Friends of the Sky: Epilogue

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Epilogue: Azure

 

Death is the state from which there is no recovery. Love is what forever rejects that state.

Forty years passed, and ten fighters and an armored merchant came back to the moon, not the Moon, just the moon, in its azure light. Eighty years the chalet on the plain had waited, and all it took to look good as new was to have the dust swept from the balcony and the windows. They parked their fighters in the bay under the rooftop, while Tasmania sat in the icy front yard.

“Needs a few improvements,” Natasha judged, as she and her wing, and Apple and Izawa and Kalkar, stood in the empty galley. “Working kitchen. Hot tub.”

“Definitely hot tub,” said Apple.

“We need more bedrooms,” said Kalkar. “How much time are we going to spend here?”

“We are going to set up patrols,” said Rachel. “All of us will only be here together every, oh, couple hundred years? Couple thousand, maybe? And either we all go somewhere together, or six go one place and four another, and Tasmania goes with someone. That’s my concept, anyway.”

“It sounds like an excellent concept,” said Kalkar. “Not one my dear Su Park would have come up with, but she’s dealing with her own problems. For all we know, she’s fighting the Ngugma at her end of the Arm.”

“In the year 14,000?” said Clay. “I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“Still, I stand by what I said. We need more bedrooms.”

“We can do that,” said Rachel. Clay felt her hand in his, taking it, taking him all over again, for the millionth time, as her own. They looked at each other and giggled.

“We know you only need one for the two of you,” said Kalkar.

“It’s not that. It’s just, we’re not used to having such a big bed.”

“I’m sure you’ll find some use for all that room,” said Kalkar.

“Clay,” said Vera, “what did you mean, ‘now we see as through a darkened glass?’ How did you know?”

“Something I figured out about the way we see things when we get that close to the speed of light,” said Clay. “I don’t really get it myself. But I realized, this is how mouthholes operate. You don’t see them, then you do. It’s all to do with that sideways drop we took at light speed.”

“And the France?” she asked. Clay gave her a funny look, but didn’t get the chance to reply.

“So what do we do,” asked Apple, “now we beat the Enemy? I mean, I get that the Enemy will be back and all—!”

“The Enemy never left,” said Vera. “Either they’re still holding out somewhere in the Arm, ready to infect more systems, or they’ll be back across the Empty Straits in a hundred years or so. We just have to keep patrolling.”

“We keep patrolling,” said Rachel. “It’s how we stay young. It’s not magic. We go a hundred years to someplace, and a hundred more somewhere else, and we circle back to Azure every thousand years or so, and it’ll be three months later. Split up—Alpha goes one way, Beta, Millie-Miz and Tasmania go another way, we meet back here in a thousand. Find a spore flower, a bunch of mouthholes, whatever, we blast them. If we find an infestation, we message the Ngugma and they come whip up some astatine.”

“And maybe we get reinforced,” said Clay. “It’s not out of the question. Su Park went a couple hundred light years back; in a thousand years the new recruits might have already found Azure. Skzyyn might have sent some Tskelly. I miss those crazy bastards.”

“I know you do,” said Rachel. “I miss Skippy.”

Kalkar, looking out the window at the big planet on the horizon, laughed. Clay said, “I miss a lot of people. But the thing is.”

“I’m glad it’s you guys,” said Vera. They looked around at each other: Alpha Wing.

“I’m just glad I get to be one of you guys,” said Mizra Aliya. Maria Apple and Gemma Izawa smirked.

 

Several months later, in their third floor bedroom, overlooking the back yard and a long slope down into a cute little crater, Clay woke hazily of a morning. Several months later: he was not used to being on real time.

He heard Rachel in the bathroom. He was awake, so he got up, pulled on a bathrobe, and wandered out into the middle of the third floor. Five bedrooms adjoined the central room, the apartments of five married couples: the fighter pilots. There were a dozen chairs of various styles, and three tables. In the middle sat a large round bathtub. Li and Timmis sat together at a table, eating some version of French toast; Aliya and Grohl were playing chess, with real pieces; Tasha, Vera, Apple and Izawa were all in the tub, dressed as one dresses for a tub.

“Newlyweds playing chess,” said Clay, looking over Mizra Aliya’s shoulder.

“I can’t let up on her,” said Aliya, “especially now we’re wedded.”

“Oh, you’re not letting up at all,” said Millie Grohl. “I wouldn’t worry about that.”

“Come join us, Clayburger,” said Natasha. “Lose the robe,” said Vera.

“Yeah,” said Apple, “Wifey won’t mind, she can join us too. Where is she?”

“She’s using the bathroom, if you must know,” said Clay. He shrugged and took off his robe, which he tossed over a chair near the tablet on which he was rereading the Witch Tales of some magic chick lit writer of 26^th Century Bluehorse.

“Is she?” said Natasha, with a bit more knowingness than Clay knew what to do with.

“Yeah, actually,” said Clay. He began to step in, and something made him turn and look at Timmis and Li, who glanced his way. “How’s the nausea, Commander?” he asked.

“It’s pretty much gone,” said Li. “I think we’ll have smooth sailing for the next six months.” She laughed and looked at Timmis.

“Then all heck breaks loose,” said Timmis.

“Oh, she’ll be a perfect child, just like you and I both were, I am sure,” said Li. They both smiled down on her midsection, which did not show through her loose robe.

“You’re going to beat Padfoot,” said Aliya. “She’s due in seven months, I think. Shelleen’s big as a house. Emily’s pregnant too. Raea’s gonna have twins. Poor Captain Kalkar. That ship’s going to be crawling with babies.” She smiled at Grohl.

“I’m not going to,” said Millie Grohl. “Are you?”

“As if,” said Aliya. “You guys think about it?”

The four women in the tub scoffed as one. “Come on, hunkburger,” said Vera, “stop showing off your ass and grab some suds.”

“Ms. Santos, really,” said Clay in his best Su Park imitation.

He dropped into the tub, as he had done every morning (every thirty hours, that is) for the past three Earth months. They smiled around at each other. The five pilots did not quite have the chance to start into their usual risqué banter: the door to Clay’s bedroom opened and out came Rachel, wearing no bathrobe, her sensor device in her hand. She was grinning.

“Oh, let me guess,” said Vera.

“No, let Clay guess,” said Natasha.

“What?” said Clay. He looked at Rachel, who continued grinning. “Wait,” he said. “What?”

“Is it?” said Natasha. “Are you?”

“That’s what it says,” said Rachel. “Tasha! Oh my goddess!”

“Well, get in here and get your hugs,” said Vera.

“Jeez, Clay, man,” said Apple. “You know what just happened, right?”

“I know nothing,” said Clay, relaxing into the bath, glancing across the unclothed women around him, the smart, talented, clever, formidable, murderous women around him, and out at the azure landscape and the Milky Way rising above it all. “Except my life is never going to be the same.”

