Homeward by Night
12. Home again

1.

The two Ghosts returned to Gliese 667 Cc over the next twelve hours, finding a fleet of now four Primoid cruisers in orbit along with eight fighters, plus a cruiser, a fighter and that battlecruiser, captured with damage. At a range of ten thousand kilometers, Clay and Rachel were fired upon, sort of: their sensors lit up with colorful laser interceptions which did them no damage, while live, hot beams sliced space in a cone around them at a safe distance. They did not know how to reply, so they accepted the accolades in silence.

They landed near the pole and rejoined their peculiar allies. The Primoids seemed sort of giddy as Clay and Rachel entered the first great hall. Some of them were clearly working at wall stations, poking and sliding somewhat the way Rachel or Clay would on their displays in the Ghosts; others were gesticulating at each other, and a few seemed to be paying most of their attention to the Humans. It would be incorrect to say that Clay sensed their jubilation, but there was something about their gesticulations and color changes that was different from before the battle.

One Primoid leaned over Rachel, who turned to it and spread her arms out in her gesture of What? The Primoid turned to the Primoids nearest it, gesticulated with its tentacles and greened and yellowed a bit, and then turned and gesticulated back at Rachel, while slowly nodding.

“So they do want to have a meeting?” asked Clay.

“Yeah, actually,” said Rachel. “They like meetings.”

The Primoids and Humans reconvened in the conference room, without chairs but with everything else. There were displays, easily-read 3D maps, inscrutable graphs, screens with videos on them, and small platforms that allowed presenters to get half a meter above everyone else. There were those wafers, somehow spicy and bland and crispy and thick, and an excellent water and even, from the two Ghosts, coffee. Rachel was right about their attitude toward meetings: they did them well, with all the panache of Commodore Henri Georges back on the old Moon.

An hour and a half later, somehow, it had been confirmed that the Primoids were sending four cruisers, and nine functioning fighters, off on a long range offensive. The battlecruiser and the other captured cruiser, which needed a lot of repair, would stay here; in the big ship’s bay were two bonus fighters that would constitute the active defense force at Gliese 667Cc for now.

All this was discussed solely through those lovely colorful displays. The Primoids didn’t do much with sound, but color they got, and the range they saw seemed a lot like the human range. Up there on 3D was a deep blue heavens punctuated with stars, whose systems could be examined closely. Some of the systems they examined were unfamiliar to Clay, but there was Corsica with its two habitable but slightly radioactive planets, and its rebel colony; this was marked as a friendly asset. And there was Bluehorse, that little third planet nestled among giants. Clay looked at it and felt a lump in his throat.

They actually seemed to debate the merits of Corsica versus Bluehorse as a destination, and several of the Primoids, Clay thought, favored someplace even further off, beyond Bluehorse, a regional capital if not the Capital of the Empire or whatever, the place Rachel interpreted as the “Primoid Center.”

Ultimately, the Primoids decided, apparently, to go where the Humans wanted to go: Bluehorse, with Clay and Rachel.

“Are they trying to take over the Capital or something?” asked Rachel. “What do they think they’ll get from going to Bluehorse? Just curious. Do they expect us to help?”

“They expect to have more meetings, I bet,” said Clay. “They love meetings.”

“On Bluehorse?” asked Rachel. “Oh, I bet there are some folks there who love meetings.”

“Well, this is a change for me,” said Clay, “considering I thought I was going to spend the next few months using up my reserves and dying in the cold and dark. Am I in trouble?”

She laughed, then subsided into a long smile, not a smirk at all. She finally said, “You’re good. You’re not in trouble at all.” They smiled at each other some more. Rachel got an impatient look. “But you’re forgetting something important.”

“I’m so sorry, Rache.” He moved up and put his arms around her, and she put her arms around him, and they kissed, one way, the other, then they laughed and then they kissed again, slowly, lingeringly. They giggled.

Then they looked around. Three Primoids were near them, all their eye tentacles aimed at them. The three had their stick-like arms entwined, their pincers gently pinching each other’s orange blobby bodies. They were nodding, together, slowly, up and down.

2.

Clay’s Ghost somehow got repaired. It took most of a week and the pilfering of pieces from other Earthling craft, and even a few add-ons by a peculiarly clever Primoid mechanic whose name they would never know, but it got repaired.

Clay and Rachel sort of got to know two of the Primoid fighter pilots. One was a bit of a darker orange than most of the Primoids; the other was notable for its waggy side tentacles on top, which was recognizable somehow to Clay; both were quite short for Primoids. They came over when Clay and Rachel were sitting having their fighter food, and introduced themselves by showing pictures, on their hexagonal Primoid tablets, of them with their big-ass Primoid fighters. Then the four pilots sat around and ate: well, it was comradeship. And they might be saving each other’s lives again in a few weeks of their timelines.

The curious flotilla got underway over the next forty or fifty hours. The Primoid rebels made for the 12th magnitude star to ransack the Primoid “imperial” depot there; Clay and Rachel took off in front. They sent back a farewell message in video, of Clay and Rachel smiling and kissing. Then they sent off their last data logs toward Bluehorse, knowing they would be chasing the signal for the next sixty years. An hour later, they were again naked and into post-coital cuddling.

“They came to that decision awfully fast,” said Clay. “The rebels.”

“Is that what you were thinking about while we were making love?” said Rachel. “I think they’ve been waiting for things to tick over into the just-right zone. I mean, you can see sort of how they are. They take a long time with things. They build their own ships, but slowly, they reproduce somehow—they can’t intend to just live on 667Cc for the next thousand years.”

“And we come along,” said Clay, “with all our weird news, the Ngugma, the platinum disk people, all that.”

“Yeah,” said Rachel, “and the fact that the Primoid Center had at least an observation base just a hop away from 667C. And all that, it’s just enough for the rebels to decide it was time to make a move.” She rolled against him and cuddled some more, her breast against his shoulder. “Clay,” she said, “tell the truth. Were you tempted at all?”

“By?”

“Well, Court, or whoever. Hanker for some Primoid, er, whatever they have?”

“Rachel. Really. After making love to me, this is what you want to talk about?”

“It’s better than before or during. Anyway, it’s been kind of a turn-off, kind of a downer, this whole trip. At Centauri, at Mathilde, or even at 581, there were both men and women, they weren’t especially desperate or anything. 581 was a major turn-off, and Centauri was right after we saw a planet full of dead people. Then a bunch more dead people at 667.”

