Silverfleet and Claypool

Five months later, New Home was far behind, with its cruiser probe and its half-fixed T-39 and its five new fighter pilots training and its folk fishing and farming and making beer. Silverfleet and her fighters were taking the fight to Central, in the form of raids from their Black Rock base into the Marelon system, and right now they were entertaining two representatives of the enemy.

“So,” said Kris Bell, “found someone you can’t cheat against, eh, Fiona?”

“Found someone I can’t beat, anyway,” Fiona Rigan replied. She continued to ponder, while Suzane Claypool continued to fiddle with her computer and Julie Dalsandro studied the board from the side. They were sitting around the old cave on Black Rock, playing chess on an old-fashioned board with old-fashioned pieces, all made of recycled waste and silicate from the moon. Nearby, Cloutier and Silverfleet and Bell were trying to run a fighter battle simulation, but they didn’t especially feel like working. Several new chambers had been fashioned, and in one of them, Elan and Conna and Vya were catching up on their sleep.

Finally Fiona made a move and Claypool, almost without looking at the board, made a countermove, and Fiona returned to pondering. “Ugh,” she said at last, “it’s so frustrating.”

“She beats everybody,” said Silverfleet. “I think she beat me about fifty times when we were here last year.”

“Fiona’s just not used to better opponents,” put in Cloutier.

“Sure I am. I went up against Silverfleet three times in a year. She destroyed my favorite fighter at Marelon. It was just bits in space, and I’ve yet to find a decent replacement. Maybe you wonder why I’ve been staying behind my desk on the Marelon starbase most of the time, while you ladies play pirate on our supply ships.”

“Just good common sense,” said Cloutier.

“Well, of course! I’m not stupid. At least Silverfleet just knocked out my ships. I didn’t want to take the chance of going up against Killer here. That’s what my pilots call her. With respect.”

“Suzane?” said Silverfleet. “Killer. That’s good.” Claypool smiled at the chessboard.

“Watch what you say, Fiona,” said Cloutier. “You’re just a visitor here—your pay still comes from Central. We may be on speaking terms, unofficially, but don’t think any of us trusts you yet.”

“I don’t.” She put her rook down in the same square as a bishop of Claypool’s, which she palmed.

“I trust her,” said Claypool, moving her other bishop out and setting it down in a forward position. Dalsandro glared at the bishop and shook her head.

Fiona stared at the scene before her. “I know why,” she said. “It’s the same reason Halyn trusts me.” She stared at the board for twenty seconds, then handed her king to Claypool. “And she’s done it again.”

Claypool smiled. She was about to suggest another game when they felt the bump of four fighters landing outside in the crack. A minute later, Jana Crown came through the airlock.

“What are your friends doing?” asked Silverfleet. “Tilla and Ginger and Meena?”

“Come see,” said Jana. “They’re waiting outside.”

“All of us? See what?”

“Marelon,” Jana replied. “That thing. You have to come see.”

“Thing?” repeated Silverfleet, Cloutier and Fiona.

“That crystal thing,” said Jana Crown. “It’s here.”

“Here?” replied Fiona. “You mean that thing you can see sometimes when you’re decelerating? What do you mean, it’s here?”

“At Marelon,” replied Jana, rolling her eyes. “You have to come to Marelon see it.”

“All right,” said Silverfleet. “I guess we should all go. Fiona, Julie? You coming?”

“Sure,” said Fiona. “I have to. I have information that those pirates are headed back to Marelon.”

A minute later, Claypool and Silverfleet were standing by their fighters waiting while Cloutier and Bell woke up the sleepers and checked for things forgotten.

“It’s not like it was when we lived here,” said Claypool. “It’s gotten so crowded.”

“I hardly recognize the place,” Silverfleet agreed.

“Seriously,” said Fiona, walking over, “it’s a nice place. I thought so the first time I saw it.” She smirked. “I thought of asking Julie if she wanted to play hookie here.”

