Homeward by Night

1.

There was still considerable caution and widespread mistrust, and neither the Primoid fleets nor the human ones were commanded by idiots. Most of the Primoid Center forces remained outside the orbit of Bluehorse-5, while a super-wing of nine Primoid fighters was detailed to threaten or monitor the fighter wings outside the orbit of Bluehorse-3. “Laughable, of course,” Clay said to Rachel. “Nine fighters? Vera could chew those up all by herself.”

“And maybe they know that,” said Rachel, “but in this context, it’s just a token of their interest.”

Meanwhile, the two or three sides of the conflict went about the dicey business of assembling a parley. The fleets watched each other closely; the fighters flew paths carefully chosen to show readiness to defend rights without threatening offensive aggression. For another thirty hours the two huge yet scattered beasts got close enough to hurl peace proposals at one another, and eventually it was determined that the Heavy Cruiser Amygdala and an unarmed Earthling freighter would rendezvous, somehow, with one of the invaders’ cruisers, and that the parley would take place on the freighter, which happened to be the venerable Tessa, built back on olde Earth. The ships maneuvered, communicating all the while, as best they could considering they did not share any sort of common language, and then, once a link-up had been jerry-rigged, the officers on both sides actually got together in the empty freight section and negotiated.

Clay and Rachel and Natasha, along with five linguists and two logicians and Captain Ray Kole of the Abstraction, were asked to join the proceedings, but after an hour of explaining how they had learned to show videos to the Primoids, Clay and Rachel were excused to return to patrol. Peace was not assured yet. Natasha was allowed to remain: along with having communicated with Primoids, she had also helped dissect one’s brain. No further dissections were planned, but other than that, what was happening inside the Tessa was maddeningly opaque.

“Okay,” Natasha broke in on the comm about Hour Seventeen, “are you ready for a quick lowdown?”

“What? Yes, oh, yes,” said Clay. “Please,” said Rachel.

“Well, it’s the Ngugma, but it’s not just the Ngugma. Okay? The Center has this ongoing war with the Fyaa.”

“Finally we may get to find out what a Fyaa is,” said Rachel.

“I think they’re like five different species working together,” said Acevedo, who was filling out the foursome with Rachel, Clay and Vera. “The squirrel guys are pilots, but there’s others that are, like, mechanics.”

“We have no idea what their systems are like,” said Vera. “But we’re going to need them to stop shooting at us, because the Ngugma can eat their planets just like they’ve eaten ours.”

“Hear hear,” said Rachel.

“Anyway,” said Natasha, “I have to get back, but the original idea was to come here and blow the crap out of humanity and not have to worry about us on their flank, but you have to think the way Primoids think, there’s all these factors, and three factors changed. One, they saw the number of ships we had, and they no doubt remembered what happened the last two times, and they knew it would be just a little harder than expected. They’d still accomplish their objective, even if they didn’t win outright, but they’re not huge risk takers. Two, they got the news from Earth. And three, um, apparently what you sent them was rather persuasive.”

“Really?” asked Clay. “What did they think of my little presentation?”

“I don’t know. I guess they were, um, moved or whatever. I found something out, though. They have been monitoring human broadcasts for hundreds of years. They only get patchy signals way out here in the boonies, and they see everything a hundred years late of course, but they did already know how to watch our graphic documents, I mean videos and pictures, and yes, they had seen the news from Earth. I guess that already had them thinking. You’d hope so.”

“Yes,” said Rachel, while Clay said, “I wonder what they thought of Firefly.”

“Ha! I could ask,” said Natasha. “Listen, I really have to get back. I’ll see you guys. This could be hours yet. Many, many hours. Fortunately the Tessa has some decent latte.” With a quick smile around, Natasha clicked off.

“Okay, guys,” called Vera, “Daria and I are taking Path One, you two lovebirds take Path Two?”

“Sounds good,” said Rachel.

