Friends of the Sky

1.

We, the Alliance of the Fyaa peoples of Fyatskaab, the Kleegrg, otherwise known as the Primoids (here, the Ngugma term for a number with exactly two divisors was adapted) and the Humans of Earth, with this message declare our intentions.

1. We mean no harm to the Ngugma people or to peoples subject to the Ngugma. We have demonstrated a certain technique, and we have dispatched signals carrying the details of this technique to several populated or recently depopulated systems in which the Ngugma currently have mining operations. These operations will stop as soon as possible, one way or another.

2. We have also demonstrated the value of our space forces. We request safe passage across Ngugma space, cooperation with Ngugma forces and an expressed agreement with Ngugma leadership, so that we may take up our share of the responsibility for the defense of this region of the Galaxy.

“I can help,” said Flaayy, reading the statement on a screen, in capital Roman letters, after hearing it read aloud by Clay in the language once used by Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr., and Donald J. Trump. Flaayy was sitting in its room aboard the commandeered Ngugma cruiser; Clay, Rachel and Skzyyn floated in front of a big screen in the Tasmania’s commissary. “I can help make the translation better. But what is it you will do at the end of the Arm?”

“We can’t know till we get there,” said Clay.

“And yet it is very, very far away.”

“We’re very, very aware of that,” said Rachel. “Not all of us are going.” She looked at Clay and Skzyyn, who looked at each other.

“Well, I’m going,” said Clay. “Skz, I don’t expect you to go.”

“In fact,” said the octopod, “it’s likely that we will not go all the distance. We have much to do to rebuild, and we do not trust these—you will excuse me, Flaayy.”

“I do not trust these either,” said Flaayy in its mournful voice. “But if I may speak, ah, advice, your answer for this statement will not be here at Vannaag Vul. Your answer will be nearby, however. Your answer will be at Zzodhohhor Kazzhonn, at the Spiral Arch.”

“The Spiral Arch?” Rachel repeated. “This is a star system?”

“It is not far from here,” said Flaayy. “It is a military center, a, an intelligence center. It is somewhat sort of secret.”

“Flaayy,” said Rachel, “we were talking about where we wanted to go. Where do you want to go?”

Flaayy half flopped on the console again. It was a different sort of console from the one in the depot, on which Flaayy spent so much time consoling itself: for one thing, there was no gravity. But Flaayy used it the same way. Rachel looked at Clay and Skzyyn, then started to apologize to the Ngugma. But Flaayy looked up and said, from that big round mouth, “I would stay here, it is good enough here. But you will want Flaayy if you go to Spiral Arch. And Flaayy does not want to live at Spiral Arch. So I will say, the place you call Pentestella, if you are going that far.”

And among other things, Clay was now pinching himself about being a fighter pilot, hundreds of light years from the corpse of Earth, sitting in a spaceship, talking to a furry hexapod alien, who then asks to be dropped off down the starry road, if Clay and company might happen to be headed that direction.

The response to the statement from the local Ngugma authorities at Vannaag Vul was positive. They felt, too, that a trip to Spiral Arch, seventeen light years from Vannaag Vul, was what was called for, and they were most happy to see the little fleet of indefatigable invaders decamp for somewhere else.

The local authorities were so happy to see them go that they sent a cruiser off toward Spiral Arch to let the military leadership know. Park, Kalkar, Root and the Primoid and Kaahriig captains were vexed at this, and had a couple of tense meetings. They decided that a trip to Spiral Arch was on, but that the crews would need to set foot on some sort of firm ground for a few days, in the best approximation to R&R available. To that end, Tasmania put down on the fifteenth planet, a ball of cold rock the size of Mercury, a tent was set up and a general party declared.

Clay, Rachel, Vera and Natasha had a few beers and some smoke and, without verbal decision, suited up, and wandered out the airlock and off up a chunky hill under the black sky. The Venus-bright star above the black horizon was the nearby sun of Vannaag Vul. Much brighter than that, shedding a faint silvery light on the ground, the Milky Way arced overhead. They came to a stop, the four of them in a line, and gazed up.

Rachel reached up, and pointed high and then back behind them down the sky. “So we came from there,” she said, and she brought her pointing hand up and over and down toward the other horizon, a little to the left of the distant sun, “and we’re going there.”

“Eleven thousand light years away,” said Clay.

“I don’t see any way we can comprehend it,” said Natasha. “But I’m ready to go right now.”

“Even if it was just us four?”

“Vera would say, ‘damn right.’ Is that right, Vera darling?”

“Damn right,” said Vera. “But first, we have to deal with these Ngugma guys. I guess it’s too much trouble blowing up all their spaceships.”

“Yeah,” said Rachel, “and besides, then we’d have to fight whatever they’re fighting.” The gazed up for some time: Clay was confronting the sheer cold fact of distance. Rachel, confronting that too, added, “This sure would be easier with, you know, warp drive or worm holes or something. But as it is.”

“As it is,” said Clay, “we’re just going to have to go see.”

“Think anyone is going with us?” asked Vera. “Or is it just us?”

“I don’t care if it is just us,” said Natasha. “I’m going.”

“Then I’m going.”

“I think,” said Rachel, “at least Apple and Izawa will go with us. Maybe some of the others. I doubt any of the Primoids or the Fyaa will go.”

“Park?” asked Clay.

