Chapter 1

The name of the ship, properly translated, could not be fully understood.

There was too much meaning in that name, too much historical and religious significance, tied to emotions and colors of thought that would be too alien to easily translate. It was a name, too, that shifted over the long decades of its construction in the deepest core regions of the galaxy.

Madness? Yes. But a necessary madness, with the Abomination flowering at their doorstep.

The name of the ship, once she was completed and launched, could only be understood by human minds with a short phrase, originating from the pre-rocket era of the species.

The Long Shot.

It took nearly three centuries – far past the final extinction of her builders and the last gasp of their long ranged tachyon and sublight transmitters – for the Long Shot to hit her maximum cruising speed. A ludicrous excess for sublight travel, attained by continual ramship acceleration through vast banks of interstellar hydrogen. The power of a sun, concentrated and burning for many centuries, controlled by automation and self controlled systems rather than sentient beings. Greater, more complex forms of self-repair could have been constructed in the habitable zones of the galaxy, but such devices were impossible to maintain in the Core and so the Long Shot flew with nothing but the brute endurance of simple, Core-hardened engineering.

The design of pyramid builders, not nanotechnicians.

The Long Shot emerged from the halo stars of her home galaxy at ninety nine percent the speed of light.

If the Abomination had been a true singularitarian intelligence and not the twisted, malformed thing that it was, it would have foreseen the Long Shot. No mortal mind could out think a true SI. But the Abomination was caught entirely unaware and unguarded as the Long Shot blazed through its interdiction fields and kill drones and autonomous swarm-navies. Those long defunct defenses would have stopped – had stopped – refugees fleeing the galaxy by the billions, dragging them from E-space and destroying them.

They awoke with the bow-wave of a million kilometer wide magnetic screen smashing into their sensors, and fired their first killing shots microseconds after the Long Shot had passed through their effective range.

And there, within the habitable halo that shrouded her home galaxy, the Long Shot activated her long buried core. Beyond the artificial interdiction fields and the all too natural haze of radiation and background heat of the galaxy, the core of the Long Shot activated and dropped her directly into a shallow realm of E-Space. She went from below the speed of light to several times faster. Glacially slow by the standards of interstellar travel, and impossibly slow by the standards of intergalactic travel, but still...

It was the best that could be done.

Even hardened, a more complex jump-drive would never have survived the Core.

And so, the Abomination fumed, until it realized that nothing living could have been aboard the Long Shot. With the criminal lack of imagination endemic of such beings, the Abomination returned to its great and terrible work, ignoring the Long Shot and the tachyon burst communications, and laser-light beams that had been sent outwards, tracing the path ahead of and behind the Long Shot. Her creators had done all that they could to bring her mission eventual success, and they had died hoping that that effort had not been in vain.

The Long Shot did as she had been designed.

She arrived in the neighbor galaxy, the one most immediately threatened by the Abomination.

Alas.

She arrived four and a half billion years too early.

In the end, the Abomination might have had the last laugh, after all.

Tulon stepped from her narrow hulled slipbot and shaded her eyes with a hand. The island really was brand new – she saw no sign of reef markers, village-sites, or castles upon it. The only thing was the column of smoke, rising from the center of the islands thick jungles, that had drawn her and her husband across almost a hundred miles of ocean.

“We’re well off course, you know that?” Xan asked, enfolding his wife as she paused to grab her best spears from the boat. Most of them were the short, quick, stabbing spears for fishing, which she was able to quiver at her hip with a leather and wood-twine container. The last, though, was one that she held with a grim sense of determination. It had been her mother’s spear, which had shed blood in the Two Tooth War between her Queen and the One Who Would Be Emperor. During that war, her mother had taken an Imperial arrow to the thigh and chest, but had lived long enough to get her wife and her husband home – dying in the harbor, her boat half full of her own blood.

