Friends of the Sky

1.

“Well, hubby-licious. We’re on our way.”

“To the middle of the galaxy,” said Clay. They lay back in each other’s Ghosts, naked and very relaxed. Their combined ship was accelerating past 90% of the speed of light. Around them, a hundred kilometers this side or that, four more pairs of Ghost 204s flew, like barrels full of dwarves bobbing on the river of space: Li and Timmis, Vera and Tasha, Apple and Izawa, Millie and Miz. Behind them somewhere, Tasmania rumbled toward light speed, alongside an explorer cruiser with six Ngugma crew.

“Just us,” said Rachel, leaning toward him for a kiss. “How do you feel?”

“It’s a lot to take in,” said Clay. “Let’s see. My suit chronometer says it’s been 141 days and about 19 hours since I got in the Ghost in the plaza in front of the U of Canada in Bouvier Square on Bluehorse. And yet out there where it isn’t all moving at the speed of light, the year is what?” He poked his screen. “It is now the year 2853. And I have it in my log that we left Bluehorse, four and a half months ago in the year 2646. It’s 519 years since we left Earth, what, a year and a half ago, maybe?” He looked at Rachel. “So there’s that.”

“Yeah,” said Rachel. “We literally could be 11,000 years in the future in a matter of months. And the circle of people who have the same chronology as us is getting smaller and smaller.”

“It’s not getting any smaller than it is now,” said Clay. “This is The Fleet. As long as we all keep to The Vow.”

Rachel held him with her blue-green eyes. Such interesting eyes, Clay thought, and breasts. And everything else. She got a little grin, as she read his mind. She gave him a glance down and up, then back to his blue eyes. “We will keep the vow.” They kissed. “But if I were going to fly across the Milky Way with just one other fighter pilot, it would be you. How’s that for a fantasy?”

“I think it’s romantic,” said Clay. “We flew to Earth and back. For our honeymoon. We could see the cities of the Sagittarius Arm for our 20,000th Anniversary.”

“If it hasn’t been conquered by the Planet Fungus from the Core.” They kissed again. “We make a good team.”

“The best,” said Clay. He laughed. “Park’s still in there, in my brain, I can still hear her voice.”

“Mr. Gilbert,” said Rachel in her Park voice, “do I need to use sarcasm on you again?”

“No, no, please. Actually, go ahead. ‘Chide me, dear stone, that I might say again, thou art Hermione.’ Or something like that.”

“Is that Shakespeare? Or J. K. Rowling?” Clay nodded and shrugged. Rachel kissed him again. “The ones we love never really leave us,” she quoted. “Ha! They’re still in there nagging us. How do you think the younglings are handling it?”

“They were obviously thrilled,” said Clay. “Oh to be young again.”

A hundred kilometers away, Izawa was saying, “I’m scared crapless, Gemma. Aren’t you?”

“I feel like I just jumped off a cliff,” said Apple. Their Ghosts were joined and they had stowed their vac suits some time ago; they lying across each other gazing at different bits of screen. “It just hit me how few people I know.”

“It’s you and me, and the rest of the fighter pilots, and the freighter crew. That’s what we’ve got. I mean, I was and I remain really excited about this, and we all sort of jumped right in, but are we really going to be okay?”

“I guess,” said Apple, “I wouldn’t be here unless what we have now was all I thought we needed.”

A hundred kilometers in another direction, Vera was napping against Natasha, who was playing chess—with Fonnggark. It had never played chess before, and it was picking it up quickly, but not so quickly that Natasha had anything to worry about. Are you sure you want to do that? was one thing Natasha texted a lot.

I am not sure about any thing, Fonnggark texted back. I had thought the bishop was better than the night. But your two nights are better than my bishop and my rook.

Knights, Natasha sent back. They’re subtle. You’ll learn.

Ah, sent the Ngugma captain. Take the middle is important?

Very.

A long pause. Then: But Natasha. You make it so I cannot move. Nonetheless, Fonnggark made a move. Natasha asked if it really wanted to go there, and it signified that it didn’t have any better idea. Natasha then took its rook. It sent some sort of indecipherable Ngugma emoticon. You have beaten me again. Is chess why you are so very good as pilots?

Oh, honey, sent Natasha, you need to play Set.

A hundred kilometers from Natasha and Vera, Li and Timmis were playing a game that looked like a cartoon about a plumber and a princess fighting an army of evil turtles, laughing and kissing as they captured flowers and mushrooms. A hundred kilometers from there, a passionate interlude was just ending.

“By God, Millicent,” said Mizra Aliya. “By God.”

“Oh, what about him,” said Millie Grohl, still catching her breath. “Or her.”

“Well,” said Mizra, “we knew we got on well enough from when we went to Tau Ceti together.”

“Our first date,” said Millie. “But that was a seventy light year date. This is eleven thousand.”

Miz thought about that and said, “I was a colony ship fighter pilot. We flew about the Moon, the Moon of Earth, you never visited that, did you?”

“No, my moon’s the little one we have at Bluehorse.”

“Oh, Millie. I swear Earth’s Moon could get larger sometimes. I remember it seeming to be huge. Seeing the Moon in the night sky over Aghabad. Then going there—to the Moon—I couldn’t believe it. Oh, it’s all so long ago. We flew about the Moon, hoping Commander Su Park would think we were just good enough. I believe I was the last on the list.”

“Oh, you were not.”

“No, no, I am quite sure I barely made the cut. Yet I was in the battle when we defended the Canada, I got my first kill defending the landing. I was some short girl in Aghabad, other kids made fun of me. And here I was blowing up enemy fighters. Real enemy fighters. And pretty close to getting blown up myself. Over a brand new planet, eighty light years from Earth. And then they assigned me to go to Tau Ceti, you know, and they gave me this colony ship recruit.”

“Tau Ceti was pretty impressive,” said Millie. “Not that I’d want to live there. It’s not, you know, space. That colony ship recruit. That was my first mission!”

“That was the best mission ever. I suppose it didn’t hurt that I fell in love.”

“No,” said Millie. “No, I don’t think that hurt at all. Even if you’re somehow 90 years older than me. And this?”

“This? Well. Seventy-odd light years? We thought it was so far, Millie. Well, we’re four times that far from Bluehorse now. And we’re only getting started. We have approximately 10,600 light years to go yet.”