“It was lonely and frightening,” said Claypool. “But it was also boring, very boring. I wonder how it’s become something I look back on with nostalgia.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that bad,” said Silverfleet. “Boring? Relaxing.”

“It’s why me and Conna went over the wall,” said Elan.

“It actually sounds romantic,” said Fiona. “But that can’t be, can it?” She smiled across them and turned away. “Fly safe, ladies.”

They put the cave’s new life support system on standby and within an hour thirteen fighters came out of the crack and turned toward the Marelon system. Black Rock and the ringed planet it circled and the two stars of the system all fell behind and became tiny and then the lights of the universe went out.

Five days later, they were decelerating into the Marelon system. They didn’t see the crystalline apparition until they were down to 25% of lightspeed, and they kept seeing it right until they were stopped. There was no doubt about one thing: it was really here. It was somewhere at last. To be specific, it was within the outer orbits of the system, and as they decelerated behind it, it headed straight toward the inhabited planets, at a speed that would be very fast for a ground vehicle but very slow for a photon.

Fiona and her second sent well wishes and bent their course toward those planets. The other eleven fighter pilots landed on a small, red moon of the outer planet, the blue giant Marelon-5, and climbed out. It was 14° above absolute zero on the surface, and there were crevices and craters and vents spewing plumes of hydrogen, but the pilots only had eyes for the sky. Presently the eleven were lying on a patch of smooth pink ice, gazing through their visually augmented visors and a couple of long-range viewers and telescopes at the strange visitor. It shone and shimmered in its best colors, a cross between some fantastic undersea creature and the Lady Luck Casino on Bela.

“What does telemetry say?” asked Claypool.

“It’s awfully big,” said Meena Melville, peering through her viewer. “I mean, like—well, ten thousand kilometers from one end to the other. It’s got a lot of empty space.”

“Ten thousand kilometers?” Silverfleet repeated. “Ten thousand kilometers??”

“Is it a ship?” asked Cloutier.

“No,” said Claypool. “It’s no ship. Um, Meena, how far from the planet is it?”

“It’s—eighty thousand kilometers from Marelon-4, but it is nearly on a collision course with the starbase.”

“How fast is it moving?” Silverfleet asked.

“Um, twenty-two thousand kilometers an hour. It’s decelerating still.”

“Um, Commander,” said Jana Crown, “when we saw it before it was going like a couple percent of lightspeed. But it couldn’t have been all the way to light speed—it was decelerating too slowly.”

“That actually makes sense,” replied Silverfleet. “It’s well beyond huge.” They let that sentiment hang in the vacuum, and after a minute Silverfleet said, “Well, it’s going to be a while.”

“I don’t get it,” said Cloutier. “How does it fly? I mean, there’s a lot of empty space in there, but still it must be freaking massive. And if it doesn’t go to light speed, how does it bend space? Because it obviously does, or it wouldn’t be here for years yet. And why could we see it? Before? I mean, like, where was it?”

“Yeah,” said Elan Klee. “We saw it from Marelon, we saw it from Black Rock, we saw it from Colfax and we definitely saw it everywhere past the Adamantine Planetoids.”

“Whereas,” put in Kris Bell, “normally you can’t even see the fighter flying right next to you.”

“It can’t have been going to lightspeed,” said Claypool. “Or if it is, it’s been converting enormous amounts of energy.”

Silverfleet sighed. “Since we don’t know what it is, and we don’t know where it’s from, and we have no idea what whoever made it is capable of, if anyone made it at all, we really can’t make any assumptions about how fast it goes or what it can do.”

“Or what it’s here for,” said Cloutier.

“Oh,” said Silverfleet, “I’ve got a message on my comm.” She went over to Vanessa and leaned in to connect her helmet audio, but she could see the message was text only. It was from Fiona.

HS, it said, my new admiral wants to shoot at it. I’m going for a spin with my best girls just in case. Stay put—who knows what’ll happen. The message was accompanied by a vast file of information from the flight in past the thing. Silverfleet shut the hatch and walked back to the others.