“It makes you think,” said Clay. “And just lately? I’ve had way more time to think than I want.”

“So when Court was all up in your space, showering her pheromones on you—?”

“Rachel. Your pheromones have blocked all my pheromone receptors.”

“You promise?”

“I totally promise! You promise? Do you?”

“I promise, Clay. I promise.”

“Then kiss me. You do want to kiss me, don’t you?”

Some hours later, after they had cuddled, played Set and chess, eaten, simulated, made love and slept again, they lay cuddling in their little closet zooming through space a little slower than a photon. “Clay,” said Rachel.

“Mmm,” said Clay, waking from a half sleep.

“Are you ready to see what we see at Bluehorse?”

“I don’t know,” he said, still a little blurry. “What are we gonna see?”

“Well, your old girlfriends, I hope.”

“Really?” he said, perking up. “Court’s gonna be there?” Rachel turned on him, and decided just to whack him with her limp glove. “Joking,” he said as she flailed at him. “Too soon?”

“Much too soon. Now you have to go up against me in the simulator.”

3.

The Bluehorse system opened out before them, first the star, then the big outer planets, and then, through the noise, the inner ones. Bluehorse-3, the smallest of the planets, was the last to emerge, and the details—whether it had been holed by the Ngugma, for instance, or left a smoking wreck by some sort of civil war—came long minutes later.

Bluehorse lived. Human colonies were obvious on it—no, one had to call them cities now, surrounded by farm land, filling several of the rifts between the uninhabitable plateaus and spreading along the shores of the small oceans. A nice up-to-date space station orbited, attended by the largest fleet of starships ever assembled by humanity.

Unfortunately, those were not the first starships Rachel and Clay saw as they decelerated past the 30% mark and the Bluehorse system began to come into focus. There was another starfleet in the fringes of the system, a pretty large starfleet, and it wasn’t a starfleet of Humans. Finding the Ngugma at Earth, this wasn’t, but there was a certain amount of swearing in the combined Ghosts. Presently it settled into mere consternation.

“It’s the damn Primoids, is what it is,” said Rachel, “not the Ngugma, so there’s that, but—honestly—?”

“That’s a what,” said Clay, “a battleship—I mean, it’s the size of that battleship or whatever—I mean, they do seem to outnumber us but—!” He stopped. There were about twenty seconds of silence. Clay said, “But wait, that’s—no. Um, they—where did they—?” Another fifteen seconds passed and he concluded, “I’m confused.”

“Bluehorse there,” said Rachel. “Definitely our ships. Heck, I see Abstraction there. Over here, Primoids. Um, it’s a combat fleet. It’s pretty large. But, um—!” She stopped.

“But,” said Clay, “considering how large that fleet is, it’s not really that large.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

As Clay and Rachel examined the Primoid fleet and analyzed the hell out of the situation, several things became clear to them.

1. This Primoid fleet was large, larger by a significant margin than the fleet defending Bluehorse, large enough to compare to the one that Clay, Rachel and a dozen of their friends, along with two cruisers and two anchor freighters, had defeated at the founding of the Bluehorse colony. They had defeated that fleet.

2. The Primoid fleet, and the Bluehorse defense force including that space station, were not in mint condition. One Primoid cruiser was clearly much repaired: they hadn’t bothered to make the hull panel tones of grey match. Meanwhile, leading the Bluehorse defenses was the Abstraction, one of the escort cruisers that had left Earth with the Human Horizon mission now almost three centuries ago; beside it was an almost identical cruiser that looked like they’d just finished sealing down the skin pieces and getting in those final welds.

3. The Primoid flagship, a different version of the big battleship that Alpha and Gamma wings had beaten the snot out of 175 years ago, looked brand new and fresh off the assembly line. The only other brand-new ships in the Primoid fleet were two big clumsy freighters. The rest of the invading fleet was: three of the size they had called battlecruisers (there had been two, the previous battle); nine cruisers (up from six last time); a quartet, curiously, of a smaller, nimbler class of crewed ship; and at least thirty fighters. Clay and Rachel didn’t know yet what all Bluehorse had to go up against the Primoids, but if the defense force was even a little bit ready, Clay couldn’t see how the Primoids hoped to do better than last time. Trying the same thing and expecting a different result: Einstein would have some things to say about that.

4. Su Park was in the system. Clay wasn’t sure what made him know it, though both her group (and Tasmania) and Natasha and Vera’s group (with Greenland) were certainly due any day now, that had been the plan. But Park was here. He just knew.

“Okay,” said Clay, “given all that, what exactly do we have here? It’s not exactly peace on all fronts, but then it’s not Gotterdammerung either.”

After some seconds, Rachel said, “Well, what we have here is Strategy at the galactic level.”

“Okay,” said Clay, “explain. You know you want to.”

“So you have to have overwhelming force. You have five, eight, ten systems you’re drawing ships from, so right there, since they’re not all going the same distance, there’s some planning. Your message to System X takes twenty years and they take 37 years to get to your target. Your message to System Y takes thirty years and they take 14 years to make it to the target. And so on. You have to plan ahead.”

“And what happens,” said Clay, “when you get there fifty years later and discover that the target’s gone?”

“Worse than that,” said Rachel. “What happened with the Primoids at 667? The rebels built up too much and had help they didn’t expect and you wind up losing. Or what if you get to the target with twenty ships thinking your enemy will have five, and they turn out to have 25? And it took you fifty years to get there? You turn around and go home and hope they don’t turn around and attack one of your systems. I’m sure it’d make a fascinating strategy game. Trouble is, we’re in it.”

“Well, if so,” said Clay, “then we’re accidentally doing exactly what we need to, because Park’s plan was that we all get back here now, and here we are in time to fight this bunch. I’d say it doesn’t look great for them.”

“Yeah, but,” said Rachel. “So our idea of how to work the tactical aspect of defending a sprawling empire with just a very few experienced star people was to synch up our various journeys so we’d all be back together every so often. The Primoids have been at this a lot longer than we have, and they have plenty of pilots and ships, obviously, so their answer has been to set up bases on the far fringes of systems they’re interested in. They had a base in the fringes of Corsica, remember, and one in the fringes of 667, and they obviously had one at Bluehorse. They’ve been tangling already, probably for years and years, and not getting anywhere. This isn’t them suddenly arriving with a new fleet to avenge the loss we handed them before you and I went on our lovely trip home to see the folks. That would be the end of the movie, it’d be real dramatic, we get back, what a coincidence, just in time as they’re arriving. No, this is old business. This is, they tried to oppress the last refuge of Humanity, and they didn’t get enough starships in place to do the job. This is them coming back with reinforcements, and it’s still not enough, they need more. Sorry, Primoids.”

