Friends of the Sky

1.

Death is the condition from which there is no recovery. Clay had a moment to think this as his Ghost cut in behind Rachel’s, dodging and picking off the front edge of a thin cloud of Ngugma missiles. The big black armored super-freighter loomed a million kilometers ahead, surrounded by umpteen scurrying cruisers and four battlecruisers, and countless robotic fighters. It was a storm of guns, coming through the debris field at the dozen Ghost 204s.

“Argon,” called out Rachel, and Alpha Wing obliged: Rachel was closely followed by Natasha, then Vera, then Clay. She pulled them across the enemy front and then turned them in along an unexpected lane of spidery Ngugma fighters, which the Human fighter pilots cut down in a row. Beta Wing pulled close together and stuck to a straight line as if traveling down a cylinder a meter wide at 5000 kilometers each second, scattering robot fighters and dancing around the battlecruiser’s blasts.

Clay took out the last robotic fighter in the column of what, thirty?—and turned to see the cruisers maneuvering to bottle them up. A pink spot appeared on Clay’s display, up and to the left, a space between three of the cruisers.

“Think we can go there?” said Rachel, in all their ears.

“Hell yeah,” said Vera.

“Kay, follow me. Tight line, guys.” Rachel dropped ten kilometers and then shot forward, and Tasha, Vera, and Clay dropped and shot forward behind her, in single file, closing to fifty meters. Rachel put a target on a cruiser that was not in their way yet but soon would be: the rest put their targets there too, and opened fire. The other cruisers hurried to close the line, but the one in the crosshairs quickly went dead.

They shot by and pulled up again, the super-freighter in their sights, its missiles flooding space before them. Clay sent a single letter to Rachel and dropped out, wiggling, braking, then whipping around and accelerating, firing the entire time, and hundreds of the missiles essentially ran into each other in a lovely silent firework. As he pulled out of line, Rachel’s voice informed all of them: “Argon Five A. Nice move, Hubs.”

The cruisers reversed acceleration to follow him, but the women of Alpha Wing burst in on them. One after another, the Ngugma cruisers blew up or went dead; Clay was leading a line of robot fighters away from all that, and then with a flip and a spiraling maneuver, he was knocking them down like pins in a bowling alley.

He was alone in empty space. He could see Beta deviously snaking through a litter of missiles (live and dead) and robotic fighters (live and dead). They and the rest of Alpha, trying to get to the superfreighter, met two battlecruisers and a damn battleship, setting up a weirdly imbalanced team sport: three ships, big as stadiums, against seven fighters smaller than pool tables.

Far away in the distance, Beta reached the fourth battlecruiser, and began bedeviling and belaboring it. One of them went dead, possibly lethally: Izawa’s name was missing. He gasped: another blew up. That was Apple.

Over there, Schmitt went black, but stayed intact. The forward battlecruiser began taking heavy damage, but another fighter diving in veered a meter too close to the fire line and blew up: Aliya. Clay did not take the time to gasp. He spent one whole second to consider seven, no, five of his best friends going up against three giants. The giants were not alone, either: yet more fighters, and at least four cruisers, were coming up to join.

He looked the other way. There was the super-freighter. If the battlecruisers were stadiums, the super-freighter was a city, or a not-too-small moon. There was no one near it but a few robot fighters. He pushed to maximum acceleration, and began knocking out the small fry that were in his way.

He was within two hundred thousand kilometers. A hundred and fifty. A hundred. He set targets and started firing.

His sensors informed him that he too was under fire.

He dodged and wove and tried to keep his target on target. Five missiles locked onto him. He let his own guitar-pick missiles go get those. He eliminated all distraction. He could go up, for all he cared now, as long as he got that shot off, that one shot that put the freighter over the edge. He could save planets. He could save Bluehorse.

And then, out of nowhere, around the corner of the freighter, came six new fighters. These were not robots, and they were not Ghosts, they weren’t even half the size of Ghosts, flown with a jittery recklessness that no Su Park trainee would ever show. They were—

“Fyaa,” he said as if it were an obscenity.

He would break off and deal with them. But he would get one more volley off first—one more shot, and one more, and one more because the freighter was—

His screens went red. Then they went blank. Then he was “sitting in a tin can,” waiting to find out if he was somehow going to be saved, or would be blasted to atoms in the cleanup.

Death is the state from which there is no recovery, so this must not be death, thought Clay as he finally was permitted to climb out of his Ghost in the weightless bay of the Merchant Cruiser Honshu.