“Hmm.” They gazed some more. “Park,” said Rachel. “I don’t know which way to call that one. Li and Timmis, you know they want to have kids. Eleven thousand years is a long way to go.”

“You could have kids,” said Vera, “you just couldn’t send them to college at Bluehorse.”

“Or you could,” said Clay, “but they’d be in the Graduating Class of the Year 20K.”

“Somebody’s going to have to,” said Natasha. “Have kids. Ever think of that? If we’re eleven thousand light years away from the nearest humans. Our supply and reinforcement lines are going to be way stretched. And I’m not having any. And neither is Vera. So—?”

“Next subject,” said Clay.

“We have eleven thousand years to think about that,” said Rachel. She turned and put a gloved finger on Clay’s vac-suited chest. “So we’re all sure we’re going eleven thousand light years to see what’s going down at the end of the Orion Arm. Are we ready to face whatever that is, when we get there?”

They looked into each other’s faces, and then all four of them looked up at the galactic center looming high over their heads. Finally, Natasha said, “We can’t really prepare. But we have to be ready.” Her hand took Vera’s. “So we’ll be ready.”

The four of them gazed up at the sky. Finally, Rachel said, “We’d better get back to the party. We may not be seeing some of these people much longer.”

But they turned and there came two more people in vac suits: Maria Apple and Gemma Izawa. “Hey,” said Apple, “you old timers out here philosophizing?”

“You got here just in time,” said Clay. “We ran out of philosophy. The hill is all yours.”

2.

The system called Spiral Arch lay seventeen light years away, almost at a right angle to the Earth to Bluehorse to Vannaag Vul line. Except for the dear departed Big Fourteen, the fleet was the same as it had been: in descending order of size, Honshu and Tasmania, the Primoid cruiser, the Ngugma cruiser, the two Fyaa cruisers, five remaining Primoid fighters, sixteen patched-up Ghost 204s, and five Fyaa fighters. They went to light speed all hooked up together, including the Ngugma cruiser, which was crewed by Ram Vindu, Raea Chee and Flaayy. The latter had earned the run of its ship.

So, a hundred plus light years from the nearest human, over fifty from the nearest Primoid or Fyaa, they played, worked, ate, partied, slept and talked, an outpost of diverse cultures moving through Ngugma space at 99.999% of the speed of light.

“Clay,” said Skzyyn, as they sat in a Honshu observation lounge, watching the confused, squashed, blobby lights outside, passing Clay’s jury-rigged pipe, “this will not be our last fight together. But the next place after this, that will be the last.”

“You guys are going home soon?” asked Clay, not surprised.

“Both Captains begin to think that it is time for us to turn back to the, the relief of Fyatskaab. The Tskelly are not ready to do so, not quite ready. So we have this long discussion, we argue, in our way. We make a compromise.”

“You go one more after Spiral Arch?”

“We go one more after Spiral Arch. It’s an honor.” They passed the pipe. Skzyyn said, as Clay took a pull, “It’s okay to say this?”

“Yeah,” said Clay. “Yes. It’s an honor. To fight on your side.”

“Yes, exactly,” said Skzyyn. “Also safer for me that way.”

In the commissary, Apple and Izawa were eating with Vera and Natasha. “You trust them?” asked Apple.

The other three women all shook their heads. “I sort of trust Flaayy,” said Natasha, “but not all the way. The rest of them—well, there’s just no way they’ve been beaten enough for me to think they’re not going to try something.”

“So we beat them some more,” said Vera. She lifted her sippy cup of beer and they all clunked cups.

“We’re in for the long haul, you know,” said Apple. She smiled at Gemma Izawa, who smiled at her. “All the way up the Arm.”

“And where are you kissing me after that?” said Izawa.

“So frickin’ cute,” said Vera as they smooched and giggled.

“But really, we’re in,” said Izawa. “All the way in.”

“Sounds great to me,” said Apple.

“Oh jeez,” said Izawa. They had to smooch again. “I mean,” she went on, “I don’t even know where we are anymore, I mean, I know where we are, but anymore? I look up at the stars and I never recognize any constellations. I guess I’m just a citizen of the Milky Way.”

“You don’t mind that it’s eleven thousand light years,” said Vera.

“How many jumps is that?” asked Apple. “I mean, we can’t do that in one hustle to light speed, right?”

“Theoretically we could,” said Natasha. “Padfoot and Poto and Gene all think it’s best to sort of come down to normal speed every hundred light years or so. Still, that’s what, 110 separate jumps to light speed? I think we have to stretch it.”

“It’s all we’ve been doing up to now,” said Vera, “stretching it. Think Li and Timmis want to go all the way to the end?”

Apple and Izawa both shrugged. “I think it could go either way,” said Izawa.

“Where are you guys getting married?” asked Natasha.

“I don’t know,” said Izawa. “I’m ready anytime. I have my whole outfit picked out.” She patted her vac suit upper.

“And who are we gonna invite?” asked Apple. “We have to send out the invites, get catering, a band, reserve a hall, all that stuff.” She looked at Vera. “You guys got married on the beach at Bluehorse. Why don’t we hold out for the next decent beach?”