“And we’re,” said Millie Grohl, “99% of light speed.”

Miz took a long breath, fixing Millie with her brown eyes: she looked like she was about to jump off a diving board. “I love it,” she said. “I love my life. I love light speed. I know I’m crazy. I love flying ten thousand light years down the Orion Arm. I love everything about this. I love it.” She laughed. “Let’s go all the way to the other end of the Orion Arm. I want to do that with you.”

“Is it a date?” said Millie.

“It’s a date,” said Miz.

The little fleet flew on across the blackest of seas, further and further from the planets of their birth.

2.

The equation for the difference in clocks traveling at relativistic speed has two factors: one is the actual distance, and the other goes to zero as speed goes to 100% of light speed. But no matter how fast or slow time passes, it takes ten times as long to go ten times as far. At a cruising speed of 99.999998% of the speed of light, a journey of twenty light years, which would cause twenty years to pass in the non-relativistic community, is felt as a 35-hour jaunt to those inside the moving space ship, train, elevator, or whatever. A journey of two hundred light years would be felt as taking 350 hours: fourteen and a half days.

The first humans to have spent two weeks in a small capsule together were Jim Lovell and Frank Borman, in the Gemini program, when orbiting Planet Earth was still considered quite the feat. They remained friends after their mission was over, but it would be fair to say that they did not enjoy being cooped up together for a fortnight. They joked on their return that they’d spent so much time together they ought to get married.

The ten paired-up Ghost 204s of the mission up the Orion Arm, however, were all, more or less, married couples. And somehow or other, without anyone going to any effort to ensure it, they were all more or less compatible, sexually and otherwise. It’s not as if two weeks passed like nothing. But two weeks passed, and Rachel and Clay lay back, in a lazy naked embrace, and watched a new system appear out of the mist in front of them.

“I love this part,” said Clay. “I always have and I think I always will.”

“Oh, me too,” said Rachel. “So many possibilities. Is there life? Are there assholes? Will we have to fight off a bunch of assholes?”

“How many assholes will Vera be forced to atomize?”

“Or,” said Rachel, “is some invading species tearing up your home planet?”

“Falls under the previous category.”

“Who’s going to be having babies? Did you know Shawna’s pregnant? Vera thinks Irah’s going to have a baby too.”

“Oh jeez,” said Clay. “Vera?”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“Just get back to me if Padfoot ever gets pregnant. We need about ten more of her.”

They sighed and laughed and adjusted and smooched. They could have been lying in bed in a hotel room watching video. “What’s the name of the system, anyway?” asked Clay.

“Ffvozzho,” said Rachel. “And the calendar year is 3044. Your personal chronology has advanced by 349.5 hours since we passed 99% on the way out of Pentestella.”

“What do we know?”

“Well, at Pentestella, they informed us that Ffvozzho would not be attacking us. They used a word we translate as friendly, but who knows exactly what that means.”

“Okay.” They watched the system: a single star, in its red giant phase; a single terrestrial planet in the middle of the very stretched Goldilocks zone; a trio of gas giants, like Jupiter-sized thugs waiting to beat up the little kid when he gets out of school. A major space station began to appear, occupying a solar orbit just outside that of the terrestrial planet. “How long till we can contact our compadres?”

“Couple hours,” said Rachel. “Whatever shall we do?”

A couple of hours later, the ten fighters, the armed freighter, and the Ngugma explorer-cruiser were in contact. The fighters assumed their Oort Cloud pattern: two were on long scout (Apple and Izawa), two were on local patrol at any given time, and the rest were aboard Tasmania.

“Fonnggark is about to contact the local authorities,” said Kalkar as Clay and Rachel entered his bridge. “No, there has been no contact between them before this. They’re behaving just the way they said they would behave.”

“But we aren’t entirely trusting them, right?” asked Vera, hanging with Natasha on a sashay bar out of the way.

“Not entirely,” said Kalkar. “Okay, let’s open comm, Mr. Vindu.”

Ram Vindu opened communications with the Ngugma explorer, and they all got to listen to Fonnggark’s message to the star base. Natasha’s word by word translation seemed pretty anodyne, and the translated text from the Ngugma and from the Tasmania computer confirmed: Fonnggark was saying hello and requesting safe passage for the fleet, not sending a secret message.

They were four light hours from the big space station when the message was sent, and seven hours later, they were three light hours away when they got the reply: granted, please stay outside the orbits of the gas giants. The Ngugma of Ffvozzho had a significant space fleet—three battleships, five battlecruisers, half a dozen heavy cruisers, more than a dozen cruisers, four docked freighters of size comparable to Big Fourteen, a good fifty patrol ships. They also had hundreds of tugs, liners, small freighters, and assorted service vessels, and thousands of personal spacecraft. None of these looked like they were going anywhere near the orbits of the gas giants.

The system was more industrial than Pentestella, which in comparison seemed rather bourgeois: it was Bath or Saco to Pentestella’s Brunswick, in the Maine municipal analogy that sprang immediately to Clay’s mind. On the map of the Orion Arm, the Earthlings could finally see that they had made progress: they were two hundred light years closer to the far end of the Arm, where it tangentially brushes the Scutum-Centaurus Arm just as the latter emerges from the Milky Way’s central bar; they were now almost 400 light years from Earth. That meant that the progress bar of their journey up the Arm was almost to 4%.

“And that means,” said Kalkar as he and Ram Vindu sat with Clay and Rachel in the commissary later, “they’re a bit more on a war footing here. But not unfriendly, given that.”

“We think they don’t believe we’re here to help?” asked Clay.

“More like, they don’t see how ten fighters and a beat-up old armored merchant is going to make any difference. They haven’t had to fight those ten fighters, obviously, or they’d know.”

“But they’ve heard of our exploits,” said Rachel.

“Evidently. And thus, whether they believe in your legend or not, they’re not going to screw with us. And we’re not going to screw with them.”

“So this is it, for Ffvozzho?” said Clay. “We just cruise on to the next place?”

“Where is the next place?” asked Rachel.

“I guess so, Clay,” said Kalkar. “Unless you want to stop and do some shopping. Pick up some souvenirs.”

