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Songshu was quiet the night that Colonel Maksim Liu-Tsahar got back from Enceladus; as quiet as any of the grand houses could get, at least. Some terrified intern who’d obviously drawn the short straw offered them a cup of tea almost the moment they crossed the threshold, and Max agreed, mostly on autopilot. Their brain was too busy trying to process to think about tea—there was always an adjustment period after missions, where one had to get reacclimated to civilian rules. After a year living under nonstop military hierarchy, a civilian environment felt nebulous and terrifying. There were rules to both, but the nice thing about the marines was that someone had sat Max down on their first day and explained everything; as a civilian, you just had to sort of stumble about until someone thwacked you. It was terrifying.
“Would you like me to ask the kitchen to make you something, Colonel Liu?” the intern inquired. They were dressed very smartly and looked all of ten—the deep shadows under their eyes were wildly incongruous with the rest of them. It was ridiculous, but Max felt a surge of protectiveness like they would for one of their own soldiers.
“Don’t worry about it. I got some food at the shuttle station.” Max hadn’t, but they desperately wanted this kid to go to bed. Christ, but when did House Gale start hiring babies? “Is Senator Gale asleep?” they asked—their spouse probably wasn’t, not at this hour. The pair weren’t even friends, not really, but they spent a decent chunk of their spare time together; Aubrey abhorred being alone as much as Max did.
The intern’s eyes widened. “Senator Gale is…presently incapacitated. Would you like me to alert you when they’re fit for conversation again?”
Max’s heart twisted with disappointment, hoping beyond hope that “presently incapacitated” wasn’t code for in hospital with alcohol poisoning. Merits of Aubrey as a person aside, it was generally bad PR. “Thank you.”
The intern nodded. “If that’s all…?”
“Absolutely. Go to bed—that’s an order.” Max attempted to joke, but they didn’t think the intern got it—their face blanched further, if that was possible, and they scurried away with a click of heels on the stairs.
Then, for the first time in a year, Max was alone. The silence felt oppressive; their heart longed to hear the slow breathing of their sleeping comrades, or the soft scratch of pen on paper.[1] But the house stayed quiet.
Suddenly, an idea occurred to them. River had been doing lectures at the university when Max left, but if they had their days right, they were almost certainly back by now. And Max knew where they would be, too—always in the valley under the gravity trains, working on their perpetual mammoth project. River wouldn’t mind being bothered; besides, Max had missed them.
Max yanked on their coat in one swift, fluid motion and tucked a rifle into the hinge of their elbow. It was an automatic that they had commandeered a while ago now—a kalash. A smile tugged at the edges of Max’s mouth at the familiar way the grip fit into their palm. Max had trained on kalashes; they were faithful and reliable, in Max’s opinion. Some people got sentimental over dog breeds, or software, but Max got sentimental over guns.
Properly equipped, they strode out into the freezing Martian night. The valley was far, but Max didn’t mind—the cold night air spinning inside of their lungs felt like a relief, a balm for their racing mind. They’d forgotten how much they loved the forest; the trees towered overhead, the stars shining above. The constellations were visible here, the familiar shapes recalling the stories that Max had been told as a child. A trapezoidal group of stars could be read as Orion, if you looked at it the right way, or it could be the Three Stars. When Max thought about it—all those people, so long ago, finding shapes in the stars and finding stories to go along with them—it gave them the same vertigo they got when they looked at Mars from the window of a shuttle. Those stories were a link to the chain that was humanity, stretching back 7,000 years to a time far before humans had slipped the bonds of gravity and gone sailing through the stars.
Max shook themself out of their daydreaming—they were in the woods, damn it. How many times could a polar bear have snuck up on them while they were busy going daft over history? But it didn’t matter, now, because they had reached their destination. There, standing in the pit of the valley with several woolly mammoths for company, was River Gale.
They were surrounded by a clump of ginormous speakers, at least half as tall as they were. Cables threaded through the trees, creating a second root network in the snow; one of the mammoths, probably a baby, was wearing a halo. The readout was obviously going to River’s tablet, because they were talking to the little mammoth in a patient way, like you would a small child.
“Okay—yes, if you answer my questions, you can have another carrot.” River was saying calmly. “But a very key step to acquiring more carrots is answering them.”
