Friends of the Sky

1.

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

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

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

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

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

“Life form?” said Clay.

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

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

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

“What did it just do?” asked Natasha.

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

“It’s another of the damn clown flower things,” said Kalkar. “A particularly big one.”

“Track that thing,” said Rachel.

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

“I read,” called Emily Gray, “thirteen of those plant-cruiser-things, and several hundred mouthholes. Moving to match trajectory with that thing. No spores.”

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

“Preliminary indications,” said Gray, “are that its destination is, um, the Ngugma base at the, um, bottom of the Orion Arm, you know, the, um, Armpit.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Clay,” said Natasha, “how hard is this going to be? I have no idea how we match up, but there’s no way this is going to be a walk-over. Are they going to flatten us?”

“I don’t know.” He pulled himself together and said, “But we’re going to keep the Vow.”

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

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

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

“Gallium,” called Rachel. “Gallium. Og-ngohdah,” she added, translating the element name into Ngugma.

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

2.

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

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

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

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

“The Vow,” several of them chorused.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Kay,” said Rachel. “Vow.”

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

“Well crap,” said Rachel.

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

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

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

“Damn it,” said Rachel, sending a new navigation and taking off. “Alpha Wing!”

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

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

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

“Right behind you.”

Immediately they found themselves in a cloud of mouthholes. But mouthholes held no fear for Clay Gilbert anymore. He dodged one, then hit it square as it passed; swinging, he sliced another in half, and then took four more with a quick sequence of shots. Rachel was slicing them up herself: the litter of iron and silicate was filling space behind them, and clearly distracting the other mouthholes, who were not averse to a little cannibalistic necrophilia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Counting: it was never helpful in these situations.

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

“Put this in your flector program and see who salutes,” he texted, and there were a hundred lines of code. Clay tapped it and it lit up.

Clay smirked. He got “Gimme Shelter” going. He charged in. The darts from the big ships came at him in a murderous cloud—and went inert as soon as they were within a hundred meters.

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

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

Ahead of him, the battle was suddenly over. The last two enemy ships were steaming hulks, beginning to fall to the planet which had sprouted them. One more intact Ghost 204 came up through their wreckage. Mizra Aliya’s smiling sweaty face filled up Clay’s screen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We did good enough,” said Clay.

3.

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

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

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

“And those two?” said Vera.

“Hey,” said Clay, “Mizra’s damn good.”

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

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

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

“Well,” said Apple, “where to next?”

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

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

“Sweetie pie.” He ducked his head apologetically. “Anyway, that’s—!”

“Um,” said Ram Vindu, floating next to Kalkar.

“What.”

Ram smirked, and he carried it off quite well. “We have outgoing,” he said, “that little veggie fleet headed for Armpit, but we also have incoming. It’s hard to detect because it’s dark, it’s not warm, and it’s not expending energy just now.”

“We have incoming??”

“We weren’t looking for anything,” said Emily Gray, “but we sure found it. We were just doing a scan out into the, uh, Empty Lanes, just as a baseline. And one of the sweeps picked up this.”

Ram was playing with the view on Kalkar’s largest screen. “There,” he said, and about ten seconds later he got the picture clear enough that they could see, brownish-black against flat black, a spherical thing in space. It was hard to see, but what they saw didn’t look like a planet or a moon.

“It’s 65.5 kilometers across,” said Ram. “A slightly flattened sphere. It is now three hundred light hours out, and coasting at about 20% of light speed, on course to enter the system in about two months. The surface is mostly silicate with some metal, but we pick up very small but definite signatures of chloroplastic tissues, living tissue that can photosynthesize.”

“So what the hell is it?” asked Vera. “I take it that this is one of the plant things. What sort of thing is it? A battleship? A tanker? A gigantic explosive?”

“Larvae?” suggested Apple. “Or spores,” said Millie.

They all looked at the thing on the screen for a minute. Clay was looking at Rachel, when she looked at Natasha and they both said, “Wait a minute.”

“What?” said Clay.

“Follow its course back,” said Natasha to Emily Gray.

The three women practically jumped on the controls for the big screen. Back, back along the exact trajectory of the blob: and then jerk back again, to focus on another 65-km blob.

And then back some more, across the sky, and another, fainter blob, and then another even fainter, and another and another.