“What’s Fiona have to say?” asked Cloutier.

“Oh, look,” said Elan Klee. “They’re firing the starbase’s missiles at the thing.”

“That’s what she had to say,” Silverfleet replied. “Typical White Hand. It’s not Fiona’s idea. Meena, can you see her?”

“Four fighters just went out from the starbase bay,” Meena answered, peering through her scope. “They look like—they look like they’re heading on a long circle around the thing.”

“They’ve fired off a round of missiles,” said Cloutier. “I read a hundred and twelve, from the Marelon-4 starbase.”

“Oh, that’s great,” said Vya. “If you don’t know what it is, blow it up.”

“Works for me,” said Cloutier.

“It’s Fiona,” said Kris Bell. “It sounds just like her.”

“No, it’s not, really,” said Conna. “It’s all those starched-shirt starfleet officers.”

“It’s their whole philosophy,” said Silverfleet. “This is all just the White Hand. Oh, it’s definitely not Fiona’s idea. Meena, can you see her?”

“They’re giving it a lot of space,” Meena answered, peering through her scope. “They look like—they look like they’re heading on a recon flight plan.”

“And the missiles?”

“They’re starting to hit now,” said Meena.

“Any bets on whether they do it any harm?” asked Cloutier.

The missiles did no harm, nor did the battleship that launched from the starbase when it was clear that the thing was still approaching. It ignored the battleship—the vast ship would have seemed not much larger than the fighters. Then the battleship opened up with its heavy guns, the ones used to blast well-armored space installations. Evidently in response, one of those glowing tentacle structures separated from the rest, reached out casually and chewed a big piece off the battleship.

“What the hell was that?” asked Cloutier, who had seen it all in her viewer. Only Meena and Vya, peering through scopes, and Cloutier and Klee, holding viewers, could really see.

“What? What?” asked Silverfleet. Cloutier handed her the viewer.

“It’s removed a piece of the hull,” said Vya. “In the bridge area.”

“It seems to be removing air from the ship,” Meena added. “I can see a stream of nitrogen and oxygen leaving the hull breach and—and apparently entering the, um, tentacle. Ooh!”

“What? What was that?” asked Silverfleet. “There’s another one!” She handed the viewer to Claypool, and met Cloutier’s eyes. “It’s eating people.”

“It’s eating air, Commander,” Vya replied. “The people are going along.”

“So the air is soup and the people are noodles,” said Cloutier.

As they watched, and traded off on the viewers and scopes, the battleship turned from proud gunboat to cast-off shell, like some formidable warrior beetle that had shed its old skin. Then the crystal thing edged up to the Marelon starbase, reached out a pulsating yellow and blue tentacle and removed a hull section. Three more tentacles stood by to suck up the exhaled air of the station, along with whatever and whoever might have been near the hull breach. Presently the crystal thing moved a large node, large meaning about half the size of the starbase, to a position close to the breach, and a dozen tubules came out and reached into the hole. The node began to flicker and pulsate with what seemed to the watchers to be the gusto of a hungry diner.

All the while the station’s operators were blasting away at the thing with photon artillery and missiles, to absolutely no apparent effect. Cool heads aboard were executing emergency evacuation measures: from the bays on the opposite side of the station, shuttles and liners were being launched. The shuttles headed toward the nearby moon of Marelon-4, the lesser of the two colonized worlds of Marelon, and most of them made it to the cover of the moon’s artificial atmosphere without being grabbed and eaten whole by one of the tentacles. The liners, of which there were almost two dozen, were taken one by one and chewed open. The air was sucked out of each, then the passengers were eaten, two hundred per ship. The empty hulls were passed back to other tentacles and disappeared in the middle of the gleaming thing.

Four cruisers remained to the Central commander, along with sixteen fighters. The cruisers and six of the fighters made a well-coordinated attack on the node that continued to invade the starbase, but all four cruisers and two of the fighters fell victim themselves, and the rest of the fighters couldn’t do any observable damage. The remaining fighters gathered near the inhabited moon and returned for another attack, trying to pester the thing from a safe distance, but their photon shots seemed unable to chip the surface coating of a single tentacle. Finally the fourteen fighters gave up, heading to Talis as fast as their starlight drives could carry them.

