Friends of the Sky
14. Down the Arm

1.

Of course the answer was still yes.

There were eight thousand light years yet to travel. The Earthlings and Bluehorselings in the fleet had come three thousand years from their planets of birth, and it was not even a third of how far they needed to go. Ahead, the upper half of the Orion Arm held 105 Ngugma bases, but just two of those, according to the latest information, held significant populations. The nearer one, which the Ngugma called Gaazokgov (translated as Greenstar), had once been a major Ngugma metropolitan system, and was now one big starship factory. It lay at about the midpoint of the journey ahead. The further one was no more than a gigantic military base, near the end of the Orion Arm, where it petered out into the Empty Lanes, near where the Scutum Arm met the Galactic Core. It had a long and unpronounceable Ngugma name, which made an anatomical reference describing an arm joining a center. The Earthlings called this second major base Armpit.

“Greenstar,” said Rachel, as the fighter pilots sat around in the Tasmania lounge on their way out of Offvroffh, “is the only actual Ngugma colony beyond this point that’s not just a military base. It’s four thousand light years away. After that, to Armpit, another four thousand light years. From Bluehorse, we’ve traveled almost 2700 light years. From home, we’re about a quarter of the way there. If we turned around now, we’d be back in Bluehorse more than 5000 years after we left.”

They looked around at each other with solemn faces: Rachel, Natasha, Vera, Li, Timmis, Maria, Gemma, Miz, Millie, Clay Gilbert. Presently Natasha said, “I give up. There’s no way to think about that.”

“No way,” Clay agreed.

“How many stops are we going to make?” asked Maria Apple.

“I plan on six jumps,” said Rachel. “What do you guys think? That’s an average of 659 light years per jump. Seems like a lot. What do you guys think?”

There was a general shrug. “Fonnggark going with us all the way?” asked Vera.

“At least to Greenstar,” said Rachel.

“660 per jump,” said Natasha, “we can do that, we just did 666. What’s our longest?”

“This next one is 610, the one after it’s 760,” said Rachel. “The rest are all in between. There’s lots of systems, obviously, so Gray and Kalkar and I sorted for decent surface conditions. We’ll see how many of them are covered in slime.”

“Commander,” said Millie Grohl, “how dangerous is the slime?”

“Well, anywhere it’s established, we are not putting our Ghosts on the ground. We call up the nearest Ngugma base and let them stew up a batch of astatine soup. Does that answer your question?”

“Totally.”

“Anyway, I suppose we could just get up to seven nines past the decimal and coast for 4000 years. It would still only be what, a couple months? We’d be coasting, it’s not like we’d use more power, so we wouldn’t need to stop just to fill up batteries. Of course, even the Ngugma don’t like to take jumps that long. So I don’t suppose we want to try that.”

“I don’t know how to actually think about the question,” said Vera, “about doing 4000 light years in one jump, or split it into nice manageable chunks of six or seven hundred. So I’m going to vote for getting the chance to put my feet down on something, and hope that it’s beach sand.”

And so the little flotilla flashed across space, accelerating to the very brink of the speed of light, then coasting for 610 years (which were to them just under a week and a half). The fighters connected together in double pairs, Alpha Wing and Beta Wing, with Aliya and Grohl getting to stay aboard the Tasmania. They played, they simulated, they had a fair amount of sex, they slept, they read and watched videos, and generally they ignored whatever was on their screens.

Then they were decelerating into a new system, six hundred and ten light years up the Orion Arm from Offvroffh. They did this five more times, until the unimaginable became routine. They spent ten or eleven days traveling, closed in their tiny shells, flashing through the empty blackness like gigantic impostor photons, playing, working, eating, talking, making love, ignoring the uncanny cosmos around them. Then they decelerated, like monks coming down from the mystic mountain. Dozens, even hundreds, of mouthholes appeared around them each time. Fonnggark’s explorer-cruiser brushed these off, with the few that fell through getting blasted by Tasmania or the fighters. By then the system ahead would be resolving itself.

The first time, they had put six hundred light years and ten behind them. There were sixty-two of the globular nasties; three got through and came at Rachel, who swore venomously as she blasted them, leaving one of the three to her husband.

