Friends of the Sky

1.

“I won’t say she looks as good as new,” said Clay, as he and Rachel and Padfoot stood around his Ghost, in the bay of the Tasmania. “She always looks better than new.”

“Don’t get her banged up just so I can fix her,” said Padfoot, “but yes, we took the opportunity to rebuild your engine and your combat systems. You have fourteen hundred some missiles now. Your comm has backup. I know that’s gone on the fritz on you twice.”

“Did you reinforce that nose cone?” asked Rachel. “He likes that ramming maneuver.”

“Now, now,” said Clay.

“And when did you start calling your fighter ‘she’?”

“I’ve always called her ‘she.’ Haven’t I?”

“We did not reinforce the nose cone,” said Padfoot, “though Gene suggested it. I’d say, get in that situation again, try back left or back right, it’s wider than just a nose, it’s got the main guts right under your seat, so that’s weight, and it’s pretty solid. Or just do what everyone else does and stay fifty kilometers away from your enemy. Makes it easier on me.”

“It was not something I spent a lot of time thinking about, actually. I sort of saw red.”

“I thought it was clever, actually,” said Rachel. She kissed him. “So the orders are set. We are off to the Fyaa home world.”

“We’re all going with,” said Padfoot, a little defensively.

“What? Why wouldn’t you?” said Rachel. “Alpha and Beta are just going on ahead, just like coming here. The Primoids are sending a force, Honshu and Tasmania are going, everyone’s going. Just we,” and she smiled smugly at Clay, “are going on ahead, as usual.”

“How far is it?” asked Clay. “We’re twelve light years from Bluehorse.”

“It’s 31 to the Fyaa home world,” said Padfoot.

“Yes. We’re still just 12 from Bluehorse, here. So if you were sent back to Bluehorse, which they might have decided to do for all sorts of reasons, you would return to find the people who live there 24 years older. That would have been weird. But you know we’re going further. You knew all along Alpha and Beta, at the very least, were going a lot further than twelve out and twelve back.”

“Honestly,” said Padfoot, “I would never see you again. Any of you. They’d tie Tasmania down to Bluehorse and we’d all raise our kids and hope you remembered us when you came back five hundred years later.” They stared up at her: she was, among other things, twelve centimeters taller than either of them. Was that a tear in her eye?

“So instead,” said Clay, “you’re coming with us, all alone in our own little chronology.”

“Till we part, I guess,” said Padfoot. “Don’t forget to love your new fighter. Care for her.” She gave Clay a shoulder push and stalked out.

Clay and Rachel looked at each other. “Well, it’s emotional,” said Rachel. “I understand that.”

“So do I,” said Clay, thinking of his niece Yvette. “But there’s only one person I know I’m never going to leave behind in my stardust, and that’s Rachel Frickin’ Andros.” They grinned, then kissed quick and went back inside.

2.

All it took was one tiny little invasion of the Fyaa home world by a gigantic fleet of mining ships, and one tiny little use of a tiny few hundred tons of synthesized radioactive material on two planets to murder the Fyaa inhabitants, and just like that, the Fyaa and the Primoids made friends. And all it took was one encounter with the Ngugma, and the Fyaa saw their way to joining in the alliance against the furry hexapods, so Clay and company could check that off their list of objectives.

“Yeah, mission fucking accomplished,” commented Vera as she and Clay did a quick recon between briefings. “What was next on the list? Oh yes.”

“Defeat the Ngugma,” said Clay.

“Just that, that’s all.”

And just a few hours later, in orbit around the outer gas giant, there gathered in the Honshu’s half-empty freight section almost every human in the PSB6 system, plus a dozen Primoids and two dozen of the Fyaa: over half were the “squirreloid” fighter pilots and cruiser crew called the Tskelly, and the rest were the smaller “chipmunkoid” mechanics, and two stork-like fellows with big skulls and eyes on stalks: these were the Fyaa race of scholars and priests (and starfleet officers). Natasha and Padfoot had been spending time with the software the Honshu technicians had worked up to tutor them in the Fyaa lingua franca. And it was evident that all the Fyaa of whichever species had been spending time with some sort of intensive English program; while friendly enough, they had distinct opinions and were happy to share them.