The attack on the starbase continued for an hour, at the end of which it was clear that at least 90% of the fifteen thousand who lived on the starbase were food. Silverfleet and her raiders tented up inside an ice cave where they sat on the floor and ate replicated goulash with replicated whisky and tried to talk about it.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” was said, in one formulation or another, by all eleven of them. Finally Cloutier asked the real question: “What do you think it’ll do?”

“It sure likes starships,” said Bell. “The bigger the better.”

“It eats people,” Jana Crown added.

“It eats oxygen,” said Silverfleet. “Well, air. Maybe it really likes nitrogen, who knows.”

“What did Fiona have to say, on her way out?” asked Claypool. “She sent you something.”

“Yes. Text. She didn’t want her trusted comrades to overhear. I’ll send you all the text, but the gist of it was, what is that thing, where did it come from, what can we do about it? She said something like, if you know anything about it, anything at all, you have to do something. Boy, doesn’t she have a high opinion of me.”

“Do you think it’ll attack the planet?” asked Conna.

“Who knows? You want to go down there and see about your family?”

“Yes, I would,” said Conna.

“Then go,” said Silverfleet. “But don’t take any chances. And stay in contact. Understand?” Conna nodded. “And that goes for all of us,” Silverfleet added. “Because I don’t think it came all this way to munch on one little starbase.”

They all went out and watched as Conna and her comrade Elan took off and headed for Marelon-3, where 99% of the system’s twelve million people lived, and where Conna had been born and raised and had raised a family of her own. Then they watched as the crystalline thing made its way to the inhabited moon of Marelon-4 and took up a position at the top of its artificial atmosphere. A hundred tentacles, flashing blue and gold, dipped in and began drinking. Predictably, spacecraft of all sorts began taking off, careful to leave the moon from the opposite side, and the crystalline thing did in fact predict it, for a few of its longest tentacles waited where the ships emerged from the atmosphere. But the thing’s mind, however it was constituted, was somewhat distracted by the feast of air at hand, and it missed fully half the escaping free traders and mining vessels. There was no defense whatsoever for the moon—the only combat ships left in the system belonged to Silverfleet’s company.

“Should we do something?” Vya asked doubtfully.

“Got any suggestions?” Cloutier replied.

“We could go take a look at it, anyway.”

They all looked at Silverfleet. “Oh, sure,” she said. “I don’t see why not. It seems to ignore fighters as long as they don’t shoot at it. And shooting at it doesn’t seem to do anything other than piss it off, so let’s not do that.”

“Are we all going?” Bell asked skeptically.

“No. No. Me, Del, Vya. Three’s enough.”

“Halyn!” Claypool tried.

“No. Sorry, Suz. Just in case I’m wrong about the danger.” She looked at Del and Vya. “These two are expendable. You’re not.”

“What do you mean, I’m not? You’re not!”

“Well, then,” said Silverfleet, “one of us is indispensable. So one of us should stay behind. And that one is you.”

While Silverfleet, Cloutier and Vya de Har crossed the empty space between their rock lookout and the thing, a journey of ten hours, it sucked most of the air off the moon. But when they got there it was still busy, thousands of tentacles and nodes glowing and pulsating and scintillating before them across more than the whole visible range of color, a looming planet of infrared and ultraviolet and everything in between and lots of empty space. The three fighters went in quickly, evade routines always at an eye-flick’s reach, but it didn’t seem to notice them. Soon they were in its midst, flying through the kilometer-wide gaps between the struts and tubes that seemed to make up the creature. “No need for comm silence,” said Silverfleet. “Let’s hear some numbers.”

“Emissions across the spectrum,” said Vya. “It’s made of normal matter—lots of silicates, hydrocarbons, metallic compounds. Amino acids! Commander, we have amino acids!”