“That latte,” Clay called to Rachel. “I hope it’s anything like what they had on the Canada when I caught up with you after you walked out on that meeting.”

“Oh, you take me way back,” said Rachel. “We were so much younger 175 years ago.”

“We were here,” said Clay.

“We’re always here,” said Rachel. She held his eyes with hers, that slight smile hovering on her lips. “I want to be with you, Clay Gilbert.”

“Oh, Rachel Andros, we need to be together. I need to kiss you a lot, over many years.”

Rachel looked away as if checking if anyone was looking. “Well,” she said, “we get this thing settled, we can land and do that walk along the beach again.”

“I’ll want to stop you every five minutes and make love to you.”

“Oh, I like the way you think.” She leaned closer on the screen. “I love you.”

“I love you, Rachel.”

“You know there’s going to be more fighting to come. You know there’s long journeys and shots in the dark ahead for us. You know that.”

“And another century or two or three,” said Clay. “With you.”

2.

Peace was made.

The entire collection of ideas in the agreement was written in English and also in the pictorial format of the Primoids, and finally in a third edition in a mixed style of English and picture. The pure English version ran to just over 600 English words. Clay’s average college term paper was longer than that. Everyone walked away more or less confident in their ability to understand what had been agreed to, which was:

(1) The Primoid Center would remove its fleet from Bluehorse within the week, and re-abandon the secret base several light weeks out into the dark of space, the one they had abandoned originally after Bluehorse was founded and first defended, and re-fortified and abandoned again after the costly invasion of eighty years ago.

(2) The Earthlings would not expand further in the direction of Primoid space, though unarmed freighters would be greeted at the six systems that formed the Primoid Center.

(3) And the rebels would not be further pressed, at least those on the Bluehorse side of Primoid space.

(4) The now three hundred Primoids on Bluehorse-3, which included five of those captured 176 years ago along with their descendants and others captured eighty years ago, were repatriated to the Center, while an embassy of sorts, consisting of a dozen Primoids from the Center, was to be respectfully maintained at Bluehorse.

(5) And, finally, it was understood that everyone party to the agreement would cooperate somehow to thwart the Ngugma.

The majority of the time spent in those meetings between the Humans of Bluehorse, the Primoids of Corsica and Gliese 667, and their foes, the Primoids of the Primoid Center, went to trying to understand each other. The negotiators, or whatever they were, a dozen Primoids and eleven Humans, hadn’t planned a teach-in on interspecies communication, but that was, perforce, what happened. Four linguists from the University of India and three of what were apparently Primoid scholars worked out the mixed script; Admiral Marjane Kalkar, her big-bearded ancestor Captain Alfred Kalkar, and Captain Palmette, the trim-bearded skipper of the Heavy Cruiser Miranda, had a long “chat” over food and drink with the invaders’ commander, along with a diplomat of some sort and another completely mysterious Primoid. They wore Natasha completely out, and she wasn’t sure anyone understood anything anyone else was communicating. But apparently there was understanding enough.

The proclamation was publically posted, in three forms of writing and in a sort of animated video, and then the experts of both species went back to trying to comprehend each other. Everyone thought important, from the four Mayors of the four cities of Bluehorse to Su Park and Alfred Kalkar and at least twenty Primoid officers, took part. It was seen to be a matter of life and death.

Meanwhile, Clay and Rachel and Vera, Daria Acevedo and Gemma Izawa put down in a lovely plaza along the shore of Hudson Bay, the gulf of the Parallelogram Sea where the Canada had landed. Natasha, in her Ghost, met them in orbit and landed with them. The old colony ship’s outlines were still clear, surrounded by an administrative building, a few college buildings, a patch of impressive high rises, a few commercial properties and then an extent of three-story residential. Beyond that, the rift had magically filled with city and farmland, and from the air the boundary between the two was magically clear. There was still no such thing as property value on Bluehorse-3 to push sprawling suburbs out into agricultural land, and every square centimeter that could foster a soybean or a grape or a tomato was doing so.