“So the situation at Fyatskaab, the Fyaa home world,” Captain Root summarized, “is that the Ngugma tried to do the same thing there as at Earth, but they were foiled by the fact that the five species are generally immune to one another’s diseases, and that the Tskelly and the Kaahriig and the technicians, the Errhatzky—!” She looked at one of the stork-like Kaahriig, who shrugged its wings and wiggled its eye stalks. “That a lot of them spend basically all their time in space. So the Ngugma settled for thoroughly irradiating both planets with synthesized astatine, and essentially wiping out all life, and in the process, they may have wiped out the other two species completely, the, uh, factory workers and the administrators, I guess.”

“That’s fairly close,” said a piping voice near Clay’s ear. It was one of the Tskelly, the pilots, the one Clay had crunched against the wall. It was hanging on a Tskelly-sized sashay bar near Clay’s head. Clay nodded. It made a gesture and then hopped to Clay’s shoulder, grabbing onto his ear. It was basically pink, but clad in a dark blue outfit that looked exactly as if Yvette had crafted a little version of Clay’s vac suit but with twice the number of arms and legs. Clay was pretty sure it had an expression on its face, but he had no clue what it was. “Actually there are two colonies that have some of the Kaahim and the Mrez. But few, very few.” It did a sort of back and forth diagonal head shake.

“As the refugees fled,” said Root, “the fighters were holding out in dozens of little bases, raiding and doing damage, but not yet anything so serious as destroying one of those Ngugma freighters. And the Ngugma were going right in with their mining crews. Astatine has such a short half-life they didn’t have to wait more than a few days.”

“So,” said Captain Kalkar, “the famous Ngugma are in the next system. And we have perforce made peace with the Fyaa. It’s our chance. How do we not blow it? Commander Park?”

“I’ve developed a two-step plan,” said Park. “First, we observe. We don’t know what the situation is. As both the Fyaa and the Primoids know, the later your enemy knows where you are, the better chance you have of winning. We’ve already picked out a planetoid in the Oort cloud of the home world, Fyatskaab. There is an old Fyaa base. We will occupy it and observe from there. Captain Sheaeek and Captain Fvaerch have invited us to use it as we need.”

She smiled at the two stork-like Kaahriig, who bowed and then stuck their beak-like jaws upward. One said, in a squeaky yet deep accent, “Yooo are welcome eeen to have food and bed down and dreenk wine and killll these basssstards. Please. Ha ha ha,” it added, and then made a gagging, creaking noise with its beaky jaw upward. Its comrade imitated: the Kaahriig laugh.

“The second point,” said Captain Kalkar.

“The second point is this,” Park went on. “It will take us 31 years to get to Fyatskaab; it took this fleet, and the news signals traveling at light speed, 31 years to get here. Believe it or not, even if the Ngugma work at the rate they were doing at Earth, they will still be in the middle of draining the magma from the upper mantle when we get there after 62 years. And we are going to smite them. We are going to figure out something very clever and we are going to destroy them. And the best kind of destroying them is to capture them, because then we get their brains as well as the debris that had once been their ships.”

“So there was still Fyaa resistance in their home system,” said Daria Acevedo, Gamma Wing’s leader. “Is there any chance that will still be true?”

“There’s every possibility they’ll have been eliminated,” said Park. “The Captains here would not rule it out. But it’s fair to say that their fighter pilots all think there will still be resistance.”

“I know sooo,” said the Tskelly pilot on Clay’s shoulder. “We will never stop fiiiiighting.”

“In any case,” said Kalkar, “other Fyaa worlds would at some point start sending ships. They are of the habit of gathering forces in the outskirts of a system until they feel they have enough, and it’s very possible there will be a nice little Fyaa fleet there.”

“Okay,” said Vera, “can I ask one impertinent question?”

“Only you, Santos,” said Park.

“All right. Let’s go defeat the Ngugma. Once we do that, do we all just go back to fighting again amongst ourselves? Have we figured out how to say ‘status quo ante bellum’ in Fyaa?”

One of the stork-like captains propelled itself forward into the middle. It spread its ragged wings a little to maneuver in the weightlessness: it was as tall as Clay and its wingspan was twice its height. It shook its head out and said, “The Fyaa will not come back in war to Kleegrg, you say Primoid seeestems. These,” and it swung a beak toward the gathered Primoids, who made glowy, googly tentacles, “these are not our enemy. Weee make this promise.”

“And we like traaaade too,” said the other captain.

“Anyway, let’s defeat the Ngugma first,” said Rachel. “Just now, just Alpha and Beta, our job is to take that planetoid base and start scouting out the system.”

“How far behind us are you guys going to be?” asked Clay.

