s charge had left undefended. Ze didn’t manage to shake zer man-on-man coverage, but with the Atlantian’s two-and-a-half-meter tall frame, it hardly mattered. Boswell zeroed in on his open receiver and let loose a rifle shot of a pass well over the head of the human Flying Injri player struggling desperately to match up with Cha’ku.
The oblong football streaked through the air in a tight spiral. Cha’ku reached up with a single hand and stretched as far as ze could. With a slap, the synthetic pigskin smacked into zer palm as the Atlantian’s four tentacle-like fingers curled around it and hauled it in for a seven meter reception. Ze was hit immediately from two sides by zer own man coverage and a free safety, but the nice thing about having receivers with thousands of tiny suction cups on their fingers was no matter how hard defenders hit them, they never coughed up fumbles.
They also never got much in the way of meters after the catch. As hard as they could be to tackle because of the extreme flexibility their omni-directional joints offered them, Atlantians were absolute shit in straight line running. With two defenders wrapping zer up like a Christmas present, Cha’ku toppled over like a felled tree. With one last desperate grab for centimeters, Cha’ku threw out zer arm and stretched the ball as far as ze could before zer knee touched turf and the play was whistled dead.
Benson didn’t have a great angle on the far side of the field and couldn’t tell where exactly Cha’ku had been brought down in relation to the first down marker. The ref made her way over to the pile of tangled limbs, recovered the ball, and placed it on the far side of the marker.
“Yeah!” Benson’s arms rose into the air along with the hoots and hollers of some three thousand Mustang fans, drowning out the boos of the Flying Injri fans that also filled the stands. Football had come a long way in the fifteen years since Benson had pioneered his little rec league, hoping to fill the hole left in his heart from the death of Zero.
Since those early days, their borrowed field had grown into a proper stadium, with seating for eight thousand people, nearly as large as the old Zero Stadium back on the Ark. The original four teams had swelled to a proper semi-pro league of six, one for each of Shambhala’s five boroughs, plus one representing the outlying settlements. Atlantian immigrants had started playing almost as soon as they’d touched down, bringing their unique blend of skills and physical characteristics to a game that was already evolving at breakneck speeds.
But some things never changed. A sudden pall settled over the crowd, squelching their celebration. Benson sensed the trouble and looked back to the field to see what the crowd had spotted. Lying there, not ten meters behind him, was a yellow penalty flag, burning in his vision as if it were the sun itself. It had been thrown far behind the line of scrimmage, close to where Boswell lay sprawled out on the turf underneath Hillman’s impressive frame.
Benson’s attention had been so focused on the pass that he hadn’t been watching the backfield. He hadn’t even seen the flag come out, but based on which ref had thrown it, the odds were good it was a holding call against someone on his offensive line. Ten-meter penalty, repeat third down, and give Coach Makhlouf another chance to put the game away for good.
Boswell was slow to get up. He stumbled over to the sidelines holding a limp left arm. “I think it’s dislocated, coach,” the QB said apologetically.
“That’s OK.” Benson nodded towards the trio of officials conferring about the penalty in the middle of the field. “Looks like we’re just about done anyway.”
Boswell saw the flag and was crestfallen. “It was a pretty good throw though, right?”
“Brilliant throw, Mohammed. Right in the suckers where nobody else could touch it.”
The lead ref broke away from their huddle and faced the crowd. “Personal foul. Defense. Number forty-three. Roughing the passer.”
“What?” Hillman threw his arms out in disbelief and started walking towards the lead ref, but the other two moved to block his way.
“Fifteen-meter penalty. Automatic first down.”
The Mustang fans in the stands went wild as the chains moved up. Boswell was out, but with the penalty they were at the outer edge of their kicker’s field goal range. A quick QB substitution, three run plays to pick up a few extra meters, a tense moment as the ball sailed through the air before hooking right and splitting the uprights, then his invigorated defense forced a three-and-out. A failed onside kick attempt later and the Mustangs had the ball back, up by one, and with enough time taken off the clock that all the offense needed to do was go into victory formation, take a knee, and let the clock run out to win the game.