They landed, got out and found a small but very friendly crowd converging on them. For ten minutes the six little pilots shook hands and hugged people they’d never met, and for the rest of the day and beyond, random people waved at them and children ran up to take selfies with them.

Vera punched Clay in the arm. “You’re famous,” she said.

“You’re famous,” he replied.

Finally the six pilots managed to snag a table in the back of a café in Canada Town. Over lattes and croissants, they discussed the peace and the process of understanding.

“They’re starting to get more people learning the basics,” said Natasha. “I think we’re up to twelve Humans and maybe twenty Primoids who can write the mix-a-bet.”

“The what?” said Clay.

“The mixed alphabet,” said Rachel. “I’m not one of those twelve. I’ve spent hours staring at the explanations, and I can’t even figure out how to write ‘my name is Rachel’ in it.”

“I can show you how to do that,” said Natasha. “Anyway, I’m sure the more the better. I mean, I like the attention I get from having a, you know, unique skill set, but this is hard work, it’s like lifting friggin’ weights.”

“They don’t really have a spoken language, right?” said Clay. “How can they have a written one?”

“Well, they do have a language. It’s not spoken, and it’s not made of sounds and words and things, but they have something they do with those tentacles, and they can perfectly well represent it in pictograms. They loved your video. And you know what I did? I showed them some of those 23rd Century cartoons, the Amazing Cow and stuff like that, no words, just animation. They loved it.”

“We could do the treaty in cartoons,” said Gemma. “That’d be cool,” said Acevedo.

“Actually,” said Natasha, “we kinda did.”

“So what else do we know about them?” asked Rachel. “What else do you know about them?”

“Okay,” said Natasha. “I knew you’d ask me that. Okay. First, they live to be like thousands of years old. I don’t know how long, but their unit of time is funny, it’s somewhere between a month and a season, it doesn’t always seem to mean the same amount of time, so the margin of error is like huge. But they can live at least a thousand years.”

“Time dilation?” asked Clay.

“No, no, biological time. I guess there must be fighter pilots who are ten thousand. I don’t even know how long they’ve been flying in space, but their interstellar flying started, they call it something like the Great Enlightenment, let’s say five or ten thousand years ago. Their empire, or whatever it is, has been in the ten to twenty system range for that long.”

Clay and Rachel exchanged looks. “That long,” said Clay. “I’d be happy with that.”

“And get this. They have sexes, they sexually reproduce, but they all start out neuter, then spend some time as male, then some time as female, have a few orange blobby babies, they give live birth by the way, then they become neuter again. And they stay that way for, like, a thousand years. Unless there’s a sudden need for more reproduction, you can live like three fourths of your life working and contributing but not being a, you know, gender.”

“So every Primoid female,” said Clay, “knows what a male orgasm feels like, but the males don’t know what a female orgasm feels like.”

“Just like in Humans,” said Rachel. “Except for you, hubby-licious.” They kissed.

“I knew the thing about their gender,” said Daria. “My first wing, when I was a tail, was sent to explore the nearer systems. It was my first assignment. We managed to fly by one of their less advanced colonies, it was PSB8. We got away with video and without being shot at. The exo-bios studied the heck out of those videos.”

“Started as tail?” said Clay. “I’m still tail.”

“You’re my role model, you are,” said Daria, laughing. “You know that, right?”

“So what’s their political system like?” asked Rachel.

“They’re decentralized, actually,” said Natasha. “This fleet has elements from eight different star systems. They agreed but it was clear they didn’t all see things the same way. But the thing is, they have a real tendency toward consensus. They love meetings, right? They hate arguing.”

“But they don’t all wait for orders from the Center?” asked Clay.

“You couldn’t run an Empire from a central location,” said Natasha. “They have a Center, out in interstellar space, apparently there’s this big station that’s their official political and military headquarters, but you know, it’s five light years from this and seven light years from that and it’s just another system out there.”