“One week,” said Park. “We will have the Primoid cruiser, the freighter, their nine fighters, and a small fleet of Fyaa; I believe they are sending us three of their own cruisers and a freighter. We’re hurrying up supply from PSB6, but you don’t need to wait for us, or for the Fyaa to assemble and make their farewells. We need you to sneak in ahead of us and spoil all the surprises.”

3.

The only people with them in the Honshu’s bay as Clay and his seven best friends set off from PSB6 to Fyatskaab, the Fyaa home world, were Park, Padfoot and Jack Dott, the utility officer who considered himself the little fleet’s concierge.

“We have no idea what you’re going to see,” Park told them. “The Fyaa fighter pilots and mechanics may still be holding out, but, given the thoroughness with which the Ngugma typically approach their chosen tasks, I imagine any resisters will be well-hidden and well-armed. The Ngugma, conceivably, might be done with what they’re doing, but we think they won’t be, we think once they’ve gone to the trouble, they’re going to be thorough. Either way, we will have a warm trail to follow, because we are not out to stop the Ngugma from ravaging the Fyaa home world, or ravaging Earth. We’re out to stop them ravaging anything.”

“Their ravaging days are over,” said Natasha.

“Let’s hope so, but you eight are not expected to do it by yourself. You know that, right?”

“Yes, we know that,” said Rachel. She turned her smirk on Apple and Izawa. “You two know that?”

“We know it,” said Izawa, and Apple said, “We made the Unbreakable Vow.”

“So about the fighters,” said Li Zan. “I understand they’ve been improved again.”

“They’re looking good, guys,” was Jack Dott’s verdict.

“I’d have to agree,” said Padfoot, running her hands along the outside of Clay’s ghost. “When Rachel and Clay were at Earth, at Mathilde, they were seeing Ghost 204s; we have the design parameters, and we’re calling these 204s, although maybe they should be 205s instead. If you needed to, you could travel several hundred light years at a jump, and if you find enough starlight for your battery, you could make a dozen jumps, a hundred. It was a good ship, it’s now a great ship, an amazing ship. You’re sure you’ll still need us?”

“Don’t joke about that,” said Vera. “Of course we need you. It scares the crap out of me, going just the eight of us somewhere like this. Before we left Bluehorse, we hardly knew what a Fyaa looked like, and none of us had seen an Ngugma except on video, much less had any idea how to defeat them. Now we’re going to the Fyaa home world, to Fyatskaab, to confront a whole Ngugma mining fleet. I won’t lie. It scares me crapless.”

The other pilots all glanced at her, a little startled still, except for Natasha, who smirked. The official facial expression of Alpha Wing. “I get it,” she said.

“You?” said Clay. “You two are the killers. I’m just a shuttle jockey.”

“I get it,” said Su Park. “You all do, I know you do. You, for certain, Mr. Shuttle Jockey. Who flew all the way back to Earth, neutralized I don’t know how many Ngugma cruisers and came all the way back with the news. I hope you never overcome your fear. You are going far away, and you’re going by yourselves. Just you, and your ship, and your fellow pilots, and your skills, and your fear.”

“And our vow,” said Vera.

“It’s what we have,” said Rachel. “It’s plenty.”

“All right, then,” said Park. “No need to prolong the farewells.” She then hugged each of the eight, which would only seem un-Park-like to someone who had not been around her long. They muttered words of good will to one another, while Padfoot and Dott looked on.

“Safe travels,” said Dott. “Call me if you need anything. See you in what, couple weeks? Or is it thirty-one years?”

“It’s both, Jack,” said Clay, shaking Dott’s hand. Then he grabbed Padfoot in a hug. “Thanks, Padfoot,” he said, letting her go. “See you all later.”

He smirked around at the others, including Izawa and Apple, who then smirked at one another. They kissed, then got in their Ghosts and sealed up. The other couples all did basically the same. Then they were dropping out of the Honshu bay, moving off a few hundred kilometers, hitting maximum thrust and speeding out of the PSB6 system, never to return.

4.

It took the eight fighters four days to reach the neighborhood of the speed of light. At 99.99999% of light speed, they experienced a mere five days of flight in covering 31 light years, notwithstanding the fact that their journey, to those not flying along, would be clocked at 31 years. Then they spend four days decelerating, before the Fyatskaab system began to come into view. They passed the time playing Set, chess and virtual soccer, and practicing simulations, along with other more private pursuits.