Meanwhile, in a study room on Honshu, Rachel and Skippy, the Primoid fighter pilot, were standing-floating, poring over video screens. Rachel called up a picture of a log house on a mountain side. Skippy nodded its blobby orange body. It called up a picture of a square building that tapered into a hemisphere as it went up. A weird green forest bloomed behind. Several big Primoids played with several little ones in the foreground. They looked up: Flaayy, on another screen, was watching. Then, on a fourth screen, Flaayy’s version appeared: a town of hexagonal pyramids rising out of a shallow pool. Big Ngugma and little Ngugma scurried along the wet lanes, while littler Ngugma paddled in the pond.

Then Rachel called up her video from Gliese 667Cc, where she and Clay had found bodies of Primoids alongside bodies of humans in the ruins of the Earthling colony. Skippy bowed and swayed. They looked at Flaayy.

Flaayy was drawing, It didn’t have a photo of what it wanted. It made a basic drawing, in simple colors: a Human with a boxy torso and a round head, a Primoid that was an orange circle with tentacles on top and a bunch of stick legs and arms, and then an Ngugma, dark brown, standing on three of its six arms, holding out two of the others to its sides, where it managed to hold paws with the Primoid and the Earthling.

Rachel smiled at Flaayy and Skippy, and watched what they had for faces, to see what a smile looked like on them.

And a little way away, beyond where Emily Gray kept an eye on the navigation, in a bunk behind the Tasmania captain’s cabin, Su Park and Alfred Kalkar lay naked side by side.

“How much further, do you think?” asked Park.

“I’m not vital to the war effort,” said Kalkar. “I mean, back at Bluehorse.” He took her hand without looking. “You are, Commander. One more flight, maybe two, and you need to head back to Bluehorse. Even if the Ngugma have attacked, or something else has happened in those two hundred years, you’re still going to be needed.”

“But you’ll be needed down the Arm, to support the wings we send onward.”

He stared straight at the ceiling of the bunk for some time, and then looked at Park and said, “If some of you are going to travel all the way to the far end of the Orion Arm, then I’ll be needed.”

“There.”

“What? Yes. There. If only to shuttle Padfoot.”

“Alfred. Padfoot’s not pregnant, is she?”

He scoffed gently. “Not yet, thank gods,” he said. “Shelleen is, again. Her second, since we left Earth. And Emily told me she’s thinking about it. It’ll be the fighter pilots next, mark my words.”

“Well,” said Park, “it pains me to say so, but at the far end of the Orion Arm, someone’s going to have to turn out some new humans. I’m certainly not going to.”

“I think you have enough on your plate as is,” said Kalkar.

“So you’re going to go all the way,” said Park. They looked into each other’s eyes, brown and brown. They leaned close and kissed. “You’re a good man, Alfred.”

“You are a good woman, Su Park,” said Kalkar. “And the best wing commander in the history of the Orion Arm. I am honored to serve with you.”

“We’ve come a long way.”

“A long way,” Kalkar agreed. “We have a long way to go.”

3.

The Spiral Arch system began to come into focus. It was a very different sort of place from Vannaag Vul. Where the previous system had one big star and many planets, this system had three stars, none very large, and a web of material about them or in transit between them, and exactly two stably orbiting planets. VV had two planets full of population and factory production; those two stable planets at Spiral Arch showed only the barest signs of habitation or technology. Vannaag hosted a large starbase and several medium-sized ones, and a wide assortment of spacecraft, peaceful and warlike; Spiral Arch showed only one base, large, and one force of spaceships, all of them military.

The three stars were young, small, and of various shades. The largest was bluish, brilliant, and almost the size of the Sun that had shone on the world of Clay’s birth; it was what both planets orbited. The other two, dimmer, tended toward the orange. The cloud they had condensed out of had not entirely dissipated: now the three suns were swaddled in veils of gas and dust, gleaming red and blue, yellow and a thin purple as they spiraled up and then curved back again, a mimicry of the Milky Way that spanned half the sky, its baleful central bulge looming over the system: the source of all the horrors visited on the Ngugma, or visited by the Ngugma on everyone else in the Orion Arm.

Park sent out Clay and Rachel, Apple and Izawa to make a preliminary patrol when the incoming fleet was fourteen light hours out from the nearest of the three stars. They split up, skirting the system in opposite directions, sailing the black outskirts.

“You guys stay out of trouble,” Rachel called when they were still light minutes apart. “You are not authorized to get in any fights.”

“Nor are you, Commander,” Izawa replied. They could hear Apple laughing.

“Are we worried about them?” asked Clay.

“No, actually,” said Rachel. “That was exactly the amount of flippancy I expected.”

Smirking in parallel curves, Clay and Rachel flew a few dozen meters apart at 12% of light speed. They played some chess and some Set, Rachel renewing her domination of Clay. They simulated, and Clay was again amazed that he was almost her equal: he had come to think of his wife as a sort of space superhero. They read: currently, it seemed romantic to read Tolkien aloud to one another, two hobbits imagining they were Beren and Luthien. The rest of the fleet slowed toward a stopping point in space still far out beyond the system’s paltry Kuiper belt. The Ngugma watched.

Clay woke up from a sleep period, sat up and said, “Hey, they’re sending something out. We have patrol boats.”

“Oh, I’m so scared I’m shaking,” said Rachel. “Okay. Their fleet is four battlecruisers, I read twelve cruisers, a couple battleships, four heavy cruisers of some kind, and a bunch of those patrol ships. Of which they have sent exactly four out to check on our side.”

“It doesn’t look like the rest are moving away from the base.” They flew on along their curve for fifteen seconds. “So,” said Clay, “do we do anything about them?”