“River!” Max shouted; River wheeled around, surprise plain upon their face.
“Max! You’re back early!” Even from here, Max could see the way River’s smile made the edges of their eyes crinkle up, a glimpse into what they would look like in fifty or so years. Carefully, Max picked the rest of the way down into the valley. Once they were down, the mammoth calf took it upon herself to investigate, a process that involved rather a lot of trunk; finding Max unlikely to be a threat, at least for the moment, she tugged at their hat curiously, and seemed delighted when it slipped off their head. The mammoth calf trumpeted in what very well might have been excitement, and dashed off—perhaps to show the rest of the herd the piece of coat she’d nicked off the tiny hairless ape.
River looked appalled. “Hey—come back here with that!” The smile that followed was steeped in self-irony. “They can’t understand me; I don’t know why I try. Anyways, I apologize. Her manners are atrocious.”
“Leave her alone, she’s only a baby. Anyways, you’ve got your days wrong, зая.”[2] The endearment slipped out without Max’s noticing—they squeezed the grip of their gun tight when they realized, trying to keep themself from doing anything else silly like giving River a hug. “We landed this morning; there was a delay. Had some stuff to clean up.”
That was an incredibly condensed summary for what turned out to be one of the most highly classified incidents of Max’s professional life. It had taken sixteen hours to get all the wounded through the casualty-clearing station; almost nobody had emerged from that unscathed. Max themself had eight stitches in their temple to show for it.
River nodded, wisely not inquiring further. “I’d believe it. I’ve been out here for a week or two.”
“Really? Doing what?” Max inquired. It wasn’t just out of politeness—they were genuinely fascinated with River’s work. House Gale heirs spoke languages, composed poetry, and wrote peace treaties; they were raised to build relations between Tharsis and its neighbors, to find a way for them to work together. Meanwhile, the heirs of House Liu were forged to become the people you sent in when diplomacy failed. Max did it gladly—it was their duty. But deep in their heart, when they were at their worst and most miserable, Max thought they would give up anything to have a birthright that wasn’t destruction.
River’s face lit up, grey eyes shining, and Max quickly pressed those feelings back down so they could listen. “It’s a mammoth-to-Mandarin dictionary! I’ve been compiling it for a while—ever since I started the halo experiments, really.” River explained. “I’ve learnt a lot about mammoth social structures along the way, though. They’re matriarchal—the oldest female is the leader of the herd. They’ve got a special title and everything; grandmother is the closest translation I could come up with. The females all raise the calves communally, while the males mostly strike out on their own. It’s rather common in animals, apparently.
“Anyways,” they continued, “the way they speak is really interesting—only half of it is really audible to human ears. The rest is subvocalization, but it’s the same overall. If you couldn’t hear the lower part, you wouldn’t just miss out on some nuance. You’d miss half the sentence entirely.”
“Hence the halo?” Max hazarded.
“Hence the halo,” River agreed. “The eventual goal is to get the mammoth language incorporated into the translator database. Preferably other animals too.” River nodded, indicating the rifle in Max’s hands with their chin. “Then, we’ll be able to talk to them—you know, say hey Mr. Polar Bear, I don’t mean you any harm, I’m just horribly lost instead of having to shoot them so you don’t get your face ripped off.”
Max smiled—River Gale, Tharsese envoy to the wildlife of Mars. It was silly, but it suited them, somehow.
River trailed off suddenly. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think it could work.” they insisted, as though preemptively fending off some snide remark. “All we have to do is try.”
Max rushed to reassure them, with a sudden flare of anger at everyone who’d ever made River feel small. It apparently came as a package deal with the urge to give Aubrey a verbal thrashing. “No, no—it’s not ridiculous. If you’re going to devote your life to a cause, reducing the rate of fatalities via polar bear is a pretty good one.”
Max must have looked melancholy again, because the largest mammoth—probably the grandmother—picked up a pine cone with her trunk and pressed it into their hand. She wouldn’t leave them alone until they took it; River laughed.
Max nodded at her, slipping the pinecone into their pocket. “Thank you.”
“I can pass that on, if you’d like.” River was already pressing buttons on their tablet; a few moments later, the speakers were rumbling, low and barely perceptible to Max’s ears.