“So the Fyaa simulations were a little,” said Clay as he and Rachel lay naked, curled up in a yin and yang arrangement, looking at opposite displays.

“Pessimistic,” said Rachel. “Maybe we’re just better than we thought.”

“Maybe it’s best to assume the worst.”

Rachel made a little noise, as if she disapproved. Then she shifted, which still got his attention every time. She poked his display and up came a schematic of the Fyatskaab system. “The thing is,” she said, “this time we have every reason to assume the worst.” She let out a little sigh. “I’ll never forget.”

“Coming into Earth’s solar system,” said Clay.

“That was the worst.”

“Yeah.”

She smiled at him. “I’m just glad you were with me.”

Tens of hours later, the Fyatskaab system began to come into focus. Around them, the stars began to appear, the incoherent smears of light gelling into the ancient splash of the Milky Way.

Far ahead of them, the bright orange sun of Fyatskaab resolved from the chaos. Two enormous blue giants, the distance and temperature of Neptune but the size of a couple of Jupiters, appeared next, then more planets, including a pair, nearly in the same orbit, near the star. Even now they could tell there was something going on at those planets: they looked battered. What might have seemed like small, oblong, black moons were identical to Ngugma space stations at Earth. More stars resolved all around them, then more and more. A blob keeping pace with the combined fighters of Rachel and Clay turned out to be the combined fighters of Natasha and Vera. Behind them, a minute later, another blob and another appeared: Beta Wing.

“I’m gonna hail them,” said Rachel. “But first. Can I just say, before we change the mood—?”

“This happy mood we’re in, you mean?” Clay replied. “Feeling pretty good about the Cosmos?”

“Clay.” He shut up. “Dang it, Clay.” She started pulling her vac suit onto her legs.

I’m in trouble, he thought, as he started to do the same, but before she got her suit up past her butt, she turned herself around and took him in her arms and kissed him. She glared at him, green-blue eyes on his blue, and kissed him once more, slow and tender, finishing with another blue-green gaze. “Clay,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Rache.”

“Clay, it’s not something you have to be sorry about. I, I just need to say this to you before I say it to Vera and Tash and burst into,” and she paused, “tears,” she finished, and promptly did so.

“There, there,” said Clay, wondering incongruously what that even meant. There? Where? He took her in his arms.

“It’s just,” she said, making just a little space in his embrace, “I’ve been thinking about what Padfoot said. We left Earth and we’re never going to see those people again, your niece, my college friends. Okay. So we fly to Bluehorse with eight thousand colonists, and, you know, Ted Trein and Alice Grohl and Dr. Mooney and Ally Schwinn. And we get them set up. And then we’re all off in different directions, you and me, Vera, Tasha, Park, Tasmania. We get back to Bluehorse and Kalkar’s great granddaughter’s an admiral, Alice Grohl’s dead but her great niece is in Gamma Wing. So we leave there and now if we went back it’d be what, eighty some years after we left, but of course we’re not going back, not for a couple hundred years at least, so we’ll never see them again, if we’re lucky we’ll see Marjane Kalkar’s great grandkid. Now it’s just down to these four wings plus Tasmania and Honshu. You see where this is all going? After Padfoot’s little burst of emotion—!”

“I know!” said Clay, and immediately toned it down. “I know.”

“So it’s gonna happen. Clay. It’s going to happen. It’s going to be just us.”

“You and me?”

“Yeah, and Vera and Tasha, we can’t not have them. And maybe a few others. But still.”

“Not the Tasmania.”

“Well,” she said, and shrugged.

“Li and Timmis? Gemma Izawa? Maria Freakin’ Apple?”

“Clay.” He just raised his eyebrows. “Okay, yeah, them. But—!”

“But every time we leave someone behind,” said Clay, “we will never see them again, unless we all loop back someplace much, much later. And eventually it’s just us.”

“Everything gets left behind,” said Rachel, “except for who we take with us.”

“Rachel. Don’t get mad at me. But I’ve made my peace with that, I think I have. As long as it’s you. And Vera and Tasha, while we’re at it. The only humans within a thousand light years. Chase the Ngugma to the center of the Galaxy. Let’s go.”

Her face twisted into a smirk. “You’re so good for me,” she said. “Okay. Let’s hail them.”

5.

“Hey guys, we’re here,” came Vera’s message from a half light second away. “Starting to see what 62 years of Ngugma occupation can do. We haven’t seen any sign of Fyaa forces, but we’re at present just dropping past 17%. I’m marking a planetoid—is that the base?”