Benson ran out into center field to shake Coach Makhlouf’s hand as tradition demanded. He leaned in and slapped the younger man on the shoulder. “Good game.”
“Lucky call,” Makhlouf said. “Holcomb was holding, I know you saw it.”
“You wouldn’t have complained if it went the other way.”
“Nope, not one bit.”
“Didn’t think so. See you in three weeks. Hope you’re ready.”
“Count on it.”
They parted ways and Benson returned to the Mustang’s locker room among a sea of attaboys and ass slaps. He took the opportunity to congratulate all of his players on a hard-fought victory and praise their grit, then critiqued their individual performances. The game ball went to Cha’ku for zer spectacular crunch-time catch. Ze was absolutely thrilled by the honor and cradled the ball like a newborn.
As the players changed out of their sweaty uniforms and stripped off their pads, Benson noticed his wife standing in the doorway, taking in the sights. Benson quickly shuffled her out of view. “Honey, you can’t just come in the locker room.”
“Why not?”
“It makes people uncomfortable.”
“I’m not uncomfortable,” she grinned devilishly.
“They’re kids, dear.”
“Awful big for kids,” Theresa said. “But speaking of kids, we have to pick ours up from the airfield, remember?”
“Right!” Benson said.
“You forgot?”
“Absolutely not.”
Theresa sighed. “Honestly, Bryan, what’s the point of even setting a plant alert for you?”
“It must have glitched again.”
“Your head must have glitched again.” Theresa started moving towards the door. “C’mon, the pod’s waiting for us.”
Benson said a quick goodbye to his team, then followed Theresa to the light rail station in the lobby. A small, four-seat electric transport pod waited for them with its scissor doors open high. Benson settled into the opposing bench seats as Theresa selected the airstrip from the small control terminal. There were no seatbelts. There was no need for them. The doors slid shut and the pod silently rolled down the thin electrified tracks.
The silence extended to the cab as Benson looked out the window, avoiding his wife’s gaze. The stadium was on the far northern side of Shambhala, opposite the airstrip. The city’s neighborhoods whizzed past as the pod picked up speed. First the Museum district with its exclusive townhouses, cafes, pubs, boulevard of shops, and naturally the Museum itself. In what was considered a minor miracle by most outside observers, Devorah Feynman had, after fifty years and change, let her job as curator pass to her assistant. At eighty-five years old, Devorah was now content to keep herself busy as a tour guide. A slow, methodical, tortuously thorough guide who more than one visitor had faked a medical emergency in order to escape before the tour had reached its conclusion.
Benson was convinced she’d outlive them all.
Next came the Glades, which they called home. Five years after Landing, they’d learned the hard way that this area was prone to semi-annual flooding. A hastily-prepped series of earthen levies had seen to that little hiccup, but for a few months that summer they’d enjoyed the quaint entertainments of living in a wetland. Theresa had wanted a new couch anyway.
Beyond the Glades and across the river was the Native Quarter, but that was just the polite title everyone used to avoid calling it the ghetto. It was a labyrinth for humans to navigate, the Atlantians who built it eschewing the grid of streets in the rest of Shambhala for their more familiar village layout of concentric rings connected by spokes. From the air, the two halves of the city stood in stark geometric contrast. The Native Quarter grew into the unused land between the spaceport and the rest of Shambhala, where the humans hadn’t wanted to build due to the noise pollution and potential for crashing shuttles.
Of the fifty thousand plus residents that called Shambhala home, just over thirty thousand of them were humans. The balance were Atlantians who had emigrated from the villages of the road network and Dweller caves in the fifteen years since First Contact and the forging of the Trident.
At least their parents had. The thing about Atlantians was, once you had three of them in one place, it wasn’t long before you had thirty more of them. This wasn’t a problem before the Ark turned up. Life on Gaia had been harsh, forcing harsh choices. Choices Benson had been horrified by when he first saw them in action. Now, he knew enough to understand them in context.