The system they were in had a pair of dull red dwarf stars, each of which had a few rocky planets. One of these was more or less in the Goldilocks Zone, but its idea of a sandy beach was to be entirely covered in sand, with water only present as a minor atmospheric constituent. There was no Ngugma base, and no history of habitation, but the sandy planet did contain life—in the form of certain mold-like plants growing on bare rock near the equator, photosynthesizing and somehow gathering water from the thick dry oxygen-poor air. There was a robotic station in a far outer orbit of the two red dwarfs, communicating as at Ghhokhur in occasional updates sent back to Offvroffh. And there was an osmium-iridium plaque.

“I do not understand what is strange about these, ah, plaques,” said Fonnggark, as it played chess on a physical chessboard with Clay, who finally had the chance to visit aboard the Ngugma ship. He had expected the Vogon spaceship from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and found himself aboard something more like the interplanetary mining explorers he had sometimes helped resupply all those years ago. “Would not you Humans do the same?”

“Sure, now I know what they’re for and who placed them. When we first ran into them, we had no idea. We’d only met the mouthholes.” He studied the board, made a move: middle game. Fonnggark liked to trade down, as did Clay: they both intuited that this made the game simpler and put them on more equal footing with great brains like Rachel or Natasha. Fonnggark took a rook with a rook, Clay took that with his bishop, Fonnggark took the bishop with his bishop, and Clay took that with a knight. He smiled at the Ngugma: all its available eyestalks were swiveling about studying the board again, little wormy meerkats among the furry tall grasses. “Fonnggark,” said Clay, “you do know what Bluehorse used to be, right?”

“What Bluehorse used to be?” the furry starfish repeated from its round toothy mouth. It struck Clay as weird how the Ngugma speaking English out of those monstrous mouths never struck him as weird. It turned to exchange looks with Vvohh, the second in command. Vvohh was playing Set with Natasha, and also losing. Fonnggark was getting better at chess and might soon have the upper hand on Clay, at least; none of the Ngugma was in the same league as any of the human fighter pilots in Set. “Oh,” said Fonnggark, “you indicate that the Ngugma once lived there.”

“Yes, for, like, hundreds of millions of our years. Like, it’s where you evolved. You know that.”

Fonnggark turned left and right to point its eye-tentacles (of which it had dozens among its thick brown fur) at the other crew around it in its open-plan bridge and lounge. “We do know that,” it said, with what Clay was beginning to recognize as a laugh. The other crew laughed as well.

“And it doesn’t bother you.”

“It doesn’t bother me, or us?” Fonnggark mused for a moment. Then it said, “No. It does not bother me. It bothers me that you continue to have two pawns more than me, than I. Clay.”

“Yes?”

“Is it than me, or than I?”

“Either works,” said Clay. He pulled out his pipe and filled it: dirty thing made of metal tubes. One of his few possessions, and it reminded him of Skzyyn. “The funny thing is, we thought we were the most advanced thing, we always thought we’d be the dominant species in the galaxy. It turns out it’s you guys, it’s the Ngugma.”

“It was the Ngugma,” said Fonnggark.

“Right,” said Natasha. “But now you’ve been joined. Now the Fyaa and the humans and the Primoids have joined you.” She smiled at the big furry starfish, whether it got the expression or not. “Now you have help.”

“Right,” said Clay, in his best Ron Weasley accent, “maybe you don’t have to do this all by yourself, mate.”

“Ah,” said Fonnggark in its bellow-whisper, “Harry Potter reference.” It and its crew had been entertaining themselves with Earthling films.

So all they managed to do was land a few fighters on the sand—Rachel, Vera, Apple and Aliya, who took readings and got a sample of the biome. They sent a message full of data back at Bluehorse; someone there would presumably read it in about 3500 years. Then they set off on their second journey to light speed. The flotilla traveled 760 light years this time, and emerged through a cloud of eighty-seven mouthholes. Aliya and Grohl got one each; Grohl got winged and needed repair; Apple killed two. The system they found had eight planets of all possible sizes around another rather large orange-colored dwarf. Two planets had water in significant amounts—the third planet out, which was 100% covered by kilometer thick water ice, and the second, which had a 1% coverage by poisonous, highly saline pools. This planet too had life, but it was also quite rudimentary, having to deal with poisons, winds of hurricane force, and radiation from the star, which was unhampered by the planet’s wimpy magnetic field. So everyone, including the Ngugma and the Tasmania, landed on a large moon of the largest gas giant, just to get out and stretch their appendages under the black starry sky.