“You were D. I. S.?” asked Izawa, floating nearby having a smoke with Apple and Aliya. Gemma Izawa was little, black-haired with light brown eyes and a natural smile; Maria Apple was, fittingly, a freckly redhead who weighed about as much as a paperclip, and could do triple integrals in her head; Mizra Aliya was brown-eyed, brown-skinned and black-haired, about Clay’s height and solidly built, with a tiny remnant of the accent she had been raised with in the Pakistani settlements in northern Siberia. Izawa and Aliya had begun as colony ship fighter pilots; Izawa’s girlfriend Apple had gotten on the trip to Bluehorse as a teenage colonist.

“Yeah,” said Clay. “Dead in space, drive ejected. You guys got cleanly killed. I had to sit there for twenty minutes and watch the rest of the slaughter. It was the Fyaa. They can’t be that good.”

“That’s the thing,” said Su Park, coming out of Bay Control. “We don’t know.”

“But we do know we can kill them,” said Daria Acevedo, climbing out of her Ghost. “I killed them.”

“You dead?” asked Aliya.

“Yeah,” said Acevedo, “but there’s good news coming.”

One minute later, Rachel’s hatch opened: within a few seconds, Vera, Natasha and Anand Ree popped out of their Ghosts.

“D. I. S.,” said Ree.

“Oh yeah?” Natasha replied. “Combat and computers down.”

They turned. Rachel and Vera were high-fiving still, and then Rachel turned to smooch Clay. Then she turned to Park. Park said, “Anything to say about the simulation, Commander Andros?”

“Oh, lots,” said Rachel. “We know we can beat basically any fleet the Ngugma send at us, if we execute.” She and Park both glared at Izawa and Apple, who had just kissed and were now trying to cuddle and pay attention at the same time. “In this case, at some point Clay made his suicide run, and then Natasha lost her computer—!”

“Sucked,” said Natasha Kleiner.

“And it was just Vera and me. And I had to take on what, ten Fyaa by myself? Just so what?”

“I could blow up the frickin’ super-freighter,” said Vera.

“And did you do so, wing third?”

“I did indeed blow up said frickin’ super-freighter, Commander Andros.”

“I should have had that god damned super-freighter,” said Clay. “I’m just putting that out there.”

“You saved our asses,” said Vera. “I think you deserve about 90% of the credit.”

“Forty percent,” said Natasha. “I get fifteen.”

“Deal,” said Clay.

“Okay, then,” said Rachel. She kissed him again. She said to Park, “We may have all gotten killed, not one of us would have not had his or her body blown up by Ngugma or Fyaa at the end, but we did achieve the mission objective.” She looked at Park. “Commander.”

“And that,” said Park, “indicates to me that I need to make the simulations a little harder.”

2.

Once upon a time, Clay Gilbert lived alone in a small city on Planet Earth. He was in his late twenties, he had a job he didn’t hate, he had sort of broken up with his sort of girlfriend. He was flying to the space station and back, and then going off for a beer with a couple of people he sort of knew from college. He visited his sister every so often, his sister Marie and her husband and his niece Yvette. He didn’t have any idea what direction his life should go. He didn’t have any idea what direction his life would go.

Then he got hired for a new job.

In a sense, more than three centuries had passed. They had visited planets around far stars with exotic names like 55 Cancri and HD85512. They had been attacked by mouthholes. Jana Bluehorse got eaten in space, the first human fighter pilot killed in action; she got a star system named after her. They had been attacked by, and then fought and then befriended, the aliens they called Primoids. Then the humans founded the colony named for Bluehorse and defended it from more Primoids. Clay and Rachel flew home to Earth and then home again to Bluehorse. They returned to their home planet a quarter of a millennium after they left. Clay was perhaps a year and a half older than he had been, because, as they now knew better than anyone, Dr. Albert Einstein had been correct about time dilation.

It could be said that Earth had changed, in the 245 years they’d been away: its entire human population had been systematically wiped out. The wipers, the Ngugma, were sailors of the skies, mariners of the seas of space, lovers of long ships, ships, in fact, so long and of such girth that they could carry significant amounts of the Earth’s mantle with them. To do what with? No one yet knew.

Nonetheless, Clay and Rachel decided to get married while on Earth. The legality of the ceremony was beyond question: it would be accurate to say that the entire live human population of Earth, at that moment, was in Greenland to attend the wedding, along with a couple of ravens as witnesses. And then they had gone back to Bluehorse because there was nothing else for it. There they discovered that it had been defended again, and that another fleet of Primoids was gathering to really flatten the place. Somehow, the aliens let themselves be talked out of it, an especially interesting development considering that the Primoids had no spoken language whatever, and their written language would be best described as non-linear.

