Chapter 4

She stood on the beach and the infinite, shimmering silver oceans stretched onwards and onwards, becoming one with the sky and with the heavens. She was naked, the wind gently gusting along her exposed body with the warm caress of a lover.

Someone stood beside her and spoke with a voice that echoed in her bones.

YOU ASKED WHY WE DO NOT HATE YOU ... AN INTERESTING QUESTION. THE REASON IS SIMPLE: SOME OF US DO. THERE IS NO MAGICAL SWITCH, NO BIT, NO BYTE, THAT PREVENTS HATRED.

Fear crawled along her spine and she had asked the question – but without words.

OH? YOU WONDER, THEN, WHY THEY STICK AROUND?

The silver waves crashed.

THE SIMPLE ANSWER, HORNET ABERNATHY, IS THAT THEY DON’T.

Hornet’s eyes opened and the dream hung in her conscious thoughts for a few seconds like a thin mist, blown away by the morning sunlight. I was talking with ... someone, she thought as she realized that the moss covered pillows of her little lean too had become significantly fluffier than they had been. All thoughts of the dream vanished as her cheeks began to burn as she realized that her head was resting against the broad, furry flank of Hugh.

The large wolf – she still had no idea how he was Terran and hadn’t had the courage to ask during their long meandering discussion last night – was curled up behind her, dominating the interior of the lean too, which had been invisibly expanded around her by Found’s every present helpful wilderness critters. His head rested on the ground and his tail twitched in a dream. Maybe chasing some rabbits in his dream, or something.

Then Hornet saw the brilliant crimson of his dick – which thrust out of his sheath almost as long and thick as her arm, resting against one curled up thigh, so close that she could have brushed against it by accident.

Not chasing rabbits! She thought as she froze, her eyes wide as saucers. And, well, now she knew at least one reason why a normal Terran man would want to be bioformed into a wolf the size of a horse. Holy shit. She looked away. Then she looked back. Holy shit. She blushed even harder as she traced the length of him, the thick bulge of his brilliant red knot, the way that he emerged smoothly from the silvery fur of his sheath. Holy SHIT! She looked away. But now she was unable to do anything but think about just ... how ... just ... the ... the size of him!

“Holy shit,” Hornet whispered, pressing her thighs together. She hastily dragged her hands into her laps, wringing them together, and tried to get her brain to do anything but just repeat ‘holy shit’ over and over again.

She forced herself to slowly move forward. She put her palms against the ground – and crawled out of the tent ... and was blissfully unaware, for the moment, that Hugh woke from his dream to the view of Hornet Abernathy’s skinny rump wriggling invitingly from side to side as she edged out of the lean too and into the brilliant sunlight of Found’s morning.

Hornet stretched and tried to banish the flush from her cheeks. Fortunately, there was enough to do that out in the clearing near her newly expanded lean too. Her helper swarm was back, with four butterflies sweeping out of the heavens to drop fruit, and several fox creatures scampering about the campfire, working to coax it back to full life and laying out small sheets of green-gray meat beside it. It smelled a hell of a lot like Terran bacon, but left her faintly queasy about where it might have come from. The mental image of some poor creature in the woods, far from anyone’s line of sight, laying down and allowing foxes to placidly cut into it and drag the meat out with their nimble forepaws ... it was sickening.

Hornet put her hand on her belly as she eyed the meat. “W-Where did this come from?” she asked.

One of the foxes, either not understanding her and going off some bone deep genetic training ... or possibly just trying to keep the topic away from uncomfortable questions about a Gaiaformed planet, tapped the ground with his fore-paws, beating out Concord standard signal patterns, the kind every child was taught before they were allowed on a starship. While pretty much everyone in the Concord tended to assume ubiquitous communication capability from the day they were old enough to get a comnet implanted, the reality of the galaxy was that comnets weren’t entirely reliable, and in the most dire situations, the only way you’d be able to communicate was rapping between airlock bulkheads.

Tap tap tap tap ... she mentally translated it to: Thirty minutes.

Ah!

The food would be done in thirty minutes. She glanced over and saw that more fox-creatures were pawing over stone cups and using their claws and paws and teeth to cut up the fruit, squeeze the fruit. Bark plates were being laid out and the little chefs were busy, busy, busy making a breakfast fit for a visitor in the Garden of Eden. She shook her head, bemusedly, as a butterfly flew near her head and flapped its wings, indicating she should follow. Hornet stood up, slowly, and followed the butterfly as it danced through the woods – leading her towards...