“So you think we got this,” said Clay.

“Yes. I do. But.”

“But you can’t be sure.”

“But you can never be sure. We would lose some people for sure, but for all we know, they might have some new tech or they might have some new luck. That’s the thing. If we’re fighting here, then, ergo and propter hoc, there’s a nonzero chance we lose the colony.”

They stared at the situation a little longer, and then started in on a long chess game that headed eventually into draw territory. It was like a romantic walk on a stormy beach. It was interrupted on Move 114 by Commander Park on the comm.

“Andros, Gilbert,” came Park’s voice as Rachel tried to find a way to keep Clay from eating the last pawn on the board. “Welcome back to Bluehorse. Terrible news about Earth, which we got just a few dozen days ago when we got back from our own journey. But we have the matter at hand. My journey was not nearly as awful as yours, but I was away and it seems things have happened in our absence.”

4.

Clay Gilbert was born in the year 2305 of the Common Era, in the second half of July, the same time of year as Harry Potter; Rachel Andros was six months old at the time. In March 2334 they left the orbit of Earth and the star system of Sol, the point (0, 0, 0) of their coordinate system. The fleet reached 55 Cancri in what would, in Sol’s chronology, be the fall of 2374. They arrived at Gliese 370, known poetically as HD 85512, in 2420; from there they made Corsica, formerly known as Candidate One, in about the year 2472 and Candidate Two, Bluehorse, in early 2485.

The trip back to Earth, a direct distance of just under 80 light years, had taken them through Holey in 2516, Gliese 581 in 2555 and finally Sol, and not so merrie olde Earth, in 2575. After getting married amongst the ruins, they started the return journey, reaching Alpha C in 2580 and Gliese 667 in 2599. And from there, a 61-light-year journey brought them home to Bluehorse, 2660 years after legends said Jesus was born. If not for time dilation, Clay would have been nearly 355 years old. He and Rachel had traveled about 325 light years. They were returning to Bluehorse after an absence of 175 years. They would be looking at their 85th wedding anniversary.

The Bluehorse system looked much as it had almost two centuries ago. There was the mustard-yellow sun, a bit smaller than old Sol; the tight inner asteroid belt with one Earth-size planet in its midst, battered and baked; a Venus-like lummox nearly twice the diameter of Earth or of the actual Venus; the two outer gas giants; and, right in the middle, the Mars-sized third planet, its desert highlands broken by broad rifts filled with green vales and little blue oceans. Those valleys now harbored four little cities full of Humans: the largest population of H. sapiens in the universe, a total of about 1.6 million.

“We got here not long ahead of you two,” Park was saying. “We’ve had time to land on Bluehorse-3 and confer a little, and it seems our war with the Primoid center continues. My wing and Tasmania were back here about a hundred back, and apparently we missed the festivities last time, because the Primoids sent another fleet to attack Bluehorse, it would be eighty-five years ago, and apparently came quite close to wiping out the defenders. Santos and Kleiner and their wing were here, as was Jane Tremblay—Andros, Gilbert, I am sorry to say Jane Tremblay was killed in that battle. But the Primoids were terribly damaged at the end, and I gather Kleiner and Santos were not terribly damaged, and our foes did not feel in good enough shape to take on at least our third and fourth best Ghost pilots.”

“I would say that’s accurate,” said Clay to Rachel; Rachel just smirked.

“But it appears they responded not by sensibly abandoning the project and making nice, but by building up and repairing at their not terribly secret base about a light-week out, out there in the great unknown. They’ve been resupplying and building up, and they’ve had a few goes at Bluehorse in the meantime, just probing defenses, I suppose. This seems to be a bit more than that, and the concern at Bluehorse is that the Primoids have a long-term strategy of wearing us down, and perhaps have a stepped-up schedule of ship deliveries to help them do so. As you can imagine, the political leadership on the planet, which in my personal opinion is quite excellent, very rational and well-educated—!”

“She’s educating them like crazy,” said Rachel. “No doubt,” said Clay.

“—would especially like us to do something clever and stop this from happening. I was just looking at your report from 667, and if you suspect I’m sending you out to have a look at their preparations, and use your expert knowledge of their social and political landscape to figure out how we can, with minimal loss of life on both sides, manage to get our flag planted on their base in the Oort cloud and dissuade them from coming back here armed, then you are correct. Your orders are to get as close to their flagship as you can, not to attack it of course, please don’t, but to get as much intelligence as you possibly can.

“Kleiner’s group is due back anytime in the next few weeks. I will be pulling them back to the planet to join our defense force, but since I’m not letting you come back to the planet yet, I will make sure you can rendezvous with them on their way in. Don’t worry that they’ll see action and you won’t: believe me, I don’t plan on going into a battle in which our enemies have a lopsided numerical advantage without Andros and Gilbert both lined up on my side.

“At some point I will be able to welcome you home in person. I look forward to that day, and until then, Park out.”

“Like she ever has to sign off,” said Clay.

“She complimented us like crazy,” said Rachel. “Did she miss us much? My head’s so big now I won’t be able to get my helmet on. Um, Clay.”

“That?” said Clay. “That’s ships slowing from light speed. Not a lot of them.”

“And,” said Rachel, and she set her Ghost’s eyes and brain to focus on the blob decelerating from the direction of the Corsica system. She waited, he waited, and then she gave a cry of satisfaction. “Yes,” she said. “We have Vera and Tash.”

5.

“Rachel, Clay, jeez,” came a familiar voice—the one that belonged to Natasha Kleiner. “I can hardly believe it’s you! We’re here for the big fight. Where can we rendezvous with you? Park’s given us the okay to visit with you on your way to whatever you’re up to. I’ve got Vera with me, and Daria Acevedo and Gemma Izawa, you haven’t met Acevedo, she was born on Bluehorse but she’s already quite the ace, you’ll like her. Anyway, super thrilled you’re here, and, um, missed you so much, um, man,” and there was a pause, “bummer about Earth. We only just found out when we got to Corsica.” Another pause. With a still 20-hour one-way communication gap, Rachel and Clay couldn’t exactly interrupt.

Vera’s voice cut in. “So, we have some heads to bash,” she said, “even if they don’t actually have heads as such.”

