Chapter 1: Exploration

The gel layer began to soften, the pressure that kept his twitching limbs immobilized slowly fading. As soon as he was able, he rose from the pod, sitting waist-deep in the strange fluid. Everything hurt, he felt as though an electric current had been running through his every nerve, and he wasn’t sure why. He blinked his eyes as his vision cleared, the bleary, indistinct shapes becoming clearer.

He was in some kind of tube, about ten meters in diameter, the ceiling curving out of view above him. It was lit by a pair of glowing strips that ran parallel to one another until they vanished from sight in either direction, the curved, white walls adorned with large racks upon which green and purple foliage was growing.

Where was he? Why did his head hurt so much? He reached up to rub his temple only to discover that he was wearing a helmet. He somehow knew how to raise the visor, hitting a touch control by his ear and watching the tinted glass open like a jaw.

As he looked around, he saw that there were dozens of pods just like his own. They were squat, bathtub-sized devices with rounded edges, or perhaps describing them as off-white coffins would have been more apt. From within them rose more of his kind, the pools of blue gel releasing them from its grasp. They were wearing form-fitting flight suits, patterned with ocean camouflage in shades of grey and blue, their surfaces covered in snaking electrical cables that resembled blood vessels.

The one occupying the pod to his right reached up and took off her helmet, breaking the seal with a hiss of escaping gas. She blinked her striking, violet eyes at him, pointing her blunt snout in his direction. Her fine scales were a shade of dark green, waxy under the light, tapering to a lighter beige under her long neck. She shook out her sheaths, the two tentacle-like appendages falling down her back for a moment. They began to flex, prehensile, before erupting into a display of colorful feathers that created a kind of vibrant headdress atop her rounded skull. She was only stretching them, and the plumes soon collapsed back into their fleshy coverings, hanging listlessly once more.

“What are you looking at, boy?” she asked groggily. She opened her mouth and yawned, exposing her rows of small, sharp teeth. “Surely you’re growing accustomed to superlight jumps by now?”

It all came flooding back to him. His name was Tepin’chi’atli, and he was aboard the Valbara’nay carrier Teth’rak’s Fang. The fading muscle cramps and the banging headache were a product of the ship jumping through superlight, hopping between the stars like a stone skipping on the surface of a lake.

The female rose from her pod, the blue gel clinging to her pressure suit. It stretched like melting plastic before its hold on her was broken, and it sprang back into place. She dropped down to the deck on a pair of muscular, digitigrade legs, her wide hips tapering into a pinched waist. There was a touch device on her forearm, and she raised it, beginning to tap at it with her three-fingered hand as she walked away with a bobbing gait. More females were emerging, some more affected by the jump than others, shaking their heads and stretching their sheaths.

Once the sensors in the pods determined that the occupant had vacated, they began to slide up the curved walls on a hidden magnetic rail, transitioning from a horizontal to a vertical position. They sank into the white metal, disappearing from view behind sliding panels, clearing the living space until they would be needed once more.

He looked down into his own pod, flexing his long, muscular tail and feeling the resistance of the substance. It was jump gel, he remembered now, a fluid that hardened when an electric current was passed through it. It prevented the occupant from flailing their limbs and injuring themselves during the dimensional transition. The wracking energies of superlight wreaked havoc on the nervous systems of organic beings, but the migraines and muscle spasms would fade in a few minutes. It got a little easier with every jump, a little less painful.

Tepin struggled to free himself from the clinging goo, stepping onto the deck on unsteady legs, leaning on the rounded lip of his pod for support. He was wearing a flight suit not unlike that of his neighbor, though it was white instead of camouflaged. She was in the Navy, while he was only a passenger on this vessel, a civilian.

The Navy personnel were returning to their posts, for the most part, vacating the ring-shaped habitat on which he was standing via ladders that led to hatches in the ceiling. This was the only area of the ship that had gravity, it was spun around the hull of the carrier to create centrifugal force that approximated the native gravity of Valbara. This was where the crew lived when they weren’t working, where they exercised to prevent their muscles from atrophying, where they ate and slept. There were padded stools, dining tables, and computer consoles with holographic displays scattered about, along with food dispensers and exercise equipment. It was as comfortable as the engineers could reasonably make it.

When Tepin released his hold on his pod, it too made its way up the wall and vanished into a recess, the blue goo clinging to the interior as it was obscured by the closing panel. He stepped out of the way as a group of six females passed him by, a couple of them sparing him a lingering glance, turning their heads on their flexible necks to track him. There were no males in the military, and the crew had been in space for going on half a rotation now. He had fended off more than one courtship dance during his time on the ship. Tepin hadn’t boarded the Teth’rak’s Fang to find a flock to join, romance was the last thing on his mind right now.