 

THE END

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Friends of the Sky 15 end: As through a darkened glass

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aliens, Bluehorse, Book, characters, Clay among the Stars, Clay Gilbert, Earth, feminism, fiction, Gemma Izawa, history, Li Zan, Maria Apple, Milky Way, Millie Grohl, Mizra Aliya, nanowrimo, Natasha Kleiner, novels, Paul Gies, Rachel Andros, sci fi, science, sex, space, Sun, Timmis Green, Vera Santos, Writing

5.

The little fleet stayed at Azure for two weeks. Then Fonnggark set off back toward Greenstar, with much awkward hugging and hopes that in all their strange chronologies they would meet again, and the ten fighters and Tasmania took off, headed for Armpit. Clay had had an idea; so had Padfoot, helped by a couple of Fonnggark’s furry six-armed tech people; equipped with those ideas, the human fleet set off to clear up the situation at the final fortress of the Orion Arm.

They only had forty light years to travel. Clay insisted on pushing the fighters to nine nines past the decimal, at which speed they would barely coast at all in their own chronologies. And when they were there, at a velocity so close to the speed of light that the light itself gave up on them and they wandered in a realm of holes and expanses and strange sliding perspectives, ten fighters huddled together in the blackness, the order went out. They did the unthinkable: they maneuvered at 99.999999999% of light speed. They dropped sideways, waited a tic and hit 120% deceleration.

And sixty hours later, when they were supposedly down to 25% of light speed, the darkness around them had not dispelled.

And twenty hours after that, they were still dragging the tenebrous drapes of light speed around them.

And then the system began all at once to appear, still not clear as day and night, but crisp, like the sounds coming through a foggy morning. Things were all around them: big things, not planets, living things. Living ships. But all was veiled, as if in a fog, and tiny things, like, say, Ghost 205s, were especially veiled.

“Clay,” called Vera, “what the heck?”

“For now we see as through a darkened glass,” said Clay, “but then we shall see, as we shall be seen. Ready?”

“Ready,” called Rachel. “Separate, everyone. We’re here.”

“Clay Gilbert,” said Natasha.

“For when I was a child,” said Clay, “I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, but now I have come to manhood, and I have put the childish things aside.” He fired his thrust to come to a near stop. So did everyone else.

They were in the middle of a fleet of the Enemy. It was just gathering for the assault on the already hard beset lunar fastness of the Ngugma, on a craggy moon of a craggy giant terrestrial planet, planet already covered in green slime in the glare of a nearby red giant, the sun of Armpit. Thirty or forty more flowers, and dozens of shzhawkhor, buzzed about.

The Enemy was here, in Armpit, in the last stronghold of the Ngugma on the shores of the Empty Straits. The Enemy was here in massive force, having gathered its legions from a dozen systems spiraling outward to this point. The Enemy was here, infecting, sliming every planet, eating every life. In all its green gooey glory, the Enemy was ready to take the last castle and unleash a full-scale invasion of the Orion Arm.

But before the Enemy could ever register them, this Enemy that had grown in the light of exotic suns, that had grown from seed and spore in the center of the Galaxy and come here to overwhelm the fortress of the mighty Ngugma, the fighters from Earth and Bluehorse opened fire on them. They did not use their lasers this time: each chose targets and fired missiles designed by Padfoot herself, and then they shot out of the pack of the Enemy and watched the missiles hit. Everything they hit began to decompose immediately.

“A little radioactivity,” said Rachel, “a little explosive, a little good ol’ human engineering.”

“Oh look,” called Timmis Green, “more Enemy to mangle.”

“Oh look,” called Li, “the planet is all infected.”

“Don’t worry,” said Rachel. “Tasmania is coming behind. They have more astatine to synthesize and unload. And I’m reading Ngugma tech still alive in that station. We got here in time.”

“Okay,” said Vera, “let’s go mangle some more enemy.”

The ten fighters took off toward the planty fleet ahead of them, whooping and hollering, until Li set off a buzzer and announced, “Everyone, please! The Vow. Please.”

Rachel called to Clay, and there was her face, the face he loved more than any other, on the left half of his screen. “Here we are, Clay Gilbert,” she said. “Gonna keep the Vow. Made it way back on Bluehorse. Still keeping it.”

“I know,” said Clay, wiping a tear.

“Aww, baby,” she said. “We’re gonna do it. We are going to frickin’ do this thing. It’s amazing.”

“I know,” he said. He looked out on the system, spread against the starry veils of the Milky Way center. They were tiny things, two meter grey grains among the stars and planets and vast, vast voids. But they were the mighty ones.

“Clay,” she said, “we are alive. This thing before us, this is not life. Life is us.”

“Oh, I know,” he said. “Life’s winning again.”

Half the screen was filled with Rachel’s grin. Then it shut off, and she sent him a maneuver sequence, and the two of them set off to find more targets.

 

Friends of the Sky 15 cont’d: Cote d’Azure

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4.

The two fleets, the huge one and the tiny one, spent two hundred hours in the Slime Ball system, mostly drifting far out in the Oort Cloud, fixing and rebuilding. The Ngugma fleet took off on its own errand, and the humans, and Fonnggark, put the finishing touches on their refits. Padfoot, Bell, Wall and Shawna Shelleen (indeed pregnant again) rebuilt all the Ghosts and managed to assemble four almost completely new ones. The screens were brighter. The drive systems had redundant redundancies. The flectors were tougher. The lasers had more settings. There were three types of missile. The food tasted better. The Ghost 205 was born.

Then they bid a less than fond farewell to the dead planets and decaying foliage of the Slime Ball system, and turned toward Armpit.

A thousand light years and more they traveled. They made eight nines past the decimal. Of course no one wanted to look out the window.

Except that, coasting across the back end of Orion’s upper arm, naked, with Rachel naked beside him, Clay got curious. Rachel was sound asleep. Clay turned on his fancy new display.

He didn’t want to look. He looked.

He did not see the France, lost in light years of space. Or did he?

He told himself he could look, because it was just pixels in his display, though he knew that what he was seeing in those pixels bore some relation to something out there,

He looked out, into the void. He recoiled, but he let the void hold his gaze. He looked until he came to understand it, and he recoiled again. And again, he made himself continue his contemplation, and finally, gazing through those strange portals, across those empty dimensions, up those illimitable avenues of night, he came to grasp the thing no one had grasped.

“I have it,” he said to Rachel.

“Mmm?”

“I have it. I know how to do this.”

 

Many years and a week later, the little fleet decelerated into a new system. Four planets circled a pale blue sun: a molten, a pair of gas giants, and an overgrown Pluto. A second star, a yellow dwarf just big enough to harbor fusion at its core, hung in space four light days away. There was a plaque, orbiting beyond the outermost planet, but they didn’t stop to examine it. There was no life, nor any sign there had ever been life, and there was no sign of technology.

“Second moon, inner giant,” said Rachel. “Ready to separate, hubby-hero?”

“Of course, Miss Amazing,” Clay replied. “You mind if I call you that?”

“You’re the amazing one.”

“You’re the amazing one.”