Fifteen and a half seconds later, Clay replied, “That’s the one. I’m picking up Beta back there.”

“Sending y’all some navigation,” said Rachel.

And twenty hours later, eight fighters dropped down toward an object made of water ice, methane ice and rock, oblong and only about fifty kilometers long in its longest dimension: about the distance from Auburn to the north side of Portland.

“Still not picking up any Fyaa signals,” Maria Apple noted as she came in toward the planetoid, the last of the eight. She took her Ghost after the other seven in through a busted hatch, down a round hall about twice as wide as her fighter, and then came to a stop in an airless bay.

Apple and Izawa got out and were immediately set to getting the bay hatch shut. It didn’t seem to have been shifted in any way in a century, and the Fyaa happen to have chosen their clockwise in the opposite direction from us: Lefty-Tighty, Righty-Loosey. Clay and Natasha lent muscle to the enterprise and the hatch got shut. They sealed up gaps. They let the Ghosts air up the bay.

“Okay,” said Rachel as they all floated in the bay. The gravity was about one percent of what they would have on Bluehorse-3. “Objective one achieved. Number two is: get this place running again. The Fyaa gave us specs. We should get power, they have starlight panels. Get life support and whatever they have for sensors.”

“We have the code,” said Timmis, holding up a finger. “They even made me a to-do list to get everything up, it’s like 150 steps.”

“It’s all yours, husband,” said Li, kissing his other hand, which she had been holding. They kissed a bit more.

“It’s like my folks at Bridge Club, back on the Canada,” said Apple.

“They build bridges?” said Izawa, while Timmis commenced to poke and slide on the Fyaa computer interface, a hexagonal touch-screen with about ten centimeters of depth, and spent thirty seconds with his right index finger against a spot below the display, downloading.

“Couple of us get back out and scout?” said Natasha.

“Sure,” said Rachel. “Except let’s mix it up. How about Vera and Izawa? Clay, Li, Maria, you guys explore the station. Natasha and I will try and find Fyaa signals once the system’s up. You guys good?”

“Sure, of course,” said everyone, basically. The little meeting broke up like a bubble popping. “Love your leadership style,” said Clay, kissing Rachel. “Phasers on stun for this?”

“Heavens no. If you shoot at some alien, I want you to blow a big hole in it.”

Clay spent some of the next hour imagining just how hardened, desperate and deadly someone would be, some alien someone, lurking without even a tech signature in an abandoned base in the dark for twenty, forty, a hundred years. But all they found were eleven rooms, carved from icy rock and then sealed tight, eleven plus the bay: a control room easily big enough for all eight of them to work, four rooms with bunks, and three rooms full of Fyaa-pilot-size junk. Two bedrooms contained twelve booths each, big enough to hold the birdlike Kaahriig officers, perching on wide, textured bars in what amounted to padded closets; two other rooms were lined with many shelves of shoebox-size cushioned bunks, the beds of the Tskelly pilots and the Errhatzky mechanics; the rest were storerooms.

There were two further airlocks, into tunnels that opened a kilometer or two east and a kilometer or two west. The three pilots sashayed all the way down each, and then returned to the now half-working control room.

“Didn’t shoot a damn thing,” said Clay.

“Each couple gets a whole room to themselves,” said Apple.

“Well,” said Natasha, “now you mention fruitless searches. We’ve got a whole big list of candidates for Fyaa bases, but not one of them shows up as a signal. Um, after 62 years of Ngugma occupation.”

“I got life support up and running,” said Timmis. “They don’t like as much nitrogen as we do, but it’s actually easy to dial the O2 down a bit. They also see about the same wavelength.”

“And they use nouns and verbs,” said Natasha. “And write dull emails to their loved ones. Preserved forever on undying storage disks. They don’t have gender, but they can still sound ridiculous.”

“We got forward camera,” said Rachel. They looked up: a big screen was showing the center of the solar system. Far inward toward the star, the two co-orbital planets, the habitable planets of the system, were right now about twenty degrees apart. One was just slightly larger than the other. Both had a rotten apple look to them, sickly brown and beaten up enough to be non-spherical. The larger one might once have been nearly covered by oceans; now, its huge holes were filled with water a hundred times deeper than the Marianas Trench. On close-up, the mining operation was still in full swing on both worlds, with cargo shuttles dropping toward vast holes in each planet, and others rising up to deposit their cargo in the orbiting stations. Perhaps because it had been going on so long already, the stations, each the size of a small province, were pooping out millions of tons of slag every day, which was falling into the atmosphere in a predictable nightly meteor shower. Several holes on each planet were now so deep that great caverns were open in the outer mantle. Settling of air into these interior spaces, along with general disturbance, had reduced the outer atmospheres to not much more than trace levels. There was absolutely no sign of life.