“Because it takes years even to send a message,” said Daria.

“Same to send a fighter,” said Gemma.

“Yeah. Their core systems are all ten or twenty light years apart, it would take forty years to send someone to another system and tell them what you wanted, and then come home. And if you wanted just to check if they’d done it? Another forty years.”

“But they’re evidently really good at logistics,” said Natasha. “They got things scheduled about as well as they could.”

“So did we,” said Rachel. “We learn quick, huh? Decentralize but make sure everyone’s on the same page. Who knew Humans would be a natural at that. So, politically? What do they do?”

“Yeah,” said Daria, “didn’t they have, like an Old Kingdom and a New Kingdom? Did I get that right?”

“Yeah, that’s what I got,” said Natasha. “They’re so long-lived, and they’re also really tolerant but really strict in some ways. And they’re incredibly risk-averse, but they’re definitely not stupid. So there was the Old Kingdom, you can call it, the Old Empire, and they had lots of cults or whatever, and the Center basically fell apart eventually but everyone looks back on those days with, I don’t know, something, nostalgia, reverence, wishful thinking, something like that.”

“Ah yes,” said Clay, “I knew people who felt that way about the Victorian Era.”

“And after the Center reasserted itself, they took this lesson that they had to ruthlessly suppress anyone who disagreed on anything important. But lots of Primoids are nonconformists, and rebellions kept on breaking out. The Center probably controls oh, fifteen or sixteen systems all told. The six that sort of qualify as the top systems, they think of them all as equal.”

“So what is the Center?” asked Clay.

“It’s on a station in deep space, away from any star,” said Daria. “You didn’t think it was an actual place, right? Well, it is. They have some kind of council, and they decide long-range things, but who knows how they decide who’s a member.”

“Elections, what’s an election,” said Natasha. “I think that with the Primoids, if you show up, you’re on the team.”

“And do they have a whole ecosystem like them?” asked Rachel. “That they evolved from?”

“I guess they must, somewhere. No idea where.”

They all sipped. Clay said, “Well, we learned how to blow them up, some of us even learned how to cut them up.” He smiled at Natasha. “But us fighter pilots, and especially you, Tash: we’re the ones who figured out how to cooperate with them.”

“And make peace,” said Gemma.

“Yes, we are,” said Rachel, looking at Daria. She smiled back at Clay. “Well, Park will be back from the big meeting tomorrow. She can instruct us.”

3.

Li Zan’s wing returned to Bluehorse the next 32-hour Bluehorse-3 day. She and Timmis Green walked the streets of Canada Town with Rachel and Clay for hours, recalling the Earth that they had left and this planet they had come home to. They held hands: two old couples, Rachel and Clay, Li and Timmis. Their repeated refrain was: “That café on the corner—didn’t there used to be a tree there? And over here, that kiosk, isn’t this where that big boulder used to be?”

“But don’t forget,” said Rachel, as they rested on a rock wall overlooking the harbor, “this was someone else’s place once. Have we forgotten about the very faint, very ancient ruins?”

“Not at all,” said Li Zan. “If you look, there are lots of signs of extremely old constructions. Highways across the plateaus, I remember flying over one when we first got here. We’ve picked up some underground constructions too.”

“And they’ve been excavated?” asked Clay. “We gave these guys 175 years, they could at least have excavated the ruins.”

“Oh, they did,” said Timmis. “They still don’t know very much, unfortunately. The ruins were definitely cities, settlements of some kind anyway—the nearest one is just down the coast from here. But they’re extremely old, like a couple hundred million years old. We don’t have records or anything like that. There’s, you know, a fossil record, but whoever lived here—it’s almost like they literally cleaned up and left for somewhere else.”

“It’s difficult to excavate,” said Li. “All this stuff is literally a kilometer or more underground. And even with no real plate tectonics, things get jumbled up, scattered, destroyed. You can imagine.”