River laughed—Max could see the subtitles, projected backwards onto their contacts. Max felt a pang of embarrassment, and tried their best to squish it down. “I, erm…”
“Oh, of course,” River said graciously, handing over their tablet so that Max could see the subtitles, too.[3]
humans ★ bad
small ★ foragers
strength ★ help
means ★ small
Now Max was laughing, too. “Do they think we’re just really bad at taking care of ourselves?”
River grinned. “Indeed—a little bit like cats.”
“There’s a paper in there, I think. Not that I would know,” Max added.
“No, you’re spot-on—I collaborated with a few biologists on one, actually. Comes out early next season. You might like it.” River flushed, as though embarrassed to be recommending scientific papers to people, and that sudden spark of fury reasserted itself. How could people do that, Max wondered—look at someone who was passionate about something, something that clearly made them happy enough to devote their life to, and belittle them about it rather than asking why?
“I think I might,” Max said; before they could stop themself, they reached out and laid a gentle hand on River’s shoulder. River pressed their own hand to Max’s, and they stood like that, in silence, for a few comfortable moments.
“You know, if you really were interested,” River started, obviously cautious, “I’m doing a lecture in a few weeks—same subject matter, mammoth behaviour and it’s influences on vocabulary.”
Max shook their head. “No—no, I’m interested, but I’m sorry, this is a bad turnaround. I’ve got to go down to HQ and be debriefed tomorrow, and that’ll take ages. Then I’m going back out.”
“Fuck—that’s…” River trailed off.
“It’s not like this all the time,” Max insisted, compelled to rush to the Marines’ defense. “It’s just because of the…the incident. We ran into some trouble we weren’t expecting.”
Suddenly, Max had an idea. It was a bad one—straight out of some bad romance novel, and would only make whatever they were doing here worse. But still.
“Here—hold on.” Max rummaged around in the pockets of their coat; it had to be in here somewhere. It took a couple minutes of searching, but eventually they came up with a challenge coin. It was a solid piece of metal, heavy in Max’s hand, blazoned with the same insignia they’d had inscribed on their forearm.[4] They stemmed from some old tradition, exported a thousand years ago by the Americans—one of the stupid macho things the Marines did that Max had never subscribed to. Still, they had carried this coin on every single mission they’d been on since they were twenty. Max pressed it into River’s hand, curling their fingers around it.
River blushed. “I can’t take this, Max,” they protested.
“Well, you’ll just have to give it back to me the next time I see you,” Max shot back with a wink.
River laughed, despite themself. The hand holding the challenge coin was now clutched to their chest, right over their heart. “Of course. Hey—get back up to the house, would you? Get some sleep. You’ve got meetings in the morning, if I’m remembering correctly.”
“Hypocrite,” Max quipped, but they followed orders. “Good luck on the lecture!”
“Good luck at the debriefing,” River said by way of goodbye.
The image of River in the valley, talking to the mammoths as the snow spun down—it stuck in Max’s brain as they turned to leave. Come on, lad, Max berated themself as they made their way through the pine forest, get your head on straight. This is the sort of thing that brings down Houses—not now, not ever. This wasn’t uni anymore; they weren’t in some bar, flirting over cheap beer. They had real responsibilities, real reputations to uphold—for fuck’s sake, Max was married.
Still, as Max trudged back towards Songshu, they couldn’t quite press down the buoyant feeling in their heart, or wipe the stupid grin off their face. Oh, River Gale…River fucking Gale.
1Cybersecurity had looped back around to hard copies a while back; one can’t worry about anyone “hacking the server” if “the server” is a just file cabinet, one of many buried deep within the labyrinthine archives of the Marines building. Max had seen them—it was said the shaft went down a kilometre and a half.
2Zaya—little rabbit. Max used it with their junior officers sometimes, to signal when they could be informal with one another. It was a bad habit, and everything they had learnt in officer training went against it, but nobody else seemed to mind.
3The military took most of your implants out when you joined, because having your black ops forces hooked up to social media 24/7 was obviously a very bad idea.
4Max’s mentor had given them that when they passed their officer’s exams—another tradition. Brigadier General Xie had sat them down in a military bar, ordered baijiu for the pair of them, and tattooed Max then and there with pen ink and a sewing needle.