“No, look,” said Rachel, “Park’s got Gamma Wing out to deal with them.”

Light that had taken hours to reach Clay and Rachel showed Earthling fighters separating from the fleet to meet the oncoming Ngugma. Acevedo, in her almost-new Ghost, led Schmitt, Aliya and Grohl straight out toward the four patrol ships. Clay and Rachel on one side, Apple and Izawa on the other curved around on distant patrol, watching, light hours from the action. They received orders and updates every so often from Park, but nothing was unexpected. The patrol boats, the same number as the Ghosts, did not adjust their course. Clay and Rachel played some chess.

“There’s no way those guys think they can take Daria, is there?” asked Clay.

“I don’t know,” said Rachel. “They may not be fully aware of how great we are.”

“Well, then Daria has a few things to teach them.”

“That’s what I’d think,” said Rachel. “I don’t know. There’s something different about this situation. I don’t know, maybe they’re just there to check us, you know, keep someone on us to make sure we don’t do anything surprising.” She took a pawn, checked a few sensors and said, “I have them decelerating now, they’re not like leaving the system or anything.”

“They can’t leave the system,” Clay pointed out. “They’re patrol boats. They have no light speed drive. Where do you have them coming to a stop?”

“Hmm. About a hundred million k in front of Honshu.”

“We push a pawn,” said Clay, “they push a pawn.”

So they played and slept and read and played and veered, a dozen meters apart at 12% of light speed. On the other side of the system, Apple and Izawa flew the opposite curve. By the time they were four light hours along their way, and seven from Apple and Izawa, Gamma Wing was half a light hour in front of the rest of the fleet, approaching the four patrol ships.

Acevedo initiated communication, using the Ngugma frequencies and codes they had learned, but the patrol boats took an attack formation. Acevedo sent a short communication back to Honshu whose contents Clay and Rachel could guess. She put Gamma Wing into a sideways square, with her and Schmitt in front, a couple of kilometers apart, and then Aliya and Grohl in back by a couple of kilometers. The patrol boats came on in a line. Both sides fired off missiles, which mostly annihilated or wandered off into space.

A hundred kilometers from contact, Acevedo and Schmitt bent left and went after the ship on the end. The rest of the Ngugma fired, but the target went over to full evasion. Acevedo, followed closely by Peri Schmitt, went in for the kill, while Grohl and Aliya started to follow.

Acevedo got right in the leftmost patrol boat’s face. She was under a kilometer away when the patrol boat exploded. She hadn’t hit it in some sensitive place: it wasn’t that sort of explosion. No photon shot to the drive would cause a blast quite like that. Unable to adjust in time, Daria Acevedo flew straight into the conflagration, and Peri Schmitt followed her: the detonation wave, like a tongue of flame, reached out into space to the oncoming fighters. The second patrol ship veered hard toward the blast, and it went up as well, joining the first in a flare fifty kilometers long.

Acevedo was gone from space. A half second later, Schmitt’s Ghost came swooping out of the initial blast, but the second one caught up with her and her fighter blew up with a silent flash.

The other two patrol boats went in to meet Mizra Aliya and Millie Grohl. Aliya, at sixty kilometers, laid down a one second burst of her laser and peeled off hard, and the third patrol boat blew up out of range of her. Millie Grohl accelerated hard, firing as she shot past the fourth ship, which blew up as well, but a second too late to catch her in its fire. Aliya and Grohl curved back, crossing each other’s paths, decelerating hard to sweep the battlefield and comb the cooling embers. The two of them were the only thing left.

“God damn it,” said Clay, as the light of the battle reached them, 3.5 light hours away. “Acevedo.” While they watched, they were already picking up Aliya’s communication, to Grohl but automatically forwarded to the Honshu and the four Ghosts on patrol, affirming that there was no sign there had been any living creatures on the Ngugma ships, and that they had been full of explosive and radioactive materials, and confirming the deaths of Daria Acevedo and Peri Schmitt.

4.

Clay and Rachel and Apple and Izawa all turned back immediately, but they didn’t make it back to the fleet for another twenty-four hours. They tried to talk about what had just happened, but they couldn’t help crying, arguing or just shaking their heads.

Finally Rachel said, “You know what the worst thing is?”

Clay put his head in his hands for one more second, rubbed his eyes and said, “What.”

“The worst thing is, she wasn’t doing anything recklessly brave or anything. They weren’t doing anything we wouldn’t have done. We would have done exactly that.”

“And we would have died,” said Clay. He took another few seconds of personal time, and then he said, “You know what the even worse thing is?”

“No. What?”

“The Ngugma have figured out how to kill us.”

Their first communication from Park came four hours later. “Andros, Gilbert,” that calm voice said, “I am assuming as I send this that you’re on your way back, and that you know basically what happened to Commander Acevedo and LC Schmitt. We have information you probably don’t have. The patrol vessels that met Gamma Wing were robotically guided, and were packed with a stabilized mix of fissile elements. We estimate that the radius of explosive destruction was around ten kilometers and definitely not more than two hundred kilometers, so medium range attacks should still be safe, as safe as anything. The spread of gamma rays would be deadly within ten kilometers, damaging within fifty to one hundred. So that gives us some parameters.