Once the females had rounded the curve of the habitat, leaving him alone, he hurried over to a nearby porthole between two of the wall-gardens. He took off his helmet and set it on a nearby table, pressing his short snout up against the glass as he peered intently through the round aperture, his breath misting it. Beyond the frosty pane was the darkness of space, infinite blackness extending in every direction, punctuated by the cold light of innumerable stars.

Above him was the glare of the carrier’s hull, reflecting the harsh light from the system’s sun. It was long and spindly, made up of modular, cylindrical sections that were a matte white in color. The spokes that connected the habitat to the main hull of the ship turned beneath him, joined to the carrier via a rotating collar on one of its segments. From his vantage point, he could make out a docking segment that had two landing craft attached to it, the camouflaged spaceplanes clinging to the external hull. There was the bridge segment at the front, along with a sensor module that was covered in jutting antennae, and a weapons module that housed a pair of electromagnetic railgun turrets. He knew that there were also sections of the ship that housed the fusion generators, and there was an engine module at the rear of the long stack.

Three other carriers were in formation with his own, each one sporting a different configuration. The cylindrical modules could be assembled and reassembled to suit many different roles, from gunships to cargo transports. Two of their number had been assembled with four of the rotating habitats, they were carrying a great many passengers, while the other was mostly made up of storage modules for carrying the supplies that the small fleet would need on their long journey. Valbara’nay ships were not suited to traveling alone over such distances, they had journeyed more than sixty light-years so far.

The Valbara’nay vessels were not what interested him, however. As the habitat slowly rotated around the carrier, his eyes were drawn to the planet in the distance, its surface a sandy red in color. They had jumped in close, perhaps twenty thousand kilometers away. It wasn’t habitable, there was no foliage, no visible oceans. Above its rust-colored horizon was a brilliant, white torus, spinning slowly as it orbited the arid world. It was only about the size of his porthole right now, but he could already get a sense of its immensity. It was much like the habitat that he was standing on, but vast in scale, so large that it made even the carrier look like a tiny insect in comparison.

They called it the Pinwheel. It was both a Naval base and a hub for travel, with thousands of citizens passing through every day. That was their destination. The ship had begun to burn towards it, he could feel the subtle tug of acceleration.

A little over two rotations ago, the Valbara’nay had encountered an alien war fleet on the outskirts of their solar system. They had not come to conquer, but to hunt a mutual enemy, the insectoid Betelgeusians. The Bugs had laid siege to Valbara, and the aliens had spearheaded the defense of the homeworld, preventing the fall of their civilization. They called themselves the Coalition, an alliance of like-minded species who worked together to defend their planets from the roving insect fleets. The Valbara’nay had recently become a member species of the organization, and with that, an entire Galaxy of possibilities had opened up. Half a dozen species, a hundred worlds, alien cultures entirely unknown to the Valbara’nay. It was all so exciting, there was a whole interstellar community just waiting to be explored.

The small flotilla was on its way to deliver several platoons of Valbara’nay Commandos to the Coalition station for integration training, along with a number of scientists and engineers, but there had been a limited number of positions available for civilians too. Tepin had managed to secure one for himself.

In Valbara’nay culture, tradition dictated that males should serve as homemakers and devote their lives to rearing children. They were smaller and weaker than the females, considered the fairer sex due to their beautiful plumage, and their objectivity was often called into question due to the belief that they were ruled by their emotions. They were seen as fragile, a thing to be coddled and protected, in part due to the disparity in numbers between the sexes. There were roughly seven females born for every male. They were expected to join a flock of females as soon as they were old enough to leave home, to father children, but an increasing number of males were choosing to live independently for a few rotations before settling down. Some took up professions, often in the service industry or the medical field. Others traveled Valbara before becoming tied down to one city.

Tepin was one such male. Tradition be damned, when he had heard that all Valbara’nay were now citizens of the Coalition, wanderlust had overtaken him. He could go anywhere, not just to any city on the homeworld, but to any planet in the Coalition. Assuming he had a way to get there, of course.

He was an artist by trade, a digital painter and sculptor, to be exact. It was on that basis that he had applied to join the expedition, so that he might serve the Ensi in a cultural capacity. To his surprise, he had been accepted, and a place had been reserved for him on the Teth’rak’s Fang. There had been a short period of training, as he had never been into space before, and then the Navy had cleared him for travel. Now his destination was in view, and his heart was pounding in his chest.

The station’s gleaming hull made it stand out against the velvet-black backdrop like a beacon, growing larger as the formation of carriers neared it, expanding until its sheer size began to give him a kind of vertigo. It was shaped like a giant wheel, with a fat, torus-shaped habitat that was connected to a central hub via long spokes. When it was close enough for Tepin to make out the details, he saw that its hull was made up of massive, metal plates in a shade of dull white. Its smoothness was broken up by jutting communications towers and large, rounded domes of indeterminable purpose.