“What the hell,” said Natasha.

“Well,” Apple said to Clay, “there’s your problem.”

4.

The Ngugma leadership team and the human leadership team—Clay was still shocked to discover he was on the latter, with Kalkar, Rachel, Li and Irah Chontz—met a few hours later, to discuss this eerie new discovery. Facts were few but definite.

“It’s definitely the Enemy,” said Rachel. “And it’s definitely coming here, and it got up to 20% of light speed without any onboard energy source. I mean, we can’t say for sure it doesn’t have an engine in it, but it has zero energy signatures. And there’s actually a whole line of them, at least a dozen, spaced about 500 light-hours apart.”

“Are they coming from the galactic center?” asked Gwaov’s second in command, who managed to make the basso profundo just a little squeaky. “It must be so.”

“They are definitely plant in origin,” said Fonnggark’s underling Vvohh. “Yet there is something strange about this path.”

“That,” said Irah, “is because they’re not coming directly from the galactic core. They’re all coming along a straight path from a star about sixty light-years out into the Empty Lanes and about 750 light years down the Arm from where we are now.”

“And what are they,” said Fonnggark, “or what do they carry?”

“Can’t tell,” said Irah. “Maybe fuel of some sort? Or they’re full up with mouthholes? Like a troopship or something?”

“No,” said Rachel, “that’s not it. Close, but that’s not it.”

“Then, Commander,” said Gwaov, “what is it?”

“I don’t know.” They all gazed at the graphics up on the Tasmania’s many screens. Presently Rachel said, “We’ll go have a look. Us and the Tasmania, if that’s okay, Captain Kalkar. You Ngugma can come, of course, or you can head for Armpit.”

“By have a look,” said Clay, “you mean go check out the nearest one, then the next, and work our way up to that star in the Empty Lanes?”

“We’d have to check the first two or three,” said Vera. “Just so there’s someone at Slime Ball to intercept them.”

“We would much like to have you join us at Armpit,” said Gwaov. “More Ngugma ships are coming to Ngakhthokh, to here at Slime Ball, where we will spend some time building our own base, and we will be able to deal with whatever comes here. On the other side, we see advantages in you investigating this, this star in the Empty Lanes, and we going to Armpit. This is a threat, we do not know what sort of threat but threat it is.”

“Yes,” said Rachel. “Threat it is.” They all gazed some more, and then she said, “I think we check the first one out, then others if need be, and then we head for the star there and check that out. And then, yeah, I think we’ll head on to Armpit ourselves, we should be there within a few years of you, don’t you think?”

“Here to the star in the Empty Lanes and on to Armpit,” said Irah Chontz, “the detour only adds about twenty light years. From that star to Armpit is literally just over a thousand. We can synchronize our navigation, and still get there at the same time.”

“Yes, we can,” said Gwaov. “We wish to dine with you, at, as you call it, Arrm pitt."

“Twenty light years—that’s nothing,” said Rachel. Nervous laughter. She went on, “We will be there, General Gwaov. Ready to party.” The Ngugma exchanged looks but let that Rachelism pass unremarked.

The two fleets, the huge one and the tiny one, spent two hundred more hours in the Slime Ball system, mostly drifting far out in the Oort Cloud, fixing and rebuilding. The Ngugma fleet took off on its own errand, and the humans, and Fonnggark, put the finishing touches on their refits. Padfoot, Bell, Poto Wall, Matt Villeu, and Shawna Shelleen (not only pregnant again, but pretty far along) rebuilt all the surviving Ghosts and managed to assemble four almost completely new ones. The screens were brighter. The drive systems had redundant redundancies. The flectors were more and tougher. The lasers had more settings. There were three types of missile. The food tasted better. The Ghost 205 was born.

“It fits,” said Vera, “in a weird way. 205 million Earthlings killed by the Ngugma, and the Ghost 205 comes to save Ngugma civilization.”