The third journey to light speed covered just 631 light years, and put them about 4800 light years from Earth. There were only about fifty of the murderous spheroids, and they all scattered without any fighting. This system had a lovely little yellow sun and a dozen planets, two of which were not only habitable but had been inhabited, more than two hundred million years ago, by a species which Fonnggark said had brought about its own extinction millions of years before the Ngugma arrived and dug out the mantles of both planets. These rocky whiffle balls still hosted a lichen and bacteria population around a few pools of ice that melted briefly right around noon in their respective day cycles.

“This is starting to suck,” said Vera, as she and Clay stood on a boulder in the noonday sun on the second planet out. “Our last decent skinny dip was at the kids’ wedding.”

“Believe me,” said Clay, “I really want all you guys to get a decent skinny dip.”

“Clay Gilbert,” said Rachel from a little way away, where she was taking a sample. But she smiled at him, before walking over to spank his vac-suited butt.

The fourth time, it was 623 light years. The mouthholes were thick here, for some reason, and Clay got a few flectors nicked. The system had four stars still stuck in a nebular womb, and two planets. One was a gas giant, a near star really, which radiated intensely; the other was a large Earth with a robust magnetic field to keep the radiation off. It was covered by ocean, except for a few islands. The islands, and the shallow ocean floor, were covered in burnt green-brown slime: the Enemy, irradiated. So they landed to stretch their legs on a Mars-sized moon of the gas giant. They took samples, flirted sarcastically, Vera cursed her bad luck, and then they were off again.

The fifth time they went to light speed since Offvroffh, they traveled just 615 light years. The system was anchored by an enormous and flimsy red giant, and it had only four gas giant planets, not counting a chunk of charred rock about the size of the Moon which orbited barely outside the surface of the star. Cygnus X, host of a famous stellar-mass black hole, was blasting radiation just a couple of hundred light years to the right of their path: they couldn’t see it with the naked eye, but in X-ray wavelengths, it spread across several degrees of sky.

The mouthholes barely bothered with this journey—Clay counted thirty, all deflected by Fonnggark’s setup. The fighter pilots decided they had to land somewhere, so they landed on a moon of the outermost gas giant, put up a tent and had a little fighter pilot party.

After everyone was pretty wasted, they all got their vac suits back on and took down the tent and lay on an icy pool to look up at the black starry sky.

“We are now six thousand light years from Earth,” said Rachel.

“If we went back to Bluehorse,” said Apple, “it’d be twelve thousand years later.”

“If you went twelve thousand years back from when we left Earth,” said Natasha, “you’d be in the last Ice Age. You’d still find woolly mammoths all over Siberia.”

“It’s freaky,” said Mizra Aliya, in her slight accent. “I grew up where they used to graze. I hardly saw snow in the winter there.”

“And yet,” said Gemma Izawa, “we’re just past halfway to where we’re going.”

“After Greenstar,” said Timmis, “it’s a lot emptier.”

“Not like it’s been exactly bustling up to now,” said Clay.

“Emptier,” said Natasha. “And freakier.”

“I can handle a little of that,” said Apple. Grohl snickered.

“You sure?”

“No,” said Vera, “but bring it on, baby.”

And so they got back in their Ghosts and took off, their batteries full after passing by the star. Another week and a half passed, playing, working, eating, sleeping, making love, and ignoring the patterns from the void. And 707 years later, in the year 9323 CE, as long since the birth of Jesus Christ as that was from the end of Earth’s last Ice Age, the little fleet arrived at the system they were already calling Greenstar.

2.

Gaazokgov, known to the visitors from away as Greenstar, was in fact a bluish-greenish sun, larger than Sol, by itself in the middle of the far reach of the Orion Arm. It had more than a dozen planets of significant size, including a whopping seven gas and ice giants, ranging from an enormous near-star with astonishing nebulous rings to three cold blue globes the size and consistency of Uranus or Neptune. It also had one major inhabited planet, the fourth rock from the star, a bit larger than Earth and half covered in water.

The system was crawling with military ships. At least five battleships and two super-battleships shared the orbit of the fourth planet; cruisers and patrol ships zipped about from bases in every orbit and also far out into the system’s vigorous Oort cloud. The star base nearest the planet was enormous, and combined a thriving civilian port with a steroidal military base. The system had at least two other military starbases larger than the 27th Century Bluehorse spaceport, and dozens of smaller space posts, not to mention at least a hundred robotic defense installations. Clouds of robot fighters patrolled the Oort cloud.