“Yeah,” said Natasha. “Not gonna lie, we got our work cut out here, and if we win, I mean, when we win, we have those furry bastards to go up against, but it feels kinda good. Just kinda wish there weren’t so many of them. And those ships, honestly, to my mind, they didn’t have to be quite so enormous. It’s gilding the lily.”

“We’ll take them, clearly,” said Vera. “Never doubt that we will fucking take them. Hell, I’m pissed off about how they ruined all those sand beaches in the Caribbean. Tash, let’s send this report thingy and then get where we can meet these guys. Let’s find some comet fragment way out in the back closet there. Be good, you guys. Killer out.”

“Yeah,” said Natasha, “see you soon, um, Greenland is heading for the planet, we’re heading for you guys, Kleiner out.”

Rachel composed a return message while she and Clay agreed on a short list of possible meeting places. Then they decelerated and bent outward in a long curve to bring them back into the general neighborhood that Kleiner and Santos and their companions would be in soon. Clay beat Rachel as black in a fast game, then suffered the consequences as she went on a 3-game winning streak, and then they played Set and simulated while exchanging further tightly-aimed messages with Vera and Tasha.

In about the length of time that Jesus had waited between crucifixion and resurrection, the two Ghosts were setting down on a dark planetoid, so distant from the Bluehorse sun that the star, “The Sun” to locals, was barely even a naked-eye object, and an hour later, four more Ghosts were setting down as well.

Clay found himself nervous as his two former girlfriends landed and their hatches opened. It took zero seconds for this feeling to dissipate. The first person out turned out to be someone he didn’t know—her vac suit was white, and on closer inspection, her hair was very blond. She advanced on Clay and Rachel and stuck out a hand to Rachel.

“Commander Andros,” she said in their ears, “I’m Daria Acevedo. It’s an honor to meet you. Uh, Mister Gilbert, uh, Lieutenant Commander Gilbert, it’s an honor to meet you too. I’ve heard a lot. You guys are like my heroes, you know. Really.”

“Thanks,” said Rachel. “Daria. Natasha said you were our type.”

“Oh yeah? Yeah. Anyway—!”

What else Ms. Acevedo would have said went unsaid, because Natasha was pushing past her to grab Rachel in a hug, and Clay turned just in time to catch Vera.

“Clay Gilbert,” came that husky voice, “you seem just as hunky as ever. Is he?”

“That’s not your business anymore,” said Rachel, but with a laugh. She and Vera hugged, and Clay hugged Natasha.

“So glad you’re here,” said Natasha. “So glad you’re okay.”

“Same to you,” said Clay. They half parted and looked at Rachel and Vera, at Acevedo, and at Gemma Izawa, former colony ship fighter pilot, who stood shyly under the stars.

“Gemma,” said Rachel. “Gemma Izawa, am I right? You were with us all the way back to from Earth? Um, can we dispense with rank, with these two, or not?”

Natasha and Vera looked back and forth between Gemma Izawa and Daria Acevedo. “Sure,” said Natasha. “I’ve been sort of their commander, but I’m not really Commander, I guess someone officially thinks me and Vera are both LC’s, I guess that’s really what both of you are, right?”

“Whatever I am,” said Clay, “I’m just a fraction less than you guys, and that’s the way it’s going to stay. So what have you guys been doing these days?”

“We fought a crapload of battles,” said Vera. “And Killer killed plenty,” said Natasha.

“You fought right here, right? 85 years ago?” said Clay. “Lost Tremblay?”

“That was bad, so bad,” said Natasha. She and Vera exchanged looks. “We had to be Su Park and both of you guys. That’s actually when Gemma became part of our group. You only killed two cruisers and nine fighters, right?”

“Oh, it was two cruisers and two fighters actually,” said Gemma.

“By yourself,” said Vera. “She seems sweet but she’s a killer. You know Lidi Moss died, right? In a system with a small Primoid base, it was pretty early in our trip—!”

“You haven’t told them about the other aliens,” said Vera.

“Yeah,” said Natasha. “We win this battle here, and next thing we know, we’re going back out with Gemma as tail, and we had Meena Manan as third, and we get to this system where there’s a Primoid base, but these other guys with these spindly little cruisers and these lightweight little fighters are attacking the Primoids, and so we figure we contact both sides, and the Primoids just started sending us all this data on how to do damage to the other guys, and—!”

“You intervened in a war,” said Rachel. “Goddess, we are truly now in Star Treks or whatever.”

“Hey, the Primoids were losing,” said Vera. “It was looking really bad.”

“What did Nilsstrom say?” asked Rachel. “You still had the Greenland with you, right?”

“Oddly, she was supportive,” said Natasha. “Nilsstrom really lets us lead.”

“So which of you is commander?” asked Rachel.

Both women smirked. “She is,” said Vera. “But not exactly really,” said Natasha. “We’re sort of co-commanders.”

“Hey,” Gemma Izawa put in, “it works great. But, we lost Meena in that battle.”

“Yeah, that sucked huge,” said Vera. “She got in a tussle with some of these spindly aliens. Those guys are crazy, they take huge risks, they’re like Jana Bluehorse after six beers. Apparently they’re really small, size of a squirrel or something, but they’re extremely quick and extremely aggressive. I mean, obviously we beat them, but we are going to see them again.”

“Hey,” said Clay, “at least they don’t mine out planets.”

“No, they don’t, as far as we know,” said Natasha. “That sucks. Is that too little to say about losing your home world?”

“Well, it does suck,” said Vera, and Gemma and Daria nodded.

“It’s weird,” said Gemma. “I’m sure Seattle’s obliterated.”

“Oh, I loved Seattle,” said Rachel. “We didn’t go by there, we went north of Vancouver.”

“I’m the only one of us not born there,” said Daria. “I can’t imagine what it’d be like to see that happen here.”

“But it could, it so could,” said Rachel.

“Not with us around,” said Vera. “We’ll find a way.”

They strolled across the planetoid. Clay was pinching himself again. Every so often he had to list what he’d gone through that he never would have believed: was he now, Clay Gilbert of Rockland ME, trudging almost weightless across the surface of yet another icy planetoid, following these brainy, beautiful, bizarrely awesome little women, as they plotted how to overcome the alien species that threatened the existence of humanity? Park had basically called Clay the fifth best fighter pilot (the “in the galaxy” was implied) and along with being incredibly complimented (and not exactly surprised, to be honest), he knew exactly who Two, Three and Four were, and One for that matter.