They bid a less than fond farewell to the dead planets and decaying foliage of the Slime Ball system. While Gwaov oversaw the building of a new base at Volhazzh Phohh (a direct Ngugma translation of Slime Ball), a task force consisting of Tasmania, Fonnggark’s ship, and the ten Ghost 205 fighters set course for the nearest of the blobs. For a distance of 300 light hours, the force accelerated to well over 99% of light speed, but didn’t push six nines; they were almost immediately decelerating anyway. They arrived in the neighborhood of the first of the spherical entities after a journey that took their bodies about eight days including acceleration and deceleration, and appeared to outside clocks to take more like sixteen days. The object made no offensive move—it was indeed running without power.

And there they were, in the Empty Lanes. The Orion Arm was on their left (or whatever), the Scutum Arm on the right, the core of the galaxy in front of them. Close by was the spherical object; following the trail of spherical objects led the eye to a star, a double star in fact, hanging in the middle of the emptiness.

The task force slowed to a stop in orbit around the spheroid. Clay and Natasha, and Aliya and Grohl, landed on it and took samples. They were a little giddy, romping and laughing on what seemed a surface of smooth soft rock, but Clay was in the grip of the willies pretty much the whole time. The surface, the rind of the nut, was rubbery hard and thicker than anything they had available to stick into it, but he had an irrational expectation that he could step on a thin spot and fall through. His imagination had a lot of fun with what he might fall through into.

Then they were back on Tasmania’s bridge, already starting to accelerate again, up the line of spheres. They met up with Kalkar and Chontz and Jack Dott and Chee and Gray and Vindu and pretty much everyone else in the freighter’s crew. Fonnggark was present via video. A black and white cat (by the name of Bob because of his short tail) sat on Kalkar’s console.

“So we brought you samples,” said Rachel, “and here’s where you tell me you figured out what to do about these things.”

“You sent data on those samples ahead to us,” said Shawna Shelleen, Kalkar’s senior drive officer. She was floating next to Angele Lafitte, the life support officer; Shelleen had a calico cat on her shoulder. Lafitte was also pregnant. “Yeah. Angele and I did in fact figure out some things.”

“Like what it is, and how to kill it?” asked Vera.

“It’s a tanker,” said Shelleen, “as I think someone said. It’s got a shell that’s at least a hundred meters thick, mostly silicate, but with some tissue, presumably so it can absorb light and keep the stuff inside fed. Because it’s full of this, uh, stuff, sort of like the yoke of an egg or the endosperm of a seed.”

“They’re sending fuel to Slime Ball,” said Clay. He was pinching himself again. They were trying to save the Ngugma from an evil fate; they were fighting off veggie invaders from Trantor or something; he and some friends had just been romping on a 65-km moon that was actually a giant seed or tuber; he was learning all this stuff from someone’s mom, who looked, actually, like she might be a mom again any minute now. And Shelleen’s calico cat, also an expectant mom, was perched on her shoulder.

“Well,” said Shelleen, “it’s not fuel exactly, but—!”

“They’re sending stuff to Slime Ball,” said Lafitte, “and probably they’ll make more flowers and mouthholes and so on there, to send on other places, except of course they won’t because the Ngugma are there.”

“But this was their whole system,” said Shelleen, pushing her always-wayward blond hair out of her face. How it didn’t get singed in the drive section, Clay had no idea. “Their whole thing was, they had this base at Slime Ball, this—!”

“Beach head,” Clay intoned, in his best Gwaov impression.

“Foot hold,” said Fonnggark, from the right end of the big screen, where it looked on from its own ship. Vvohh and the other Ngugma crew found it amusing.

“Yeah, this beachhead,” said Shelleen. “What do you do with a beachhead?”

“You expand it,” said Kalkar. “You break out of it and conquer swaths of territory,” said Vera. Fonnggark said, “You start with a toehold and you grow it into a foothold, and then you pull yourself up by boooot straaaps.” The Ngugma did one of their things that was like laughing; so did Clay.

“If you gain a beachhead, you have to resupply it constantly,” Shelleen went on. “And so they had this whole setup, they were literally sending tanks of stuff, 65 km wide? That’s literally,” and she punched her tablet, “like 140,000 cubic kilometers of stuff to make giant flowers out of—!”

“Giant clown flowers,” said Apple.

Shelleen laughed at her. “Right? And one after another after another. All headed for Slime Ball. The thing I don’t get is how this star in the Empty Lanes fits in. I guess we’ll see about that.”

“And you figured out anything about how to damage one of these things?” asked Rachel.