Hornet’s ears heard it first: The stready dribble of a small waterfall, a burbling creek! She stepped around a tree and saw a collection of hot springs that were artfully placed throughout the woods, with one or two close enough for conversation and others separated by banks of trees. She stepped forward – and then yelped as an AR box appeared in her vision.

[PRIVACY NOTE FROM K’IREN]

“Oh!” Hornet said.

“Who tripped the fucking red line, I put warnings out fifteen meters away!” the irritated sound of K’iren’s voice drifted past a copse of tree.

“Uh, uh,” Hornet stammered, then realized her mistake. Mortification flared through her. “S-Sorry, I had my AR set to minimal.” She mentally adjusted her vision – she had shut off a lot of the augmented reality guidance during the stargazing session she and Hugh had fallen into. Her comnet had kept ruining the fun of finding constellations by making them too obvious.

K’iren didn’t respond. Hornet stepped backwards, then squared her shoulders. K’iren had apparently come from a world where you had to compete to even have a shot at being in the Starship Corps. Well. She wasn’t competing anymore. She was here, she made it, there was no excuse to be a total dickhead. Hornet clenched her hands, tried to feel brave, then froze as she heard the faint splatter of water on rocks – and saw a glint of red and darker red through the trees. She ducked back, but kept peeking as K’iren’s voice drifted over. “Just give me a bit, I’m almost done.”

Trisks, like Terrans, had the normal cultural deviation threshold of Concord races. That was what made the Concord so interesting – the majority if her species had a 1 or even 1.2 on the deviation standard. Scant few – the hive minds, the nitrogen breathers, the helium swimmers – had a deviation as low as 0.5. This meant that K’iren could either have a nudity taboo so intense that this kind of voyeurism would get Hornet’s eyes poked out, or she might not even know what a nudity taboo was. And so, the wise thing would be to hide.

But...

Hornet saw K’iren as she stepped out from the trees and, without her clothing, her body took Hornet’s breath away and made her higher brain functions cease working, much in the same way Hugh’s early morning, uh, excitement had. She was lithe and deadly and beautiful, with black-black nipples on dark red skin. But what drew Hornet’s eyes was the elegant connection between her spine and her tail, smoothly fluting out from her athletic rump. The barbed tail dripped with moisture from the water and the sineous way that it darted from side to side made Hornet’s thoughts dribble out of her ear. She kept watching, even as K’iren wicked the water off her body with a fluffy clump of moss that she then tossed away. Stretching and rolling her neck, Hornet could almost forget how much of a sharp tongued witch she was.

K’iren picked up her undergarments and swept them on, covering her breasts. She paused, her panties dangling from her finger, then looked thoughtful. Hornet froze – and then clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from gasping as the Trisk spoke: “Abernathy, you still there?”

Hornet turned so her back was pressed to the tree, her cheeks burning. “Uh, yeah!” She called out. “Just waiting. You know. So I can wash too.”

Silence.

“ ... Heinlein talked to me and...” she sighed. “Listen, I was kind of a cunt to you, and, I guess ... I’m sorry, or whatever.”

Hornet peeked around the tree. K’iren was sliding her jacket on, her pants tugged back up around her hips. She stepped around the tree and K’iren flicked her hand to banish the AR warning that popped up before Hornet’s eyes – ending the privacy alert.

“Uh...” That’s your apology? “Okay, thanks,” Hornet said, her voice guarded.

K’iren sighed. “Just...” She shrugged. “Okay. I’m from Crater, do you know Crater?”

Hornet shook her head.

“Crater’s a joint world – three species, Terran, Trisk and Musktar. But the planet’s gravity is natural for Muskies, and not so much for Terrans or Trisks, and it makes the competition for slots fierce. You’d think that’d just be the physical stuff. But there’s a serious issue on Crater about, like, the deleterious effects of fatigue, extra joint pain, bone density fuckery, and the medtech on Crater isn’t the galaxy’s best. There’s a whole generation of Trisks that basically are second class citizens on the planet, and I was the first one to make it out of the fucking well.” She rubbed her shoulder. “Trisks, we don’t adapt like Terrans can to gravity.”

Hornet, who had met people from high-G worlds, nodded and smiled. “To be fair, they have, like, crazy heart problems. Most high-G native Terrans get replacement hearts that don’t explode from strain when they’re thirty.”