“Well,” said Rachel, “a hundred. Million. Years.”

“Funny to think,” said Timmis, “we could have wound up at Corsica, if it hadn’t been for the radiation. We could have colonized Corsica. We could be Corsicans.”

“Is that like a Primoid metropolis now?” asked Clay.

“The rebels have like thousands, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a million. They’re still all underground.”

“They find it more secure,” said Rachel. “The Primoids are all about security. They’re a lot like Humans, but they’re also a lot like cats.” The others nodded sagely. “So,” she asked, “you were here more recently than us, right?”

“We were here 33 years ago, local,” said Li Zan. “Before that, we were back here—what?” She turned her round face to Timmis Green’s round face. “Another 24 years, correct? That was when we went to bolster the rebels.”

“And you fought a battle at Corsica?” asked Clay.

“Yes!” said Timmis. “I got three of their fighters and a cruiser all by myself! And ended up dead in space and Li had to rescue me.”

“He was quite the hero,” said Li Zan. “They outnumbered us, actually, but not by as much as we’re used to.”

“And you cooperated well with the Primoid rebels?” asked Clay.

“We had no difficulties. Their tactics are much like our own: we understood each other intuitively. They were certainly amazed by Timmis’s exploits. I know I was.”

“Yeah,” said Timmis, “you only notched two and helped on two cruisers. But you didn’t end up with half your fighter gone. The left side frame got zinged and I lost about a third of my skin panels. I could wave my arm outside my fighter.”

“Exciting times,” said Rachel. “Fighting off the Primoid Center, helping out the rebels. We thought that was what it was all about out here. That was before we knew of the Ngugma.”

“What do you figure to do about the Ngugma?” asked Li.

“I want to know what anyone can figure to do about them. Gene Bell and Padfoot are still with us. I can’t wait to put that little problem before them.”

“Did you shoot at any of the Ngugma fighters?” asked Timmis.

“Oh, we blew up a bunch of them,” said Clay. “And one of their little cruisers, it was almost as small as one of the Primoid cruisers. They blow up just like anything else.”

“Are their mining ships really as big as they look on video?” asked Li.

“Bigger.”

“Those things are frickin’ huge,” said Rachel. “You can’t even imagine just from the video. One of those could literally haul away the Ile d’Orleans.”

“Why does everyone else in the galaxy build things so darn big?” asked Timmis.

“I don’t know,” said Rachel. “I kind of like it. Larger targets.” They all gazed out over the sunlit sea. “So anyone know anything about these Fyaa? Daria mentioned them.”

“I don’t,” said Li. “We’ve been operating on the Corsica side of Bluehorse. I had never heard the name until this morning’s briefing, and that was less than informative, I thought. I expect Park will know more.”

What Park knew, the others found out as she and her former wing (plus Vera) walked the streets of Canada Town, dressed inconspicuously enough but still recognized from time to time. They explored the halls of the permanently grounded Canada, they checked out the museums and the mechanics’ shops, and they enjoyed the little pleasures of human society on a nice day.

“We had heard of the Fyaa,” said Park, around a cone full of chocolate ice cream made from actual chocolate and actual cream. “First, from seeing them across systems we explored. Their fighters are, well, different, you wouldn’t confuse them with human or Primoid. They’re, I would describe them as—!”

“Small, like vermin,” said Vera. “Tricky,” said Natasha. “Fragile,” said Vera. “Vera killed a couple, when we saw them,” said Natasha.

“Actually, I killed four, Tasha killed two, so don’t let her be all self-effacing. Tasmania took down a couple as well. Antonia got two before she got blown up, Gemma got two. We lost one, we kicked ass, and the Fyaa clearly totally thought they were going to kick ass. Yeah. Bold, but fragile.”