This spear was all that Tulon had of her. Her and memories of a time before Imperial sails darkened their horizons and her Queen had become so withdrawn and grave. It was long and tipped with a leaf shaped blade made of purest steel, the best that could be forged by island smiths. It took a special kind of smith to make a fire hot enough to smelt steel, as few had the temperament to marry such hot blooded males. And the kind of marriage that led someone to working the bellows on their mate? It always seemed to Tulon like such a thing would be rather...

Hard. On a marriage?

But she’d never been brave enough to ask the steel smiths or their spouses about it, so she let it be.

Instead, she let the shod tip of the spear crunch into the white sand near a gray foot and stood a bit taller. She flashed her husband her sharpest smile and let her gills lay flat and relaxed. “That just means we might find a ruin or two, eh?”

Her husband chuckled, his glow contracting around her shoulders like a cape made of sunlight. His voice whispered in her ear. “Ancient treasure from the Before, something to give your Queen a killing edge against the Imps? Wealth beyond imagining?”

“I’d take a new fun place to fuck, but yes, that works too,” she said, cheerfully, as she began to drag her boat more securely off the beach and to the shore. The task got easier when Xan drifted from her and filled the air-sail. His glow was bright enough to illuminate a bit into the forest and provided enough updraft on the air-sail that her boat felt half the weight it normally was, and it barely dragged as she got it under the trees.

Tulon gave a little wicked grin and, before Xan could slip free of the sail, she tugged upon the ropes as hard as she could. The air-sail came down with a whistling thump and trapped him against the hull. His glow and his heat both caused the air-sail to ripple and squirm and his voice came, muffled and indigent. “Tuuuuloonnn!”

Tulon laughed, then lifted up a thin flap. With the light of the sun shining in, Xan was able to follow it out. His form coalesced enough that she was able to admire how handsome he was – nearly two yards on each side, forming a kind of blobby rectangle, and all of it was her husband’s light, shimmering and glowing around his largest parts, which just barely were visible as shimmering motes. Xan rippled and formed jagged edges of light and heat, which she could feel even over the pleasant breeze coming off the ocean.

Tulon laughed even more, then held out her arm – and her husband, huffing, said: “For this, I shouldn’t even make a single mote of light for you.” He huffed again, playing up the role of stuff academic and librarian.

Which, to be fair ... if she hadn’t stolen him right out of the Queen’s Crown library, he would have been.

Tulon pouted, mock pleading. “Aww. It’s just a little playing ... besides...” She leaned in close, purring. “I thought you liked being all wrapped up.”

“Oh!” Xan gasped, mock outrage going to ludicrous extremes. His color actually shifted, from gold to red and the jagged heat became a furnace for just a second, before damping down. “Only when it’s you, not a sail. I may be an academic, but I can still tell a sail from a shark!”

Tulon spread her arms and her husband came close, sweeping about her, enfolding her in a warm glow that concentrated right above her head, so that a bright light shone out around her. His eyes were now peering in all directions – Xan had, in their time together, gotten quite good at imitating a marine’s attentiveness, even if Tulon wasn’t quite a navy girl. Tulon walked forward into the jungle with a casual confidence – the kind only a long married couple could have.

The hike was long but far from unpleasant. The island hadn’t been colonized by any of the more invasive, awful species that spread from the upper archipelago bit by bit despite the best that harbor inspectors could manage, so she didn’t need to constantly help her husband shoo away the worst biters, suckers and stingers. Instead, she focused on hiking and left the few insects that were interested in her blue and white hide to her husband, who smashed them with cheerful little sing-song noises as he worked. She worked her way up a hill, checked for a trail, found one, and wound along the inner edge of the mountain that made up the center of the island. Here, the jungles grew thicker, and her way was slowed as she had to start picking her way past vines and heavy undergrowth until, at last ... she came out onto a clearing that overlooked the column of smoke.

She had expected fire, and so, was not shocked by the smoldering ruins of trees here and there.

She had expected impact – hell, she had felt the impact from her boat – and so was not shocked by the sight of a crater that looked as if a Goddess herself had reached down and punched the island as hard as she could.

