Just Scenery

[Tabelle]

Age 899

---

The manifest said four crates of drill bits and two replacement filters for a water recycler, which meant Tabelle had been in the GPM courtyard for the better part of twenty minutes, checking serial numbers against the delivery order while the afternoon sky sagged low and grey over the compound. The yard smelled like diesel and mineral dust and the industrial soap they used to hose down the trucks at the end of a shift. Good stop, this one. The guys on the loading dock always let her use their freight scale instead of estimating by hand, and the older woman in receiving, Marta, kept a tin of cookies on her desk that she opened for anyone who walked through the door looking even slightly tired.

The last crate had a smeared label. Tabelle was crouching beside it, running her thumb across the ink to see if any of the serial number was still legible, when the wall of the building in front of her stopped being a wall.

No warning. No sound first. One moment there was brick and concrete and the low electrical hum of a working warehouse, and the next moment a column of light, deep red, almost black at the edges, punched through the facade and kept going, carving a trench in the courtyard concrete that sent heat washing over her face and arms like opening a kiln door. Tabelle dropped flat on instinct, the way you drop when a load shifts on a hauler, hands over her head, cheek against the ground, grit pressing into her skin. Debris came down around her. Chunks of brick. Dust so thick she could taste it, chalky and hot at the back of her throat.

The dust was still settling when she got up. Couldn't not.

Through the hole in the wall a man came flying. Actually flying, his whole body wrapped in red light that crackled and popped against the air like something alive and furious. Tabelle recognized him without knowing his name, the boss of this place, dark hair, lean build, always in that white shirt and red sash when she caught a glimpse through the office window on other deliveries. He hovered above the courtyard for a moment, burning red against the grey, and his eyes found her.

"Leave! Now!" he shouted.

Her fingers were still curled around the smeared label. She could feel her own heartbeat in her palms, in the pads of her thumbs, that hard urgent rhythm that meant something very bad was happening and her body knew it before the rest of her caught up.

"Is anyone still inside?" she called back, and her voice came out steadier than the rest of her, which was something.

"Just go!" He didn't wait for her to argue. The red light flared brighter and he shot upward, northeast toward the city center, and then he was a streak against the clouds and then he was nothing.

The courtyard went quiet. Not quiet. The ringing took that word away. But the man was gone, and Tabelle stood alone with the freight manifest crumpling in her fist and the smell of scorched concrete baking up from the trench he'd carved through the yard.

Then something moved inside the building.

A shape came through the hole in the wall. Small, shorter than her by a good margin. Red-orange skin, dark armor, a crest of something smooth and hard where hair should have been. It walked the way people walk through their own house, unhurried, easy, like the smoldering wreckage around it was just the hallway between the bedroom and the kitchen. Its eyes, dark and flat, swept across the courtyard and across Tabelle and kept going. The way you look past a parked truck on the way to the one you actually need.

It didn't speak to her. Didn't slow down. Didn't register that there was a person standing six feet away with dust in her hair and brick grit on her cheek and her whole chest hammering.

Then it lifted off the ground, smooth as water running uphill, and followed the red streak into the sky. The courtyard dust swirled once beneath it and went still.

Tabelle stood there. The manifest crumpled tighter in her fist. Somewhere deeper in the compound, alarms started, that flat industrial tone that meant something structural had failed. Through the hole in the wall a light fixture swung from a single wire, and past it she could see a corridor filling with smoke and hear voices, confused ones, people calling out names.

She went inside.

It wasn't the brave thing. She didn't have a word for what it was. Someone needed to check, and she was already here, and leaving when you're already here felt worse than anything inside that building was going to feel.

---

Months later, and the courtyard didn't have a trench in it anymore.

Tabelle noticed that on her way in, the way she always noticed what had changed since the last visit. Fresh concrete where the blast had carved its path, paler than the old stuff and still curing at the edges. New brick along the warehouse wall, not quite the same color as the original but close enough that you'd have to know where to look. The tarps were gone. The light fixtures inside worked again. Marta's cookie tin was back on her desk, and the loading dock guys had stopped flinching at loud noises, mostly.