The newcomers were challenged immediately. Three heavy cruisers separated from the Oort Cloud base and began trundling over to intercept the deceleration path, escorted by a dozen patrol ships and a slew of the spidery little robot fighters. Communications encrypted with the medium-level Ngugma codes went to Fonnggark’s ship, and then back, at a distance of two light hours. Eight hours later, as the cruisers were closing in on the Tasmania and its friends, now no more than a few light minutes away, negotiations began in earnest. Fonnggark invited Clay, Rachel, Emily Gray and Jack Dott onto the explorer-cruiser to get updates, and possibly to keep Fonnggark from trying to put a photon blast through the round mouth of the Ngugma in charge of the heavy cruisers.

“They are being most dreary,” it told Clay and the others. “It is understandable that they need to be suspicious. Perhaps this is the only place in the, ah, the Dohsh Kawlawk, the Orion Arm as you name it, that has been attacked multiple times by the Enemy. Yet, but, they can see we are not spores. Can they think we might be here to attack them? It seems like they do think this.”

“So,” said Rachel, “Level 1 is that they let us pass through. Level 2 is that they basically accept our help, in theory or something. Level 3 is that they let us dock somewhere. Level 4 is they share intelligence. And Level 5, which is where everyone wants to be, is where they share useful intelligence. What level can we reach?”

“In true,” said Fonnggark, “Level 2 is the most difficult. Yet I am sure that I, Fonnggark, will wear them down, as you say.”

Fonnggark did wear them down. It took time, and there was an hour there where Clay kept pinching himself because (1) he was six thousand light years from home, (2) home wasn’t even Earth, (3) he was on an alien cruiser, (4) they were the same aliens who had wiped humanity off Earth, (5) but Clay Gilbert, shuttle jockey, was somehow a notorious fighter pilot and (6) oh, just everything else, including Rachel’s mole, which Rachel made sure he got to check on during a quick patrol excursion while the Ngugma captain negotiated. Fifty more hours of back and forth, and Kalkar, Rachel, Clay, Emily Gray, and Fonnggark and its executive officer Vvohh went aboard the lead heavy cruiser. They were not permitted to see much more than the vaulting, dramatically designed bridge and the rhombicuboctahedral conference chamber behind it. Floating in the conference chamber, they met Captain Gwaov Zhawkuhh, five aides and three members of a slave race. Clay tried to take the measure of the slave race, the Hapthah: no more humanoid than the Ngugma, these were a sort of shelled slug body atop about a dozen arthropod legs, with four long arms with gripping paws and a bulb of a head sticking up, covered in sensory organs. He supposed they were nice enough, but they were not much to look at.

Gwaov was not the captain with whom Fonnggark had been negotiating. Clay was beginning to recognize individual Ngugma, and Gwaov was something of an old salt: it had seven arms, not six, perhaps because one of the original six had been half blown off, and it had other long-healed scars as well as a streak of paler fur, possibly the Ngugma equivalent of grey hair. In any case, Gwaov was the Ngugma entrusted to deal directly with the aliens from Pentestella.

Fonnggark said something to Gwaov, who said something back, and then they exchanged Ngugma words again, and then Fonnggark turned its front toward Rachel and said, “They do not want us to meet with the Governor of Gaazokgov. Captain Gwaov will talk to us.”

“Very good,” said Rachel in the Ngugma language, making her voice as deep as she could. “Will Captain Gwaov give us the information we need so we can help?”

She smiled at Gwaov, which of course was lost on Gwaov. Fonnggark did his amused little snort. “Captain Gwaov,” said Fonnggark, in Ngugma words, “simply does not know you as I do.”

“You shall have information,” said Gwaov in the Ngugma tongue, “when you can tell us how you can help us.”

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.” It added, “Suqueamahish.”

“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. “Okay. 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 Fonnggark. “That is not even a small problem at all. We can assure—ensure? Insure?”

“I think it’s the one with the E,” said Rachel.

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

“Thank you, my friend,” said Fonnggark. “We can make sure that you can destroy the Enemy once you are in the same system that it is in. There will be 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. And we come behind with the radiation.” 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?”

“Only the first book was any good,” said Clay. “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, 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. Ten of us: that’s hundred k each. And don’t they have mouthholes with them? What do you fight?”