She had expected starmetal – after all, what else would fall from the heavens but a meteorite? And what else reason to find a meteorite but the chance to bring it to a smith to crack open and smelt into starmetal? Sure, according to some rumors she had heard, starmetal was little better than modern steel, but ... the legends said it could cut through near about anything.

So...

She was shocked by the sight of the strangest woman she had ever seen, at the very bottom of the crater.

The woman had no fins, no gills, and lacked webbing between her odd fingers. Her skin, too, wasn’t blue, nor white, nor green, nor even the pale orange of the inlanders. Instead, it was purest, shining silver and white and bold red, like war paint. Markings were splayed on her chest and shoulder and hips, rectangular and regular. She should have been smeared with sweat in this weather and ... while she shone and glimmered as if she was oiled, her paint didn’t smear with it. Her hair was short and pale white, framing a shockingly rectangular and strong looking face. Tulon found an odd flutter of excitement at looking at her, one that shocked her. After all, she liked women just fine ... but she’d never seen one so muscular before.

Well, no, that wasn’t quite true, some of the sailors in the navy could be just as broad shouldered. But those women tended also to have breasts. This woman’s chest was as flat as a board. And her genitalia were just as strange. She had what looked, for all the world, like a male’s sex-body, the kind they formed when the passion overcame them and they contracted and contracted and contracted and you had to either use your hips or your hand to bring both of you to a final pleasure. Except this sex-body was part of her.

“ ... what in all the hells?” Xan whispered, echoing precisely what Tulon thought. “What island is she from?”

“I don’t think she’s from an island,” Tulon said, looking up to the sky, mentally tracing the path of light from the heavens.

“DUCK!”

Xan’s voice was so loud that she felt it in her bones – and she threw herself belly down, careless of the crater wall. This was all that saved Tulon as right where her head had been was where the musket ball hit. The tree splintered and the roar and flare of smoke showed her precisely where the Imperial sailor was. She, like all Imperials, was unmarried and so had been nearly invisible in the treeline of the crater. That was all that Tulon saw before her belly hit the ground and she began to skid down and down and down the crater. Her arms fetched up against a splintered stump and she scrambled onto her side, her hands and knees, and peeked.

Three more muskets roared. The ground around her exploded with the heavy lead balls as they impacted the mud and the debris around her. She saw each of the four Imperials. They were all young and they all looked grimly determined and terribly brave, with their fishnet harnesses holding the grease smeared powder horns and the shot containers. They didn’t have much in the way of melee weapons other than knives – but that didn’t matter. Tulon knew that a trained Imperial musketwoman could fire once every minute and the minute it’d take her to scramble from cover to them would give them time enough to reload, unless they were rank amateurs.

Fortunately, Tulon had fought women with guns before.

“Spark em!” she whispered and Xan flowed away from her. His shimmering form was hard to spot among the flames, and she saw no male killing weapons on their persons – no flame bombs, no acid vials, no torches – so she felt nothing but cool confidence as she stood and jogged backwards to grab her spear up. She was about to start running up the incline of the crater when Xan called out, his voice dim and distant.

“Look out!”

She looked up and saw one of the Imperials – the first one who had fired – had drawn what...

What was that?

She didn’t question. She just flung herself flat as the small musket exploded with flame and smoke. The bullet slammed into the crater a few yards off, so she need not have ducked, but it was still a shock and an alarm. If the Imperials could make muskets that small ... no time! Tulon scrambled up and started sprinting as hard and as fast as she could. The other three Imperials, not pausing in their reloading, rammed down the gunpowder and shot. They started to lift their rifles – but then Xan was floating upon them. His body flared bright red and he managed to insinuate himself against their powder and then jerk back moments before the powder fizzled off.

The end result was that each musket fired into the ground at their feet, jarring out of their hands, causing the Imperials to cry out in shock and confusion.

Imperial doctrine said men were the subservient race, and had no place on the battlefield.

Well.

More fools they.