“Where?”

“Oh. Never mind. That’s in its digestion. I wondered—they weren’t much.”

“Just the remains of fifteen thousand residents of the starbase,” said Cloutier. “Giselle counts 2,854 tentacles into the atmosphere, from 22 nodes. It’s sucking up air at a rate of—well, would you believe five thousand cubic kilometers a second?”

“Five thousand cubic kilometers? A second??”

“Yep. Yep. It should be done here in, oh, another couple of hours.”

“Twelve hours total,” said Vya, “at this rate, to denude the moon of atmosphere. It’s already starting on the water—I pick up aqueous signatures in one node, now two.”

“It’s mostly empty space,” said Silverfleet, “but it’s still as complex as any living creature. Vanessa’s got a schematic of the thing, but I can’t tell what it all means. Brain function could be—well, all over the place, I suppose it is. Locomotor—well, who knows?”

“Commander,” said Vya. “On that subject. Check this.”

Silverfleet turned her eyes to the left display, where Vya had sent a marked 3D picture of their surroundings. They coasted at five kilometers a second down an avenue through the beast, encountering a thin rain of particles that seemed to be waste material. Vya’s mark indicated a structure about two hundred kilometers above them, about the size and shape of a small moon, made up of concentric shells of hexagon and pentagon gridwork. It was quiescent now, but there certainly were a lot of tubes connected to its outer nodes. “Oh, yes,” she said, “something’s happened here lately—lots of energy emissions. Like it’s cooling off. So I wonder what it does?”

“We’ll have a hard time getting it onto the dissecting table,” said Cloutier. “Halyn, it’s starting to dig up the trees and the soil.”

“Goddess,” said Silverfleet, “what doesn’t it eat? Air, water, people, dirt, trees, metal—!” They were nearing the other side of the thing. She sighed, then called to her companions, “Well, we’re almost out of its, um, colon or whatever this is. Let’s go down and survey the damage.”

“Are you sure we can handle it?” asked Cloutier.

“Why do you think I picked you two? Who else of us could handle it?”

This largest moon of Marelon-4 had been chosen for terraforming because of a moderate water content along with a number of valuable minerals, and in the process of making a liveable world out of it, great deep oceans had been formed. The deepest points of these oceans were along a series of cracks ten or twenty kilometers below sea level, formed when the original water of the moon had frozen long ago and expanded. Now the cracks remained, along with a little of the air and water, for it seemed the creature wasn’t interested in sucking out the last drips from the bottom of the glass.

Above, three thousand tentacles grazed on the now airless forests and cities of the moon. The three fighters flew low over the capital, avoiding a couple of hundred mouths, each a dozen meters or more across, sucking up anything organic. There were bodies everywhere, of course, mostly victims of suffocation, but the mouths were only interested in masses and left the individual dead to mummify in the oncoming vacuum. Down there, if one but looked for them, one could see lovers who had died hand in hand, mothers trying to protect their children, dogs fallen beside their masters, men who met their end in frantic efforts to fight back or escape, beasts of field and town felled by a foe unseen. None of the three pilots looked for long.

They were drawn to the cracks in the depths of the vanished sea. Far down, a little atmosphere remained, and far down water glinted, and as they flew over this newborn fjord, ten kilometers wide and fifteen deep, they saw a few fishing boats and lots of fish and birds, and then, far ahead, a rocky promontory where a few dozen people stood around. They flew in and landed and hopped out, stunners at the ready. These were unnecessary—everyone there was already as stunned as they could be.

“Excuse me,” said Silverfleet, walking up to the largest group, gathered near a raft that was what was left of a fishing dock. “Are you all right?” They just looked at her. “I’m Halyn Silverfleet. We can’t offer you much help, but whatever we can do—how did you survive?”

“Is it stopped?” asked a young athletic woman in a bathing suit, who towered over Silverfleet.

“Yes. I think it is. It’s sort of eating the rest of the soil and forest. But it doesn’t seem interested in the trenches.”