There were cavernous hangar bays spaced out at intervals along its structure, each one glowing with a shimmering, blue light. Those were the force fields that he had read about, an Earth’nay technology that allowed solid objects to pass through while keeping the atmosphere within from venting into space. There were dozens of Earth’nay vessels floating around it like shoals of fish in a lake, some of them three times the length of the Teth’rak’s Fang.

The Humans, as they referred to themselves, possessed technologies far more advanced than any that the Valbara’nay had access to. Their ships were like mobile battle stations, their angular, black hulls bristling with alien weaponry. Their jump carriers could launch a hundred fighter craft at once and were capable of deploying thousands of troops to a planet’s surface. Everyone on Valbara knew of the Rorke, the Earth’nay carrier that had stood defiantly against the Bug armada. There were even people naming their children after it.

“All personnel report to the landers.”

Tepin pulled himself away from the porthole, hastily returning his helmet to his head, slipping his sheaths into the dangling tubes. It was finally time, they must be coming into transport range. After a brief jog to the small cubicle where he had slept for the duration of his journey, he retrieved the rucksack that contained what few belongings he had been permitted to bring onto the carrier, slinging it onto his back and fastening the straps about his chest. He hurried towards the nearest exit, gripping the rungs of one of the ladders as he ascended towards an open hatch in the ceiling. Before him was a long tube that led to the carrier proper, not much wider than the breadth of a female’s hips.

He never liked this part, it defied everything that his body thought it knew about physics, making him feel nauseous. As he pulled himself up the ladder, the gravity seemed to lessen, almost as though his body was growing lighter as he climbed. When he reached the halfway point, he began to float, a brief panic overtaking him as his balance was thrown off and his instincts warned him that he was falling. He clung to the ladder, waiting for the sensation to pass, then began to coast down the remainder of the brightly-lit tunnel.

When he emerged, he had to flip himself upside-down, as what had once been the floor was now high above his head.

The almost homely environment of the habitat now gave way to a purely functional Navy vessel, the interior designed for zero-G. There was no up or down, no floor or ceiling, no point of reference. The occupants were expected to pull themselves along using handholds that were spaced out at convenient intervals all over the padded walls of the cylindrical modules, or to push themselves off surfaces. Computer consoles, access panels, and equipment racks were placed seemingly at random. Anything that wasn’t bolted to a wall was held to a surface using magnets, usually attached with a bungee cable to prevent it from floating away if someone dropped it.

Tepin gripped a nearby handhold with his tail and pulled himself out of the way as a trio of females wearing Navy pressure suits emerged from one of the spokes one after the other, the hatches continuing to spin around him. The rotation of the habitat couldn’t be halted to let the crew on or off, they just had to pick a passing hatch and go for it. It wasn’t spinning fast enough that it posed any kind of danger, but Tepin still found the prospect unnerving.

“This way to the docking module,” one of them said, gesturing for him to follow her with a wave of her three-fingered hand.

“Are you lost, boy?” another chuckled as she looked him up and down.

“I ... I know the way,” he replied. His feathers tried to flush purple in an involuntary expression of embarrassment, but his sheaths were contained within his pressure suit. Instead, his onboard computer interpreted the muscle spasms, lighting up the integrated color panels. A wave of purple LEDs flashed along the length of the twin sheaths that hung from the back of his head, floating in the air due to the microgravity, the colors mirrored in the touch displays on his forearms.

The females floated through the pressure door that sealed off this module from the rest, the round aperture dilating like an iris, affording him a brief view of the adjacent module before it slid shut again. Cursing his meekness, he pushed off the walls gently, floating towards it.

The sensor opened it for him as he neared, and he drifted through. This module was the same cylindrical shape as the last, maybe ten meters in diameter, but there was no rotating collar. Instead, there were people floating in front of computer consoles that seemed to have been randomly bolted all over the walls. They didn’t need stools to sit on, they could completely relax their bodies in this environment and just hang in place, their hands waving as they interacted with the flickering holograms. A couple of them spared him a glance as he passed through the center of the room, and then he was through to the next module.

This one had a pair of large hatches on opposite sides of the cylinder, the walls lined with racks of spacesuits. The two camouflaged spaceplanes that Tepin had seen from the habitat were docked here. The three females who had passed him earlier were already disappearing into one of the openings, and there was another female floating in place as she examined the screen on her wrist. She looked up at him briefly as he approached, Tepin catching a handhold to stop himself from coasting into her.

“Name?” she demanded, waving her gloved hand over the display.