Clay had seen Earth after a couple of months of mining. Now he was imagining what it would look like the next time he was back, after they’d been working the place for a century or two.

Many ships flew around the two planets. A dozen fighters supported by two cruisers patrolled just beyond the outer orbit. At least four giant freighters—it would be accurate to describe them as the size of Manhattan Island in its glory days—squatted in space in high orbits over the two planets. One more super-freighter was trundling away, trudging toward light speed at the best acceleration it could manage, guarded by what seemed an enormous fleet: two battleships, mere kilometers long, at least forty cruisers and practically uncountable fighters.

“Okay then,” said Clay after five minutes. They left the camera display up but they all turned away from it.

“Our scouts are returning,” said Timmis.

“Well, let them in,” said Rachel. Everyone laughed nervously, and then all but Timmis headed for the bay. In a minute, they were all back in the control room.

“Absolutely nothing to see,” said Vera, detaching her helmet and unzipping her suit a bit. “Or way too much, I mean, my god, if they ever did this to Bluehorse—!”

“Well, they’d better not have,” said Rachel. “Leave it at that.”

“But no contact with Fyaa, no sign of Fyaa, nothing.”

“Not true,” said Timmis. “Look.” The pilots glommed around him looking at his screen. “See? We’re looking at a little rocky moon of the outermost ice giant. This is just as you two dipped behind the planet to land.”

They could see a curve of rocky lunar surface, two billion kilometers away, gleaming a happy grey in the magnified sunlight. And there, just at the edge of the moon, three little Fyaa fighters rose to about fifty kilometers, then dropped to a spot just rotating into daylight, where they disappeared. The whole sequence took about thirty seconds.

“Well,” said Rachel, “we’ve just made contact with the locals.”

6.

The key to communicating with the Primoids had been the shared facts of number theory. The key with the Fyaa of Fyatskaab seemed to be peek-a-boo. Vera and Natasha flew out and back three times along a trajectory only someone on that moon could see, and as soon as they were back in the shadow of their planetoid, the third time, the three Fyaa fighters did the same thing three times. The third time, one of them remained visible. Natasha went back out and beamed a short greeting in the Fyaa lingua franca. She got a long greeting back.

“They’re inviting themselves over,” said Natasha over the comm, after they watched the video message. “I wonder if we can make coffee.”

An hour later, three fighters came out from behind some rocks on that far-off moon, came out and didn’t go back. They curved out into black space and then, covered by a scatter of rock and ice, they turned toward the distant planetoid occupied by the humans.

“Look,” said Natasha, as the eight pilots stood around the control room watching, “that could be their entire surviving population in the system.”

“I don’t believe that,” said Rachel. “Not after sixty years. I mean, we know a little about the Fyaa. The Tskelly lifespan is only about a hundred Earth years. I can’t believe they’d sit in the same system, just three of them, and watch their planets get chewed up. They’d do something or they’d leave.” She looked around. “So they’re coming here? Should we clean the place up?”

7.

Ten hours later, three tiny fighters pulled into the repaired bay. They hopped out, three squirrely little octopods, and two toady little hexapods as well—Errhatzky, the mechanics. They had a little conversation with Natasha, which the other humans sort of understood some of: welcome to Fyatskaab, sorry about the hospitality. Natasha assured them the hospitality was fine.

Then Timmis, with some help from the locals, got the base system to produce food the Tskelly and Errhatzky would eat, a sort of pellet, much like what Captain Root fed her three cats. They tried coffee, and liked it black; they tried other human food and didn’t like either salt or sugar on things. And then everyone got out their videos and started in comparing holocausts.