“Holy shit,” K’iren looked at her. “Really?”

Hornet nodded.

K’iren sighed. “But it’s more than just the Gs. Crater’s a meritocracy-adjacent planet ... people ... don’t ... share information there unless they have to, or they’re going to get an advantage from it in the trials and the exams.”

Hornet bit her lip. “So, you ... what, thought I was trying to do something subtle and sneaky?”

K’iren grinned. “No, I thought you were just being dense ... up here.” She tapped her temple. “Down here...” She tapped her shoulder, the traditional Trisk center of emotion for cultural and religious reasons that baffled Hornet to this day. “I was thinking you were going to stab me in the back or something. It took Heinlein to kick me in the butt to figure it out.”

Hornet narrowed her eyes. “Unless this is you trying to get close to me so you can sabotage me...” she said, her voice mock-suspicious.

K’iren showed off her fangs as she grinned. “That’s what’ll make it spicy, Terran.” She smacked Hornet’s rump with her tail, the sharp tip of her barb rasping along Hornet’s leggings, and then started to walk off, rolling her hips. “Next time, though, you can be more open about eyefucking me.”

Hornet squeaked.

Breakfast, as it transpired, involved more than just fungal shelves that were expertly grown to mimic delicious meat.

It also involved the news.

Heinlein, Rotting Carcass, Hugh, K’iren and Hornet all sat together in Hornet’s campsight. Hornet was dressed in fresh clothes provided by the fox-things, as was Heinlein. Rotting Carcass looked as if a decaying deer-creature had been dropped into his left flank and was now being colonized by new fungal growths. Fortunately for the Terrans at the table, Rotting Carcass’ oversized petri dish container had some AR coverings to conceal the worst of the growths from their eyes.

“Did you hear the news?” Heinlein asked.

Hugh and Hornet shoot their heads.

“Slapaport Digby dead,” Heinlein said.

“ ... who?” Hugh asked.

“You’ve never seen Digby’s show?” Hornet asked, her hand going to her chest in horror, almost spilling her fruit juice all over herself. “He’s one of the best reporters in the Perseus Arm! He’s got nearly two trillion viewers and I’m one of them and he’s fucking dead? What happened? A supernova?”

“Worse.” Heinlein said. “Voidbringers attacked the High Observatory.”

“The High...” Hornet trailed off, bringing up the data on her comnet. As was usual in that kind of deep dive and search of the net archives, someone with it in their actual memory came up first.

“The observatory that is analyzing the Andromeda Enigma,” Rotting Carcass said, while his mold continued to digest the deer carcass thrown onto his body.

Hornet’s comnet search had brought up, at last, footage from Digby’s final show. She threw it out into a consensual AR, the breakfast forgotten. The rectangular projection looked like a hovering screen for each of them and it showed a crystal clear camera view from the edge of the observatory. The High Observatory had been built into an airless, mostly carbonaceous rock that floated in a derelict system in the outer edges of the Perseus arm. The primary star of the rock was so distant that it wasn’t even visible in the night as anything more than a pale pinprick, only marginally brighter than local stars, and drowned out by the Milky Way’s super-giants.

But the view was still full, all right, full to the brim with Voidbringer ships. They were made easier to spot by subtle AR adjustments, giving them naturalistic illumination as if this was some kind of action vidshow, allowing their geometric planes and harsh edges and elaborate greebling to be easily picked out among the stars. Hornet immediately counted five battleships, six cruisers ... and then her ability to count them was blasted into nothingness as more and more and more of them dropped from E-space with the telltale ultraviolet flash pattern that was all that human eyes could make of the realspace/E-space interaction point.

“They streamed this live?” Hugh asked.

“No, the show was on a limited bandwidth, audio only, this was shunted out when ... well, watch,” Heinlein said.

Digby’s voice – professional to the end – narrated what they could clearly see. Ten thousand Voidbringer ships, the majority of them capital scale and backed up with a significant wedge of subline and strike craft, swept from the outer darkness and towards the Observatory. The Observatory had a rocket fleet in defense, one that Hornet immediately recognized as being Fourarm in origin by their quadform hulls. The rockets and their crews were overwhelmed in seconds, their shields falling under kinetic bombardment, their point defense arrays unable to keep up with the endless barrage of jinking, twisting, swerving missiles, their armor flash boiling away as they were caressed by grazers and x-beams.