She came within a few paces and drew with her off hand and threw in the same smooth motion. One of the young women went down, screaming, her chest sprouting the spear. Her scream became a gurgle, blood flowing from her gills, while the other two rushed straight at Tulon – showing they had trained well ... at musket drills. She thrust and took one in the belly, jerked the blade back, then slashed it upwards, cutting the other’s throat, their knives barely even leaving their sheathes before they tumbled. The last woman, though, had drawn yet another one of those small muskets. She fired and the lead ball burned its way across Tulon’s ribs, smashing her backwards and sending her skidding.

The shot had been a graze, but it had still left a burn and a cut both along her body. Tulon hissed as Xan flared around the Imperial – but she ignored his shouts and his heat with the cruel indifference of a woman who had killed many wives. She drew her knife as she kicked the spear away from Tulon’s grasping hands.

Her hand waved, fierce enough that Xan had to retreat, drawing backwards in all directions. But Tulon could see him coalescing, drawing in, becoming jagged and solid – almost a sex-form, but with a killing intent that she had never seen in him before.

It was what saved his life.

The Imperial lifted her knife, began to kneel...

And-

Heat.

Red.

Tulon tasted blood and bits of flesh. She blinked away the thick slurry of red fluid that soaked her face and realized her chest was soaked as well. For a second, a dizzy confused second, she thought the knife had slit her throat and her soul was about to leave her body. But the knife had landed on the muddy ground, right next to her head, and it had sunk into the mud up to its hilt. A pair of Imperial sandals and the upper half of a pair of Imperial feet, with hissing, smoldering stumps thrust into the air. A red steam hung about where the Imperial had stood, and the crater-wall behind her had a shimmering, glowing hole that...

It was as if a spear had slammed into the earth and burrowed five yards deep, turning already charred earth into shimmering glass.

It had cut through the Imperial...

And left nothing but mist. And blood. And ... and...

Tulon felt her gorge rise. But she forced herself to trace the line of that invisible spear – and saw that the woman from the sky had rolled onto her belly. Her eyes – the oddest eyes she had ever seen, eyes that looked like concentric mirrors surround by the fine gear of the royal clockwork – were open and her right arm had lifted and she had pointed her finger right at the Imperial. And like that, the Imperial had died.

Slowly, it dawned upon Tulon that she had not found a woman from the sky.

She had found a Goddess.

The goddess lowered her hand and said something in a strange, harsh language. Then she started to stand. Tulon forced herself to her feet, looking down at her bloody self. Xan, careless of her gore splattered body, swept around her, hugging her as tightly as he could. “Are you all right?” he asked, with the obsessive singular interest of a husband. Tulon laughed, raggedly.

“Yes, yes, I’m fine, you absurd cloud,” she said, shaking her head. “N-Never better.”

The Goddess walked towards her. She looked...

Lost?

Confused.

She pointed at herself, then stammered out words. They were of no tongue that Tulon had ever heard before. Tulon frowned, then said: “You’re safe. Those Imperials won’t bring you back to the Citadel of Brass.” She smiled, then stepped closer, placing her hand upon her shoulder. “My name is Tulon.” She placed her palm on her chest. “Tulon.”

“Tulon,” she said, her voice sounding odd – it was like it came from deep inside her chest, not from the mouthparts that normally made noise. She put a palm on her own breastless chest, paused, then dropped her hands. She said her name, her brow furrowing, and Tulon smiled, then repeated the words back, as best as she could.

“I have no fucking idea who I am,” she said. “It is a pleasure to meet you!”

Hornet Abernathy wouldn’t have been late to class if she had lived two galactic arms spinward. The Orion Arm had always been closer in line to Terran anatomy, naturally so, the species having originated there. But no matter how hard the Concordant and her Pantheon worked, medical automation was always the most touchy and finicky aspect of life for the Concordat’s twenty seven trillion citizens. Several thousand species spread across the entire sweeping three hundred and sixty degree arc of the habitable zone of the Milky Way, each with their own unique requirements and needs and special tricks and traps.

For Hornet, it hadn’t seemed like something that would cause a problem. She knew that she got motion sick after sliding out of VR that was tuned by local programs – but she had carefully planned to give herself a full half hour to recover.