“It’s going to move on to the planet, isn’t it?” asked the woman.

“Well,” said Silverfleet, not quite prepared to say or deny the obvious.

“Of course it is,” said Cloutier. “Did you see anything that would help us deal with it? We can go there and try to save people.”

“Can’t you shoot at it?” asked a young man in a swimsuit.

“That doesn’t seem to work,” said Cloutier. “How’d you guys survive?”

“The dock came loose,” said the woman. “We just sort of hung on. I’m a lifeguard.”

“I’ve got a fishing boat,” said a middle-aged woman, “it’s over there, it’s a bit dinged up but we should be able to fix it. So what about our families?”

Silverfleet cleared her conscience and said, “I have no good news to report.”

“On the planet?”

“It hasn’t gone there yet,” said Cloutier. “But we have to assume it will. So, anything we can tell people there to help them survive?”

“Get on boats,” said several people.

“If you’re going,” said a young man, “could you find my folks? Tell them—can you bring them? In those ships of yours?”

“No,” said Silverfleet. “I’m really sorry. I would if I could. I’m all that fits in that ship. I doubt we even have time to look up your family. But maybe we can get help down here.”

“We’ll be okay for a while,” said the fisher woman. “We can fish and we have wood aplenty. Is there any hope of supply? We saw what happened to the starbase.”

“I don’t know. I think all the freighters pulled out—a bunch of them got eaten. I doubt there’s an interplanetary vessel left in the system, aside from fighters. I’ll send someone to Talis.”

“Talis,” Cloutier repeated. “Halyn, it’ll go there next. They better be ready.”

“How?” They all looked at each other, then up at the sky, deep blue in the daylight, a few hundred stars visible.

“Well,” said an old man, “lot of good that Central starfleet did us. Pirates, huh? What about monsters the size of a planet? They didn’t have a plan for that, did they?”

“No,” said Silverfleet. “No, they didn’t. Neither do I.”

“Stay for dinner?” asked the fisher woman. “There’s plenty of fish.”

“No,” said Silverfleet, “you’ll need all the fish. No, we’d better keep going. But before we go, anything we can do? Any other questions?”

“Sure,” said the old man. “What the hell is that thing?”

They flew on up the trench and counted five hundred survivors out of the moon’s population of almost ninety thousand. “It got real light for a while,” said the captain of a trawler, a leathery man who seemed hardly surprised by any of this. “We all about passed out. Then we saw those things hanging down, and we sort of set course for deep water and went below. Fortunately it likes water too, or else we’d have never woke up.”

“You going to be okay?” asked Cloutier.

“Depends,” he said. “We’ll be fine if the fish stocks hold up. Right now those fish are practically jumping on board.”

By the time they had gotten up off the planet, the crystalline beast had moved off toward Marelon-3. “We’d better go warn people,” said Silverfleet. But though they reached the planet two hours ahead of the thing, warning people proved difficult.

The capital city, home of a third of the system’s twelve million people, was in chaos, of course. Every time they tried to land, mobs came at them, and the first time they had to hatch down and lift off while people were banging on their hulls. They found a group of distinguished-looking people on the top of a skyscraper and landed, thinking they would get to talk sense to those in charge of the city, but these rich and powerful Marelonians were preparing to take cyanide. They were very nice about it, but didn’t see any reason to change their minds.

Then they went down to the sea, one of several that occupied about a third of Marelon-3’s surface, and found a big fishing vessel out in the middle of calm waters. They landed on deck and got out and found the crew lying about waiting for their doom.

“You guys have a chance, you know,” said Cloutier.

“What chance?” several of them asked with belligerent laziness.

“We’ve seen what it did to M-4,” said Silverfleet. “People on ships survived by making for the deepest waters. It’ll drink down the water and the air, but in the deepest parts there should be enough left to live on. We’ll head for Talis and try and get help.”

Several of the crew got up and stretched. “You think we might survive?” asked one burly woman.

“There’s every reason to think so.”