“Your orders are to return to Tasmania. Izawa and Apple have the same orders. We will give due consideration to the next step, but suffice it to say, this has not increased our tendency to trust negotiations with the Ngugma. We will be taking offensive action, and in the meantime, anticipate a carefully composed ultimatum for our hosts in this system; we will make sure you receive a copy.” She waited a beat, and added, unnecessarily, “Su Park.”

And thirty minutes later the ultimatum came in, in Ngugma language and script with an English translation.

“To the Ngugma of the Spiral Arch system: stand down your forces upon receipt of this transmission. Evacuate personnel from all armed spacecraft, and from the starbase. Our vessels of the Alliance will arrive at your base within thirty hours, and by that time all Ngugma personnel should either be en route out of the system, or self-confined within the base, away from the control area. We will then sanitize the control area according to a protocol we have developed, which will be less explosive but just as effective as the protocol you used in destroying two of our fighters. We will destroy every ship you have which is not in compliance. Do not make the mistake of thinking that we cannot or will not do so. Do not attempt to negotiate. Do not expect that you will be trusted in any way. We only trust your actions. Su Park.”

“Whoa,” said Clay. “Just whoa.”

“Well, what did you expect?” Rachel challenged him. “They didn’t have to take the offensive like that. We could have handled this all peacefully. Not that I thought we were going to, not that I thought the N’s were ever going to treat us like we’re their peers or whatever.”

“Hey,” said Clay, “I agree completely. I’m ready to rip some new buttholes. I agree with everything she said. I just flashed back to when we first got to know Su Park. And how glad I am it’s not me she’s ticked off at.”

“Yeah, that’s a good thing,” said Rachel. “Game of Set, then maybe simulate a bunch?”

“Sounds good,” said Clay.

A minute later, as Rachel was collecting her sixth set to his one, she said, “I’ll tell you one thing. I’m feeling a lot better about stuff right now.”

5.

Of course the Ngugma of Spiral Arch did communicate, did attempt to negotiate, and did not in any way stand down. Rather, they cranked out every fighting ship they could find and began moving forward in combat formation. The “alliance” had a big meeting about this, on the Honshu, conducted in the Su Park style: open-ended and loose in format, but steadily moved along by Su Park, beginning with information, followed by a to-do list, and ending with a Plan.

The information was primarily about the Ngugma fleet. It was led (from behind) by two battleships, as big as the battleship they had victimized at Vannaag V. These were accompanied by four heavy cruisers, at the geometric mean of the Ngugma cruiser and the Ngugma battlecruiser. There were twelve cruisers and twelve more patrol ships, as well as three apparently unarmed freight vessels.

“Those freighters,” said Kalkar, who had a skinny black and white cat gently clawed into his shoulder. “I hope no one thinks they’re carrying wool.”

“Unless it’s radioactive explosive wool,” said Vera. Skzyyn, hanging onto Clay’s shoulder, snickered the Tskelly snicker.

“We’ve finally reached the area,” said Park, “where the Ngugma have had enough experience of us that they’re starting to come up with stratagems. We just have to come up with stratagems to counter their stratagems. Padfoot?”

“Uh, yeah,” said Padfoot, stepping into the middle of the conference room. “Actually this is more about what Gene Bell and Hhmvyvya have been up to. It has to do with missiles.” Hhmvyvya, hanging onto her arm, said something to Padfoot. “Do you want to tell them about it?” No, Hhmvyvya did not. Padfoot said, “Yeah. So we have a new missile. It’s about one tenth the size of the ones we already had, and it’s got a limited range, but it can evade a lot better than the regular ones, which is useful because of the actual, you know, stratagem.”

“Which is to not cancel out against the enemy missiles,” said Park, “but to pass them by and attack these freighters, or the patrol boats, directly.”

“I can guarantee,” said Padfoot, “the Ngugma haven’t seen missiles like these. They may not even pick them up on their sensors, or not till we’re in lethal range.”

“This sounds excellent,” said Natasha. “Skippy wants to know if Primoids can have them too.”

“Actually, yeah. That was one of the design parameters. We have basically 100 missiles per fighter, and that’s the Ghosts, the Fyaa fighters, the Primoid fighters. We had the tech guy, or the tech Primoid, from your cruiser, um, it was there to check everything was compatible. And we have a launcher for each of you guys, your tech guy will be installing them, they don’t take up much room at all, obviously, so yeah, everyone gets to play.”

“What about the stuff we don’t know about?” asked Clay. “Like, the stratagems they haven’t revealed yet?”

“What can I tell you?” Park replied. “Think on the fly, Mr. Gilbert. You’re good at that.” She looked at Vera, who was snickering. “Because,” Park went on, “it seems quite reasonable to assume that they have at least five more clever ideas ready to go.” She looked at Padfoot.

“And we have a couple more things we’re thinking about,” said Padfoot. “Commander Park has given us fifty more hours to work on things before we have to go live.”

“All right,” said Park, “our strategy.”

“I.e.,” said Kalkar, “the Plan.”

“Yes. The Plan.” What whispering was going on at this point ceased. “The Plan is that we will cause each ship of their fleet to explode, and we will take possession of the computer archives on their base, and we will not lose a single ship of any sort in the process. We lost two fighters in this system, who came all the way from Bluehorse and from Earth to die here. We are not permitted to lose any more, human or otherwise.”

“And how shall we execute this excellent plan?” asked Vera.