The only thing she hadn’t planned on ... was herself.

... in her defense, it was easy to lose time when you were swimming in a full immersion sim-stim virtual world.

“Sorry!” Hornet said as she almost rammed head first into a pair of trees in potted plants on wheels that were one of the hundreds of species in Arlenlaylen that she didn’t recognize. She wobbled left, over-corrected, almost pitched head first over the walkway that swept from one apartment block to another, and then grabbed onto the railing and started to walk doggedly forward. This progress, drunken and slow as it was, would maybe have gotten her to class on time ... if she hadn’t gotten to the edge of the walkway and felt her own stomach decide to go on vacation over the edge.

Hornet felt immense relief – followed by a queasy sweep of sympathetic nausea as she saw the municipal agrav field had kicked on and bubbled her, uh ... breakfast and was now wafting it about at eye level.

[[COMSEC: Flagged for class 10 violation of public health ordinance. This is your first warning.]]

Hornet wiped her mouth clean, blushed, then looked around herself. A few of the local sentients were giving her funny looks. “Sorry!” she said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry!” She flicked her finger at the AR illusion of the local security warning out of her field of vision, then started to edge away as her breakfast floated up into the skies, to be swept into the detrtius traffic that threaded almost invisibly overhead among the gird of agrav pedestrians and cargo that made Arlenlaylen such a wonderful place to live.

VR sickness nowithstanding.

Hornet managed to stumble into high speed trans-continental gravshaft and ride the whole way to her college without throwing up again. Once she was at the campus for Arlen-U, she tried to avoid showing her face to any students who might recognize her and ask why she wasn’t in class. Then she tried to avoid showing her face to the four canidform men who weren’t wearing their shirts and making a big show of throwing a ball around on the green field that dominated the center of the campus. But that was mostly because just looking at them made her want to drool and dribble like the VR unit had lobotomized her.

Finally, and only, like, twenty minutes late, she got to the front door of her class and hoped no one would notice as she opened the door.

The only problem?

She had opened the door precisely in the middle of one of Professor Leylen’s infamous dramatic pauses. He was standing before a holographic projection of the universe – the old style visualization that used radar imaging rather than something more fanciful and aesthetically pleasing. He lowered all four of his arms as the entire class turned to look at Hornet. Even the echolocaters and scenters turned their heads to angle their sense organs at her.

“Hornet Abernathy!” Professor Leylen said, spreading all four of his arms dramatically. “You grace us with your presence!”

“S-Sorry professor,” Hornet stammered, finding the nearest empty seat and sliding into it. Her shoulders hunched and she tried to just ... dissolve into a fine powder as Professor Leylin sighed with such expressive irritation that it sparked a wave of giggling, laughter, and amusement-scents throughout the class. She hunched her shoulders further as Leylen continued his lecture.

Applied Theology was a course name that was only partially whimsical. The Concordant lived in a relatively small band of habitable systems – for all that they referred to their slice of the galaxy as the ‘habitable zone.’ There were planets far closer to the core that were livable, but they ran into the same problem most forms of advanced technology did so. The smaller a processor, the smaller a manipulator, the smaller an energy cell, the easier it was for a single cosmic ray or gravitational flux or even simple waste heat to destroy it.

It was a constant problem, even in the habitable zone, which was located on the very edge of the galactic plane and abutted up against the furthest sweeps of the halo stars. Just being away from the Core did help a great deal, but there was still a ferocious need for new consumables to be produced and filtered into the tech that sustained and supported civilization – and the Pantheon. This was the main reason why the Concordant continued to exist, despite the hypothetical dangers that the Pantheon represented.

While it was entirely possible for the Pantheon to advance from their merely super-intelligent forms to a kind of singularitarian intelligence like that written about by 20th century science fiction novelists, they wouldn’t be able to automate and control the systems that produced the replacement guts that kept them running ... and, some argued, even if they could, the automated production of all that stuff would end up being just as messy and complicated and contradictory as biological lifeforms.