“Tepin’chi’atli,” he replied.

“Lander two,” she said, gesturing to the hatch on his right. He pushed off the wall and made his way towards it, emerging through the deck of the craft’s troop bay. It was more cramped than its outward appearance would have suggested, exposed machinery and piping protruding from the cushioned padding in places. There was a sealed door at one end that led to the cockpit, and at the other was the landing ramp, which was currently closed. He was met with two dozen pairs of violet eyes, the other occupants staring at him through their visors. They were strapped into rows of crash couches that were lined up against the walls, harnesses secured tightly about their chests. They were all wearing ocean camouflage, save for five individuals who were clad in the green and purple camo of the Commandos. Tepin felt very much out of place in his matte white, as if he needed to be singled out any more than he already was...

He looked around for a vacant seat, finding his place and struggling his way over to it. There were fewer handholds in the lander, so he had to hook his long tail around the straps and tug himself closer. After stowing his pack in the compartment beneath his crash couch, he noticed that one of the females was unstrapping herself. She rose from her seat, Tepin’s color panels flashing purple again as she approached him.

“I don’t need any help,” he whispered, the female ignoring him as she reached out to close his visor. Her gloved fingers brushed the side of his helmet, the glass panel lowering, his nostrils filling with fresh oxygen as the pressure seal activated. She placed a hand on his chest, pushing his back against the padded wall and fastening his harness securely, pulling the straps taut.

Tepin wasn’t sure whether to thank her or not as she returned to her seat, but she wouldn’t have been able to hear him now anyway.

After a moment, the strips of warning lights in the deck turned from green to orange, Tepin’s chair beginning to vibrate as the lander’s engines spooled. The hatch in the floor sealed up, and then there was a sudden sensation of motion that pressed him into his seat, the craft lifting away from the carrier. It drifted for a moment, getting some distance before firing its main engines, Tepin closing his eyes tightly as his stomach churned. It wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as the initial ascent into orbit had been, but it still made him feel like he was being rattled around inside of a giant centrifuge.

Deceleration soon alerted him that they were nearing the station, the rumble of the landing gear and the tug of gravity informing him that they had touched down in one of the hangars, the lander taxiing for a short distance before coming to a full stop. The lighting strips turned green again, Tepin watching as his neighbors began to unfasten their harnesses. He did the same, stooping to retrieve his pack, the ramp at the back of the bay beginning to lower as the occupants lined up in two neat rows.

Tepin followed behind them as they jogged down the ramp, blinking his eyes as he emerged from the lander and into one of the station’s cavernous hangars. The ceiling was so high above his head, the deck so massive that it made the camouflaged lander look like a toy. Theirs was not the only vessel in the bay. Far to his left was an Earth’nay ship, perhaps one hundred and fifty meters long, sitting atop a set of sturdy landing skids. Its angular, jet-black hull was sleek and tapered, designed to defeat radar detection. It was covered in hatches that Tepin recognized as torpedo launch bays, the bridge subtly raised from the hull towards the aft, just above the monstrous cones of its main engines.

The vessel was being fawned over by Earth’nay wearing yellow jumpsuits, the aliens appeared to be servicing it. They were inspecting the underside of the craft, tablet computers clutched in their five-fingered hands, and they were walking along gantries that extended from the walls to let them reach its blocky hull. It was the first time that he had seen one of the creatures in person. They were big, perhaps a foot and a half taller than he was, with flat faces and an upright posture. Their scaleless skin came in varying tones, as did the fur atop their heads, all of them rather drab.

He turned to look back at the lander, his eyes widening as he noticed the force field behind it. It was a wall of shimmering, blue light, transparent enough that he could easily see the starfield beyond. The cold points of light rotated past slowly with the spin of the station, the gaping maw of space transfixing him, making him feel as though he was about to be sucked out into the vacuum.

It was a struggle to look away, but he turned his eyes back to his fellow Valbara’nay, hurrying to catch up with them as they made their way towards a far-off hangar door. He had only been on the station for a minute, and already he had discovered a vista that he was inspired to paint.

There were two more Earth’nay flanking the exit, these ones dressed in black armor, their faces concealed behind opaque visors. Their appearance didn’t frighten Tepin, far from it. These were UNN Marines, Earth’nay ground troops of the same kind who had fought to defend Valbara. The sight of them filled him with a kind of awe. He had only ever seen them in videos before now, footage captured during the battles to repel boarders on the planetary defense stations, and the fight to retain control of the Yilgarn spaceport.

One of them stepped forward, beginning to exchange information with the leader of Tepin’s group. The aliens had wrist-mounted computers much like those that were integrated into Valbara’nay pressure suits, and after a short conversation, they were admitted through the door.