“Kalkar and Fvaerch and I are still debating the fine points,” said Park, “and I think we will want to rope in Andros and Li, and Mr. Skzyyn, and, um, Kleiner and her Primoid friends, but you will all have no doubt about what you are expected to do long before you have to do it.”

Clay and Rachel had some dinner with Vera and Natasha; Skzyyn and Skippy the Primoid joined them. The conversation was light, though Natasha had to explain the jokes to Skippy, by gesture or tablet picture. Then Rachel, with Skzyyn on her shoulder, and Natasha and Skippy, went off to brainstorm with the captaincy. Clay and Vera wandered off to see what trouble they could get into, and they wound up in Tasmania’s observation lounge, not for romantic purposes but to check in by video with a familiar furry face.

“Clay Gilbert,” said Flaayy, “Vee-rah.”

“Did you know they were going to do that?” asked Vera. “Blow up in our faces?”

“I warned you not to trust them,” Flaayy replied in its slow, low voice. “I do not know what they think, I do not know the way in which such ones think, it’s not the way I think, I think it’s not the way you think. But that they think of blowing ships up to kill you when you have not attacked them yet? That is the way that they think.”

“It was mean, and ugly and deadly,” said Vera, “and effective, and it cost zero Ngugma lives.”

“It is the way they think,” said Flaayy. “We have our war, we must fight our war, we must not lose. So, Verah, Clay Gilbert, you may kill all of these, to me all these military leaders may be destroyed, if you kill all of them you must fight their war.”

Clay looked at Vera. “You kill off all the wolves,” he said, “you have to take the wolves’ place in the ecosystem.”

“Yeah, except we’re not fighting a bunch of elk,” said Vera. “You know, I’ve had the chance to take a good look at the map, you guys had some info on your computer back at Okhozzhan, so we now know a lot more than we did, way out where we come from, about how the Orion Arm is shaped. And it’s pretty blurry when you get into the periphery of the Arm. It’s not like there’s a big empty gap, there’s systems in between Orion and Scutum, Orion and Perseus, Orion and the center, there’s less star systems, but that space between the spiral arms, it’s not completely empty, not at all. So how are these enemies of yours not attacking all over the place?”

Flaayy seemed to take a breath. Then it said, “You have, on your Bluehorse, a sea creature, perhaps, which does not have, ahh, eyes, which does not see? And yet it crawls about. Looking for its food, looking though it does not have eyes to see.”

“We do, yeah,” said Vera. “Like, starfish.” She laughed nervously, but Flaayy had no idea that it looked like a mammal version of a sea star. “We had those on Earth too, maybe they’re still there.”

“I am sorry sorry,” said Flaayy, “about what we did to your Earth.”

“I know, I’m sorry, Flaayy. I didn’t mean to bring it up.”

“I am sorry still. You have these sea creatures. They cannot see.”

“So you’re saying,” said Clay, “the enemy has to grope its way from system to system.”

“Yeeees. They grope. Grooope.” Flaayy clearly liked the word. “They grooope. So you must be prepared to defend in all directions—in perhaps a very long time. But for all this time that we fight this war, which seems to us has gone forever, we fight across only where this arm, this Orion Arm, closest meets the Galactic Core. It is the only place they come across, or almost so.”

“Almost so,” Clay repeated.

Flaayy sort of wiggle-shrugged. “That’s still plenty of room,” said Vera. She called up a schematic on her tablet, and turned it various ways. “That’s got to be a thousand light years across.” She looked at Clay. “Circle, radius 500 light years. Looking forward to patrolling that?”

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” said Clay. “So. Flaayy. Any advice? As we get ready to fight your relatives again?”

Flaayy did something that seemed like a laugh: it convulsed its arms and let out a sort of raspberry. It composed itself and said, “You must defeat my relatives. Of course you must be ready for their trickery, trickery? Yes. Do not trust them, they will try some trick. Have tricks of your own.”

“Park and Padfoot have some things up their sleeves,” said Vera. “Um, sleeves?”

“Sleeves, sleeeves, sleeeeeeves,” said Flaayy. “Arms in sleeves.” It did its sort-of laugh. “Keep your aaarms in your sleeeeeves, my friends,” it said. “And be careful, Clay, Verah. Be careful.” It flopped a little. “Please, pleeease. Very careful. I am concerned for you.”

“Flaayy,” said Clay, “are you telling us you worry about us?”

“I dooo worry, Clay Gilbert, I dooo!” It did the Ngugma twitchy chuckle. “So dooo be careful.”

“Oh, we will,” said Vera. “Thanks.”

6.

Sixty hours later, the ships of the allied fleet separated, and the fighter wings went out. They arrayed the armored freighters in back, with the Fyaa cruisers flanking them a bit to the front, and the Primoid cruiser, a substantial and well-armed crab among the venomous little prawn of the Fyaa, in the middle and forward. Alpha and Beta Wings banded together in front of the center; Su Park and her special wing adopted Mizra Aliya and Millie Grohl, while the five Primoid fighters and the five Fyaa fighters paired up, big brothers and tiny brothers.

The Ngugma fleet closed to ten light minutes and then put its robotic fighters and its presumably robotic patrol ships out in front, its cruisers in a flat hexagonal lattice next, and then its heavy cruisers and its two huge, cylindrical battleships. It looked, in every way but the exact numbers, exactly like every other battle-ready Ngugma star force Clay had seen.