Letting that argument sit, they separated with the others, gliding in ahead of Tasmania and Fonnggark. The moon they were aiming at was large, the size of Mars, and while it showed definite signs of past geological activity—it had less craters than one would expect, and large expanses of plain—it was now stable. It had no air, and no bodies of liquid water, but it had plenty of water ice, and trails of moisture dripped down canyon walls here and there in the sunlight. It was far enough out from the star or its enormous planet, which was larger than Jupiter and with brilliant rings, that it received very little gamma radiation. They set down on a flat highland near the equator and put up a tent.

“That one,” said Natasha as the ten pilots stood outside the tent in the yellow-black evening. “That star there. That’s Armpit. That’s the Ngugma’s big fortress system guarding the Orion Arm. That’s what it’s all about.”

“You think the Ick has gotten there yet?” asked Millie Grohl.

“I’m sure it has,” said Rachel. They gazed up at it for another minute, and then she added, “Fortunately my husband has an idea.”

 

The Ngugma explorer-cruiser and the Tasmania landed on the moon and immediately set about fixing up a more permanent abode, on a stony knoll high up on the highland. Eight Ngugma, including Fonnggark, and twelve humans, including Kalkar, were out digging holes, fabricating beams, putting up frames, and debating about floor plans. Beta Wing concentrated on glass production, Clay and Natasha and Miz on interior design, Grohl and Santos on patrolling the sky, while Rachel went about supervising.

The moon was orbitally locked to its giant mistress, which it orbited every thirty hours; thus it had an almost normal day, except that, day or night, the planet hung in the same place in the sky, brilliantly blue with orange streaks in the night, glowering and dark in the day. Where the ships were setting up their digs, the planet was permanently rising (or setting); sometimes at lunar dawn, the planet would block out the sun in a moon-wide eclipse. Most of the time, the moon, despite its tenuous atmosphere, seemed flooded with a blue light. It was decided to call the system Azure.

They took four four-hour shifts. By the end of the fourth shift, a sort of ski chalet was shaping up on the flat highland. There was a lot left to do, but the fighters were inside processing air and water, and Jack Dott and Timmis Green and a couple of Ngugma were setting up cannabis and alcoholic beverage production, and Rachel, Clay, Natasha, Kalkar and Fonnggark found their way out onto the big balcony in their vac suits. The giant planet loomed up ten degrees above the horizon, its rings rising at least to ten o’clock. Behind all that, the Milky Way stretched across the heavens from one horizon to the other. Its central bulge loomed on the other side of the sky, a foggy mirror image of the rising planet.

“Do you think that whole galactic core is infested?” asked Kalkar.

“Our assumption,” growled Fonnggark, “is that it is so. There would be forty, fifty billion suns in that central bar. It should be everywhere there, at least a little. Perhaps one percent, perhaps ten percent, harbor an infestation like that of, you say, Slime Ball. Volhazzh Phohh. A lovely name.”

“So,” said Rachel, “if it has had the time you Ngugma have had, to conquer most of the Orion Arm, then it logically would by now have overrun the entire central bar of the galaxy. Do you think it would have made it into the other arms? The Orion Arm is rather the puny one.”

“We do not think the Enemy has yet grown into the large arm near here: the Scooootooom?”

“Scutum,” said Clay. “They will. Do you think there are other species in the other galactic arms, Scutum, Perseus, Cygnus, also desperately resisting the Enemy Goo?”

“Perhaps,” said Fonnggark. They gazed up at the Milky Way for some time, their eyes led down to its sinister central bulge. Fonnggark stretched a vac suited arm up from there. “You call it Persooos. Yes. I was once small, a child you say, I recall looking up at the stars, and at pictures of other galaxies, and wondering if there was a child there looking up at me, you know, billions of stars, the probability would be extremely high.”

“All those open windows,” said Natasha.

“Open windows?” said Clay.

“You know. Some little girl was looking out her open window at the sky. Maybe she had tentacles.” She laughed and patted Fonnggark on the nearest arm. “Maybe she was an Ngugma. It didn’t matter. I was in my mom’s house looking out the window—I remember it was a place we lived for a whole two years.” She laughed. “Anyway, it stuck with me.”

“Is this why you went into space?” asked Kalkar.

“Oh, it’s complicated.”

“Tasha,” said Clay, “why did Vera go into the program? I’ve always thought she had some sort of secret. I mean, I just sort of wound up in it, my dad died, my mom died, Park wanted me. But—?”

“She had an argument with her mom,” said Natasha. “Do not tell her I told you.”

“What?? Of course we won’t. But—what?”

“She had an argument with her mom, and then she broke up with her fiancée, and she had this offer out there, she was going to just let it sit, but she got mad and joined HHP. Human Horizon Project,” she explained to Fonnggark.

“She joined up on a snit?” Clay couldn’t think what else to say: he was struck by the memory of Vera Santos smiling at him through their visors on the Moon, giving him her serious look just before that kiss, that first kiss. Vera. Killer. How many years ago? “Well,” he said, “my dad died, and I was bored with my job.”

“It’s as good a reason as any,” said Rachel. “I got divorced.”

They stood there on the balcony, watching the moon’s plains grow dark even as the giant planet didn’t move in the sky. The sun was already set; the Milky Way glowed brighter and brighter. Fonnggark and Kalkar excused themselves and went inside; Vera landed, as she and Grohl were replaced on patrol by Apple and Izawa. Rachel and Clay were left on the balcony alone.

“Clay,” said Rachel.

“My love?” he replied.

“I want to live right here.”

“What?”

“I want to live right here. This is it. This is the place. You and me. And our, um, friends. Here. On Azure. You still want to be with me, don’t you?”

He looked at her. “I always pictured us living on a place with more, you know, air.” Then he laughed. “Of course I do,” he said. “We have all the air we need. You’re my air.” He grabbed her hand and twirled her about and let her fall back into his arms, and they bumped visors. “I will always want to be with you,” he said.

“That’s especially convenient,” said Rachel. “Because I will always want to be with you.”

 

Friends of the Sky 15 cont’d: Forever

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3.

The freighters were doing their laudable dirty work still, by the time Tasmania reached orbit of Slime Ball 2. Further out, only two of the six Ngugma cruisers survived, and only one of the four heavy cruisers didn’t take significant damage. The battleship had several dead sections. Even the explorer-cruiser had gotten involved, fighting off the last of the big “ships” of the enemy. But Gwoav and Fonnggark were in a good mood.

The Bluehorsers’ mood was more complicated. They were all still alive, and they had won their first battle against major forces of a species that even the Ngugma feared. But they were now even further from home, whatever that even meant. They hadn’t breathed free air since before Offvroffh. They were also well aware that they’d had a narrow shave.

“I can believe a lot of us got knocked out,” said Natasha, when most of the fighter pilots were sitting around the Tasmania bridge, beers in their hands. “But down to two?”

“And those two?” said Vera.

“And just two freighters,” said Timmis. “If we’d lost even one of those—!”