“So what do they have,” said Vera. “Battleship, three battlecruisers, nine cruisers? Four light cruisers, or whatever we’re calling those.”

“The cruisers are a bit heavier than the ones that attacked when we were landing the colony ships,” Natasha said. “You two wouldn’t have met things like these: they’re just heavy and really hard to put a dent in.”

“Oh, you can put a big ol’ dent in them,” said Vera.

“Killer,” said Natasha.

“And what Bluehorse has,” said Rachel, “is two heavy cruisers, I wonder what those are like in a fight, looks like four Abstraction class escort cruisers, and Greenland and Tasmania and two more armored freighters exactly like them, and maybe four decent wings of fighters, four each. But of course one of those wings is us.”

“And another has Park in it,” said Clay, “and another, I guess, would have these two seasoned veterans.”

“I really can’t believe I’m seasoned,” Gemma said to Daria.

“Are you joking? You’re very seasoned,” said Daria.

“Point is,” said Rachel, “we can take them. How many fighters?”

“N,” said Natasha.

“As in,” said Vera, “some of theirs are aboard their big ships still, and it’s all going to come to some large number, and we’re going to neutralize every single one of them.”

“Great,” said Clay. “Why am I worried?”

The other three looked at him and sagged. “See, that’s the thing,” said Natasha. “We’ll lose a bunch of ships. They’ll lose a bunch of ships. They’ll send more, we’ll build more. Their nearest major system is fifteen light years from here, it’s PCS2, it produces cruisers and sends them places, and we get an allotment. Eventually they’ll get close enough to maybe bomb the colony, something like that.”

“And who knows,” said Vera, “it could happen this time. You have Primoid allies coming in? There’s already a Primoid rebel cruiser from Corsica here. But Tasha’s right. We’re fighting on our own territory. I like our chances, but what if we ever lose?”

“And how does this allow us to get ready to fight the Ngugma?” said Rachel.

“And how does this allow us to get ready to fight the Ngugma?” said Natasha.

“Because there is no doubt we’re going to fight them,” said Clay.

“Because there’s no doubt the human race is going to have to fight them,” said Vera, “and the Primoids too, and we all know which Humans are going to be called on to do the fighting.”

“So why are we fighting,” Clay concluded. “We have an interstellar coalition started already. We just need a few more allies.”

“Yeah,” said Vera, “no offense to either of those, but it would be nice to have allies who weren’t at the present moment living in hiding.”

“Okay, a lot more allies.”

“So while we’re asking,” said Rachel, “at Mathilde, where they were under siege, they said Kapteyn and Tau Ceti and, um, 832 got colonized, but they weren’t sure about things. Anything on that?”

“Tau Ceti’s a going concern, they say,” replied Natasha. “Right after the first battle, they sent Mizra Aliya and Millie, Alice Grohl’s great niece or something. They didn’t get back until about twenty years ago, but Tau Ceti has, or had, like fifty thousand, they had a little farming even, like out in actual atmosphere. Gliese 832 didn’t work out, but they evacuated okay, they’re all at Kapteyn or Tau Ceti. Kapteyn we’re not as sure about but a hundred years ago it was still going, they mine a fair amount but I guess they aren’t exactly terraformed.”

“But even Tau Ceti,” said Vera. “It’s way too seasonal, dry ice snow in the winter, water nearly boils at the equator in the summer. And the atmosphere isn’t fully remediated yet. Anyway,” she finished with a sigh, gazing out at where Bluehorse must be, “this is the place. This is the only place that’s anything like Earth.”

“That’s why,” said Clay, “we have to save it.”

The five women and Clay set up a tent, pulled their fighters inside and filled it with air, but then they didn’t feel like sitting inside it and went for a walk. The planetoid was shaped like a rugby ball and only about ten kilometers long, so everything, including their feet as they walked, had to grip the icy surface with little grippers. They walked around to a rock outcrop and stood there gazing into the heavens.

“There’s a crapload of stars,” said Vera.

“Yeah, and Primoids,” said Natasha. “You guys can talk to your rebels yet? We can’t really talk to ours. I’ve tried.”

“They don’t talk as such,” said Rachel. “That’s not how they communicate at all. Remember all that stuff about whether something’s an adjective or a preposition, or whether you even have adjectives and prepositions? They don’t, I think—well, it’s not like I actually know, right?”

“No,” said Natasha, “but you’re right. That’s the state of knowledge right now.”

“You’re saying they don’t have adjectives and prepositions,” said Vera.

“No. But video they understand,” said Rachel. “Say you want to plan a battle with them. You can put together a nice video and they’ll know what you want them to do. It’s a bit like the bee thing.”

They looked around at each other. Natasha laughed. “It’s weird how well we understand each other. So Gemma, bees like do this dance to show each other where the flowers are.”

“Yes, I get it,” said Gemma Izawa. She looked at Acevedo, who smiled.

“Bees do this dance, I know,” said Daria. “We have bees on Bluehorse.”

“So, let’s talk about Earth,” said Natasha.

“That must have been pretty bad,” said Vera.

“Well,” said Clay, “on the subject of alien communication, yeah, the Ngugma can communicate with the best of them. They didn’t just make contact with us. They conned us out of our whole home planet and killed 99.9% of the human species.”

“We saw,” said Natasha. Gemma said, “That was awful.” Daria Acevedo muttered, “Not here, not here, not here.”

“Let’s hope not,” said Rachel. “We know more or less what they’d do. And we know more or less what their fleets look like. They think big, I think Clay said.”

“But the problem before us is the Primoids,” said Gemma. “Right?”

“Not in the long run.”

“No,” said Clay. “At 667, we saw how the Primoids wiped out a human colony. Our people there all wound up just as dead as the Humans of Earth did, but it just didn’t feel the same. I mean, obviously dead is dead and 100% is 100%. Dead children are dead children. But it felt like the result of a battle, a conflict, a struggle. It made a difference too, that there were Primoids on our side in that battle. But mostly it was just the feeling that, I don’t know, the Primoids kill out of fear or defensiveness, they don’t really want to but they’ll kill if they have to. But the Ngugma just wanted to mine our planet. Killing us off was the easiest way to do it. Killing 205 million people.”

“Yes,” said Rachel. “At Alpha C, they knew they didn’t have to kill off the colony so they didn’t. They were happy to let it die because of the mouthholes, but they didn’t have any need to go to the effort and trouble of murdering everyone themselves.”