Alpha and Beta moved up to face the robots, adopting the vertices of a cube: Rachel in front of Li, Natasha in front of Apple, Timmis behind Clay, Izawa behind Vera. On one side, Su Park led her fighters in, in a flexible octahedron, with Ree in the back. On the other, the ten fighters of the Fyaa and the Primoids came on in a sort of spread W. Clouds of missiles were fired off, tiny bloodless peasant militia charging together and mutually annihilating.

They came on. They came on.

Two sets of robotic fighters, a dozen each, zeroed in on Alpha and Beta. One near the front began to gleam pink on Clay’s screen.

“Bismuth, bismuth,” cried Rachel. The whole cube dropped, then flipped upward. The lead robotic fighter blew up, its eleven brethren scattering and then concentrating again as the wave of radiation spread outward. Alpha and Beta, still flying down and on, were past them, and when the poisonous gamma ray wave reached them, it had diluted to the point that their ships’ skins stopped it.

Before them were the patrol boats. Four closed in and began to gleam bright blue in Clay’s display.

“Larry, Larry, Larry,” called Rachel.

The eight Ghosts opened fire. Their range was still too far—for their old lasers. The new, refined lasers, an Errhatzky and Poto Wall cooperation, made their light speed journey on a very tight beam, and lost almost no energy en route. One by one, over the course of half a second, the four patrol boats exploded, perhaps five seconds earlier than intended. The gamma rays were excessive, but again, their intended victims were already out of range.

The Ghosts bent their course upward again. One cruiser, then another, swerved to block them. Clay and Timmis found one in their faces and blew open its bridge; Vera left the other as scattering molecules. The heavy cruisers were next.

To their left, Park and Ree were behind their two patrol boats and had them disabled. Their two dozen robotic fighters were down to three, also disabled: Bain, Leith, Aliya and Grohl had let their exploders explode, and had come back in to ravage the rest. Park’s group now turned to deal with those of the middle group of fighters that had not exploded or caused their neighbors to explode, and that was looking exactly like all the previous fights. To the right, two of the Primoid fighters were badly damaged, but had weathered a gamma-ray-rich blast. Two Fyaa fighters flew guard on them, warding off or killing off more Ngugma robot attackers. The other three pairs had accelerated through the patrol ships and were into the cruisers.

“Okay,” called Rachel, “Sophocles. Sophocles.”

Rachel and Li swooped left, firing off more missiles at their chosen heavy cruiser. Natasha and Vera swerved right, and simply bypassed the missile wave to plant their wide-beam lasers in the drive section of their heavy cruiser. It blew up magnificently.

Clay, Timmis, Apple and Izawa hopscotched past to the right-hand battleship.

Clay chose this moment to step in the manure bucket. He slightly over-maneuvered, and then he was out of line with Timmis and they were both under a withering fire from the line of gun emplacements up the side of the big ship. The two of them were blasting away as hard as they could, and letting loose with all the guitar-pick missiles they could manage: explosions and rips began to appear all along the hull ahead of them. But it only took a couple of seconds for Clay’s flectors to get wasted, and then he took a hit to his combat systems and another to life support. He could see stars through part of his hatch. Cursing, he pulled back away into open space and looked all around for enemies he could no longer shoot at.

Timmis was spinning out near him, firing away as he did so. He stopped firing: he could no longer be sure what his targets were doing. His engines were fried; he just about managed to stop the spinning before his computer restarted. Clay looked around again, then scooted after him. “Timmis,” he sent, “Timmis, come in.”

Behind them, Apple and Izawa were hooting as they traveled the length of the battleship at a distance of about a meter, cutting it deeply and leaving explosions behind them wherever they hit something sensitive. It was so intent on killing them that it was shooting itself, and its robotic fighters, emerging from bays along the way, were falling victim to the two Ghosts, to the big ship’s guns, or to one another.

“Clay, what,” Timmis sent back, “what, my drive—!”

“Just sit tight.” Thinking of the first time they had met the mouthholes—the first time they had met alien creatures, the first time Clay had saved someone in space—he shut out the battle and set a course to coincide with Timmis. Both Ghosts were damaged, but it looked like both hatches were largely intact. More shots were flying about, there was an explosion a few kilometers to the right, then a running series of explosions, but Clay ignored them. A hundred meters, ten, one. Ten centimeters. Clunk.

Clunk, clunk-click. He was thinking, not of Natasha, but of shuttle docking in Earth orbit. Nine to five job.

“Get your hatch open,” called Clay.

Timmis asked no question. He got the hatch open. In a few seconds, they were hitched, sitting across from each other in their suits in a doubled, if somewhat compromised, fighter.

“I have engine,” said Clay, pulling away from the still-exploding battleship. “You have weapons, right?”

“I have weapons,” said Timmis, with a smile visible through his visor.

“Then let’s try those new missiles. Shall we?”

“Target?”

“Freighters. See?”

Somehow, under guard of four cruisers, a heavy cruiser and a whole slew of robotic missiles, three unarmed freighters had moved forward to within a few thousand kilometers of the allies’ big ships. The Fyaa cruisers were engaged in a fierce but inconclusive blast fight with the Ngugma cruisers, which were getting closer and closer; the freighters were right in their shadows.

“They’re not within range yet,” said Clay. “But if those are full of the same stuff those patrol boats had, they could wreck our entire fleet.”

“So,” said Timmis, “targeting. Shall I?”

“Fire at will,” said Clay. “And can you get mine fired too?”