And now, the humans (who were becoming known as the species whose home planet is Bluehorse-3) and their Primoid allies were trying to figure out how to fight back against a species that could and would overwhelm whole planetary civilizations just to suck their mantles out for the metals.

Once upon a time, Clay Gilbert had lived on Earth. Once upon a time, Clay Gilbert had lived on a planet.

“Now I live in a tin can,” he said. He looked, across the ten centimeters that separated them, at his wife Rachel. They floated, post-coital, in their joined Ghost fighters, watching a documentary about the blended marine ecosystem of the Parallelogram Sea.

“You love it,” said Rachel. “Tell the truth. You never liked gravity.”

“It seemed like a good idea at first, I’m sure,” he replied, “but yeah, I stopped being into it about when I passed the one-meter-tall mark on the wall in the kitchen.”

“What were you, eighteen at the time?”

“You’re a fine one to talk, Shorty. And there’s not many people I can call Shorty.”

“You’re a Shorty,” said Rachel.

“No, you are,” said Clay.

“And you are,” she said, looking down his body, “except for one place, but I’m the only one who gets to know about that.” They smiled at one another in innocent married lust. Then Rachel let her smile go, and said, “You’re happy being with me.”

“I am so happy being with you. You’re happy being with me?”

“I’d—I mean, yes, yes, a thousand times yes, but what I wanted to say is that I’d better be. And you’d better be. Because we’re off again.”

“Of course.”

“And pretty much the only people who will be keeping time with us will be Alpha, Beta and Gamma, and the Honshu and the Tasmania and Park’s special wing. That’s what, sixteen fighter pilots, and maybe thirty freighter crew. Time dilating together.”

“You’re asking if I’m okay with that?” said Clay.

Rachel gazed at him, then suddenly laughed. “I don’t know why you’re a mystery to me anymore,” she said. “I should know that if anyone didn’t mind the thought of bidding farewell to everyone he knew outside of the Wings, it would be you.”

“Not you? Wing commander?”

“Oh, me too,” she said. “As long as you’re under my command.”

3.

Alpha Wing strode into the conference room three minutes early, but everyone was there already: Beta (Li Zan, Timmis Green, Gemma Izawa and Maria Apple); Gamma (Daria Acevedo, Peri Schmitt, Mizra Aliya and Millie Grohl); Su Park’s “Special Wing” (Park, Bonnie Bain, Jamaica Leith and Anand Ree); and most of the crews of the two armed freighters. Also present was the Home Wing, led by Indra Singh and therefore called the Singh Wing. They were staying around Bluehorse, transiting to Corsica and back just to time dilate, and taking half a year every trip to train fighter pilots to defend Bluehorse and Corsica; someone had to stay home and watch for trouble.

There had been a wave of predictable marriages in the past three weeks: Tasmania’s two pilots, Emily Gray and Ram Vindu; Li and Timmis; Tasmania drive officers Shawna Shelleen and Ryne Mahmoud (who were bringing their baby daughter Abigail along); a couple of engineers on the Honshu; and Vera and Tasha, Missus and Missus Killer.

“Wow,” said Mizra Aliya to Natasha as the Alphas sat down with the Betas. “You’re hitched. You guys are a married couple. Wow. Congratulations!” She looked at Vera. “I am still in shock.”

“Uh, thanks,” said Vera and Natasha. “I was glad you were there,” Natasha added. “All you guys.”

“It was a beautiful ceremony,” said Gemma Izawa. She was across from Aliya, next to Clay; she was holding hands with Maria Apple on her other side. “Not too large, not too small.”

“Vac suit formal,” put in Peri Schmitt.

“On the beach,” said Millie Grohl. “We could have gone the naked wedding route.”

“We were just happy to be invited,” said Apple. “I mean, I didn’t know I rated. I wasn’t even an alternate when we left Earth. I was in tenth grade. I was still learning trig.”

“At least we all remember Earth,” said Natasha. “You’re my family, guys. You’re our family.”

“It was more than we had at our wedding,” said Rachel. “I’m sorry we didn’t get around to inviting you guys. Clay only thought to ask those ravens at the last minute.”

“We’re going to do what you guys did,” said Maria Apple. “Right, Gem?”

“You’re getting hitched next?” said Vera. “You have to invite us, obviously.”

“We’re thinking about which planet,” said Gemma Izawa. “You know, it matters.”

“Not Bluehorse?” asked Rachel.

“The thing is,” said Apple, “we only want to invite you guys. The fighter people.” She looked around. “Maybe the Tasmania people.”

“Kalkar can officiate,” said Clay.

“I thought Park lent a certain solemnity to our wedding,” said Vera. “Why don’t you ask her?”