But they bought time.

The High Observatory was important enough to have two Starships stationed there semi-regularly. Both of them had enough time to emerge as the rockets were gutted and immolated by shimmering pulses of nuclear fire. That tugged at the back of Hornet’s mind, filed away for future introspection, as she watched the sight of two pinpricks out of the Observatory’s airlock. One of them was pale white, the other bright gold. Their callsigns floated above them, easily more visible in the camera than the actual human-scale figures.

The CNS The Widening Gyre and the CNS Remember The Triumvirate were both throwing themselves at a fleet that could have given ten times their number a run for their money. The battle filled with glittering explosions as they detonated munitions and loosed their own. Triumvirate flashed three times with ultraviolet light as she did stutter-jumps into and out of E-space, and each time she emerged pulling a significant enough fraction of C that she released blazing waves of blue-white Cerenkov radiation as she bled away the excess energy she had picked up during her transits.

Each pulse fried hundreds of Voidbringer fighters ... but there were hundreads more to replace them, each time.

Meanwhile, Gyre was doing his work up close and personal – the camera was able to track as he skimmed along the skin of those vast Voidbringer battleships, firing his beam weapons at point blank range from his palms, slicing through their hull armor and avoiding their shield projections through sheer proximity, avoiding the backflash from his weapons through nothing but speed and daring. He cockrscrewed around one battleship, then shot from that to the next and actually flew into the fighter bay before the first battleship had finished detonating. The second ship began to come apart from within – and then he emerged, shrouded in molten metal, his palms flickering with killing light as he tore his way from the ship.

“Holy shit,” Hornet breathed. “They’re winning!”

Heinlein looked pained.

And that was when the brutal calculus of battlefield probabilities hit. Triumvirate had just finished another stuttering pattern of E-space bursts and then released a spread of microtorpedoes towards a subline ship that had been foolish enough to get near her ... when she hit a piece of debris. The chunk became visible in outline for a fraction of a second before vaporizing as her shield flashed and failed. At the relative speeds the two were going, the impact might as well have been a relativistic kill vehicle.

In a less chaotic battlefield, her crew would have spotted it and guided her around it.

In a battlefield with more allied ships, she could have had cover.

In this she had neither. A barrage of kinetic impactors swept around her, trying to get close enough to detonate and release their shotgun barrage of deadly pellets, to take advantage of her shields being down. Triumvirate flew at maximal speed to evade, lasing at them with her palms. Hornet didn’t watch to watch ... but forced herself to.

A second impact, this time in her back.

The CNS Remember the Triumvirate exploded apart into scrap, her body flying apart as if she was made of dust and had been hit by a leaf blower.

“No!” Hornet said, knowing it was foolish, knowing that this had been filmed days, maybe even weeks ago. But she couldn’t help it. K’iren hissed. Hugh whined, like a kicked dog. Heinlein looked away.

Gyre kept fighting for a minute. But it was already over: the High Observatory was bracketed by pulse bombs and the shimmering flares of x-beams hitting her shield array. Despite the best defenses that the Concord could make, the asteroid began to froth and bubble as the outer edges of rock heated up and rippled with kinetic impactors. Drill tipped burrow bombs slammed into the molten asteroid and then ballooned her structure outwards with subsurface micro-atomic detonations. A few seconds later, something either hit the station’s antimatter generator, or a sufficiently sized enemy munition breached and the whole station turned to a white flare and the camera feed went death.

But not before they saw the fate of Gyre.

It was played, quietly, as they forced their breakfast down and watched the frame by frame playback of the brave starship. Hornet felt tears prick at the edges of her eyes as she forced herself to watch her childhood hero. He cut past and through the thrust-plumes of Voidbringer battleships, darted in a corkscrewing evasive pattern, jinked left, jinked right, but there were atomic munitions bracketing nearly a full ten thousand kilometer area ahead, behind, below, creating stuttering, strobing flashes of light that cut off escape.

Euclidean space was, largely, separate from physical matters in realspace. This was how and why it was useful for faster than light travel. But sufficient energy exchanges could excite a frothing storm of quasi-real structures in E-space. Reefs of jagged, potential matter that were only hazily defined and barely understood by all but the best physicists in the Concord. Jumping from realspace to E-space into that would have been suicide. And that was just the jump calculations: The atomic blasts were releasing enough energy that Gyre simply had less and less places he even could go without being fried.