“We would have had Tasmania as backup,” said Rachel. “I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone, but Kalkar agreed to carry a backup reactor setup just in case we lost all the Ngugma freighters.”

“It was a brave decision,” said Kalkar. “It gave us every excuse to stay out of the way.”

“Well,” said Apple, “where to next?”

“Armpit,” said Rachel. “Remember that spiral pattern? They’ve been building up to an attack on Armpit. That’s the whole purpose of this system we just despoiled. To take out the Ngugma’s fortress on the border, and that would bring the deluge.”

“They’re working a long plan, aren’t they?” said Natasha. “Thousands of years,” said Gemma.

“So are we,” said Rachel.

“And their newest fleet is on their way there already,” said Clay. “And we let them go.”

“Sweetie pie.” He ducked his head apologetically. She went on, “They’ll be concentrating their forces. We took out their source system, but they’ll have plenty of assets coming from previous slimings. So that’s where we’re going.”

“That’s over twelve hundred light years from here,” said Timmis. “One jump?”

“Not quite,” said Emily Gray. “We have a staging system.”

“How far is that?”

“1180,” said Gray.

“We’re in a hurry, aren’t we?” said Clay. “We just won and—!”

“We need to nail this down,” said Rachel. “”We took out their source of ships in the Orion Arm, their industrial system as it were. Now all we need to do is eliminate their offensive force.”

“And we’ll be in the clear,” said Kalkar. “Eleven thousand light years from Bluehorse, but in the clear.”

“Fonnggark going with us?” asked Clay.

“We get Fonnggark. The rest of the Ngugma ships are headed for an arc through the systems the Enemy slimed on the way to Armpit. We may meet them again in like three thousand calendar years. But we take out this one force, we’ve done our jobs. We’ve justified coming all the way to the upper end of the Orion Arm. A distance of, well, by the time we get there, it will be 11,168 years since we left Bluehorse.”

“And then what do we do when we’ve done our jobs?” asked Apple.

“We find someplace we can defend,” said Rachel, “and by golly, we defend it. Forever.”

 

Friends of the Sky 15 cont’d: A vegetable fight

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2.

The Enemy had sent everything it had to the fight in the orbit of the gas giant, and yet when Rachel led the ten Ghosts, and the six Ngugma freighters with their own escort of spidery fighters, toward the orbit of the second planet, somehow the Enemy had found more to throw at them. There were at least fifteen more of the plant-cruisers, and dozens of shzhawkhor, and hundreds more mouthholes, and an orbiting pod that was sending out a steady welter of those splinter-darts.

“All we need to do is get one of these freighters close enough to the planet,” said Rachel as they came within two light minutes of the planet. “And any of these spore flowers we can do, that’ll be bonus.”

“Think they’ll be sensitive enough about the flowers,” Vera asked, “that attacking them might leave an open lane for the freighters?”

“It’s as good a theory as any,” said Rachel. “Li and Timmis, you’re with the freighters. Everyone else, in pairs, start taking down all the daisies in orbit around this planet. Turn and fight the enemy as they come at you. And remember the Vow.”

“The Vow,” several of them chorused.

“Let’s go, loverboy,” she called to Clay. Smirking, he tilted and followed her out toward the planet’s outer orbit.

A giant flower pod floated in space, its fleshy petals open to the mother Sun. Ten kilometers across, its center was a vast disk of yellow-green, dotted with the poison green of a million beachball-sized spores. Clay and Rachel curved in toward it from the outside, and it hung there innocent and sinister, a flower in a clown’s lapel.

“Me first,” called Rachel, and she moved in front. Clay fell behind by a hundred meters, tail of the wing as always. Rachel opened up and the flower began to take bright, fiery damage.

One second later she was passing into the front face of the thing. Clay was already opening up with his own laser. Rachel cursed. “God damn dart things,” she said, but she flipped and kept firing.

A second later, Clay was into the cloud of darts too, and he could see his flectors lighting up. “Can’t take this long,” he called. “Get back into the shadow.”

They both zipped around the flower and for a few seconds it was all quiet. “I’m down to 25% shield,” said Rachel.

“I got 45%,” said Clay. “Just let’s kill this particular thing and then back off and see what’s up.”

“Kay,” said Rachel. “Vow.”

They immediately opened up together on the pod they were hiding behind. It took perhaps twenty more seconds, and the thing began to rip open in the middle. They backed up and kept firing, spreading their lasers across to the outside of the flower, and it came apart into two pieces, then more. The darts shot through at the fighters, but seemed also to be ripping up the rest of the flower pod. In seconds, there was nothing left of it. The Ghosts backed and backed and then shot sideways and left their splintery pursuers in the dark. Rachel and Clay cut engines and coasted, looking for another target.

“Well crap,” said Rachel.

Of six of the flower pods in orbit around the second planet out, three were gone. Of six Ngugma freighters, three were gone. Li and Timmis were valiantly fighting off mouthholes and shzhawkhor and a couple of the giant plant cruisers, and as they watched, Li’s shield went. A moment later, she went as well—out into space, in her vac suit, a second before her Ghost blew up. Timmis retreated after her, still firing, still taking damage.

Aliya was slicing up one of the flower pods, while Millie Grohl’s Ghost floated dead in space near the remains of another one. Apple and Izawa, heavily damaged, were fighting another big enemy vessel in the ruins of one of the freighters. Apple went critical and ejected; Izawa shot forward, wounded the enemy mortally, and then pulled back, caught in a cloud of the splinters. They had done her enough damage too now. Clay heard her curse as she ejected her drive and went dead.

Vera and Natasha were finishing off the fifth of the flower pods and turned to take the sixth and last. Four of the plant-cruisers chose to ignore them, and went for the three remaining freighters.

“Damn it,” said Rachel, sending a new navigation and taking off. “And I thought this would be easy. Alpha Wing!”

“With you,” called Natasha. “So it turns out this creature has a brain.”

“Yeah, damn it,” said Vera. “Hate that.”

“Let’s go, hunkburger,” Rachel called to Clay.

“Right behind you.”

Immediately they found themselves in a cloud of mouthholes. But mouthholes held no fear for Clay Gilbert anymore. He dodged one, then hit it square as it passed; swinging, he sliced another in half, and then took four more with a quick sequence of shots. Rachel was slicing them up herself, and the litter of iron and silicate was filling space behind them. They turned to the left to push the body of the enemy back toward the planet, and the mouthholes began to scatter to avoid the atmosphere.

They turned again, and there was another of those big vessels. They didn’t seem to have laser weapons, but they had plenty of splinter-darts: Clay wondered for a moment if the whole ship was just a big log. “Diamond,” called Rachel. They dropped into the diamond pattern without another thought, and their lasers began carving into the thing in front of them. They didn’t know what to shoot for, so they just made sure they were shooting for something.

The enemy released a burst of demon walnuts. Four blew up at once right in the face of Alpha Wing. Rachel cursed, and a moment later her Ghost was toppling sideways. She waited till the last second to eject before it blew up. There she was: a vac suit labeled Rachel Andros.