GPM was almost whole. Whole enough to work, anyway, which on Earth amounted to the same thing.

The coffee shop two blocks from the compound had become a habit. First time was three days after the attack, Tabelle showing up with her number written on a slip of paper and too many questions for a girl who drove freight. Buck hadn't known what to make of her. He'd called back mostly because she'd asked three times and he was too tired to keep saying no. That first conversation had been careful, him studying her across the table while she asked about offworld shipments and engine types and who handled cargo clearances at the Interstellar Market, and him not quite deciding whether she was a reporter or a spy or just strange in a way he couldn't place.

The second time was easier. The third, Buck ordered for her without asking, because he'd already learned she drank whatever the house blend was and didn't complain about it being burnt. By the fourth there was no pretense left. Tabelle was just someone who showed up, the way rain showed up in the wet season, and eventually you stopped carrying an umbrella and let it happen.

Now they had a booth. The window one, with the view of the compound and the terrible draft that came through the seal every time the front door opened. Buck sat across from her with his sleeves rolled up and his second cup already half gone, and Tabelle had her hands wrapped around her own, thumbs tracing the rim the way they always did when the rest of her was being patient. The conversation had wandered this morning, the good kind of wandering, route conditions on the eastern highways and a procurement contract GPM had just landed and the new kid on the loading dock who kept miscounting crates and blaming the freight scale.

Buck had laughed at that one, the real kind that shook his shoulders and made him set his cup down so he wouldn't spill. Good sound. He laughed more now than he had in those first weeks, when the color was still coming back to his face and every conversation circled back to the afternoon his office wall came apart.

Then he set the cup down again, and the way he did it was different. Careful. Both hands flat on the table afterward, like he was steadying something that wasn't the cup.

"So," Buck said. "I've got something."

Tabelle's thumbs stopped on the rim.

"I got in touch with the boss."

The words landed plain, the way Buck said most things, but his eyes stayed on her face in a way that meant he knew what they carried. The boss. The man wrapped in red light who had shouted at her to run, who had torn a hole through his own building to draw that creature away from his people and then vanished northeast into a grey sky. Months of nothing after that. Tabelle had asked about him in the early weeks, carefully at first and then less carefully and then not at all when it became clear Buck didn't know either.

"He's offworld," Buck said. "Has been since that day. Won't tell me everything, and I don't think he plans to, but he's alive." The careful hands on the table relaxed a fraction. "Asked about the company. Asked about the staff. Whether we'd kept things running."

A pause. Buck's mouth moved toward something that wasn't quite a smile yet.

"Told him we had. Told him about you, too."

Tabelle's fingers tightened around the cup.

"Told him about the freight girl who was in the courtyard when it happened and walked inside instead of running. Told him she'd been showing up ever since, asking smart questions about routes and engines and offworld cargo, helping with inventory when we were shorthanded, and generally making herself impossible to get rid of." The not-quite-smile finished arriving. "He wants to talk to you."

From his jacket pocket Buck produced something and set it on the table between their cups. Small, green-tinted glass on a curved metal frame, built to hook over an ear. A scouter. Tabelle had seen them in trade catalogs and once on an offworld merchant passing through the eastern district, but never this close. This one was old, the casing scuffed and smoothed at the edges from years of handling, and the glass had a faint warmth to it that might have been from Buck's pocket or might have been something else entirely.

"He's on the other end of this whenever you're ready," Buck said, and tapped the frame with one finger. "Told me to tell you he remembers the girl in the courtyard."

Tabelle looked at the scouter on the table. Then at Buck. Then at the scouter again, and her hands left the coffee cup and reached for it the way they reached for everything, turning it over, feeling the weight, the ridge where the earpiece hinged, the smooth face of the glass that caught the morning light coming through the window and threw it back green.

Her coffee was getting cold. The draft from the door came through again, ruffling the napkins in the dispenser. Outside in the GPM lot, a truck was backing up with that steady warning beep that meant the day was moving whether anyone was ready or not.