“And how much time do we have?”

“Oh, a couple hours,” said Vya. “Before it makes serious inroads on your air. You might black out—it takes the air first—but if you get to deep water, you’ll probably be okay.”

“Do we have time to go ashore and get our families?” asked an older man.

“Oh, probably,” said Cloutier.

“Sure,” said Silverfleet. “Don’t forget the dog.”

They left the ship as it made for a nearby port. “We may have saved someone,” said Vya.

“For what, who knows,” replied Silverfleet. “Even if they make it—no trees, no farms, most of the people gone. Fish for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

“And algae for salad,” Cloutier pointed out. “What about Elan and Conna?”

“Oh, Goddess,” said Silverfleet. “I have no idea. Vya, did you pick up anything?”

“No,” said Vya, “but we might spot them from space.”

“Let’s go.”

They zipped up into the sky and gasped. It was as though they had jumped in front of a freight train. There was the thing, barreling down on them. They did what anyone would do—they jumped out of the way. Moving away from its epicenter on the edge of the atmosphere, they found themselves crossing mountains and flying across high plains, scanning for signals.

“I have Conna,” said Cloutier. “Down there in the highland, out in the open.”

“That must be her ranch,” said Silverfleet. “Her family’s homestead. She told us all about it—they raise beef and milk and some crops. If we’d beaten Central, way back last year, she was going to have me and Suzane over for some charred meat.”

“Well, let’s go see if she’ll start the grill,” said Cloutier.

Ten minutes later, the three ships settled to the ground before Conna Marais, who was sitting on a rock in the middle of a field. A hundred cattle grazed at the far end of the field, near a pretty pond. Conna stared out in their direction, but not at them. Around her feet a young cat rubbed and played, a sturdy grey cat with flecks of brown and cream and wide open eyes. The cat gave the three pilots a meow of complaint.

“Conna,” said Silverfleet.

“You didn’t find them,” said Cloutier.

“They’re gone,” said Conna.

“Who, your folks?” asked Vya. “Where to?” Conna didn’t answer. The three looked at her, then turned to look out into the medium distance as if to see what she was looking at.

“Conna,” said Silverfleet, “where’s Elan?”

“I don’t know.”

The three pilots looked at one another. “Let’s go look inside the house,” Cloutier suggested. They walked to the rambling farm house and went in the kitchen door. It looked like any farm house kitchen on any reasonably technologically advanced world, from cooking and refrigeration units to rural and animal-totem decorations to many cubic meters of cabinet space. The next room was a sitting room of some kind, and an office, a stairway, a bedroom, a bathroom, another bedroom and another sitting room. Silverfleet stood in the middle of the first sitting room. It could hold her and all ten of her comrades along with all eleven of their fighters, without having to stack anything.

“How do people live like this?” asked Silverfleet.

“Don’t ask me,” Cloutier replied. “I grew up on Arturo. We had five million people crammed into one complex of old mineshafts.”

Vya came in from the kitchen. “I’m sure Conna’s the only one here,” she said. “There are recent signs of ground transport, but the vehicles are all gone.”

“They’ve all gone off to seek salvation,” said Silverfleet. They spent a few seconds exchanging looks, and all of a sudden their ears popped. “Oh, crap,” said Silverfleet. “It’s here.”

“We’re on high ground,” Cloutier shouted as they ran outside. “It’ll suck the air off here first.”

Their hearts jumped when they came around a bush and saw another fighter dropping toward the rock where Conna still sat. By the time the three got there, Elan Klee was standing before Conna, who had the cat in her lap. “Elan!” said Silverfleet. “We were worried.”

“It’s here,” said Elan. “It just started. I was trying to, I don’t know. Trying to find people. It’s such a bleepin’ mess. Come on, Conna, babe, we gotta go.”

“I’m waiting for my folks to come back.”

“Conna,” said Vya, “they’ve all gone off somewhere. They’re not coming back in time. What’ll you do even if they do come back? Give them a ride in your ship?”