Vera and Natasha shot forward, and Clay filled the gap between them. Something was going to happen to this log they were faced with. And something did, finally. A hole formed and widened. Flashes indicated something like explosions. Bursts of gases ignited and scattered.

And then the thing broke and the pieces drifted apart. One by one the pieces began to fall back into the atmosphere and burn up.

On the other side, they could see just two of the six Ngugma freighters still intact, and four enemy ships attacking them. Timmis was dead in space, Li was floating, Apple and Izawa were both out of action, Millie Grohl was floating, even Rachel was floating in her vac suit. A new wave of shzhawkhor came up at them, and in the onset, Vera lost her system control and went dead in space. Without a word, Clay and Natasha began dodging and shooting: these were cannier and more agile even than mouthholes, and they seemed to fire some sort of short range laser blaster, the biology of which must have been—

“God damn it to hell,” cried Natasha, banging her screen till her drive ejected.

Clay didn’t have time to process this. He was too busy blasting one, dodging another, blasting the next one. He lost count. But his shield was still in the thirty percent range.

He came through the wreckage of the enemy, and there were three of the big vessels still, unable to seal the deal somehow. Clay came in at them, and just then received a communication from a light minute away—from Padfoot on Tasmania.

“Put this in your flector program,” she said, and there were a hundred lines of code. He tapped it and it lit up.

He charged in. The darts from the big ships came at him in a murderous cloud—and went inert as soon as they were within a hundred meters.

With a cry, his Ghost leapt forward. He searched the nearest enemy and found an interesting place for a hole, and put one there. Gases outgassing began to catch fire, and after a few seconds the big ship blew apart. He burst through and into a quartet of mouthholes. He took more damage—now his left shield was on the brink and his right side was at 20%. The next hit—!

One down. He spiraled left and took the next, then dropped and flipped and the other two were right where he would have been. Three, four. He was in the clear.

Ahead of him, the battle was suddenly over. The last two enemy ships were steaming hulks, beginning to fall to the planet which had sprouted them. Mizra Aliya’s face filled up Clay’s screen.

“We’re clear, Clay Gilbert,” she called, and then laughed, a little hysterical. “I got the last two. All enemy in planetary orbit cleared, sir! All our people are alive. Clay! We kept the vow.”

“And the even better thing is,” Clay called back, “two freighters left, two planets. They stripped the defenses of both planets to stop us here.”

The two of them, the last two fighters going, Mizra Aliya of Aghabad, Siberia and Clay Gilbert of Camden, Maine, went off to keep their comrades from falling into the atmosphere, while one of the Ngugma freighters coasted in and began seeding the same atmosphere with newly synthesized and highly radioactive astatine. The other freighter was already trundling off to do the same to the other planet. Its half dozen space flowers would succumb to a leisurely attack. Behind them, the Ngugma fleet was cleaning up the rest of the battle in the outer parts of the system.

“Wiping out all life in the system,” Clay muttered. He laughed grimly. “Hey Rachel. We’re helping kill all life in the Slime Ball system. And I’m okay with it.”

“That’s great, hubby dear,” came Rachel’s voice, from an unstable orbit of the planet. “Now come give me a ride. We can both fit in yours, right?”

“We did good, right?” said Aliya. “We made it?”

“We did good,” said Clay.

 

Friends of the Sky 15 start: Slime Ball and Armpit

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XV. Slime Ball and Armpit

 

1.

Death, Clay had often thought, was that condition from which there is no recovery.

“The death had been at it,” Mr. Lovecraft would have said of the planet they now had on their screens. The death had been at it, and had turned to a new, horrible life, and had risen from the planet into the sky and circulated about that sun, eating the asteroids and the dust and the blessing light and turning it into more of itself.

The system before them—bright young yellow star, two terrestrial planets, and a huge gas giant with dozens of moons—had been thoroughly infected. The inner planet was practically covered in lime green glop. It could hardly have been more covered if it had just been pulled from a vat of green paint. The second planet was cooler, and only had glop where it didn’t have ice caps. Its two moons were both covered, notwithstanding their tenuous atmospheres. The giant stood in its gold-amber glory, proud and free, but at least five large moons were infected, circling it like zombie bodyguards.

The fleet coasted in, and for a while they didn’t say much. By arrangement, the fighters took the forefront, with six Ngugma cruisers behind them. They began to approach the region of the gas giant, though the planet itself, and its demented escort of moons, were 90° away in its orbit. They picked up a lot of things in space. Hundreds of mouthholes had been dealt with by the Ngugma, but thousands more zipped about, as did slightly smaller, greyer globules of silicate, which must have been the shzhawkhor that the Ngugma had told them about. There were also at least a dozen of what looked like gigantic green and pink rootless flowers, in outer orbits of the two terrestrial planets, turned so their open sunflower faces faced the Sun.

There was one further entry in the botany of the system. There were several dozen large dark objects, grey-black rather than the children’s toy green of the orbital flowers. Though their size range, from a few meters to a few kilometers, was like the size range of asteroids, these were distinctly biological. They were elongated blobs, with knots and appendages and circles and spirals of solar-collecting material. As soon as the invading fleet had begun to approach the orbit of the gas giant, these objects started concentrating toward the same place.

“Life form?” said Clay.

“Looks like they grow their own cruisers,” said Apple.

“I dub this system,” said Natasha, “Slime Ball. Or maybe Slime Balls, since there’s two planets covered with this crap, not just one. I don’t know, is that too graphic?”

Suddenly, most of the pilots, and several people on the Tasmania, said variants of “Oh my.”

“What did it just do?” asked Natasha.

“Planet 3’s biggest moon,” said Emily Gray, “just launched something into deep space.”

“Track that thing,” said Rachel.

“We chasing it?” asked Timmis. “It’s picking up an escort.”

“I read,” called Emily Gray, “thirteen of those plant-cruiser-things, and several hundred mouthholes. No spores.”

“The flower thing,” said Rachel, “it makes the spores. Where’s it going?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Gray, “but preliminary indications are that its destination is, um, Armpit.”

“Hey, maybe we’ll see them there,” said Rachel. “Because if that’s where they’re going, then that’s where we’re going. But first, we have to do something about this.”

 

Over the next few hours, while the herbaceous space fleet began to accelerate to light speed, and another herbaceous fleet assembled to meet the Ngugma battleship and its friends, Rachel and Li video-conferenced with Kalkar and Fonnggark and Gwoav and a couple of other Ngugma captains. The conference was detailed, but surprisingly brief.

“We certainly have our work cut out for us,” Kalkar said, once they were all as satisfied as they were going to be with their plan.

“Just you stay out of this, old man,” said Rachel. “Your job is to be around to pick us all up out of the rubble at the end.”

“And your job,” said Gwoav, “is to make sure that at least two of our freighters are not destroyed by the shzhawkhor.”

 

The two fleets, one technological, human and Ngugma, one made of biological stuff, drifted towards one another, crawling at insane speeds. Clay could not help think of a dopey addiction of his childhood, a game in which one supervised a garden of violent plants for the purpose of defeating an invasion of zombies. He couldn’t help notice that he was cast as a zombie.