She fitted the scouter over her left ear.

"How do I..."

"Red button, on the side," Buck said.

Her thumb found it. Small, slightly raised, still warm.

She pressed it.

 

[Gehn]

Static first, then a click, then breathing that wasn't his own.

Gehn sat in one of the offices he had claimed as a workspace — Avondall's secondary lab, stripped of the equipment that made it feel like a medical facility and refitted with his surprisingly high-quality chair, a desk dragged from another room, and other equipment collected by Failure for him. Screens lined the far wall, most dark, one still scrolling through cargo manifests from the Market's commercial hub. The air recycler hummed its low, constant note. Somewhere deeper in the complex, he could hear Failure moving through a corridor, barefoot, the soft rhythm of her steps as familiar to him now as his own heartbeat.

The scouter he had left with Buck was old. His first scouter, actually — the one he had brought from Vegeta when he left. Scuffed at the earpiece. Smoothed along the frame from years of use. The green glass had a slight warmth to it that came from nowhere in particular and that he had never been able to explain, even with all his technical knowledge.

Insufficient locating and targeting systems, and why Buck had come to him that day, when Axar found him, to ask for Gehn’s newer model.

Now, because of one old scouter he never threw away, it was his connection back to Earth – something he accidentally called ‘home’ more than once.

The connection remained open, but no voice came through yet. Gehn heard the ambient noise of Earth on the other end: wind through a poorly sealed window, the murmur of a space that served coffee, the distant industrial beep of a vehicle reversing somewhere outside. Sounds he hadn't heard in months.

He waited.

Then:

“You must be Tabelle,” Gehn spoke first and broke the silence. Last he had talked with Buck, he mentioned that she had practically riveted herself into the foundation of HQ. Gehn wondered how she got so much time away from work, if she labored in freight, but didn’t question it.

Buck likely exaggerated, but it meant that this had to be here. If it were Buck himself, or another of Gehn’s manangers, he would have heard something by now.

“The one I told to run, right?” Gehn continued. “Buck told me he saw you do just that: run, but the wrong way. Into headquarters. To help.”

Gehn leaned backwards in the mesh-backed chair as he talked, direct from the scouter in his head to his old one on someone else’s ear.

“Thank you,” he told her before she had a chance to interrupt. “That was stupid, you didn’t understand the situation at all and could have died, or made it worse for others, but you didn’t – so, thank you.”

Then there was just a slight moment’s silence as Gehn looked down in the direction of the corridor with Failure, and caught distant sight of her bare and pale legs rounding a corner.

“Buck also told me you wanted to talk,” he confirmed for her with a sudden, faked formality. “So, you have him: Gehn of Global Prospecting and Mining, how can I help you?”

He couldn’t help but chuckle at his own, dumb joke.

 

[Tabelle]

The static came first, and Tabelle almost pulled the scouter off her ear because she thought she'd done something wrong. Then the click, and then a voice, warm and a little tired, speaking to her like he already knew who she was.

Tabelle glanced at Buck across the table.

"The one I told to run, right? Buck told me he saw you do just that: run, but the wrong way. Into headquarters. To help."

Her hand came up to the scouter, fingertips resting against the frame, feeling the smooth ridge where it met the glass. Orienting.

"Thank you. That was stupid, you didn't understand the situation at all and could have died, or made it worse for others, but you didn't, so, thank you."

A breath that was almost a laugh. "Yeah, that's fair," she said. "I didn't know what I was walking into. Still don't, honestly. I just knew there were people in the corridor calling names and nobody was answering, and I'm not very good at hearing that and walking the other direction." Her thumb traced along the scouter frame the way it had been tracing the rim of her cup a minute ago. "But you're right, it was stupid. I'll take the thank you and the stupid, both."

"So, you have him: Gehn of Global Prospecting and Mining, how can I help you?"

The laugh came out quick and real, and she caught Buck's eye across the table and shook her head at the delivery of it.

