09/28/2023 Snippet, THE GOLEM JOB.

Back to this!

Fort Carson, Colorado

‘Weird and insular?’ Man, the first report wasn’t kidding.

The tribe or clan or whatever was really good at sneaking around; we didn’t even realize they were at our camp until one of them casually helped himself to a bowl of our stew. That gave us about five seconds of gaping before we realized how we were surrounded by grinning humans in brown-and-green deerskin. I guess you have to be really good at stealth when you’ve spent centuries hiding from the Universal Dominion, even this far out in what used to be its frontier. 

Good thing that the other parts of the report were also true: the humans were civilized. Rustic as Hell, but civilized. We were offered some of their own food, once we were relocated to their underground bunker. 

Their leader was even apologetic about the relocation. “We know the Dominion is gone,” Majorman Joe told us in classic Old American, the kind you get when you’re literate in the dead language you’re speaking. “But old habits die hard. And what if the Dominion comes back?”

“Only if they start practicing necromancy,” I muttered, then translated for the others. Mai had refined her translation spell, but it’d still be a few hours before it could get enough vocabulary to be useful. And even then the nuances wouldn’t come through. If we wanted to negotiate with these people, it was probably going to come down to me and Oren.