“No,” said Clay, “all in all, they’d rather someone else do it. Mouthholes, or hemorrhagic virus, whatever, just set it up and sit back and watch. No malice, no sympathy, just greed.”

There was a silence, and then Vera said, “So.” Everyone looked at her. She smiled at Clay, then Rachel, and said, “They’re my enemy.”

“Then why the hell,” said Natasha, “is it the stinkin’ Primoids we’re facing off against?”

They stood there almost weightless thinking for some time, and then Vera walked a few steps. She looked back. The others let their boots get unstuck and joined her, and the six walked some distance over the undulating surface, over very cold but very old snow, crunchy and porous. They climbed with no labor whatever to another rocky peak.

“So you were in the last battle here,” said Rachel.

“That was a frickin’ battle,” said Vera. “Bluehorse had built these three heavy cruisers, the Vision, the Cognition and the Empathy. They’d trained up about twenty new fighter pilots, like Daria here. They had four more cruisers of the Abstraction class. Of course Abstraction and Tasmania and Su Park’s group happened to be out of town at the time. But we managed.”

“Barely,” said Natasha.

“Tash and I and Daria were the only ones left flying at the end. We lost Tremblay. We lost that colony kid Toray Brun, who else? Bunch of newbie pilots. Cognition and Empathy both went up: Vision’s actually docked at Bluehorse right now, and they’ve built two more. The Primoids lost basically everything. We chased three fighters off at the end, they were all out of combat systems.”

“Tremblay died,” said Clay. “She was amazing. And Toray. Wow.”

“Wow,” said Rachel. “Tremblay. Am I the only original wing second left?”

“A lot of people died,” said Acevedo. “But, you know, we won. We won. We were the only thing moving. Think about that.”

“I got hit in the drive ten seconds in, and had to eject,” said Gemma, “so I had to float there in the middle of the battle, dead in space.”

“You blew up a cruiser doing that,” said Vera. “There were so many fighters floating around dead in space, cruisers full of crew sitting in the dark waiting to see what happened.”

“Kind of like walking among a bunch of corpses,” said Clay. “That’d be unusual.”

“Yeah, okay, you have us there,” said Natasha. “In this case, they weren’t all corpses. We won, so we got our crews back, a lot of them, and we captured three whole Primoid cruisers and like ten of those big fighters, disabled with Primoids inside, some of whom apparently went ahead and joined the rebels.”

“I ought to point out,” said Daria, “that we had a few surprises when the enemy would wait for us to get close and check them out, and then open up on us.”

“Yeah, but none of them was faster than you, were they, Daria?” said Natasha.

“Daria is also a cold-blooded killer,” said Vera. “Just my type.”

“I learned from the best.”

“Wow,” said Rachel. “Sorry we missed it. I guess about then we were facing mouthholes at Alpha C. We mentioned that one that stuck its face through the hull, right? Wanted to give Clay a kiss.”

“No, you didn’t,” said Vera. “Good looking?”

“Not my type,” said Clay. “Too bitey.”

6.

The six fighter pilots strolled across the nighted surface of the little planetoid.

“So anyway,” said Natasha, “we headed back to PCS2, me and Vera and Gemma and Antonia Allan and the Vision, in hopes of talking some sense into the Primoids, but we had to fight our way through a cruiser and nine fighters first. But then yeah, they actually met us, Vera and I met face to face on this planetoid, not too different from this one we’re on.”

“Did you make friends?” asked Clay. “Because these guys don’t seem to be bringing us a cake or anything.”

“We got on okay,” said Vera. “No breakthrough, but we did find out about this other species. The Fyaa.”

“I’d already gone up against them,” said Acevedo. “Sorry. Your story, boss.”

“Yeah,” said Natasha, “we headed for this secondary system of the Primoids, we call it PSB3, we had this list of B systems, anyway, turned out the Fyaa were attacking it.”

“Fyaa,” said Rachel.

“Fyaa. Little vermin. Squirrely things with like eight legs, sort of squirrel-tardigrade-pangolin things. They were doing unto the Primoids what the Primoids wanted to do unto Bluehorse. I guess what they did unto 667. Anyway, they made the mistake of attacking us. Gemma got two, so you can see she’s earned it. I got two. Antonia got two, before she got blown up, she was our only loss.”

“Antonia,” said Rachel. “That’s rough. I liked her.”

“She was good,” said Natasha. “Would’ve been one of the great ones. Anyway, that was six, two were attacking Tasmania and that was a mistake, and then Killer over there got the other four. I think after Antonia got shot up, Vera was sort of pissed off.”

“I was,” said Vera.

“There were twelve fighters??” said Clay. “And you guys took them, with only one loss? I’m sorry about Antonia, but that’s pretty amazing, guys.”

“Twelve fighters. And two little cruiser things, one went right at the Vision and that didn’t look so good but Vision’s a tough cookie. Daria and I helped Vision knock off its cruiser and Vera and Gemma killed the other one.”

“So don’t take this wrong,” said Clay, “but I have to ask, do the Fyaa just suck, or are we really that good? I mean—!”

“No, no offense at all,” said Vera. “I was pretty surprised myself how well we did.”

“If I may,” said Gemma, “they didn’t suck at all. They were beating up on the Primoids.”

“Clay,” said Natasha, “here’s a news flash. We really are that good.” They looked up at the sky, as if they could see the Primoid fleet across the well of space. “Humans make good fighter pilots. Sorry, Sister Shia. It’s a fact.”

They looked around at each other. “So you interfered in the Fyaa-Primoid War?” asked Clay. “Won’t that affect the balance of power?”

“It probably saved PSB3 for the Primoids. Stupid Fyaa got what they deserved. Apparently they’re rather of the attack first mentality.”

“And this hasn’t made them like us?”

“Maybe they’d like us better if we weren’t here,” said Vera.

“Okay,” said Rachel. “So, having changed history, you came home?”

“Not directly,” said Natasha. “We flew to this one place we call Ice Palace, it’s three little stars, they have some planets but no planet in the system isn’t basically frozen solid. We saw a lot of nitrogen ice. I have now stood on frozen argon. Anyway, it’s a cool place—sorry. Ha ha.”

“We set up a hideaway there,” said Acevedo, “when I was first put on explorations.”

“So we got there, there was no one there, we went on to Corsica. And that’s where we met Abstraction and Daria and that’s where we got some more Primoid Rebel help, because we knew the Center was going to have another go.”