“The next place,” said Ram Vindu, “is actually a ruins system. Captain Fonnggark informs us that we might actually be able to land and, you know, stretch our legs, or tentacles or whatever.”

“How far?” asked Natasha.

“Five hundred light years and six,” said Kalkar. “Two hundred was no problem, so we’re going to up it to five.”

“Apple and Izawa should be back with us in about eight hours,” said Rachel. “They haven’t picked up anything untoward.”

“So this was Ffvozzho,” said Clay. “Quiet little burg. If only the whole trip was going to be like this.” He smiled at Ram Vindu, then Rachel. “But it won’t be. Life would be too uninteresting.”

“Can’t have that,” said Kalkar.

They sipped their coffee and nibbled on reconstituted croissants, and their ships glided on, just beginning to accelerate again, never having slowed past 5% of light speed.

3.

Gemma Izawa and Maria Apple were back in the Tasmania bay before the big ship was past 12%. The fighter pilots convened a meeting, with Kalkar and his pilot and Padfoot, in the bay control room.

“Okay, people,” said Rachel, once she felt the noise level had risen enough. Everyone shut up, not exactly the way they would shut up for Su Park. “So we’re making a 500 light year trip this time. It’s the longest we’ve ever done. So that’s not quite what I wanted to ask you all about. Because we’re going so far in one jump, even with time dilation, even at 99.9999 nine eight percent, it’s still going to take us 36, 37 days, and that doesn’t count maybe four days accelerating and four days decelerating.”

“What’s the alternative?” asked Li Zan. “Go to 99.99999 nine? Do we like to do six nines past the decimal?”

“We didn’t like that all the way back when we pulled into Gliese 370,” said Natasha. “You remember that, right, Clay?”

He blush-smirked. Yes, he remembered: Natasha getting whacked by the first mouthhole they ever saw, Clay saving her life, a brief affair ensuing. Rachel smiled at all this unspoken history all before she and Clay were a thing. She said, “We felt, when we went back to Earth, six nines past the decimal was dangerous.”

“But Captain Fonnggark,” said Captain Kalkar, “feels it’s routine.”

“It might actually be routine,” said Ram Vindu, “for the Ngugma. Remember that Big Fourteen did something funny near light speed. That spacecraft went well past six nines.”

“So, two questions,” said Clay.

“Can we do it,” said Vera, “and should we do it?”

“And how much time does it save us?” asked Li.

“Okay,” said Ram Vindu, “I have that right here in my tablet of answers. At 99.999998, five nines and an eight, 37 days. At 99.999999, six nines, it’s 26 days. At 99.9999999, seven nines after the decimal point, it’s just over eight days.”

“Seriously? That much? Let’s do that.”

“The Ngugma say it’s okay, right?” asked Gemma Izawa.

“My head is spinning,” said Natasha. “Trusting the Ngugma. Flying six nines past the decimal. Seven.” Several people started to reply, but she raised a hand. “I’m okay,” she said. “Worst case, we shoot some mouthholes. Do the Ngugma have a problem with that?”

“The Ngugma,” said Kalkar, “well, Fonnggark, says they often have to shoot a few mouthholes, or sort of scootch them out of the way.”

“So the mouthholes aren’t Ngugma allies?” asked Timmis. “I thought that was a theory.”

“It was,” said Clay, “or actually, more of just a hypothesis.”

“The Pirate Code, you know,” said Apple. “It’s more a set of guidelines,” said Izawa.

“Is that what we are, pirates?” asked Mizra Aliya.

“Arr, seven nines past the decimal it is,” said Millie Grohl. “Buck up, me hearties. I’ve got me laser blaster.”

Vera smirked at Clay. “Yup,” she said, “the kids are growing up and turning into us.”

Even at “seven nines past the decimal,” their apparent travel time (sorry, Dr. Einstein, I mean the travel time that they experienced in their frame of reference) was eight days accelerating and decelerating, and eight days running with the photons and the neutrinos. The fighters were inclined to run in front of the Tasmania, but as the ships began to approach 20% of the speed of light, Captain Kalkar informed the pilots that he and Captain Fonnggark had come up with a plan. Rachel was inclined to go along, as was Li, so the fighters, paired up as before, took a position in the shadow of Tasmania, about a kilometer behind, with the Ngugma ship about five hundred meters in front of the freighter.

It was a swift flight, and one of unprecedented distance, but it had something in common with several of their previous sojourns in the land of photons.

“Okay,” Clay said as they crested, cut engines and began to coast. “This is already weird enough.”

Rachel and Clay watched the screens that wrapped around them. Random voids opened up here, then there, then over here, and slowly swept backwards, carrying their wrong-end-of-the-telescope views of something, something, with them.

“Eh, it’s the usual,” said Rachel. They watched for a full minute. “Turn it off.”

“Okay,” said Clay, switching the screens to gentle views of the rolling Parallelogram Sea. They watched that for a minute. “Think the young ones are processing all this okay?”

“Oh, Miz and Millie went all the way to Tau Ceti. Aliya told me once on Bluehorse they pushed their Ghosts to six nines past the decimal and they saw all kinds of stuff they didn’t like. What about Apple and Izawa?”

“Well,” said Clay, “they’ll confront the mysteries of the universe.”

“Yeah. Maybe it’ll get them to actually get married. Kalkar can do that, you know.”

“Heck, we can marry them. We married each other.”

Whatever the voids hid, it did not reach out and take any of the ten fighters or the freighter or cruiser. As they decelerated past 40%, they did begin to notice objects moving near them, but these seemed unable to close on the little fleet. At one point, there were at least ten mouthholes bobbing along around them, but the bow shock and energy chaos of the explorer cruiser followed by the armored freighter seemed to push them outward, off the path. As the next system coalesced before them, two mouthholes managed to get through, but Tasmania’s gunners blew them both away before the fighters even got a look at them.

The system before them looked almost like the one Clay and Rachel had been born in. A little too much like: its second of ten planets, the one place with liquid water and ambient oxygen, was pocked with deep holes, craters and trenches, and an inner asteroid belt had been pulverized for its metals. There was no indication of sentient life forms, though there were old tech signs like rusty beams, abandoned highways, and discarded plastic. But there was plenty of life, in its way.