Shelleen turned to Angele Lafitte, who smiled sweetly, turned and poked a screen. On the big screen, a schematic of one of these big spheroidal plant tankers appeared: with its brown shell and a pale color for its formless insides, it looked exactly like a coconut. A spacecraft landed on the shell and injected something into the plant material; this spread into the interior, which turned a sickly green; the spacecraft departed and the coconut went into swift decay.

“Whoa,” said Natasha. “You can do that? You know you can do that?”

“We can infect it,” said Lafitte. “We’re not sure what happens to it as a result, aside from it dying. We’re not sure how long it takes. But we know we have something that can infect and kill this substance.”

“As for who does it,” said Kalkar, “we propose sending this to the Ngugma at Slime Ball, and they can destroy the things as they arrive.”

“And we fly on to that star system,” said Rachel. “And deal with that situation, whatever it is. Because this is all about how the Enemy crosses the Empty Lanes, and if we can disrupt that supply line, we might just have the upper hand on this crap.”

“And,” said Shawna Shelleen, “we will have figured out how to beat an enemy that even the Ngugma haven’t got the hang of, and they’ve been at it a hundred million years.”

“Well, we’re great at killing things too,” said Clay.

“Sure,” said Rachel, “and we’re also great fighter pilots.”

“And great fighter mechanics,” Timmis threw in from out on patrol.

“Humans are awesome,” Angele Lafitte chimed in. “That’s why we need to make more of them.” She and Shelleen high fived.

5.

So they set about embarking from nowhere to somewhere, from a dark blob in space to the actual system it had come from. They traveled 750 light years in a single journey. The Orion Arm and everything they or the Ngugma or the Primoids or the Fyaa had ever known was on their left; on their right were the base of the huge Scutum Arm, and then the galactic central bar and the horror it held. And around them, as they cruised at seven nines after the decimal point, voids opened and light was squashed and neutrinos pulled over to ask directions from passing gravitons. The little fleet cared not: they shot onward from dark into dark, simulating and playing chess and having a fair amount of sex and never looking out the window.

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

He didn’t want to look. He looked.

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

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

He looked out, into the void. He recoiled, but he let the void hold his gaze. He looked until he came to understand it, and he recoiled again. And again, he made himself continue his contemplation. There were paths of light, lanes of energy flow, lines of dimension in directions otherwise unseen, spaces that a colony ship could fall right into: roads wide open to infinity. He saw, he looked, he considered, and finally, gazing through those strange portals, across those empty dimensions, up those illimitable avenues of night, he came to grasp the thing no one had grasped.

“I have it,” he said to Rachel.

“Mmm?”

“I have it. I know how to do this.”

Many years and a week later, the little fleet decelerated into a new system. It was the most interestingly placed star system Clay had ever been to, and he had been to a lot of systems up and down the Orion Arm. He had come to think of himself as an expert in coming into new systems. But this one: it might be a double star, but it was by itself in a way that even a normal singleton sun like the Sun was not. Nearly 100% of all stars went about with other stars at most a few light years away, but this, these two little stars and the planets orbiting one of them, drifted alone down the dark river that was the Empty Lanes.

Here, in the middle of nothing, four planets circled a pale blue sun: a molten, a pair of gas giants, and an overgrown Pluto. A second star, a yellow midget just big enough to shine with fusion, hung in space ten light days away, 40 times the distance from Earth’s Sun to Pluto.

The blue sun and its little family showed no sign of technology, no sign of life whatever. The yellow dwarf held all the life in this system.

“Ick,” said Apple, as she and Izawa slowed into the system and got a good look. Other pilots began seeing the same thing and registering the same reaction.

The dwarf had no planets, but it was surrounded by flowers, like the ones at Slime Ball but much larger, opening their smile-less happy faces on the star before them, beholding it and sucking in all the light they could get from it. And behind them, orbiting just a little further out, many more blobs floated, some spherical, some stomach-shaped or kidney-shaped, some long and stringy. Among them, various defensive forces mingled: a few dozen of the planty cruisers and battleships, hundreds of shzhawkhor and mouthholes, and even something in between mouthhole and cruiser, a new sort of planty fighter perhaps.