It all started with a bearer with no name. Malnourished and heavily pregnant with a brood, ze’d wandered down the road network in Atlantis until ze found G’tel and the Shambhala Embassy. The bearer wove a tale of abuse at the hands of zer village elders, who demanded that ze adhere to tradition and zer judgment over which among zer brood lived or died. But ze’d heard fantastic rumors about G’tel, where beings from the sky had taught the village to grow two fullhand times as many crops on the same amount of land. Where there was more food than could be eaten, and broods weren’t culled anymore.
So ze escaped, and found zer way to this mystical place.
Tuko, still Chief at the time, wished to return the bearer to zer village, as was proper under their traditions. But Ambassador Mei was adamant, which was her tradition. Mei taught the bearer a brand new word. A human word that, until then, had never existed on Gaia, not even as a concept.
Asylum.
The political and diplomatic shitstorm that followed took months to settle back down again, but in the end, ze was granted asylum and safe passage to Shambhala, where ze gave birth to zer brood, all thirty-four of them. Ze was not the last. Within a year, over five hundred bearers, most of them pregnant, had requested asylum and moved to Shambhala. Nor were they alone. Many of the parents of the bearer’s broods also made the move, just as concerned about the fate of their children as the bearers were.
In short order, Shambhala was dealing with a massive refugee housing crisis. The urban planning council had to throw everything out the window, lift zoning restrictions, loosen building codes, and turn a blind eye to a lot of graft just to attempt to keep up with the unexpected population explosion.
Then, to make matters worse, the bearer with no name disappeared, leaving a hole in the expat community and a leadership fight that had yet to fully resolve itself. That had been ten years ago.
“Your secondary still needs work on their one-on-ones,” Theresa said, suddenly breaking the silence and causing Benson’s train of thought to derail in a spectacular fashion.
“Sorry, what?”
“Your secondary. They’re missing a step on their match-ups. They should be in position to disrupt more passes, even get a few interceptions, but they’re too slow out of the gate. Maybe a few more shuttle runs and interval drills.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Benson said. “Wait a minute. You said you weren’t watching the games anymore. You said they were, what was the word, ‘Barbaric’?”
“They are,” Theresa confirmed. “Totally savage. But you’re only one game out of first place, and well, you know how I am about men in tights.”
“They’re not tights,” Benson objected. “They’re pads.”
“Well they certainly pad all the right places.”
“Hello? Your husband is sitting right here!”
“And he’s dead sexy,” Theresa cooed. “For a fifty-two year-old.”
“Oh God, I’ve hit ‘qualified’ age.”
“Sweetie, you hit qualified age about seven years ago. Which is a lot longer than most men manage, so be proud of yourself.”
“I do try,” Benson said, then fell quiet again.
“Hey,” Theresa pressed, “you’re tuning me out again. What’s the matter?”
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s something. It’s not like you to forget appointments, especially not when Benexx is involved… well, usually.”
“Sorry. I’ve just been distracted.”
Theresa reached across the pod and lightly rested her hand on his knee. “You’re not just distracted. You’ve been distant. I hoped that zer summer with Kexx and Sakiko would give you enough time to look forward to seeing zer again, but–”
“No, it’s not that at all. I miss zer terribly. You know that.”
She leaned in and took his hand in hers. Her hands had lost a lot of their youthful softness, hardened and creased by a law enforcement career now entering its third decade. But to him, they’d always be velvet.
“Then what is it, Bryan? Because I still can’t read your mind, even with the plants.”
“Benexx and I have…” Benson paused, afraid of what he was going to say. Afraid that putting it into words would somehow cement it into reality. “…have been growing apart. I’ve tried to fight it, but she, excuse me, ze keeps pushing me further away. We can’t agree on anything lately. It feels like I’m losing zer to something.”
Theresa squeezed his hand. “God, Bryan, I love you so much, but you’re an idiot.”
“Thanks.”
“No, I’m serious. Ze’s a teenager, Bryan. How well did you get along with your father when you were a teenager?”
“That’s different,” Benson said. “Fathers and sons always have a hard time dealing with each other through adolescence.”
“And you think mothers and daughters don’t?” Theresa said, barely suppressing a laugh. “My mother and I nearly killed each other.”