“And that’s where we got the news from Earth,” said Vera.

“It all comes back to that, doesn’t it,” said Rachel.

“Yup,” said Vera. “Darn right,” said Acevedo. Gemma Izawa nodded and shook her head.

“Maybe so,” said Clay. “But we have the present situation first. How are we going to deal with this? What do we have? I can bloody well see what they have.”

“We’re outnumbered,” said Rachel. “Again.”

“We’re going to win, again,” said Natasha, “but we’re going to lose people.”

“It’s getting tiresome, this is,” said Rachel.

“I’ll tell you what it’s getting,” said Clay. “It’s getting time we stopped fighting the Primoids and started fighting the Ngugma.”

“See any chance of that?” asked Vera.

“Who cares,” said Clay. “Who cares. It’s what we have to do. Because if we fight each other, the winner’s going to have a heck of a time fighting off the Ngugma. And they’re coming. They’re coming for us, and they’re coming for the Primoids. They’re hungry for iron or whatever, they obviously have a use for a lot of it. It’s only a matter of time before they get to this neck of the woods.”

“You think they’ll be here like, soon?” asked Vera.

“No, but who cares. They’ll be here. Look, we just left for Earth 175 years ago. We’re now back in time for the second battle here since we left. We go off on another mission and come back in 150, 200 years and who knows. You going to bet they’re not going to hole this place?”

“No,” said Vera. “No, no bet.”

“So we have to take it to them,” said Clay. “We have to stop them where they are now. I don’t know how, but that’s what we have to do.”

“And these guys? This Primoid fleet? Do we fight them?” She grinned at Natasha. “Just us four?”

“Bite your tongue,” said Natasha. “Clay, come up with something better than that.”

“Or we go with that,” said Vera.

“What does she mean, just us four?” Gemma said.

“Hush,” said Clay Gilbert. “I’m thinking.”

7.

An hour later, after some light discussion and meals of wafers and tea, the six got off the ice. Vera, Natasha, Gemma and Daria turned back toward the far-distant star, resuming the observation of the impossibly vast fleet from Primoid Center. “We’ll be back with the Starfleet,” Vera texted Rachel and Clay before they got out of light-second range, “so make sure not to start without us. Oh, and Clay, you said you’d think of something clever.”

“You had the plan last time,” Clay texted back.

“True. So it’s your turn. We’ll be in touch.”

Then over the hours the four and the two flew apart, accelerating to ten percent of light speed in perpendicular directions, the four to patrol the cubic light hours between the Primoid fleet and the planets of Bluehorse, and Clay and Rachel to haunt the dusty, dusky outskirts of the system.

“We totally took them before, of course,” said Rachel on her private line to Clay. “When we were outnumbered and outsized. Why am I not feeling it this time?”

“Well,” said Clay. He paused. “Want a list?”

“I can make a list. One, nine cruisers, three battlecruisers, a battleship, and a bunch of fighters, 54? I bet it’s 108 if not 135. And freighters full of who knows what—ground troops? Or worse? Okay. Two, no Bouvier, no Tremblay, no Vilya. Just us, Su Park, Tash & Vera, Gemma’s obviously good, Acevedo, and other than that—a whole bunch of wee little chidren. Three, we had this great plan that time, remember? No plan this time. I’m just not getting anything. Vera hasn’t had a brilliant insight, and while I can hear your gears grinding, Hubby-licious, I’m not seeing a plan clever enough to actually deal with this situation in the long run. Maybe there isn’t such a thing, that’s occurred to me. Four, it kind of takes the wind out of your sails to know that behind this fight there’s another one down the road with the Ngugma, whom we do not know how to fight, not really, not their big ships. Five, it also rather impacts one’s optimism when one thinks of the 99.9% or whatever of the Human Race that’s dead already, not coming back. Six? What the hell. I’m just not feeling it. What the hell?”

“Well,” said Clay, “I wish I could argue.” They curved along, in the dim closets of the Oort cloud, and Clay amused himself scanning the outer orbits of Bluehorse, still a long way in from him and Rachel. There were some stray asteroids, there was a bit of debris, but the enemy was moving with great deliberation and was unlikely to be fooled by, say, fighters hidden under space rocks or among garbage. “Well,” said Clay, “we delay. Fabian tactics.”

“So,” said Rachel after a bit, “do you still love me?”

“I love you more than anything,” said Clay. “Do you still love me?”

“I love you so much.” They glided, watching the enemy form up way out in the Oort cloud.

8.

Clay spent fifteen minutes making calculations and guesses; Rachel was doing the same in her fighter. Clay suddenly stopped and said, “Proposition. The Primoid Center can keep on sending spaceships to attack us indefinitely. So how do we win, not just now but in the end?”

“I don’t know. How do you simulate that?”

They flew on in silence. Clay was scanning through his computer: actually he was looking at old pictures. Some minutes later, he said, “Rachel. We have to change the rules.”

“Of the simulations?”

“No, of the real world.”

“We could attack Primoid Center, PCS One or whatever, take out their production–!”

“Rachel.”

“You got a plan after all, boy toy?”

“Rachel,” said Clay.

“Clay babe?”

“New navigation program coming. Also, a slide show I’d like your comments on.”

“Nav? From you? I’m the commander here, you know.”

“From me. As your lieutenant commander and senior adviser, I advise you approve it.”

The two old Ghosts had been accelerating still, intending to get to the foggy regions around 30% of light speed. But now they changed course, after sending a tightly aimed transmission at those other four Ghosts. For four hours they flitted through the dark closet of space. They decelerated and turned, and then swerved back in a vast S, still decelerating, and now they were face to face with the big invading fleet, a mere four hundred million kilometers apart.

Nothing looks big in space. The Primoid fleet was spread across millions of kilometers. But his display managed to make it appear properly impressive, listing statistics for each of the Primoid ships moving out there in the wilds of the system, weeks away, perhaps, from arrival at Bluehorse-3, or weeks away from battle.

Clay’s Ghost, zipping along at twenty percent of light speed, took a course diagonally across the front of the fleet, at a range of 260 million kilometers, a bit under fifteen light-minutes. Rachel zipped along next to him, a mere ten kilometers off his port side.

Clay began sending pulses of light at the flagship: two, then five, then eleven, then seventeen. He did it by hand, touching the screen to send, and he did it slowly, the pulses within a given prime number a second apart. He got to twenty-three and stopped.