Four of the structures were truly planet-sized, and what their function was became clear over the first twenty hours of observation, as one of them slowly pumped out another 65-km pod. Stringy things joined up to the new pod and began pushing it toward Slime Ball 750 light years away.

Meanwhile, they picked up five or six similar but much larger pods coming from five or six different points in the galactic central bar or the base of the Scutum Arm, decelerating under power of some sort, on course for the yellow dwarf. The largest of these, still a light-week away, was the size of Ceres, 900 kilometers across; unlike Ceres, it had a sort of engine.

“At 20% of light speed,” said Gemma Izawa, “that new pod thing will be in Slime Ball in almost four thousand years.”

“Yeah, they have quite the queue,” said Apple. “Well, Gwaov’s guys are going to meet them at that end with Shelleen’s treatment, and we’re going to take care of this end. Right?”

“We just have to blow up about a million of their, uh, ships,” said Aliya.

“Never fear,” said Rachel. “Hubby has one of his Ideas.”

“Is that so?” Vera asked. “And where shall we hear of this Idea?”

“Gonna set ourselves up nearby,” said Rachel. “Second moon, inner giant, blue star. Ready to separate, hunkadelic?”

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

“You’re the amazing one.”

“You’re the amazing one.”

Letting that argument sit, they separated with and glided down ahead of Tasmania and Fonnggark. The moon they were aiming at was large, the size of Mars, and while it showed definite signs of past geological activity—it had less craters than one would expect, and large expanses of plain—it was now stable. It had no air, and no bodies of liquid water, but it had plenty of water ice, and trails of moisture dripped down canyon walls here and there in the sunlight. It was far enough out from the star or its enormous planet, which was larger than Jupiter and with brilliant rings, that it received very little gamma radiation. There was no sign of the slime: this place was just too cold, with no air to speak of, and the sunlight it received was just too wan. No, the slime, the Enemy, to give it proper respect, had chosen the smaller of the two stars as its logical nursery.

They set down on a flat highland near the equator and put up a tent. By the time the bigger ships landed, the fighter pilots were standing outside the tent on a yellow-black evening.

“That one,” said Natasha. “That star there. That’s Armpit. That’s the Ngugma’s big fortress system guarding the Orion Arm. That’s what it’s all about.”

“But right here,” said Vera. “Right now, it’s all about right here. We lose this, they can re-infect anywhere in the Arm. We win this, we have time to go fight at Armpit and come back here in case the Enemy realizes what we did.”

“So why did the stuff not infect this system at all?” asked Emily Gray, coming up with Ram, who, the speculation ran, was the father of her future child. Fonnggark was with them.

“I don’t know,” said Natasha. “You ship guys got a theory?”

“The small star is more stable,” said Ram. “You can check. That is a very stable little star.”

“It’s everything they need,” said Rachel. “It’s got plenty of light and no complexity. It’s their trans-shipment point. All the stuff they produce gets sent here as pods, and it’s redirected here for wherever—in this case Slime Ball, though we have detected streams of pods, not currently active, headed for Armpit.”

“I.e.,” said Clay, “they send a steady supply of stuff out, but just aim it at wherever they think needs it.”

“Think,” said Emily. “Funny word.”

“They,” said Natasha. “Funny word.”

“So,” said Rachel, “not to be all Su Park and all, but if we take this system, and hold it, we can stop them, it, invading the Orion Arm for centuries, millennia. And if we can win here, we can win in Armpit, and save the Ngugma’s artificially replicated bacon.”

“So, that’s great,” said Apple. “How do we win here? Clay?”

6.

The warring dance between Death and Life had been going on longer than the warring dance between Rock and Water. Things die because other things have gained life from them; little things fertilize and multiply in the bloodstreams of big things and bring them down; in their demise and decay, new life burgeons.

The Dance goes on, but it’s not always the same, it’s full of surprises. Ten fighters emerged from the tent on the azure moon and started up into orbit; Tasmania was ready to lift off behind them. Almost before anyone knew what was going on, a lattice of tiny objects, not more than centimeters across, came up over the moon’s horizon, moving a few percent of the speed of light and maneuvering like mouthholes but more smoothly. Every fighter took on fifty or so of them in a period of about half a second.