“You may ask me anything,” said Park, looking at Apple but talking to the room, “but you have to wait till I’m done briefing. Perhaps you should invite the Primoids. They can officiate.”

“We could invite the Fyaa,” said Clay.

“Thank you. An excellent suggestion, should our first task succeed. Four months ago, we talked the Primoids out of destroying Bluehorse. Now they’re our allies. So I hope all of you have enjoyed your four months of rest and relaxation. It’s been decided that we are all needed elsewhere again.”

“It’s been decided,” said Kalkar, with a grin at Captain Cassiopeia Root, “by Commander Su Park.”

“I only wish.” The two armored freighter captains made conciliatory gestures. Park touched a point in the air, and a three-dimensional display of stars came to life around her hand. She began touching stars, which grew brighter: “Bluehorse is here, this is Corsica, and these are Primoid Center systems. And over here,” and she reached to the edge of the region on display, “forty-two light years off, is what we think is the Fyaa home world. And this,” she said, “is PSB6.”

“This is the one,” said Rachel, “that’s under attack by the Fyaa.”

“If things haven’t changed by the time we get there,” said Park, “it’s now a stalemate. The Fyaa did not send enough forces to take the planet from the Primoids, although I’m sure they thought they had, so they settled for building up in the outer reaches of the system. Of course the Primoids have been building up as well, they have a Center system about nine light years away, so they too are steadily resupplying. One is sure the Fyaa thought it would be a walkover, but instead it’s turned into a quagmire.”

“And the Fyaa being the way they seem to be,” said Kalkar, “they can’t give up on it.”

“Because they don’t know the meaning of retreat,” said Vera.

“At least their fighter pilots don’t,” said Park. “PSB6 is only twelve light years from Bluehorse. Our marginal objective is to stop the Fyaa from overwhelming the Primoids. Our substantive objective is to win them over to the fight against the Ngugma.”

“Well,” said Natasha, “this sounds just like the Primoids at Bluehorse, and we won them over without firing a shot.”

“That’s not going to happen this time, I’m rather sure.”

“This fight at PSB6,” said Clay, “it’s been going on how long?”

“None of us knows Primoid time units,” said Park. “Less than a century, I guess, but it had been through at least one cycle of reinforcement when we became aware of it, which would be just a couple of months ago, but add twelve years of travel time. We get back there in twelve more years, and maybe it was going on twenty years before that: forty plus years? But quite possibly much longer.”

“So we all go in as a fleet?” asked Timmis Green.

“That is the plan,” said Park. “This will probably be the start of a rather long journey, and in future planet-falls, we may send fighters ahead, if you behave.”

“We’ll behave!” said Apple.

“We’ll see,” said Park. “But listen. As I say, this could be a very long mission: we could be back in Bluehorse centuries from now. Being gone five hundred years is not beyond the realm of possibility. We will be our own command, because no one else will be able to stay in touch with us. So our mission, as I see it, is twofold.” Park, the smallest person in the room, took in Kalkar, Root, Li Zan, and Rachel with a glance around, as if she weren’t the boss. “One, we go forth to degrade the capacity of the Ngugma to mine planets. The reserve fleet, which is much larger than ours and includes the Singh Wing, has the task of defending Bluehorse.”

“They’ll be slaughtered, Commander,” said Clay. He looked around. “Do you guys think the Ngugma are going to attack Bluehorse in the next five hundred years?”

Everyone else including Park made some sort of gesture of surrender: rolled eyes, hands up, head shake. Rachel looked Clay in the eye and said, “Hope not.”

“Thank you, Mr. Gilbert. The plan is to find and destroy their local depot, their local hub. That may cause them to pull back temporarily, and we can figure out what to do next. But simply staying here and waiting for them and hoping to win on our home ground may not be the optimal solution. It wasn’t at Earth.”

“Or at Holey,” said Rachel. “Okay. That’s mission one.”

“Mission Two,” said Park, “is this: none of us is allowed to get killed. I once thought it ill to have members of the same wing be in a relationship.” She looked around at Rachel and Clay, their shoulders touching; Natasha and Vera, holding hands; Izawa and Apple, holding hands; Li and Timmis, her hand on his. “Suffice it to say, my strategic thinking has adjusted. My tactical thinking has also adjusted. And I recall hearing, and I did not approve of this at the time either, of a certain oath that you four swore, Andros and Gilbert and Kleiner and Ms. Santos.”

“Ah,” said Vera, “the Unbreakable Vow.”