Thirty minutes later, he received, and echoed to Rachel ten kilometers to his right, the reply: slow pulses much like his, three, seven, thirteen, nineteen, twenty-nine.

Clay then sent an image. It was coded in three coordinates, as if you could build an approximation of it out of blocks—it was all a format Clay and Rachel knew from their Primoid friends.

It was a three dimensional image, a color representation of himself and Rachel standing on that ledge in Greenland, the island of Greenland, not the space ship. They were naked, holding flowers. He had forgotten he’d had the picture at first, but after she rescued him at 667, he found it again and looked at it often. Rachel looked great in it, smiling at the camera as Clay held it for a 3D selfie; Clay didn’t look too bad. He assumed it wouldn’t do much for whatever the Primoids had for libido.

Then he began sending a series of images. He had put together quite the slide show, but over the last few hours he and Rachel had pared it down to thirty pictures.

A mother with a baby somewhere in old Africa: they might have been the first two actual Humans. An old man looking out across the savanna. Two women weeding a garden. Some children playing somewhere in China. Some Semitic-looking teenagers kicking a soccer ball.

A man sculpting, a cat watching him. A man fixing something: he seemed happy about it. A man and a woman talking as they ate, possibly in a café in Ville de Quebec. A man and a woman pushing a stroller together, with twin toddlers: the couple looked happy, the toddlers not so much. A woman standing in a vast space under a dome: it was, in fact, the Hagia Sophia.

An old man with a cow. A child with a big dog. An African woman, in colorful clothes, surrounded by butterflies. A middle-aged woman with a cat in her lap, reading. An old man, skin white and wrinkly as old paper, feeding a cat and her kittens.

Two men arguing heatedly. A man pushing a woman. Two women roughing up another woman. Men marching with weapons. A man shooting another man in the head, blood spurting from the other side of the victim’s skull.

A woman crying, holding a lifeless child. An old woman crying over a dead man. Villagers somewhere in anguish, their village burned to the ground. A man, a 21st Century American soldier in full fatigues and helmet, with tears running down his dirty face. A small throng of dirty refugees dying in a nuked wasteland.

A man, a fire fighter, carrying a child. A doctor, careworn as she treated an old man. Several men shouting and looking ahead as they carried a stretcher with someone injured. A man carrying a calf out of a burning barn. A woman smiling at a child as she secured a bandage on a knee.

“Did we make them see them?” Clay asked Rachel, unexpectedly choking up as he reviewed his own images.

“We won’t know for thirty minutes at the least,” said Rachel, “but the code should force the show to play on the kind of screens they had at 667.”

“Okay,” said Clay, “time for Phase 2.”

He watched as the images spooled out, some moving video, others 3D stills. A series of rockets and the like took off, gradually refining into the reusable shuttles he had himself piloted. A space station went together in time lapse, then a better, bigger one, then an even better, even bigger one. Spacecraft flew and evolved, three hundred years in a minute.

The Human Horizon Project departed on its search for a perfect colony site.

And then there were other spaceships, spaceships that made Earth’s spaceships look like toys. They were seen in orbit from the space station; their shuttles were seen landing; on video, their passengers emerged into the sunlight, furry six-pointed suns, six-armed mammal starfish. They came in peace. They were the Ngugma; the word, as pronounced by the Ngugma themselves on the old videos, was heard, and then pronounced again by a series of news readers. Ng-GOOG-mah. They left. They came back.

And then. People were sick in beds. Nurses were treating them, doctors were worried. Dead were buried. A series of short videos showed the progress, not just of the disease in a person, but of the realization of the scope of the disease across humanity. It ended with a woman speaking at a desk, an official or perhaps a news reader, clearly sick, speaking in Russian. Clay did not bother trying to find a translation. It was clear the sort of thing she was saying.

And then there was only an edited sequence of images and videos from the visit to Earth of Clay and Rachel. At the very end, he had added the minute of their vows and then the two of them kissing, and then the two of them, vac suits on, climbing into their Ghosts and taking off, over the pocked Earth, over the Earth being chewed up by gigantic parasites, those same ships that the Ngugma had been in when they came in peace.

The final element had been Rachel’s idea: a ten second clip from orbit of the biggest hole in Holey; a ten second clip of mining operations on Earth; a ten second clip of piles of dead Earthlings; and then a ten second cut from the Gliese 667 Primoids’ video of Primoid adults and youngsters, playing in the orange sun.

And finally, there was a single sweep several minutes long: Clay and Rachel, vac suited, canvassing the wreckage of the human colony at Gliese 667, finishing with their discovery of the Primoid dead among the human dead, the Primoids fallen with their fallen human allies.

It was over. And on a whim, Clay opened his own channel and let himself be seen, in his Ghost, speaking to his camera, tears running down his face. “I know you can’t understand me,” he said, “but the choice is simple, that you can understand. You can destroy us and face the Ngugma without anyone to help you, or you can join with us and make peace and take on the real enemy. We can live together in peace. It’s your choice,” he finished, his voice done for. He sniffled, he wiped his eyes. He had no idea if tears meant anything to them.

He reached up and hit send. He looked to his left, at Rachel’s face in the side of his display. They smiled at each other, their faces streaked with tears.

“We’ll know,” she said. “In forty minutes. Twenty minutes for the message to go there, twenty for it to come back. Or for them to send out fighters to blow us the heck up.”

“That’s fine either way,” said Clay. “We’ve done all we can.”

Forty minutes later, she had beaten him at Set three times, and there had been no news. The big fleet came on, and the tiny fighters still stood in their way, like men standing in front of tanks.

Twenty minutes after that, however, a series of messages began to come in from the battleship: first, the first twenty prime numbers. Then images, just images, a sort of blurrily 3D photo that was their particular photographic mode. Their eyes adjusted to it quickly, and they beheld Primoids working, Primoids greeting one another, little Primoids being helped by big Primoids, Primoids big and small tending trees, building dwellings, making food, sharing water, doing something that might have been a sport and might have been religion. It went on and on.

After twenty minutes of this, the Primoids sent back the same video Clay had ended with: the sweep of the battle scene on 667, ending with the group of dead Primoids and Humans together. And then there was a single short video: of a dozen Primoids standing around the bridge of a ship, none other than the huge flagship before them. They faced the camera, or whatever, their optic tentacles aimed ahead. They were swaying left and right, and then they began to sway forward and back, nodding.

Rachel said, “Let’s come to a stop, relative to them.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really know at all. But I do get the feeling that they’ve chosen peace.”

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