Clay’s experience of this was to instinctively dodge upward, shooting at the line of attackers. Possibly this helped, but the dodge took him out of the way of all but about ten of the things, and he suffered mere flector damage. That is what flectors are for.

Others were not so lucky. Apple was hit badly enough that she ejected and her Ghost suffered a muffled explosion; Izawa picked her up, but her Ghost took heavy damage and they abandoned it together. Rachel and Vera took significant flector damage; Timmis lost drive control; Grohl and Aliya lost most of their flectors. That’s what those things are for. Padfoot will fix them.

But then the barrage came to the base, and the Tasmania and the Ngugma ship, both of which had stayed on the ground. This probably saved them, but they both suffered significant damage and they both experienced loss of interior pressure.

Only Li Zan and Natasha Kleiner were unscathed.

“I don’t know how I did it,” both of them basically said.

“You shot through,” said Vera to Natasha. “I thought about it but for once I didn’t do it. The secret is to hit the thrust and give them a little wiggle on your way through.”

“I just concentrated, played them against each other,” said Li. “I think the other secret is to play it safe and keep the eye on the ball, if you will.”

“Let’s keep those in mind,” said Rachel, “when we meet the next wave in about ten hours. I read Clay, Tash, Vera, Li, Miz, Millie, and me. Navigation coming, folks, we are going after that base.”

“We’re not going back to get fixed up?” said Millie Grohl.

“You got 40% flectors,” said Aliya, “you’ll make it. Just keep the vow, baby.”

“Tasmania has its own problems,” said Rachel. “It’ll be a week before they’re ready to fix us up. Meanwhile, apparently they’re sending a blast at our landing spot every ten hours, whether we’re ready for it or not. We have Padfoot’s ideas, and we have Shelleen’s and Lafitte’s idea, and we, um, have Clay’s little concept programmed into nav. We are going to prune those flowers.”

7.

Rachel ordered maximum acceleration, and the seven fighters sped across the void that separated the two stars, the bluish star with its chill planets and the yellow dwarf with its garden of horror. They passed around navigation, combat and sensor reprograms, updated their simulators with the latest data on what was in front of them, and ran those simulations. They won a few and lost a lot and never once kept the Vow: Clay himself was devoured twice. The green-goo full-screen animation was hilarious, the first time.

They took a break and debriefed, or whined, as the seven fighters flew parallel paths just a few tens of meters apart, the six women appearing in little rectangles all around the margin of Clay’s screen. He tapped Rachel’s and it doubled in size.

“Rachel,” called Natasha from her rectangle, “not to question authority or whatever, but if we barely beat what they had at Slime Ball, where we had an entire Ngugma battle fleet on our side, how do we figure we can take their base in the Empty Lanes, nexus of all their supply lines, with seven mostly damaged Ghosts? Just curious.”

“Well,” said Rachel, “we have the Clay maneuver, which we didn’t know how to build into the setup, and we have the laser refinements which we weren’t sure how to build into the battle simulation, and we have the missiles Angele and Shawna were working on, we have what? I have three, I think. And guess what. We weren’t sure how to build those into the effects of attack.”

“So be of good cheer,” said Vera. “We can’t be sure, but we’ll probably kick ass.”

“Yeah,” said Natasha, “but it’s that probably that makes it interesting. Because we made the Vow. There was no probably in the vow. We can’t come twelve thousand light years and then lose a couple people. We’d be so screwed.”

“So we be careful,” said Clay.

“So we be mindful,” said Li. “We be fully aware of the situation, including whether your partner is damaged. Rachel, since my partner is out of action, I volunteer to fly backup. And I have, um, five of those missiles.”

“Okay,” said Rachel. She brought up the schematic they had been using of the yellow dwarf and its surroundings. “Vera, Tash, take the Gigantic Blob A, marked on your screens. Hubby, we are hunting those clown flowers; Miz and Millie, hopscotch behind Vera and Tash and hit Gigantic Blob B. Li, you get to fly backup, if by backup we mean you mark time for fifteen seconds after contact, and then take out Mr. Kidney.”

“Mr. Kidney?” Vera and Clay repeated.

“That,” said Rachel, circling a curiously dark shape in the shadow of one of the clown flowers, a dark kidney shape.

“This accel program,” said Li, “if I may ask, it seems a bit abrupt—can it be right?”