Rachel took advantage of her position as senior commander, and assigned herself and Clay and Apple and Izawa to land on the planet, while the rest of the fleet was still approaching, and make sure everything was safe.

“Ngugma were definitely here,” said Clay, as they climbed out on a young beach along the shore of one of the bore-hole oceans. They tested, then pushed their helmets back and off their heads. The aging yellow sun shone warm, low in a turquoise evening. It was pleasantly hot, and the air was pleasantly oxygen-rich. Something like insects or birds flew and sang, and the wind blew around, strong but aimless.

“Well, yeah,” said Rachel. “There’s a plaque, you know. Orbiting beyond the outermost of the ice giants.”

“They weren’t the only ones who were here,” said Gemma. “There’s loads of ancient tech signs. I make it forty million, maybe fifty million years ago.”

They stood looking out over the sea. Then they turned to the shore, and up into the hills behind, and up to the sky.

“The archive we got from the depot,” said Rachel, “says that the Ngugma conquered this place 55 million years ago. So you were close on that one. They mined it out in about a thousand years, and left it. They had a base here.”

“Why don’t they have one now?” asked Apple.

They all just stood there, looking up and around. “Another thing we don’t know,” said Rachel.

They stood looking around. Apple pushed her helmet off and said to Izawa, “Hey Gemma.”

“Hey Maria.”

“Look,” said Apple. “A beach.”

4.

The year, according to outside observers, was 3550, and eight fighter pilots ran and played naked on the strange beaches of the nameless planet. Two more stood, naked, on a worn down crag of a boulder which stuck up out of the water just offshore, just before the drop-off into the borehole. A bearded man and a woman with dark brown hair, dressed in simple black robes and ploofy hats made just for the occasion, stood before them, trying not to look either too serious or not serious enough.

The two naked women spent five minutes with their eyes closed. They opened them and looked at the bearded man, who had been studiously not watching them. He handed the redhead a lit pipe, who handed it to her black-haired partner, who handed it to the brown-haired woman, and the four of them passed it around three times.

“Shall we start?” asked Captain Kalkar.

“You have everything you need?” asked Padfoot.

“We know our vows,” said Gemma Izawa. “I have her ring on my pinky, and she has my ring on her pinky.”

“These are the ones from Fonnggark? They’ll do?”

“They’ll do great,” said Maria Apple. “They’re titanium!”

“You’re ready for the attendees.”

Izawa and Apple looked at each other, then up at the westering sun. “Yeah,” said Apple, “we’re ready.”

Kalkar pulled back his robe’s voluminous sleeve and spoke into his wristband. “Will the wedding party please attend the brides,” he intoned.

The playing pilots stopped, not quite all at the same moment, and then with laughter and cries of excitement they ran out into the shallow water and climbed up onto the boulder. And then they stood around, naked in the sunlight, while Maria Apple and Gemma Izawa promised to be faithful and true, in sickness and health, on planets or in space, and travel to the ends of the galaxy together, and nothing may them part, death be damned. And then the ten pilots, and Kalkar and Padfoot, who had come down in spare, beat-up Ghost 204s, zipped back up into space and headed for the next destination.

5.

In the year 4167, Clay Gilbert and his best friends, his only remaining friends, really, came to Shzhannahr. They had unwanted company, but not unexpected company.

“Mouthholes,” said Kalkar in the ears of the fighter pilots, who zipped along in the Tasmania wake like ten goslings following Mom. “Piles of ’em.”

So they cleared the mouthholes out of their way, exactly as they had at the previous system. They took no damage and blasted or shouldered their way through at least sixty of the things: Timmis got a kill, Apple got a kill, and when two bounded through between Clay and Natasha, they each got a kill. The rest shot away into oblivion behind them.

And then the little fleet was decelerating into a new system, the one the Ngugma called Shzhannahr. Ten planets spun around a hot little blue star: six of them giants, one of those close in and losing material in a long spiraling ribbon into the star. The fourth planet out was a watery terrestrial, and that carried the Ngugma colony. Fonnggark had an advisory for them.

“These,” said Fonnggark, “are not like those of Fflohhvakohh, Pentestella.”

“Not the friendly type?” called Rachel.

“Not, as you say, the friendly type,” the Ngugma explorer captain replied, in its deadpan basso profundo, and in the usual flawless English that so many of the Ngugma seemed to have mastered. “This vessel has flown here before. Our function is that of message bearer to and from, you say, Pentestella.” PawntohSTAWLLaw. “We ascertain,” and it paused, savoring that word as well, “we ascertain the condition at these forward systems, and return to inform Fflohhvakohh, and the one you call Spiral Arch. We pass through Shzhannahr again and again. Perhaps it is the nearness to, to the bad.”

“We notice a lot of military ships here,” said Kalkar on the same line. “I have: a couple battleships, something even bigger than a battleship—!”

“That would be the Khohhzzhof, it is very big indeed, yeah,” said Fonnggark. Clay couldn’t tell if Khohhzzhof was the name of the ship or their word for the kind of ship it was. It was certainly big, like three or four battleships welded together, but it would still fit inside Big Fourteen. “They build ships here, of course, as at Vannaag Vul. But all of these here go to the war at the edge of the empty lanes.”

“You mean,” Li put in, “that Shzhannahr builds fleets that actually go right off and fight your enemy?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said the Ngugma. “And they crew these ships.”

“With Ngugma?” asked Rachel.

“Yeah, yes, yeah, sure, but also with ogkutthoz, with, yes, the subordinate race here. They serve many roles on the biggest vessels.”

“Captain Fonnggark,” said Clay, “do these ships that go off to fight at the front, do they come back?”

“Usually,” said Fonnggark. “Some are lost.” It turned its attention to its console—the Ngugma made kick-ass consoles. Then it turned to a junior Ngugma and said something in their own deep, buzzy language. Then it hauled itself up and said, to the video, “And now I need to end the transmission for an hour or two. We have five diagnostics we must run. I think you will not wish to stop here, we should continue in our course to the next destination.”

“All right,” said Kalkar, “over and out, Captain.”

“Over and out, Captain.” The transmission ended and the furry face of the Ngugma captain disappeared.