"Okay, Gehn of Global Prospecting and Mining," Tabelle said, smiling wide enough that it was probably audible on the other end. "You can start by telling me what kind of engine gets a person from Earth to the Interstellar Market, because I've been asking your operations manager here for months and he keeps telling me to ask you."

She waved a hand in Buck's direction without turning from the window where the GPM compound sat whole and working in the morning light.

"I run freight. Six routes in this district, most of them ground-level, all of them short. I've been driving them for years and they're good routes and the people on them are good people but the roads got short a while ago and I've been trying to figure out what comes after. Your company touches offworld logistics. The cargo clearances, the nav routes, the engine specs on the freighters that run your offworld contracts. Buck's taught me a lot about the groundside operations but the offworld piece is yours, and I have about a hundred questions if you've got the time."

Her fingers went still on the scouter frame.

"Also, I'm glad you're alive. I know that's a strange thing to say to someone you've never met, but the last time I saw you, you flew through a wall and into the sky and then something followed you that looked like it could break this planet in half without trying. So. I'm glad you're on the other end of this thing."

The stillness lasted another breath, and then her eyes were moving again, from the window to the table to Buck and back to the window.

"Where are you, anyway? Buck said offworld but offworld is a big place."

 

[Gehn]

A hundred questions.

Gehn exhaled through his nose — not quite a laugh, but adjacent. He couldn't remember the last time someone wanted to talk to him about logistics. Not even Gehn wanted to. Even Buck's eyes glazed when the subject turned to engine classes and fuel efficiency and the economics of interstellar haul contracts. The man ran GPM's operations like a machine, but he operated on instinct and relationships, not technical specifications. It was why they worked well together.

This woman, apparently, was the other kind.

“Engines first, then,” Gehn said, and his voice settled into something more comfortable — the same tone that crept in when he explained deposit survey methodologies to new contractors, or walked a pilot through scouter calibration over comms.

“What Buck's freighters use for offworld runs are mid-range superliminal drives. Not cheap, but about average. They'll get you across a solar system and then some, but interstellar travel on them is slow — weeks to reach the nearest trade hubs, months to cross serious distance. It's just the sweet spot for cost, which is why most independent freight operations use them.”

He shifted the chair forward, elbows on the desk now.

“One tier above that, true warp. Drastically faster, and drastically more expensive — to buy, to maintain, to fuel. Most of the ships docked at the Interstellar Market run warp-class. Military vessels, wealthy merchants, anyone who moves between star systems regularly and can afford to. The jump in speed between mid-range and warp-class is categorical it every sense.”

A pause. He caught himself before he went into superluminal drive theory and reeled back. She asked a question, not for a lecture.

“But none of that is why you wanted to talk to me,” Gehn posed a ne question. Not the one he asked, but the one he probably shouldn’t have needed to ask. “Not to talk propulsion over a quantum-entanglement line.”

I'm glad you're alive.

Gehn heard it again in his head. Plain, the way she said it. Not weighted with something she wanted in return. Just a statement from a woman who saw him fly through a to escape something terrible, and then thought about it for months afterward, and decided the simplest and most honest thing was worth saying out loud.

His jaw tightened for a moment.

“…And first: thank you for that, too,” Gehn said, quieter. “It's good to hear.”

He left it there. Anything more and it would have been too much, for him more than for her.

“As for where I am? I can't give you specifics.”

He glanced at the screen on the far wall. The cargo manifests had refreshed. New fuel shipment pricing from the Market's docking authority. Numbers he would need to review later, given a not-insignificant purchase agreement he had just signed.

“What I can tell you is that I'm somewhere with a lot of trade traffic, decent security”—he looked in the direction Failure had walked off into—“and terrible food.”

 

[Tabelle]

Tabelle's whole body angled toward the voice in her ear. Her coffee had gone cold ten minutes ago and she hadn't touched it since the scouter went on. One hand stayed near the earpiece, fingers resting against the frame. The other lay flat on the table, thumb pressed to the surface.

Mid-range superliminal. Warp-class. The gap between them categorical. Each piece built the shape of a system in her head, where the money went, where the time went, where the bottleneck sat between a person on the ground and a person among the stars.