He was one of ten little Ghost fighters, speeding out in front, with several hundred robotic Ngugma fighters coming up behind, on his side for once. Against them came a thousand mouthholes and hundreds of the grey-dark planty-gritty shzhawkhor. His side had six cruisers and a battleship of the Ngugma; the other side had dozens of its big ships, already unloading spiky shot that might have been missiles and might have been some sort of dart. His side had hundreds, now thousands of missiles, the tiny missiles of the Ngugma and the tiny and tinier missiles of the Earthlings. Ranged against them, coming behind the first wave of darts, were things the size and texture of walnuts, which had the zip and madness of mouthholes.

According to plan, Clay and the rest of the Ghosts faded back into their comrades, while the battleships drifted forward and began blasting away at the larger Enemy “ships” opposite them. The spidery robot fighters passed through the Ghost wings and set upon the shzhawkhor and the mouthholes, and a bloodless cancellation began to play out. The splintery darts began to reach the ten Ghosts, which registered tiny amounts of damage, but Clay could see how it would build up: he felt like they were wading through a field of brambles. The wave got past and into the cruisers, which came forward bravely into the thin pelting. The battleship, behind, was laying into the largest of the enemy craft, a thing about five kilometers long which might have been the Enemy’s version of a battlecruiser. It was a goner, but not before it fired back all its darts and walnut missiles. The demon walnuts started blowing up all over the battlefield: one Ngugma cruiser took five hits almost at once, and began to overload, while two more were significantly damaged. More little explosions popped up across the face of the battleship, which was still unperturbed.

“Gallium,” called Rachel. “Gallium. Oggohdah,” she added, translating the element name into Ngugma.

Two Ngugma cruisers peeled left, eighty spidery fighters screening them. Rachel led the ten Ghosts out behind this screen. The six Ngugma freighters began lumbering the same direction. They began to accelerate again, and within minutes they were leaving the battle behind. Another cruiser and another went down, but the enemy’s big ships, if that’s the word for them, also began to go, typically with splattery bursts rather than explosions. Clay counted six of these, and then he was moving swiftly away.

 

Friends of the Sky 14 ending: To Slimeball

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6.

The augmented fleet set off 220 hours after Millie and Miz took the Vow. They flew 810 light years, a new record, and they flew 99.99999999% of the speed of light, eight nines past the decimal, which the Ngugma admiralty (or whatever) seemed to like. They paid no attention to anything they saw at that speed. The gigantic Ngugma ships shouldered aside any mouthholes that followed them. But then they looked upon the system they were slowing into.

There was a single star, large and bright. There were a half dozen blobby giants, mostly pale in color, pale orange or pale green or palest thinnest blue. There were two baked planets, a baked desert and a baked lava swamp, its mountain islands floating on molten rock. And there were two planets in the temperate zone, and they both must have harbored extensive ecosystems, because, without even getting close, the fighter pilots could already tell the two planets were largely covered with a crust of burnt slime.

“Captain Fonnggark,” called Rachel, as they flew along at 23% of light speed, “did you know—?”

“We did not,” replied Fonnggark, peering at all the fighter pilots from a little square on each screen. “But I think Gwoav knew. Would you have preferred to know—?”

“No, no,” Rachel replied. “It’s fine.”

“Captain Fonnggark,” called Padfoot from the Tasmania, “can I ask a question? Is it all pretty solidly dead down there? I have a reason for asking.”

“It is all dead down there these—in your units, two thousand years?”

“Great,” said Padfoot. Looking at Fonnggark, Clay could tell that it had not yet got the hang of talking with Padfoot. “Commander, Captain Kalkar, I would love to land on one of those planets and take up samples.”

“Oh,” said Kalkar. “Oh, I see. Oh, I think we can accommodate. You want to land on the outer one? It’s only half irradiated glop. The other half is polar ice caps.”

 

The fleet moved in through the system and took up an orbit just inside Planet Five, the innermost and largest of the pale gas giants. They stuffed Padfoot into an old Ghost, and she joined Alpha Wing, and Fonnggark took the Ngugma explorer-cruiser with them, on a jaunt to Planet Four.

Rachel took Clay, Natasha and Vera along with Padfoot down to the surface of the fourth planet. It wasn’t all that bad: they didn’t open their visors. They landed, four Ghost 204s and one Franken-ghost put together from spare parts, on a patch of open rock between a long slab of glacier and the northern end of a valley-full of hardened slime. It sat there, almost level, almost rippling up the hillsides, frozen forever in the act of bubbling. Rachel and Padfoot spent fifteen minutes collecting chunks of the stuff, which was as much as half a meter thick in places. It wasn’t a crust on top of a soft inside: it was hard all the way down. The other three looked around for any sign of organic matter, dusting the cracks in the rocks, taking cores of the ice cap, and finding nothing that had ever been alive except the burnt slime.

Back on the Tasmania, Clay and Natasha and the Ngugma captain shared a sort of nacho plate with two beers and what amounted to an Ngugma liquor.

“Fonnggark,” said Clay, “every time we see this, it means that the Enemy found a planet full of life, and that you guys got there later and radiation-blasted it. Right?”

“Yes, exactly,” said Fonnggark.

“So is that a victory or a defeat?” asked Natasha.

“Both,” the Ngugma boomed. It waved its arm-tips and just said, “War.”

 

The next system, 795 light years on, was not as bad. It had two stars and only one planet covered in burnt gloop. They skipped the samples, zipped past the twin suns to refill their solar batteries, and flew on to the next place.

The third system was 887 light years further. It was the best of all: four young stars reeled in a chaotic dance amidst the swaddling veils of their mother nebula. There was not a single well-formed planet, nor any sign of life forms.

The Ngugma fleet, after a conference with the Bluehorse leadership and with Fonnggark, began accelerating away. Tasmania and the explorer cruiser trundled after them. The fighters paired up: five couples joined, heading off to race the photons. 777 light years on, 777 years later, they began to see where they were headed, the system from which the enemy goo had sent out its spores to infect Ngugma space and grow a slimy foothold from which to infect the entire Orion Arm.

 

Friends of the Sky 14 cont’d: Millie and Mizra make the Vow

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5.

The Ngugma of Greenstar, diffident at first about any contact with the Bluehorse flotilla, now assembled an expeditionary force that dwarfed the human fleet: a full-size battleship, two heavy cruisers, six cruisers and a couple of hundred fighters, escorting their versions of Honshu and Tasmania: six armed freighters much smaller than Big Fourteen but much larger than Honshu or Tasmania. Gwoav was put in charge.

“What do they have in their holds?” Clay asked Fonnggark, as they floated in the Tasmania bridge.

“Makings,” said Fonnggark. If its twenty or so eye-tentacles could have a glint, they would.

“Makings of?”

“Astatine, I bet,” said Rachel. “So, we’re going to a system 3200 light years away. I thought we’d break it into four jumps: it might add a couple of weeks to a real travel time of three millennia. Gwoav concurs.”