“Yes,” said Park. “This accords with my experience: the Fyaa are very willing to throw away lives, which the Primoids are not. We had two skirmishes with them. They nearly killed both Mister Ree and Ms. Leith, but we all got kills: I think Ms. Bain got three in the second one, she’s starting to show quite the killer instinct. Then, from Ms. Acevedo and other local fighter pilots, afterward, I and my people heard what they call themselves, and apparently somehow Acevedo and Hasse and Captain Zender of the Hippocampus managed to capture a couple of them. By now you must have seen the videos. People call them squirrel-like; they have hair, but it’s coarse, and the overall effect is of bristly lizards. And yes, it seems there are other species from the same home ecosystem, they form some sort of complex society, we’re told they work together in some sort of complex social system. Fascinating, I’m sure. In any case, they are asserting themselves in any star system they consider too near to their capital, and they seem to be putting pressure on the Primoids from the other side; one is fairly sure one would prefer the Primoids as neighbors.”

“Like PSB3, where we fought them,” said Natasha. “Where the Fyaa were trying to commit genocide on the local Primoids.”

“Yes,” said Su Park. “Welcome to the galaxy.” She looked up at the sky. “We had no idea, back on old Earth, did we? We had no idea, when Agneska and I flew to Alpha Centauri, how many people are out here with sharp knives. And now it appears that the Primoids and the Earthlings, or the Bluehorseans, will need to ally just to keep us all from being mined out of existence by your discovery, Ms. Andros, Mr. Gilbert. Perhaps we can persuade the Fyaa to sign on.”

“Yeah,” said Clay. “Here’s to the Ngugma. They might create peace in the galaxy one way or the other.”

4.

“So where do mouthholes come from?” asked Natasha as she and Vera walked down the beach in Bluehorse-3’s long early evening. Clay and Rachel went hand in hand a few meters ahead: naked as they all were, Rachel made sure Clay was not walking behind his former loves. They could ogle him all they liked.

“They seem suspiciously associated with the Ngugma, I think,” said Rachel.

“Are you joking?” said Vera. “We saw mouthholes everywhere after 55 Cancri, and I’ve never been in the same system as Ngugma.”

“We had them flying along next to us a couple times,” said Natasha. “Mouthholes, that is. When we pushed our speed to, oh, 99.999999%.”

“Six nines past the decimal,” said Rachel. “It’s a bad place.”

“So what then? Somehow flying faster than the speed limit makes them appear?”

“No idea. But we know they sometimes trail the Ngugma. Maybe that’s how that happens: the Ngugma flout the speed limit and the mouthholes show up. But at Alpha C, they thought the Ngugma dragged the mouthholes there on purpose. So maybe the Ngugma had it happen by accident, and then figured out how to use it, whatever this thing is that the mouthholes have with light speed.”

“Ngugma,” said Vera. “So vile.”

“You didn’t see the video till Corsica?” asked Clay over his shoulder.

“Clay, man, I want to say I’m sorry,” said Natasha, her eyes floating near his buns. “I can’t imagine what that was like to find.”

“It wasn’t great. But we got married.”

“I heard, and without us? Jeez. We’re inviting you to ours.”

“Wait, is this real?” said Rachel. “You popped the question? You’re getting hitched?”

“We sort of explored the question,” said Vera, “and came to the obvious conclusion.” Natasha and Vera stopped for a quick kiss, giggled, and kept walking.

“Well, congratulations,” said Clay, “not a bit surprised.”

“I was, and I wasn’t,” said Natasha. She smiled at Vera and pushed a long black hair off her brow; Vera smiled, a quarter impatient and three quarters enamored. “But you find the right person and you know. You know how that is.”

“Yes,” said Rachel and Clay. Clay said, “People keep telling you you’ll know when you find the right person and you keep thinking they’re crazy and then it happens and you know.”

“Exactly,” said Natasha. “Um, so yeah, Corsica. We got there and there’d been a battle there. Missed it—I hear Li and Timmis had a good day that day. Anyway, we were coasting on in there, this last time, on our way back to catch up to you at Bluehorse, and we started picking up signal from Earth. And it wasn’t sit-coms.”