"Superliminal gets you to the trade hubs in weeks," she repeated back, confirming, testing the weight of it. "Warp-class gets you there in, what, days? Hours?" She'd asked Buck adjacent versions of this for months, but hearing it from someone who'd actually flown offworld made the scale land differently.

Then he stopped talking about engines.

"But none of that is why you wanted to talk to me. Not to talk propulsion over a quantum-entanglement line."

The thumb on the table lifted and settled again.

"No," she said. "It's not."

Outside the window a GPM truck pulled into the lot. Tabelle's eyes tracked it through the turn, then came back.

"The engines are the how. I need to understand the how because I'm practical and because the difference between weeks and hours matters when you're trying to figure out whether a thing is possible or just something you want. But you're right. The engines aren't why I asked Buck to let me talk to you."

"I want to get offworld. Not as cargo staff on someone else's contract, not as a passenger sitting in a cabin watching the trip happen to me. I want to go somewhere and learn something I can't learn on Earth and then go somewhere else and do it again. I've been running the same six routes in this district for long enough to know that the ceiling on what I can become here is lower than the ceiling on what I think I can become, and the only way to find out if I'm right is to leave."

The words came out in a long unbroken line, one thought pushing the next, the way a loaded hauler takes a hill, momentum doing the work that planning didn't.

"I don't have money for a warp-class ship. I don't have connections past the atmosphere. What I have is a freight background, a willingness to work, and the fact that I apparently don't run when I should. Buck's been teaching me your groundside operations for months and I've been useful to him while doing it, and I figure if I'm useful enough to the people around you, eventually I'm useful enough for you to point me in the right direction."

"A lot of trade traffic and decent security and terrible food," she said. "That could be half the ports in the galaxy, from what I've read. But if the food's that bad, it sounds like you could use a supply runner. I know a little bit about getting things where they need to go."

 

[Gehn]

She wanted to go somewhere.

She wanted to get off world, outside the cradle of Humanity’s civilization, and experience something she could never experience on Earth. Gehn thought about it for a few moments. He had come to appreciate Earth far more than he ever anticipated. Yet, here she was, wanting to leave.

He looked around at the cinderblock-like walls around him. Much of Avondall’s facility was subterranean, but not all of it. Gehn stayed in the underground portions only out of a sense of greater security. Less chance to be seen, to be heard.

As if the walls on the ground floor wouldn’t have been sufficient for that. The only risk, windows that he could keep electrically tinted such that they stood opaque.

“Buck’s told me more, too,” Gehn answered after she finished promising that she was good for getting something where it needed to go.

“He’s told me that you’re far more powerful than the typical martial artist on Earth. Which means you’re much more powerful than I was,” he said. “No freight girl gets that strong doing her day job, with martial arts classes on the weekends and evenings.”

Something about her was different. From what Buck said, when he used that old scouter on Tabelle when she wasn’t looking, he got a reading: something over one-thousand. Buck didn’t know Saiyan script and couldn’t be certain, but from what he described, it sounded to Gehn like a decent amount over.

Or Buck could have been entirely terrible with how he described the characters he saw—either or. Gehn decided he should have asked for a direct data link to be setup, so he could read the logs himself.

Another time, perhaps.

“If you want something more than what Earth currently has to offer you?” Gehn continued before she answered. “I might have your answer, Tabelle. But I need to understand who you really are, and some girl driving trucks and carrying boxes does not a four-digit power reading make. I need you to understand, too:

“That creature you saw was a Changeling, and a particularly strong one at that. There’s worse than him out here, too.”

Perhaps that would be the bucket of cold water to stifle these foolish dreams of hers.

Or, maybe, the talk of a seemingly-insurmountable opponent would awaken something in her chest – the way he felt in his, for the first time since he was a young boy on Vegeta.

He looked down to his white shirt and put his hand on his chest only to immediately feel the hard beating of a racing heart.

His tail, he realized, might have been gone – but it didn’t take the Saiyan with it.