“Padfoot wants to refit all the fighters,” said Kalkar. “There go another couple of weeks.”

“Ever going to refit Tasmania?” asked Clay. “I can hardly wait to see what color you do the café in. It’ll be interesting to see if it can be made uglier.”

“I doubt it,” said Kalkar. “No, Tasmania is as refit as she is going to be. Commander, is it your plan that Tasmania will go wherever you go? Perhaps it’s time to discuss the long term.”

Clay’s heart skipped a beat. Rachel said, “Are you thinking of leaving?” with just a hint of panic.

“Absolutely not,” said Kalkar. He laughed through his beard. “I just wonder if we get to brave the Empty Lanes and all that, or if you’re planning to park us somewhere.”

Rachel narrowed her eyes. “Well,” she said, “suppose we did. Say just the fighters had to get somewhere where we wouldn’t want to risk the larger vessel. We need a base of operations. Heck, we might end up operating around here for the next million years. But the problem is, if you just park yourself at the base and we go 200 light years away and back, it won’t just be four hundred years later, you’ll really be four hundred years older.”

“So,” said Clay, “as long as we’re moving, you have to be moving.”

“I think that can be arranged,” said Kalkar. “Ms. Gray will wave her navigation wand at the problem. So, from here—do we proceed to Armpit?”

Rachel looked around. She laughed. “Sorry,” she said, “it still seems weird to me that I’m a commander.”

“Babe,” said Clay, “you’re the commander.”

 

The little flotilla was granted landing privileges at a nearly abandoned Ngugma base on an Earth-sized planet, frozen solid in Greenstar’s inner Oort cloud. They partied and trained and slept, while the Ngugma fleet got organized and underway. The pilots spent a significant amount of time lying on the hard ice outside, in their vac suits, looking at the stars.

“It’s finally starting to hit me,” said Apple. “We’re not going back.”

“What are we doing?” asked Millie Grohl.

“It’s a one-way journey, silly,” said Apple. “You knew that. If we went back to Bluehorse, it’d be what, twenty thousand years later?”

“It’s a one-way journey,” said Rachel, “but that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to die, because everyone took the vow—Miz and Millie, you did, didn’t you?”

Millie Grohl and Mizra Aliya both half sat up, and looked each other in the visor. “I thought we did,” said Grohl, and Aliya said, “”Well, maybe we should do it again.”

“Okay, stand up,” said Rachel, getting up. Everyone got up. Vera and Natasha pushed Aliya and Grohl in front of Clay and Rachel. “Hunkalicious? You want to do the honors?”

“Okay,” he said. “Millie Grohl, Mizra Aliya. Do you promise to fight with all your heart and brain, and win the next battle and the next and the next, but above all, to be alive at the end of the next battle and the next and the next?”

“And every one after that?” asked Rachel.

“We do,” said Aliya. Grohl said, “I so vow,” and Aliya said the same thing.

“What do you promise on?” asked Vera. “What are you swearing on?”

They looked up. “The whole galaxy,” said Aliya. “We swear on the Milky Way.” Grohl said, “Yes. We swear by the Milky Way Galaxy that we will be alive at the end of the next battle and the next and every one after.”

They hugged each other, and then they swore a few more things, and then everyone hugged, and then they lay down again on their backs.

“Is it true Gray’s having a baby?” said Aliya.

“Shawna’s having another,” said Izawa, referring to the drive officer Shawna Shelleen.

“I don’t know,” said Rachel, “but we’re gonna find out.”

“We want to have one,” said Li Zan, “but naturally we have to wait and see.”

“We’re not having one,” said Vera. “Just in case anyone wondered,” said Natasha.

Rachel and Clay both sat up and looked at Tasha and Vera. Rachel looked at Apple. “You guys? Now you’re married and all?”

Apple giggled. Izawa said, “We’ve talked about it, actually.” Apple added, “Mostly about which of us would actually go through it. You guys thought about it?” she asked Aliya.

“What? No, no, we haven’t,” said Aliya. She looked at Grohl. They smiled, took hands, giggled and looked back at the others. “What about you, Commander?”

“Me?” said Rachel. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t mind having a baby me to raise. Maybe I can get Clay to actually carry the pregnancy.”

“Oh, that’s hilarious,” said Clay. “Anyway, it’s all a bit hypothetical, at least for now. But actually, I don’t think the far end of the Orion Arm would be such a bad place to raise a kid.”

“I think so too,” said Li. “I look forward to trying.” She looked to her right, into Timmis’s visor. “But we have to wait and see still. The thing that isn’t hypothetical is the Vow.”

“No,” said Rachel. “That part’s very real.”

 

Friends of the Sky 14 cont’d: The hunt is on

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4.

Emily Gray, second pilot of Tasmania, went into a huddle with a couple of the Ngugma and with Natasha and Padfoot, and an hour later, on the Tasmania bridge, they were ready to talk.

“The Ngugma are very clever,” she was saying, “about patterns, about connecting the dots. But the thing is, these dots are varied by time, so that if there’s a pattern, we’re seeing it not only in three dimensions, but in the order in which it comes to us chronologically. So farther away events come later, but happened earlier. So in case you’re wondering what that means—!”

“This,” said a local Ngugma called Gghawra, tweaking the screen with the stubby fingers at the end of its leftmost arm. The upper end of the Orion Arm appeared, in 3D, with Greenstar marked at one edge, and Armpit at the other, both given their English nicknames as well as their Ngugma names, written in the scratchy Ngugma letters. Then about twenty bright dots appeared, and it would have been a very imaginative child who could have connected them into anything coherent. “We look at this and we say, ‘The Enemy attacks at random.’ But Pilot Emily says something to us, and we try some things.” It tweaked again, and the dots disappeared and reappeared, again in a seemingly random order. And again. “And then, the fourteenth time we try, this.”

Now the dots shone out, one by one, in an ascending spiral, approaching the system called Armpit. The pattern was suddenly so obvious that it seemed like a different pattern. But as they compared, they could see that the actual dots were in the same places, just different times.

“Each dot,” said Gray, “is an attack that news came back to Greenstar about. First we saw them in the order in which Greenstar learned of them, but as the pattern spirals, some are closer and others are farther, and Greenstar learned of the farther ones much later. Second, they occur in a certain order, in a certain sense, although—!”

“Simultaneity,” said Gghawra, relishing the word in that way Ngugma sometimes relished English words, “simoooltan-eee-it-eee, is an illoooosion.”

“But in any case,” said Gray, “you tick back the clock by the amount of time it took for the signal to reach Greenstar. And then you tick back by the amount of time it took for the Enemy to reach each target from where the Enemy began, and this is what you see.”

“But you have to know where the Enemy began,” said Rachel.

“Right,” said Natasha. “So we made some guesses. And as Gghawra says, guess number 14 got us this lovely pattern. And where is the Enemy’s point of origin in guess number 14? It’s right here.”