But it wasn’t done communicating yet. Thirty seconds later, Clay and Rachel were lazily discussing the conversation, and a closed call came in. They both tapped it on, and there was Fonnggark, in its captain’s quarters or whatever.

“Commander Andros,” it said, “Clay Gilbert, I need to say more to you, and you need to tell me whether this should be said to Captain Kalkar and the others.”

“Whaaat?” was Rachel’s response.

Fonnggark barely waited for her to finish her one long syllable before it said, “We had best not stop here in any case. The local people can be very hostile, they lose many to the war. They are hostile to us, and we are well known to them.”

“We?”

“We of Pentestella, of Fflohvakohh. Not so much you, ah, you would say aliens. They do not know any who are aliens, except this thing they shoot.”

“They lose many?” asked Clay.

“It is worse than many think, at Fflohhvakohh. The enemy has sent invasions into the space ahead along the arm, several times. They have infected entire systems, and we struggle to eradicate these infections. Even Shzhannahr has been attacked, they lost millions, it was, ahhh, in your time units, perhaps ten million years in the past. So we build ships here and send them to fight, and their crews come mostly from Shzhannahr, and yes, many are lost.” It leaned back and threw its upper arms up. “So I needed to tell someone.”

“We can tell Kalkar,” said Rachel. “So they don’t trust you, because you’re from Flovako? Pentestella?”

“I think I get why, don’t you?” said Clay.

“Oh, I get why. You know, it’s another problem with running a big space empire. Okay, Captain, we will discuss this with Kalkar ourselves. Do you think we’re all okay to make another long jump? It’s over five hundred light years. You have the coordinates?”

“The flight should be no problem,” said Fonnggark. “We may pick up sphericals, but you appear very capable of dealing with them. Ah, mouth-holes. It is a mouth, and a, ah, asshole.” It paused to savor this. “Assholes,” it said, and it sort of laughed. “Ah, I know the next system a little. It is empty, but it once was a major system of the Ngugma.”

“What happened to it?” asked Clay.

Fonnggark turned all its little eye-tentacles on him. It said, “The same thing that happened to the planet where you were born. Different, but the same.” It didn’t shut off, but turned half away and began checking settings and data. Clay watched it for a little longer, thinking, here’s the very second Ngugma I’ve ever trusted.

6.

“The year is 4701,” said Natasha in the big square on the side of Rachel and Clay’s combined view screen, as the little fleet decelerated into yet another star system in the loose empire of the Ngugma. “The future is more future than it’s ever been.”

“We have two stars,” said Clay, “a large yellow, and a compact one, collapsed, it’s gaining material from the large star, just a little at a time. Can’t see the smaller ones yet, but we have a couple of gas giants circling the large star. Surprised the compact object isn’t disrupting the orbits more. Yeah, there’s definitely a terrestrial on an inside orbit. Yeah, we left Earth in 2334? What day is it, exactly? I was born in 2305. I’m nearly two thousand four hundred years old.”

“Guys,” said Natasha, “I can’t get my head around it. Is that bad?”

“You mean you can’t fathom being two thousand years in the future? Heck, try this on for size. Back in the old days, when we were boogying down at Club Zoot, we were closer to the birth of Jesus than we were to today. By the time we get where we’re going, you could say the same about the last ice age.”

“Or the next one,” said Vera. They both watched their readouts. She said, “Hey. No mouthholes.”

“Don’t know,” said Clay. “Okay. You’re right, no mouthholes. You guys get any mouthholes?”

“Scans on a broad range of frequencies,” called Emily Gray from the Tasmania, “show no mouthholes. There is an Ngugma spacecraft: no, it’s an unmanned satellite, orbiting the outer of the two giants.”

“Nothing orbiting the terrestrial,” called Ram Vindu.

“How come we can’t see that yet?” asked Clay.

“Padfoot tweaked their sensors,” said Vera. “Something to do with putting antennae at far ends of the freighter. Better res. We can’t do that, we’re too small.”

“We could join together and make an interferometer,” said Clay.

Rachel said, “Ooh. Interferometer!”

“Any life or tech?” asked Kalkar.

“No tech,” said Gray. “Life, um—!”

“If I may,” called Fonnggark, who liked the phrase a lot, “it would depend on one’s definitions.”

Twelve hours later, Tasmania, Fonnggark’s ship, and the ten Ghosts were coming into orbit of the outer gas giant, taking up a position near but out of radiation range of the robotic station: just being safe. The robotic station sent a signal every ten hours or so in the direction of Shzhannahr, the photons embarking on a 500-year journey. There was no other live technology.

Aliya and Grohl were sent out on patrol around the immediate vicinity of the terrestrial planet. The rest of the fighter pilots assembled on the Tasmania bridge. While Emily Gray flew the ship, Kalkar, Vindu, Padfoot, Bell, and Jack Dott and the eight pilots watched the left side big screen, where the high-res video showed fine detail on the fuzzy, brown face of Fonnggark, with little moveable white teeth all around its round mouth, and little wriggly tentacles with eyes on them sticking out of tufts of fur, as if its hair were home to creepy worms.

“Well, Captain,” said Kalkar. “I can tell you’re bursting with information. We can’t even decide if there’s actually life on the inner planet. And the station, it’s not really built to house anyone, it’s robotic. We don’t even pick up bacteria on that thing.”

“You should land and see it for yourself,” said Fonnggark. “It is called Ghhokhur, Ghhokhur-1. You need not fear contamination. It is harmless by now. But I will tell you what happened.”

“They got here, didn’t they?” said Natasha. “The Enemy.”

“There were 75 million Ngugma living here, and 60 million of the, uh, subservient population. Then it came. Then, we returned and destroyed them. One had to be, you say, ruthless. Rooothlusss.” Clearly the captain liked the word. “We left nothing alive. It was, ah, it was one hundred thousand years, that’s how long it’s been like this.”

“Like what?” asked Rachel.

“It is harmless. You should go look.”

“You’re with me, Hubbylicious. Apple and Izawa. Li, could you take charge of patrols? Are we all filling up our solar batteries?”

“I think we all are,” said Kalkar, “unless my fellow captain has some other form of engine power. Do you use solar energy to power virtual ions?”