“Oh,” said Fonnggark, “we do fight. If we see enough spores in one location, we send a missile to explode and release radiation to kill all within, oh, a thousand, that would be perhaps 3000, 3500 of your kilometers. 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.”

“They come from somewhere,” said Rachel. “If we could only catch the spores before 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.”

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.

Emily Gray was the opposite of an Ngugma. The Ngugma, like the one named Gghawra floating next to her, were asexual, dark of color, made of six fat arms covered in thick fur with wriggling tentacles. They struck Clay as kind of short and stout, like the proverbial teapot. Gray was tall, much taller than Clay, and skinny, with just two arms and two legs and rather thin blond hair. He was not attracted to her—in fact, she was in a monogamous relationship with Vald Singer, the Tasmania gunnery expert, and murderer of many mouthholes—but she was one of those people who, while not at all promiscuous, still radiated sexual attraction. She also lacked tentacles.

“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 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 at the bottom, and Armpit at the top, 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 seemed to relish some 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, three fourths of the way to Armpit. It was more than 3000 light years up the Arm 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, “sex-you-al 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,” a 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, 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.

“But the Ngugma killll them with radio activity,” said Fonnggark.

“Intense blasts of gamma rays, yeah, you’ll kill anything if you have enough. A million tons of newly synthesized astatine. A burst of gamma rays from the star could be pretty bad, but the astatine thing—well, let’s posit that the Ngugma kept upping the dosage until they actually did kill off that stuff. The bursts in this system aren’t enough. 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.”

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. Gwaov 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.

“So,” said Rachel, “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. Gwaov 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. So to speak.”

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. That way you live forever.”

“I think that can be arranged,” said Kalkar. “We can take up a relatively mundane patrol route while you lot are off slaying dragons. 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 Gemma Izawa. “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?”

“Even when we do go back,” said Gemma, “and I do say when, it will so not be the Bluehorse we all knew. Hopefully all the seas are in the same places and there isn’t, yeah, an ice age.”

“Yeah, 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 your heart and your eye and your brain, 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, swinging her arms high above her like a little girl. “We swear on the Milky Way.” Grohl said, “Yes.” She held up her thumb, in the midst of the galactic smear. “We swear,” and they finished together, “by the Milky Way Galaxy that we will be alive at the end of the next battle and the next and the next. And every one after.”

They hugged each other, and then everyone hugged, and then they lay down again on their backs.

“Anyone know which of the ladies of Tasmania is having a baby?” said Aliya.

“Shawna Shelleen for sure,” said Grohl. “Her first girl’s almost two already. Growin’ up in space.”

“Angele Lafitte was talking about it,” said Apple. “I’m gonna bet Emily is too.”

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

“We want to have one,” said Li Zan, “but naturally we have to wait and see. But it is feasible, at some point.”

“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, as though it was crazy. She looked at Grohl, then at Rachel. “What about you, Commander?”

“Me?” said Rachel. “I don’t know. The thing is, if we’re stationed way out at the end of the Orion Arm along the shores of the Empty Lanes, ten kay light years from the next human, we’re going to have to produce the next generation, even if it has to travel to light speed with us and winds up living five hundred thousand years. 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. “It’s all hypothetical, 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.”

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 prefer. 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 Gwaov 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 million years?”

“Great,” said 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. Here and there a pseudopod was frozen in the act of reaching for the sky: some were four or five meters tall. Rachel and Padfoot spent fifteen minutes collecting chunks of the stuff. 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 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, in the Ngugma language.

“Both,” the Ngugma boomed, in Ngugma. It waved its arm-tips and just said, in English, “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. They played, they simulated, they made love, they slept: oh, and when they simulated, Clay and his comrades got to introduce themselves to the tactical aspects of the Ngugma’s once-mysterious enemy.

It was like fighting a forest. Half the time, Clay felt he was in a star battle; the other half, as when he was laying into some house-sized vegetable cruiser with his souped-up mechanical laser, he felt like he was bushwhacking his way up the wrong side of Mount Megunticook. He was also painfully aware that (a) he’d never fought things like this before, and (b) every time they’d had to go up against something new, they’d needed to lose a couple of battles before they started winning, and yes, (c) even the Ngugma data on the Enemy’s herbaceous hordes was incomplete and unreliable. Still, it was prep.

And 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.

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