“Not really,” said Vera.

“It was basically the first news about it,” Natasha went on. “When they first figured out what was going on. Everyone was dying. It was something to see, it must have been something to actually walk the streets. We didn’t get your video until we got here, but we’ve seen some of it.”

“At least they had been dead for a while when we got there,” said Clay. “It would have been a lot worse to get there while they were still dying.”

“We wouldn’t have landed,” said Rachel. “Forget about it. It’s not like we could have done anything whatever to help beyond joining everyone else coughing up blood till we died.”

“And you think,” said Tasha, “that any of these races would do the same thing if they could. The Fyaa, the Primoids.”

“I don’t think that’s clear,” said Rachel. “I do not believe the Primoids would commit quite that level of genocide. I believe they might have wiped out Bluehorse, but I will say I think learning that Earth was gone and that this was the largest place humanity had left, I think that stymied them. I think they couldn’t bring themselves to do it.”

“I think you’re right,” said Clay. “They live in their skin a lot longer than we live in ours. I think moral decisions are very weighty to them.”

“Oh, I think you’re probably right,” said Natasha.

“Anyway, I like to think our little slide show made them see us as people.”

“I liked their version of the same slide show,” said Vera. “Cute little Primoid tots and toddlers. So funny. But sort of, I don’t know, poignant, you know?”

“Definitely,” said Rachel.

“Is it true that at 667, you found Primoids who had been killed trying to defend the human colony there?” asked Natasha.

“Yeah,” said Rachel. “Primoid Center was trying to do its own little genocide. 667 Colony was never strong—conditions weren’t quite good enough for terraforming, they were mostly living underground. They had maybe twenty thousand?”

“Yes,” said Clay. “We’ve had a look at their records, from the human colony. They were doing okay on hydroponics, they actually did have some cooperation with the local Primoids, but they didn’t get their place hardened enough in time, and they were just a little too fragile.”

“Fragile,” said Rachel. “But the thing is, that’s where we found out that Humans and Primoids could fight side by side. We wondered that way back at Corsica. Well, here at 667, we could prove it. We don’t need to fight, we can cooperate. It’s better for both of us.”

“Hey, man,” said Clay, “peace out, right?”

“So the problem to you is all about the Ngugma,” said Vera.

“No peace out to those guys.”

“The Ngugma are the problem,” said Rachel. “It’s quite straightforward, really. They want to kill us so they can take our stuff. Sadly—!”

“We don’t have a solution,” said Vera. “We’re still understanding the problem. Well, whatever is going to be done, guess who is going to be sent to see it done.”

“You and Tasha,” said Rachel.

“Oh no. Not by ourselves.” She smiled at Natasha. “You knew Park and old Captain Kalkar have been given a task force, right? You skipped the meeting yesterday, but Tash and I went and took notes for you. Tasmania, and the Hondo, that’s the new merchant cruiser, sixteen fighters, and a Primoid component as well. You would have known you’d be on that with us.”

“But we get to be Alpha Wing, just the four of us,” said Natasha.

“What?” said Clay.

“How do you know this and we don’t?” asked Rachel. “Miss one meeting? Seriously?”

“Now you do,” said Vera. “We’re to be sent out ahead, just us four. The cat’s paw. And you know who’s going to be Commander?”

“Don’t say it,” said Rachel. “Do not even say it.”

“I’ll say it,” Tasha replied. “You are, Rachel. Of course. Vera’s Second, because she was a second before. I’m stuck at Third.”

“You know second and third, there’s no difference,” said Clay, turning around and walking backwards looking back at the other two. Then he turned and walked on. “It all looks the same from tail position.”

The ladies laughed in a way befitting ladies, naked ones, walking in the waves of a sunny beach. Rachel put her hand on Clay’s buns. “Don’t worry, hunk-a-licious,” she said. “I’ll take care of you and your tail.”