The Ngugma came to Fyatskaab more than a hundred Earth years ago. It was a beautiful day, by Earth or Fyaa standards: the rolling sea in the light of a brilliant sun, the rolling hills blanketed with farms and forests. Fyatskaab had no plants or animals or fungi with any sort of relationship to those of Earth, but, by golly, they had plants (blue-green, not “tree green”) and animals (observably arthropod or reptilian or fishy or mollusk-like) and fungi (which made up a large part of the diet). The mountains were tipped with snow behind the landing craft from which the first Ngugma visitors waddled. The pitch was exactly the same as at Earth: we are far superior in technology, but don’t worry, we are here to help you, and all we ask in return is a chance to trade. They had suggested the Fyaa send back with them a delegation chosen from the various species that made up the Fyaa nation. The Ngugma spoke nearly perfect Fyaa lingua franca.

It was all so familiar that Clay and Rachel kept exchanging glances, and held hands through much of the show.

But if the first act was identical, the second act was much rewritten. The Fyaa, led by the crustacean-like Kahiim, the scholarly Kaahriig and the militant proletarian Mrez, decided they would not trade with the Ngugma, nor would they send a delegation. They did not like green eggs and ham. If the Ngugma wanted any intercourse with the Fyaa, they would have to reveal a lot more about their own empire than they had. Each of the five Fyaa species was proud, in its own way, and the five together, and perhaps especially the space-faring Tskelly, harbored a pride in being Fyaa that exceeded the sum of all the subsidiary prides. So you think you’re far superior to us, do you? Well, perhaps it is we who are far superior to you.

The Fyaa said no to the Ngugma. The 180-minute video showed them doing so, nicely but in no uncertain terms.

The Ngugma left, and that was that, except that forty years later, huge ships had rolled in, with their clouds of fighters, more than a hundred cruisers and a dozen battleships, and were allowed to sail right up to the inner orbits. The Fyaa still said no, but they didn’t want to have to fight a battle against such a massive enemy, not if they could talk their way out of it. And who knew what the next step was going to be? Not the Fyaa, who had paid zero attention to what had happened to Earth. To the Fyaa, humans were little more than a rumor.

It struck Clay and the others now, because it hadn’t struck them before, how little all these space empires—the humans and the Primoids and the Fyaa and, well, the Ngugma—actually knew of each other. Even the Ngugma seemed a little shocked at the pride of the Fyaa. In all the movies, in all the shows, alien races taunted each other over the comm and brawled in starport bars. Clay imagined Ngugma throwing chairs at Primoids: no, it didn’t scan. Only the Humans and the Fyaa would behave that way, and both, frankly, were getting the shit beaten out of them.

The Ngugma sent forth robotic shuttles over the two inhabited planets, and each of them sent out many smaller shuttles, and these sent out even smaller craft in their hundreds of thousands; and these sprayed out a shower of material which fell across the two planets, and by the time anyone in the Fyaa leadership could work out what was going on, every living thing on both worlds was dying of radiation poisoning.

Astatine is one of those chemical elements which is notable for the instability of even its most stable isotopes. That’s why it’s even called “astatine.” The longest half-life isotope is astatine-210, at 8.1 hours. One does not mine anything with a half-life measured in hours—by the time you processed it, it wouldn’t be it anymore. And, of course, in the process, it would have pumped out a ton of gamma rays.

The Ngugma could synthesize astatine in large quantities—they were some great synthesizers. The isotope was essentially perfect for the use they put it to: it released killing levels of radiation, and then quickly decayed into nice, innocent bismuth and lead and thallium. In a matter of days, everyone and everything was dead. Whole ecosystems were wiped clean off two planets; creatures that were the result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution were gone in a few hours.

Everything died. The video spent a fair amount of time showing it dying. It was no more pleasant than what Clay had seen broadcast from Earth. The fact that the dead, rotting and corroded, and the dying, struggling to explain what was happening as it happened, were Mrez and Kahiim and Kaahriig and not humans: it made no difference.

Everything was dead, and then the astatine was pretty much gone. A hundred half-lives was less than a month. The drilling could begin.

The Fyaa and the humans were alike in many ways. They breathed oxygen, they ate stuff made of carbon, they drank stuff that was mostly water, they used nouns and verbs, they had two eyes each and one mouth, they wore vac suits, albeit tiny ones, and fired laser weapons, they saw in similar wavelengths and they heard at similar frequencies, even if the Errhatzky in particular could distinguish by smell a thousand different compounds at parts-per-billion levels. And their civilization had been almost completely wiped out so that the Ngugma could mine their planets to the point of mutilation. Humans and Tskelly and Errhatzky watched it all in disgust, anger and despair.

And two days later, when the rest of the fleet from PSB6 began to appear out of the haze of light speed, they had the beginnings of a plan.