“Conna,” said Silverfleet, “we don’t have much time. We have to go.”

“Go on without me.”

“No. No. We’re not going without you.”

“Conna,” said Elan, “you can take Helga with you. Right in your lap. No, really. I used to fly with my cat, back when I worked for my dad. Conna! That cat. Either we go and Helga lives, or we stay here and Helga dies!”

“Conna,” said Vya evenly, “you can’t save your folks, or your kids, or the planet. All you can save is yourself—and this cat.”

Conna looked up, tears in her eyes. Her voice was even. “I can save Helga?”

“Sure,” said Silverfleet, who wasn’t sure that Elan hadn’t just made it up. She wondered what she’d tell Conna if poor Helga got crushed by the acceleration buffers during flight. For all Silverfleet knew, Conna would arrive with a pool of feline guts in her lap. But they could explain that later. “Sure,” she said. “But we have to go now.”

The five fighters flew out over the city, where the milling crowds were just starting to meet their doom. The tentacles hung down deep into the atmosphere now, munching on wind and ponds and crowds. The fighters fired a few blasts at the tentacles, to no avail. Then they lifted and flew out past the body of the crystalline thing, which was just settling down to make a meal of the planet. It was picking on something almost exactly its own size, but it still had a few tentacles free to grab shuttles and a last barely spaceworthy freighter full of refugees. The five pilots took fourteen hours to return to the distant planetoid where the other six fighters waited, and in that time, slightly slowed down as their speeds caused the light to take longer to catch up to them, they watched pictures of Marelon-3 being sucked clean of air and water. When those ran low, the thing started in on the soil.

They landed on the planetoid. “Hey, Conna,” Cloutier called, “is Helga okay?”

“I’ll let her tell you,” Conna replied. On the screen, they saw Conna’s lap, where her vac suit was covered with shed cat hair, except where a big cat glared out at the deflating acceleration buffers. It sat up, its claws gently hooked into her suit. “Maybe I’d better scoot my ship into the cave before I get out,” Conna went on. “I think Helga may have ventilated my suit a bit, and I doubt her suit is properly configured for vacuum.”

“We can do that,” said Silverfleet, wiping sweat from her brow.

“So,” said Claypool a few minutes later, as the eleven women and one cat sat around in the cave eating stew from the replicators, “what now?”

“Well,” said Vya, “we estimate Marelon isn’t a total loss. The starbase is, of course, but as many as five thousand survived on M-4 Moon, in the deep sea trenches or in mineshafts, and Elan and I estimate that we may have talked ten or twenty thousand into saving themselves on M-3. As for the thing, it’s getting full—its total interior volume isn’t as much as you might think. We estimate it might be near 100% capacity.”

“So,” said Silverfleet, “does it take a nice rest here, maybe hibernate a little, or does it use this big meal to fly on to the next big meal?”

“Are you okay?” Elan was asking Conna.

“I’m fine,” said Conna, and she actually smiled, tears in her brown eyes.

“How about you, Helga?” asked Kris Bell. “What do you think of all this?” She petted Helga, whose fur flew in the low gravity. “Does she always shed like this?”

“Yes,” said Conna. “That’s perfectly normal.” She reached out to pet the cat, who reached her head forward and rubbed her cheek on the approaching hand. Then Conna started blubbering. Helga got up, stretched and insinuated herself into Conna’s lap. Elan sat next to Conna and put her arm around her. Conna sat there petting the cat and softly weeping, and Helga gazed out upon the rest of them as if to say, What are you looking at?

“So why didn’t it attack New Home?” asked Claypool. “Why not Colfax? Why Marelon?”

“Who knows, who knows,” replied Silverfleet. “What is it, what’s it made of, where’s it going, how does it travel, where did it come from.” She stood up. “What doesn’t it eat. Well, if we’re not lucky, we’ll certainly learn the answer to some of those questions.”

“If we’re not lucky?” Bell repeated.

“Well,” said Silverfleet, “if Talis isn’t lucky.”