“Rachel. I can’t tell you how glad that makes me. Really. Really really. Losing Earth—it’s still getting through to me. It’s like when I lost my mother. I literally thought, I can’t go back and live at home, home is closed now, that place I grew up, it’s now officially gone. I’m on my own, I can’t go home, I can’t have my old room back. I have to live my life out here in the hard cold world, I have to make my own home. Well, losing Earth is the same thing. We’re finally having to grow up and live our lives.” He smiled at Rachel.

“With you,” said Rachel. Vera and Natasha just kissed and giggled.

“So you guys,” said Clay, “you seem like you guys are good? As a couple? After all these years?”

Vera and Natasha giggled and kissed. “We’re good,” said Natasha. “I know you worry about us. You seem good. Is he doing what he’s told?”

“He is,” said Rachel, and she kissed Clay. “And we’re very, very good, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“We’re so good it’s amazing,” said Clay, “considering my birthplace lies in ruins, my people have been slaughtered, and the one place I care about is under threat.”

“But that’s normal,” said Vera.

“Apparently,” said Clay.

They walked in silence, gazing out over the sea, and up along the volcanic peaks. “Yup,” said Vera. “This is the place.”

“We have to treat it right,” said Clay. “We wrecked old Earth. We wrecked the climate, we killed off thousands and thousands of species, we dumped radioactivity and toxins in the water, in the air, in the ground. It was starting to get better but it would have been another ten thousand, hundred thousand years before it was healed.”

“We didn’t do that,” said Natasha. “Our stupid great grandparents did.”

“Okay, sure,” said Clay. “Our stupid great grandparents. Anyway, we have the chance to start fresh. We are so lucky. We cannot afford to make a mistake. We cannot afford to blow it this time.”

“We won’t,” said Rachel.

“Dang,” said Vera, “your man’s gone all philosophical. Emotional. Was that Earth?”

“That,” said Rachel, “and we almost got killed by some Primoids outside of 667. He was dead in space for nine hours. I saved his life. Of course he saved my life too.”

“That’s true space romance right there,” said Natasha. “No shit,” said Vera.

They walked as the sun descended toward the polygonal sea. It looked like any sea on any planet that experienced sunset, the waves rolling slowly up against the long strand. Presently they stopped and gathered Bluehorse driftwood and built a bonfire and lit it with the laser Rachel had in her backpack. Soon they were sitting around the fire, naked still, sipping Bluehorse brandy and passing a bowl of Bluehorse smoke as they listened to the waves under the slowly appearing stars.

“Begin, and cease, and then again begin,” said Clay.

Rachel went on: “With tremulous cadence slow, and bring / the eternal note of sadness in.”

“Sophocles heard it long ago,” said Vera. “Love that poem.”

“Sophocles long ago,” said Clay, “heard it on the Aegean, and it brought / into his mind the turbid ebb and flow / of human misery; we / find also in the sound a thought, / hearing it on this distant northern sea.”

They gazed into the sunset, and Rachel said, “Whatever. We have our thing to do, and we’re lucky enough that it’s kind of important. I look at you guys, and I look at this place, and I think I have only the vaguest idea how lucky I am.”

“Yes,” said Natasha. “Even if we all die in the next battle, I wouldn’t trade what happened to me for anyone else’s what happened to them.”

“What the hell,” said Clay. “We’re the best wing ever. We get to live among the stars.” He raised the flask. “Here’s to the next place we drink together on a beach in the sunset.”

“Maybe it’ll be Earth,” said Rachel, taking the flask and drinking in her turn. And the flask went around, and the bowl went around, and the sun drifted beneath the horizon, and the four fighter pilots got their vac suits back on, and the stars wheeled above them, a city in the sky more populous than any on old Earth. The tiny moon broke from the horizon and added its thin gleam to the starlight. One by one, Clay and Rachel, Vera and Natasha lay back and gazed up at the heavens, just like mariners gazing out to sea.

THE END