“It’s right,” said Clay.

What surprised Li was not that they pushed all the way to 99.99999999%, eight nines past the decimal. It was that they coasted for at most a minute and then lurched into full deceleration, and what was especially surprising, as their engines cranked along at 110% deceleration, was how the tenebrous blur of light speed clung to them.

Still roaring toward zero speed, the seven curved to their various destinations. And the Enemy, the planty blobs and blocks that moved about the little star, did not seem to notice them. Rachel sent off her usual happy hunting, be safe to the other six, and then she and Clay were spiraling in on a huge flower, a hundred kilometers across and thoroughly engrossed in gazing upon its little sun. Laser began cutting across the fronds, which folded away from the attack. Spiky missiles detached from the base of each petal and accelerated toward the Ghosts, and then suddenly chose to ignore them. Rachel’s and Clay’s laser blasts met at a point on the bulbous body of the flower, cutting into it until its gooey insides began to burst out. They turned and raked up the side, creating a rip that disrupted the entire monstrous blossom.

Rachel and Clay came out into a mob of shzhawkhor, but they cut through these in a zigzag that confused the ones they didn’t destroy. Three different waves of the fireballs came at them, in grids hundreds of meters on a side, containing tens of thousands of the things, but it turned out that a certain kind of wiggle made the things overcompensate and bunch up and Rachel and Clay just shot through the gaps.

Ahead of them was another of the gigantic flowers. “Walk this way,” called Rachel, and she wiggled her way past the lateral defenses, both the spike things and the tinier needle things. This time, they dug the hole and made the tear and pulled away while the spike missiles and more nets of fireballs tore up the flower’s own petals.

They were on to the next clown flower, a zip of sixty seconds away at 0.1% of light speed. Now there was no defense mounted, and no reaction from the flower, which came open and deflated without firing a single spike. The shzhawkhor that came to its defense were disorganized, acting on their own limited intel.

And then Rachel, who like Clay had taken no damage at all so far, led them up and away from the battle, from the star. They were pursued for a minute or so, and then the pursuers, shzhawkhor and missiles alike, gave up and died.

Clay didn’t say anything. He just looked, down from above the north pole of the little star. Vera and Natasha were coming up toward them, leaving two of the four giant spherical bodies in trouble behind them. Now Miz and Millie were coming back from a similar encounter with the other two of the giant bodies. While Clay watched, one, then the next, then the next and the next, began to deflate; discoloring bruises seemed to spread under the skin from several gunshot wounds on each sphere.

And from far around the little sun came one more Ghost, badly damaged but still flying. There was Li Zan’s smiling face.

“I had to fight my way in past a whole bunch of those shzhawkhor,” she said, “and then I had to fight my way out through another whole bunch, but I took it out. I took out the kidney.”

“You sure did,” said Clay, while Aliya said, “The kidney?”

“The kidney!” said Li. “You know. The brain!”

“The brain?” said Millie. “The brain of the whole Enemy thing?”

“Just the brain of this operation,” said Rachel. The seven Ghosts, gathering a hundred million kilometers above the north pole of the star, looked down on the destruction and chaos they had wrought. “I’m sure it has a real interesting brain in Galaxy Center. But this depot needed a sophisticated brain: it was here that the whole campaign against the Orion Arm was planned, however that worked.”

“And without the brain,” said Natasha, “the rest of the apparatus had trouble functioning. The second spheroid was easier, it didn’t try to defend itself.”

“So this,” said Vera, “is why we’re better. We’re better than the Ngugma, who are all about robotics and mega-production, and we’re better than the Thing from the Core, because we can think as individuals.”

“And we’re just better,” said Aliya. “Is that okay for me to say?”

“You’re one of us,” said Clay.

“Yeah, we’re better,” said Rachel, while the seven of them, now in a loose group, gazed down on the swift decay of the flower things, which were already showing signs of losing orbit and falling toward the yellow dwarf. “We’re better—at this. And that’s why the Vow is so important. But hey, we’ve been over that a few million times already. The Ngugma are still the muscle behind defending the Orion Arm—we’re here to help them do that.”

“Better that than destroy more civilizations,” said Vera. “Okay, darlings. We’ve learned enough tricks. Let’s take this carnival to Armpit.”