“Yes.” She looked around the fighter pilots before her. “We are the best. We are superior fighter pilots to all we have met. I know this, because I have been trying to create a realistic challenge to your skills, in the simulator. I have not found it, and not through lack of imagination. We can create a simulation that you cannot defeat, and we can make a simulation that is realistic, but it seems we cannot do both.” She let them think about that for a moment, then went on. “We are going on a long journey. We have no idea what’s out there, but we know the Orion Arm is not a safe neighborhood. We have many fights ahead. It is my objective that we lose no one during those fights. We can win a battle in which we do not lose a single pilot. Everyone here knows we can. I hereby adopt this as a strategic principle.”

“Lose no one?” said Li Zan.

“It’s a weird concept,” said Rachel, “but it makes sense when you think about it.”

“It makes sense,” said Park, “because we are the best fighter pilots we have met, and thanks to Padfoot over there,” and Patricia “Padfoot” Lopez and her underlings Gene Bell and Poto Wall all bowed their heads, “we have the best fighters we know of.” She paused and glared at Rachel. “You play chess. It makes no sense to sacrifice your rook for their knight, or pawn. We have at least a dozen queens and rooks, and they have thousands of pawns. Why would we trade one of ours for one of theirs? Why would we trade one of ours for a hundred of theirs?” She looked around.

Rachel looked around too. “Commander,” she said, “I don’t think any of us believes otherwise.”

“All right. Consider those your orders. We leave in fifty hours.”

Everyone looked around: fighter pilots and freighter crew members stood up in this conference room where, months or centuries ago, they had floated weightless. Then, starting with Clay and Vera, they started high fiving.

“We’re going in space again,” said Rachel, high fiving her husband and Tasha. “Yay!”

4.

The Alphas and Betas went off for a little squash soccer, a game they had invented, and then out for wine, a lovely white from grapes grown on the slopes of the uninhabitable highland above Canada. They went off to bed in actual queen-size beds well past Bluehorse-3’s midnight, got up eight hours later just about dawn, and went for a swim in the Parallelogram Sea. By midmorning, they found themselves seated around a large table on a verandah overlooking the bay, having actual fish and actual lettuce. Locally grown coffee gave way to locally made pale ale.

“Make the most of it,” said Vera Santos. “We’re going to be back on regurgitated food and drink in about thirty hours. It’s going to be a while before we have fish like this, that’s for sure.”

“Oh, we won’t be gone that long,” said Maria Apple. “Twelve years out, then maybe a couple more jumps, twenty each, then back home?” She looked at Izawa.

“That’s seventy or eighty years,” said Gemma Izawa. “Probably more.”

“I think it could be a lot more,” said Timmis Green. “We’re chasing the Ngugma.”

“And there’s no way to plan a campaign like that,” said Rachel. “We know we’re going to catch up with them. We just don’t know where.”

“Not forgetting,” said Clay, “that we also need to work out how to attack them. The simulations are very comforting, really, but—!”

“But if they’re at all correct,” said Vera, “then we’re better off with the Fyaa on our side than with them fighting us.”

“Yeah, and that reminds me. No fair sticking Fyaa in as allies of the Ngugma, in that simulation. I felt that was reprehensible and mean.”

“It was fun the one time,” said Rachel. “Ha ha. I’m not sorry about making sure we all have those guys on our minds.”

“No, I want them with us for sure,” said Vera. “Either we get them, with their zippy little fighters and their, um—!”

“Carefree ferocity,” said Gemma.

“Or we manage with just us and the Primoids, or there’s someone else, which there isn’t. There are a lot of dead civilizations around here—the Plaque People, the guys from Holey, whoever once long ago lived at Bluehorse—but we only know of four going concerns, and one of those four is the Ngugma themselves.”

“Are we the only ones who survived an Ngugma attack?” asked Maria Apple.

“Apparently so. Yeah.”

“What does that tell you about the Ngugma?” asked Vera.

“That they prey on the weak,” said Clay. “Well, I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but we’re going to show them.” They looked around at each other, exchanging nods, murmurs and raised eyebrows. Then they gazed out over the sea and sipped their beer. Apple laughed.

“We’re a bunch of old couples,” she said. “Look at us.”

“Remember those swinging singles we used to be?” said Natasha. “Back in Old Quebec?”

“Okay, everyone,” said Gemma Izawa, “this sounds like we need to do a big selfie.”

They laughed, and then set about organizing themselves for a picture. The girl who had been waiting on them came over to take it, as they unconsciously coupled up: Gemma and Maria, Li and Timmis, Tasha and Vera, Rachel and Clay, Bonnie and Jamaica, Mizra and Millie.

“This is us,” said Clay between takes. “This is what we were when we grew up.”

“A bunch of old couples?” said Natasha.

“Who figured out how to beat the Ngugma.”