Fonnggark made a peculiar noise and gesture. “I can tell you,” it said, “that we gather solar power. I am not permitted to tell you anything else about the, uh, drive system.” It made a noise Clay thought of as its version of a chortle. “But you would not be mistaken if,” another favorite phrase, “you made the assumption that our technology is similarrrr. We too will need to fly past the star.”

“We’ll go down,” said Rachel, “and have a look, and then take back off and meet you on the way out.”

So four Ghosts dropped from the Tasmania bay and peeled out to head for the surface of the sole terrestrial planet, orbiting about where Mars would be. Its shape was a result of plate tectonics and wind and rain: there were high mountains and broad plains and river valleys, sinuous or majestic. It was about 30% covered by water, and its air appeared breathable. Large-scale shapes seemed to indicate cities and roads and ports, all defunct now. After some discussion, Rachel selected a landing site on the edge of one of the highlands.

The four Ghosts circled what seemed a rare completely bare spot on the ground, a wide rock outcrop next to a cliff down. They paused in air, forty meters up.

“Getting kind of strange readings now,” said Izawa.

“What is that goo?” asked Apple. “We in danger here?”

“Supposedly not,” said Rachel. They observed for another minute. Rachel said, “Okay. Let’s go down. Me first.”

She dropped down in hover mode, and came to a stop a meter off the ground. The others followed suit, and then, after more testing, they dropped gently to the rock surface. More tests. The hatches popped and they climbed out, in their vac suits.

“Getting a ‘Colour out of Space’ vibe, not gonna lie,” said Clay. “You guys read that?”

“I had to, in high school,” said Izawa.

“Right?” said Apple. “Maybe this is where they come from. Maybe ol’ H. P. wasn’t making it up?”

They strode down a shallow slope, away from the cliff edge. Back here, the rock disappeared under the soil, or whatever. They stood looking at it: the place where soil should be.

It was brownish-green, but somehow the wrong green and the wrong brown. It didn’t sway like grasses or move about like vermin or wash and swish like water: it looked burnt up from inside, bubbling and brittle.

Here and there shapes rose from the substrate, like stiff misshapen arms coming up out of the muffled ground. Clay thought at first they were long-dead native plants, still shrouded in the brown stuff, but presently it occurred to him that they were purely the brown stuff. It didn’t just sit on everything and rot, it reached occasionally for the sky.

Rachel popped her visor and pushed back her helmet, releasing her black hair into the light breeze. “Okay,” she said. “It’s definitely dead. It’s not a pathogen, anyway. It actually rained down spores here and the blobs ate everything they landed on and became a single blob. And the Ngugma ruthlessly killed it.”

“So this is what they’re fighting?” said Clay. He looked at the pathetic remnant, a dried and half incinerated scum washed up from the shores of space, fouling everything, the occasional arm or tentacle groping upward to foul the heavens as well. Yup, it was dead. It had accomplished so much in its lifetime: the consumption of all life on Ghhokhur.

He looked around. Everything was covered in this thin coating of deteriorated slime: everything but the tops of mountains and a few places like this where the surface was bare rock. It had been different before: the slime had been alive, had had, presumably, a consciousness of some sort. It had been a different color, he was sure: lime green, at least, or possibly a pulsating pink.

The plains. The valleys. The hillsides. The towns, full of bouncy furry Ngugma, their cute little Ngugma children, their subservient populations with their own no doubt very cute children. The lakes. The rivers. The oceans, forsooth. The burnt green-brown slime ran right down to the shores, and offshore, sensors picked up the signatures of the stuff, give or take a sea change, on the sea floor.

“Full fathom five thy father lies,” said Clay, gazing out over the sea.

“What?” said Apple.

“Think of how long the Ngugma lived here. Think of them swimming under the sea, wandering the plains and hills. Their cities, their, oh, great libraries. All those millions of years.”

“I don’t know how to think of that much time,” said Gemma Izawa. “That much life, that much—death. I can’t figure out how to think of it.”

“So, yeah, that’s where Shakespeare comes in,” said Clay. He couldn’t keep himself from going on: “Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are corals made. Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him but doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange.” He looked back at the others. “Not so rich in this case, but strange.” He kicked the edge of the bubbly burnt stuff, which made Apple and Izawa both retch a little.

Presently Gemma Izawa finished: “Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell. Ding-dong. Hark, now I hear them: ding-dong bell.”

“Gah,” said Apple.

“They got their spores in here,” said Rachel. “This far inside Orion Arm. The fear is that they’ll infect the whole arm. That’s why the Ngugma are so ruthless.”

“And it was what, a hundred thousand years ago?” said Apple.

“220,000, in Earth years,” said Rachel.

And they all thought a series of thoughts, the four of them, as they took pictures and videos and readings and just stood there aghast, at the extent of the dead scum, covering almost the entire surface of this old world, dry or wet. They looked around. Clay could feel Shakespeare abandoning him. Full fathom five: there lay the burnt scum, fatherless and childless. Looking up at them with bubbles where its dead eyes, its pearly eyes should be. Reaching up with its dead pseudopods. It wasn’t the land of the Bard: no, Ghhokhur was solidly Lovecraft country.

Just as Clay was deep into the willies and ready to leave immediately, Apple said, “135 million died. I mean, Ngugma, yeah, and their slaves or whatever, but still. 135 million. Think what that must have been like.”

“Thank you for that,” said Clay. “And what if this happened at Bluehorse?”

“Thank you for that,” said Apple.

They stayed there for another ten minutes, took a few samples, and got off the ground. Within an hour they were leaving the Ghhokhur system for a star more than 600 light years away.

7.

As they sped from the Ghhokhur system, Clay and Rachel, in their combined fighter, played virtual squash with Natasha and Vera in their combined fighter, connected by an improved version of the conduit that was at the focus of their first encounter with a mouthhole.

“It really got to you, that stuff,” said Natasha, holding the virtual ball before virtually serving it.

“I particularly didn’t like the way it sort of reached upwards,” said Clay.

“My man,” said Rachel. “He was all quoting Shakespeare and all. But I would say that the thing that got to me was how far into the Orion Arm they got, how far into the Ngugma Empire they got. Serve please.”

Natasha smirked, tossed the virtual ball in the virtual air, and smacked it off the virtual wall. Clay managed to turn it around, then Vera met the ball with a killer return, and then Rachel dove and dug it out and got it back to the virtual wall. Natasha met it and rang Clay’s virtual bell with it.