Timmis smiled wider. Twelve tardigrade-sized missiles shot off toward the left-most freighter, then twelve more toward the middle one, and then, from Clay’s Ghost, twelve more at the right one.

Ten seconds later, the left freighter, still 1400 km from the nearest Fyaa cruiser, went supernova. Half a second after that, the middle one went, and then the right one. The Fyaa and Primoid cruisers peeled off like they were fighters; Honshu and Tasmania did the same.

Timmis and Clay flipped around. The other battleship was in a dogfight with three fighters, and its last heavy cruiser was chasing down two more. Bonnie Bain was floating in space in her vac suit; Anand Ree’s Ghost went dead in space. But Su Park, coming out of nowhere, put her wide angle laser directly in the heavy cruiser’s bridge. She held down the gun for second after second until the heavy simply gave up and exploded noiselessly, scattering its residents into space.

Beyond, Leith, Grohl and Aliya dodged around the far end of the battleship. Leith went down, spinning out with significant damage. Grohl had her flectors blasted off, and then the back end of her fighter. Mizra Aliya, the colony ship explorer pilot from the Siberian Pakistani colony, was alone in the face of a ship a thousand times as big as her Ghost in every dimension.

She dodged. She spun. She swerved and flipped. And for each flector she lost, she put a photon shot in the same hole on the battleship.

Ten or twelve of those, and the battleship’s drive was glowing. Missiles stopped emerging, guns stopped firing: now vac-suited Ngugma were emerging, floating away as fast as they could.

Aliya hit the throttle, stopped on a dime, grabbed Grohl in a hatch-to-hatch embrace, and hit the throttle again. They were away, accelerating at maximum, five kilometers, ten, twenty, fifty. A hundred and twenty kilometers. The battleship blew up behind them.

Space was empty again. Spiral Arch was theirs.

7.

The invading fleet approached the starbase gingerly. It orbited the largest of the three stars, about where the third planet would be if there were more than two planets. Any remaining Ngugma ships remained in their bays and docks. A pair of older-model cruisers and three large, but not giant, freighters could be seen, attached along the rim of the base.

A series of demands and threats from the invaders alternated with conciliatory but unconvincing messages from the station crew. To pass the time, the invaders began putting holes in the freighters at dock. Presently, the station crew seemed to recognize that the invaders were not going to be conciliated. Ngugma like to remain alive, just as humans, Fyaa and Primoids like to remain alive. The dialog became much more constructive.

“You will move all personnel to living quarters, and leave your main control room sealed off,” Park instructed the Ngugma, and they did so. “You will send us schematics of your entire station,” she told them, and that was done. Then Padfoot, Hhmvyvya, Kalkar and a couple of Primoids went over the schematics and compared them with what their own sensors could tell from outside, as they approached to within a hundred thousand kilometers.

“Be aware,” Park told the locals, “that we are prepared to kill all of you. We have that capacity. If you do not want to die, then stay exactly where you are and do nothing that would in any way affect our use of your control room.”

“Commander,” said Natasha, “the Primoids think we can do what we need to with just what’s in the auxiliary cargo control room up here. It’s got the main control between it and where the Ngugma are.”

“Exactly,” said Park. “And send Apple and Izawa out, better send Rachel and Clay too, and put some holes in the main control, because I think it needs a little ventilation.”

“You want it open to space,” said Rachel.

“Just don’t damage anything else, if you can avoid it.”

“Can do, Commander,” said Clay. “Rache, she called us by our first names.”

“Kleiner,” said Park, “you’re going in with Hhmvyvya and however many Primoids and Errhatzky you think you need. Can you be off in an hour?”

“We can be off in five minutes,” said Natasha. “The Primoid cruiser can get us there, if it’s okay for us to blow open the cargo airlock.”

“It’s fine,” said Park. “Can you be back in an hour? I’m leery of radiation leaks, whether accidental or intentional on the part of our hosts.”

“We’ll watch out,” said Natasha. “Primoids are resistant to radioactivity. Did you know that?”

“Well, you’re not,” Park said, almost in chorus with Vera, Clay and Rachel.

An hour later, the expedition to the Ngugma starbase had returned. They had plenty of information, and, thanks to Apple and Izawa, supervised by Rachel and Clay in loco parentis, the main and auxiliary control rooms were empty of air. The invaders’ fleet was already putting distance between itself and the station. There was quite a crowd in the Honshu bridge, where images of just a few of the documents downloaded from the Ngugma were displayed, and translated, on the bridge screens.

“There’s a lot to digest,” said Padfoot. “How long do we have before we decide where to go next?”

“We stay here a week,” said Park. “We can go put our feet down on an outer planetoid. We’re a hundred plus light years from Bluehorse and fifty from the next Ngugma population center, this place we’re calling Pentestella. And eleven thousand years from the war zone. I think we can afford a week.” Everyone noticeably relaxed. “But we know where we’re going next. Some of us are going back, to Fyatskaab, then Bluehorse, or Primoid Center. Some of us are going on. To Pentestella.”

“Wait,” said Clay. “Who’s going back and who’s going on?”

“The Primoids are going back, they told me that,” said Natasha.

“The Fyaa cruisers are going back,” said Skzyyn by Clay’s ear. “But Dzvezyets and I are going on a little further.”

“And we’re going on, Hunkalicious,” said Rachel. “We are going all the way.”