A red spot shone, just on the edge of the Orion Arm, about halfway to Armpit. It was more than thousand light years from Greenstar, but it was not more than a hundred light years off the path the Bluehorse fleet had penciled in from Offvroffh to Armpit.

“So we attack it?” asked Clay.

“Well,” said Rachel, “at the very least, we have to go there and see what it is. What do you think it is, Mr. Gghawra?”

“What do spores come from?” Gghawra replied. “Spore, is this the same as seed? Is this to do with,” and it girded itself for a pair of very un-Ngugma words, “sexual reproduction?”

“It has a specific meaning,” Rachel replied, “and a not so specific one. Specifically, a spore is non-sexual, while a seed is the result of sexual reproduction: you need two parents to make a seed. But the basic concept is the same.”

“Then what we mean,” said Gghawra, “is that there is something at this place that sends off things that, in their millions, act as spores and find a place to grow and eat life. What we have now learned is: these things do not come in random waves, but emanate,” another word it relished, “from this place and over time in a predictable way. Now what is there? It must be a laahsting thing, permanent. There is a star, which is not surprising, since the thing would use light to grow and gain energy. There must be substance there, for it to make spores and send them out. And we look, and Ngugma have visited there. It was a system with three planets with water and air, but the star is unstable and sends out bursts every so often, bursts of radio activity, radioactivity! That would kill off any colony that any species attempted to put down.”

“Yet these things,” said Fonnggark, “whatever they are, they have survived these bursts.”

“We think they may actually thrive on them,” said Natasha. “We think we’ll see a whole complex setup there, with this uni-body life-form covering three planets, and with some sort of setup to make spores and mouthholes and send them out. I’ll tell you, I’m gonna write a hell of a paper about this in the Bluehorse Journal of Exobiology, when we get back there in about one million years from now after the next four ice ages.”

They looked around at each other. “Well, fascinating,” said Kalkar, as the Ngugma explained Natasha’s little speech to each other. Kalkar looked at Emily Gray and Ram Vindu and said, “Well, shit. I guess we have a new itinerary.”

 

Friends of the Sky 14 cont’d: I think we can

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3.

A couple of hours later, several of the fighter pilots, Padfoot, the pilots Emily Gray and Ram Vindu, and Fonnggark and two other Ngugma floated around in the Tasmania conference room. They had a 3D display of the inner end of the Orion Arm, along with screens and white boards and actual paper with actual colored pencils.

“Three problems,” said Rachel. “One, we don’t know how to find the enemy in the first place. We could go over across the Empty Lanes and look, that’s only another thousand light years or so on top of the eleven thousand we will have traveled already, but that didn’t go well for you guys, Fonnggark, and you’re not more squeamish than we are.”

“Suh queeem ish,” said Fonnggark. “Squeamish.” It checked a device on one of its arms. “S, Q—?”

“It means,” said Clay, “horrible things bother you a lot. Which they don’t.”

Fonnggark and its comrades exchanged looks. One of the others said, in a strong accent, “Cross empty lanes is not a thing to advise.”

“Even though,” Fonnggark said, “we are not squeamish, no, yes, we were affected by what we saw there, what our people saw over there, it was too much.”

“And what was it exactly?” asked Emily Gray.

Again the Ngugma looked at one another. Fonnggark said, “None of us would know. Nor do we wish to know.”

“So we’re not going to do that,” said Rachel. “Two, we have no way of predicting where the enemy is going to attack. The upper Arm is too big, it has too many systems. If we see them launch an attack from Point A on Point B, and we’re here at Point C,” and she was drawing it all on a white board near her, “the light from Point A has to reach Point C before we can leave for Point B, and they will always be there before we are, probably decades before. Centuries before.”

“And three?” asked Padfoot. “We don’t know how to kill them?”

“Because we’ve never fought them.”

“The Ngugma can help you with that,” said Fonngark. “That is not even a small problem at all. We can assure—ensure? Insure?”

“Any of the three is fine with me,” said Clay.

“Thank you, my friend,” said Fonnggark. “We can assure that you can destroy the enemy once you are in the same system of them. There will be their, its version of cruisers. And these—mouth holes. They are much more hard, much harder than these, ah, spores. And there are the—shzhawkhor. A sort of fighter, I suppose, which cannot accelerate to light speed, but which our robotic fighters are designed to fight. They are dangerous, but you should do well enough against them, you slaughtered our fighters. But they will not send those in an invasion—they will invade and infect, and then grow the shzhawkhor in place.”

“So we can fight these things,” said Li Zan, “but we probably won’t have to?”

“It depends on much,” Fonnggark replied, “but, whatever system it is you, we, attack: the Enemy will be well-established there. Yet I think you would defeat them. All we need to do is get you into that system.” One of the other Ngugma said something in their language, and Fonnggark said, “It is also true, that there are many, many. At a time, there are many spores. That may be also a problem.”

“How many?” asked Apple.

“A hundred thousand, a million,” said Fonnggark.

“Then we will kill a hundred thousand, a million,” said Apple.

“Geez,” said Clay. “That’s very Dragon Riders of Pern.”

“Oh no,” said Rachel. “Do we all have to read one more fantasy novel?”

“Let’s not,” said Clay. “I actually thought it kind of sucked. Look, being realistic, maybe there’s a million spores we have to kill? Ten of us?”

“Yes,” said Timmis, “what are the offensive capabilities of these spores? How hard are they to kill, and can they kill us?”

“Your Ghost?” said Fonnggark. “The spore is perhaps twenty, as many as thirty zhoaw across. Half or less the size of your Ghost. It is soft, not hard, not rigid. If it hit your Ghost while moving fast enough, perhaps it might damage you, but I have doubt, I have seen your battles on the video. It is easy to kill, as well. But you are correct. If you met the Enemy when the Enemy was already in the attack, it would be hard to destroy completely all of them. Still, they are unarmed, and if you are not attacking their base but defending ours, you would not see the shzhawkhor. Only the spores.”

“It doesn’t matter if they’re unarmed,” said Vera. “There’s a million of them. A hundred k each. And don’t they have mouthholes with them? What do you fight?”

“Oh,” said Fonnggark, “we do fight. Sometimes they will send, as you say, mouth holes along, and sometimes when we send fleets to stop them in the Empty Lanes, there are bigger—vessels, cruisers, you could call them, but these vessels have no crew, of course, they are also living things perhaps. But often they send masses of spores deep into our space to attack a system, and they have overwhelmed many systems through sheer numbers.”

“The spores attack Green Star,” said one of the local Ngugma. “We have enough fighters to destroy all of them. Unfortunately, most of our systems do not have such numbers. We have two thousand fighters here.”

“We have ten,” said Apple.

“They come from somewhere,” said Rachel. “If we could only catch the spores when they’re, I don’t know, released. Wherever that is.”

“So,” said Clay, “we might be able to solve Problem 3 if we can do either 1 or 2. We can kill them if we can find them. Can we do one of those?”

“Actually,” said Emily Gray, playing with the 3D display, “I kind of think we can.”