“But ze’s not fighting with you.”
She squeezed his forearm. “Bryan, I know you’ve tried really, really hard to treat zer like an Atlantian child, but I know you think of Benexx as your daughter. I do too, even if I hide it better. But ze’s not a girl, and the expectations you have for what your relationship with zer should be are screwing up your ability to process what it is.”
“That’s not it.”
“No?”
“No, well, maybe some of it, but not all. I just miss…”
“Being zer hero.” Theresa smiled warmly. “Sorry sweetie, but that happens to everyone eventually. Recognizing that your parents aren’t infallible or indestructible is part of growing up for every kid. So is rebelling against stuffy old mom and dad, otherwise they’d never leave the damned house. I have a feeling it’s just as true with Atlantians and us. But I don’t know. Talk to Kexx, ask zer if Atlantian kids are supposed to become insufferable little pricks around fifteen.”
“Let’s hope not.” Benson nodded out the window at the last of the makeshift housing units, lean-tos, and even traditionally-built Atlantian mudstone buildings made by those immigrants with the skills who didn’t feel like waiting around for the construction robots to catch up. “Otherwise, we’re going to have real problems.”
Theresa shivered. “Don’t remind me. I already have nightmares about what this place is going to look like in another couple years.”
Among those living in the Native Quarter, almost eighty percent were younger than twenty, most of those having been born right here after the first wave of bearer immigration fifteen years ago. And thanks to the Atlantians’ unusual lifecycle, it would be another eight to ten years before the first of them started transitioning to the elder gender.
An entire generation of adolescents coming of age in an alien city with no one around to mate with. It was a demographic time-bomb no one was talking about, but Benson knew it was already ticking.
But, it wasn’t his problem anymore. He’d been out of the law enforcement game for a very long time. This was Theresa’s wheelhouse. Benson only had to worry about one unruly Atlantian teenager.
The pod rolled gently to a stop at the small terminal building at the edge of the airstrip. To the north, a large, utilitarian hangar had been erected to service the growing fleet of passenger jets and to shield them from the occasional severe weather that the long summers tended to whip up.
The doors rotated open and Benson held Theresa’s hand as she stepped out. The pod reversed out of the terminal and accelerated back towards the city just as the airliner’s wheels touched down on the tarmac, throwing out little swirls of blue smoke.
The pudgy blended-wing craft slowed rapidly and coasted to the end of the runway, then rolled down the smaller taxiway to one of the three waiting terminals. A small crowd of people assembled near the door, either waiting to pick up returning friends or waiting to get on the plane before it turned around for the return trip. A security guard waiting by the jetway recognized Benson and Theresa and waved them through. Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t have done that, but Theresa was unlikely to complain.
Benson psyched himself up for the reunion. He put on a smile that was at least seventy percent genuine and tried to ignore the other thirty.
“There ze is,” Theresa said, pointing down the jetway. Benexx, a large wheeled bag rolling along behind zer, saw them and walked over. Zer skin seemed a little darker from the sun, although with Atlantians’ constantly shifting chromatophores, it was hard to tell a sun tan from a foul mood. The finely braided bracelets and choker, however, were new. Tiny volcanic glass beads and the iridescent shells of as-yet unnamed sea creatures adorned zer wrists and neck. New acquisitions from G’tel’s constantly expanding bazars.
Ze embraced zer mother in a tight hug.
“Welcome home, sweetie,” Theresa said.
“Hi mom.” Benexx looked over Theresa’s shoulder at Benson’s smiling face. “Dad,” ze said, cool and non-commital.
“Hello pumpkin.” Benson held his arms open to offer a hug, working hard to keep the thin veneer of his smile from cracking under the weight of his child’s chilly indifference.
“I’m tired,” Benexx said, suddenly bored. “Let’s go home.” Ze let go of Theresa, then stalked away towards the light rail station and hailed a pod.
“Well,” Theresa said, “That could have gone worse.”
“How? If ze’d shot me?” Benson asked.
“Yeah.” Theresa bobbed her head. “That’s one way.”