“One zero,” she said. “This is only my second favorite thing to do, but you can’t have sex all the time, you’d get sore.”

“Thank you, Tasha,” said Rachel.

“I don’t know,” said Clay, “I might have expected I’d sympathize with the scum, seeing it all fried on that planet. You know, attacked from space by the ruthless Ngugma, that ought to excite my sympathies. But not so much.”

Vera met his eyes (though they were in their own ships, with their own partners, four meters apart and accelerating past 45% of light speed). “Roger that,” she said. “One life form covering an entire planet. Arrives by spores through space. Eats the ecosystem.”

“Hate to say it,” said Natasha, “but I too found myself feeling for the Ngugma.” Clay muttered, “Roger that.”

“When Apple said it killed 135 million,” said Rachel, “I thought, most of them would have made it off the planet, it’s not like it all happened at once. But—!”

“They didn’t leave,” said Clay. “We looked it up. Fonnggark is pretty free with access to the Ngugma database anymore. It really doesn’t care what we know about the Ngugma.”

“Oh, it’s fascinating,” said Natasha. “You better believe I am taking full advantage.”

“I hope so. So the locals, when the infection came to Ghhokhur. They just stayed. A few Starfleet types got away. That’s all. No one on the planet managed to leave.”

“Remember,” said Natasha, “when the first fleet came back from crossing the empty lanes between the upper end of the Arm and the galactic core? They were kept isolated. They didn’t get to tell anyone, because they were considered insane. We figured what they saw made them crazy. What if it was actually more like an infection? There are infections that can affect your behavior—rabies, toxoplasmosis. What if this was like that?”

“Now that,” said Clay, “that’s very Colour out of Space.”

“Yeah,” said Vera. “So sorry I read that one. So glad I missed your landing party back there. I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of that slime. Maybe we’ll find out what color, or Colour, it is when it’s still alive. You ready?”

“Probably not,” said Rachel. “Oh. For your serve? I’m ready for that.”

The little fleet sped through the emptiness, giving the photons a tough time of it. While the fighters flew along on their own, on board Tasmania, Padfoot and Angele Lafitte, the life support officer, did everything they could stand to do to the samples, and found that the burnt goo did have cell structures and genetic information, different from those of Primoids or Tskelly or Ngugma or Earth-originated life, but cell structures and genetic information nonetheless.

“They’re hopelessly damaged, of course,” Lafitte explained over the comm, “but they definitely have cells, quite large, elongated cells. The genetic data is stored in these ring-shaped molecules, and the genetics is very simple, we think that’s just because they have some way of pruning. You know your own genetic material is full of repetitions and useless crap, but it looks like the goop can fix its genetic info over time.”

“What does this tell us?” asked Kalkar.

“We don’t know yet.”

“But it’s gonna be useful somehow,” said Padfoot. “We’re using everything we can get.”

“Well, good luck then,” said Kalkar. “Hope you succeed beyond your wildest dreams.” All the fighter pilots were thinking the same thing.

Then, ten days of their lives later, 666 years had passed, and they were decelerating again. The system before them was a triple star: two brilliant little blue-white stars shone among the fragments of the cloud that gave them birth, while an old white dwarf a light-day away was perhaps the remnant of the star that had exploded to create the cloud in the first place. Around the two bright young stars orbited a small collection of planets, of which a terrestrial a little farther out than Earth showed signs of an Ngugma population. There was an orbital station, which looked mostly commercial, and a starbase in an outer orbit, which was clearly military. The orbital base seemed downright rural, with the space equivalent of tractors and banged-up pickup trucks. The outer starbase was the home base of a fleet comparable to the largest and most modern Ngugma fleets they had seen: three battleships, dozens of cruisers and heavy cruisers and battlecruisers, and at least a thousand robot fighters and patrol ships, along with various sorts of freighter and a few of what seemed to be troop ships.

Just as the little fleet dropped below 25%, they were set upon by as many as a hundred mouthholes, but they managed to fight these off with help from the Ngugma explorer.

“Welcome to Offvroffh,” said Rachel. “The date is 5367. Please adjust your clocks accordingly.”

“And we’re being hailed,” called Kalkar.

The hail was from a planetoid in a far outer orbit, where there was a modest ground base. They identified it as scientific, or at least mostly civilian, as they approached. Tasmania stayed in orbit, along with Rachel and Vera on patrol, while Apple and Izawa drew the long-range scouting duties. Clay, Natasha, Li, Timmis, Mizra Aliya and Millie Grohl landed, with Fonnggark and its executive officer; Kalkar and Irah Chontz hitched a ride on the explorer cruiser. They were greeted on the icy, airless ground by three more Ngugma and a couple of spidery robots. No one had guns drawn.

“Uzok Fonnggark,” came the abysmal voice of one of the Ngugma, “vormoh fongkog shuohphaw.”

“We are invited inside,” said Fonnggark.

Inside, the visitors were led to an observation lounge that could have been on the Canada during its spacefaring days. Above them arced the black starry sky, facing out toward the outer Milky Way behind them: the road they had followed to get here. Along with Fonnggark and its second in command, who was called Vvohh, they were introduced to four Ngugma locals. The chief was an astronomer or something, and its name was something like Zokkof; old Zokkof seemed also to have some sort of military rank.

They were treated with a hospitality that made Clay check his facts about the destruction of the human race which he had seen with his own eyes. The locals finagled to get their technology to produce omelets of some sort; their tea was weirdly drinkable; they had a sort of mildly alcoholic liquor that tasted pretty good. They wanted to know all about the journey so far, and were quite apologetic about basically everything, up to and not including the Ghhokhur system. Zokkof and the others told the whole horrible story—a bustling Ngugma metropolis system, science and education and art, little Ngugma kids playing in the shallow waters, and then lights in the sky, a barrage of incoming chunks of stuff too numerous to shoot down. Patches of the slime, which was a yellow-green with just a little too much orange, began to grow on the ground and on the sea surface. Then the waters went bad, and the farms went bad, and before anyone thought to run away, patches of the slime started to appear on the Ngugma themselves and their subservient species: slaves, animals, plants, everything. Creatures fell over and began turning into more slime. It was what the Ngugma had done to humanity on Earth, but it wasn’t. Clay had to admit: it was distinctly worse.

The system was quarantined, but several expeditions failed to find a way to clean it up, and at last they chose the final solution: irradiating the entire planet and wiping it all out. “Even then,” said Zokkof in its accented English, “it took three tries. We have become good at seeding and creating astatine, and we finally put enough onto the planet to destroy everything.”

“Astatine,” said Clay. “That’s what you—that’s what the Ngugma ships used at Fyatskaab.”

“I am very sorry, but it happens to be useful,” said Zokkof. “It is great at killing whatever you need to kill, whether you are right to do so or not.”

“It’s effective because it has a half-life of about eight hours,” said Rachel. “You know even the name literally means ‘unstable.’ Make a bunch of that, dump it, you have a blast of radiation and then it just fizzles out. I’m happy you did it here, at least—!”

Fonnggark said something in Nguma to Zokkof, who nodded its upper half sagely. “Yes,” said the local. “We know only a little of the Fyaa and their home planets. Terrible things have been done; just, it is not even close to the first time. You still have, ahhh, Fyaa with you in your task force?”

“No,” sighed Clay, “pretty much just Earthlings. They used a biological weapon on us.”

The local Ngugma, who all seemed to be some sort of academic, gave back grave looks with their dozens of eye pods. “Orvvoh porh ngagm,” said Zokkof after a moment, his whole body aimed at the humans. “We are very sorry.”

“We hope,” said Fonnggark, in a tone Clay was just starting to decode as ironic, “that you can forgive us for slaughtering your home planet’s inhabitants, and help us with our problem.”

Clay and Natasha laughed grimly. “It really wasn’t you guys,” said Natasha. “Yeah,” said Clay, “let’s not let a few bygones keep us from saving the Orion Arm. That’s the task at hand.”

“Indeed,” said Fonnggark; Vvohh was repeating the word bygones with relish.

“We use an isotope of astatine,” said Zokkof, “with a half life in, ah, seconds.”

“And is this what we’re going to meet from here on?” asked Li.

“We are at the end of the active provinces,” said Zokkof. “But there are bases yet ahead, many bases. And one colonized system, Gaazokgov, the Green Star. Captain Fonnggark is going with you, no?”

“That is our function,” said Fonnggark.

“The question,” said Clay, “was whether we would see what happened at Ghhokhur again and again as we go up the Arm.”

“No,” said Zokkof. “That is why we are here, at Offvroffh. The Enemy has not made a, you would say—?”

“Beachhead,” said Clay. “A beachhead.”

“A beachhead,” said Zokkof. “Not this far in, since Ghhokhur. We have become much more—!”

“Ruthless,” rumbled Fonnggark. “It means, zathmaggak, more or less.”

“Ruthless, yes,” said Zokkof, also relishing the word. Clay pinched himself. He was three thousand light years from Earth, watching two old military guys with the bodies of hairy starfish talking about the English Language. “Ruthless. We deal out destruction rather than allow a, ah, beached head. Beach head.”

“You mean,” said Clay, “you’ve wiped out all the life on the systems beyond here, just to keep them from allowing a foothold to the Enemy.”

“Foothold,” said Zokkof. “We have not destroyed all life, but we have made sure that what there is, we can protect, and what we can’t protect, it does not provide a place for a beachhead or a foothold.”

“Ruthless,” said Clay.

“Clay Gilbert,” said Fonnggark, “this is not a wrong thing we did. This was not one of those things.”

“No, no, I get it.”

“Foot hold,” said Zokkof. One of his fellow Ngugma scientists, who did not seem to speak English, imitated: “Foothold. Beachhead. Ruthless!” They did the Ngugma chortle.

“How bad is it?” asked Natasha.

“All we can do,” said Zokkof, “is defeat what has already come in. We must patrol and patrol, we must maintain a hundred and five forward bases in a hundred and five systems beyond Offvroffh. And our mining fleets must go forth, and those must be protected as well. We have lost many, many. Ghhokhur was terrible, yes? Forty-three are the systems beyond Offvroffh which have met such a fate.”

“So you fight them in the strait? In the Empty Lanes?”

“We fight them where we must,” rumbled Zokkof.

“The Admiralty,” said Fonnggark, who had picked up the term from Kalkar, “has decided a policy of sending fleets beyond the Arm to fight off invaders before they reach here. I am sure it makes sense to them, but I—!” Fonnggark bent its body to look, with the eye tentacles among its fur, straight at Zokkof.

“I too,” said Zokkof. “We are the ones who fight the Enemy in the Arm itself. They throw their ships away in their multitudes, and still we have to fight for the Arm.” It turned to Li, whom it had identified as senior somehow. “What can you do to change this sad slow disaster? Can you defeat them?”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Li. “We’re going to take a look and see.”

“It is a long distance to travel, to take, you say, a look.”

“And yet we’re traveling there,” said Clay. “I know our way of fighting is very different from your way of fighting. There are just ten fighters in this group. You wouldn’t send a fleet with less than ten cruisers into the Empty Lanes, right? And I know you’ve been fighting there for tens of millions of—well, years, on Earth, over a hundred million. Even for Ngugma, that’s a lot of lifetimes. But I have to ask: how is it actually working out for you? How is the war going?”

The six Ngugma with them sort of turned to look left and right at each other. Several of them sipped tea from Ngugma-friendly sippy cups, puckering closed their big round mouths over the sipping holes. Zokkof said, “It is not going well. That is not secret.”

“It’s not going well?” said Li. “How bad is it?”

“They have not got a beachhead,” said Zokkof. “But then, we do not know that, we patrol only so fast, it is a lot of space. One hundred and five bases we have, but that is not much across such a distance. And—Ghhokhur, it was shocking to us, what happened was shocking, but before that, that they could enter and come so far.”

“So you’re okay with us helping,” said Natasha.

“We need your help,” said Zokkof. “We humbly request your help.”

“But you know what the Ngugma did to our home world,” said Clay.

“Yes, I know what we did to your home world. And yet it is true: we need your help. It is a slow defeat, but we can all taste defeat in this water. We are losing, and we cannot afford to lose. Will you help us?”