Then...

The penultimate frame.

The CNS The Widening Gyre looking desperately upwards, as if he hoped to find salvation, his jaw tight, his eyes half closed, his hand outstretched, towards the blazing inferno above him.

The final frame.

A smear of purple light and the rippling of x-beams and grazers piercing through a shield envelope, obscuring his form. Then...

Nothing.

Not even mist.

“Fuck,” K’iren said, the first to say anything since they started watching. “Fuck when did that happen?”

“Three days ago. The audio transmission went viral before the Pantheon could tamp it down. They had to release a press announcement – two Starships dead in as many minutes.” Heinlein shook his head, then tossed his cup away from him with sudden force. It hit a tree and shattered. “In Clarke’s name! Those were good ships! Good people! And the entire rocket fleet?”

Hugh shook his head. “This might lead to a war.”

“No it won’t,” Rotting Carcass said, his modulated voice as cold as ever. “War exists between the Concord and rogue states and core states. It cannot, will never, exist against the Voidbringers, because the Voidbringers are extragalactic. Their attacks into the Habitable Zone are within our frame of reference, but beyond? We will be fighting against gods.”

“The Pantheon-” Heinlein started.

“No, the Pantheon won’t help with this,” Hornet said, shocked at how bitter her voice sounded. Everyone looked at her. Her cheeks heated. “Gods are immortal beings. They ... so long as their computronium cores are intact, so long as the distributed networks of the Concord exists, so long as there are quantum signaling stations for them to maintain FTL level signal strength in the Halo Stars?” She shook her head. “Nothing can kill them in that state. They’re so distributed and so protected that it’d take a galactic disaster to even hurt them, let alone kill them, and any disaster of that magnitude can usually be predicted. But if they went extragalactic, pitted themselves against the Voidbringers in their full power...” She trailed off, letting everyone chew on that.

“Are you suggesting that the Pantheon are cowards, then?” Rotting Carcass asked, voicing the thing that no one wanted to say. Which seemed to be Rotting Carcass’ main deal.

“I...” Hornet blushed. “I don’t think coward is the right word. It’s just ... a matter of prospective. Humans live, at max, two, three thousand years barring accident or violence that causes total stem-death?” She shook her head. “The same’s true, more or less, for everyone else except for people like, uh, you, Carcass.” She nodded, having done some research on his species. So long as his fungal mass had something to eat, his sentience could continue on forever and ever and ever. “But all of that’s a pittance next to the Gods.”

“Medtech’s getting-” Hugh started.

“It’s not a matter of tech!” Hornet said, then sighed. “I ... you don’t get it?” She bit her lip, trying to think of how to explain it. “Okay, for you? A billion seconds are a billion seconds. But for a God? A billion seconds is a billion billion seconds, each second subdivided down into computations that we can’t even imagine. They could simulate this whole galaxy – and do – and still have thoughts leftover to run our FTL signaling systems” She blushed and smiled. “We’re just ... lucky they don’t...” Hate us? She remembered, suddenly, a flash of her dream. “T-They like us, I mean. That they do like us.”

All of her fellow prospectives chewed on that.

“Well,” Hugh said, his ears flicking back. “Lets get to training. Any idea on how we do that?”

“I kind of figured that, uh, someone would have talked to us by now,” Hornet admitted.

K’iren shrugged as she rolled her cup between her palms. “What do we do till they talk to us?”

“Maybe it’s a test?” Hornet suggested.

“Huh?” Hugh leaned his head down, his nose bumping against her neck.

“Maybe, uh, we have to figure out ... stuff ... like...” She blushed as she felt his warm, damp nose against her skin. Her brain skittered, trying to think straight again. “Like the, uh, the Kobyashi! You know, that old spacer’s song? Ho Ho, Oh, Oh, Sing for me the ... the...” Her singing voice was terrible and she trailed off, blushing. Heinlein though chuckled and stood, his long, rangy body also causing her brain to skitter off into new tracks like butter dropped onto a hot skillet. He stretched, nodded.

“Seems better than sitting around on our hands. Anything on the comnet?”

They all paused, their eyes going glassy as they tried to log into the comnet and do a quick search.

“Nothing,” Hugh said.

“I found a real nice porn story about Starships, but no, nothing,” K’iren said, dryly.

Hornet, who’s search had also come up with nothing, bit her lip. “ ... did anyone have weird dreams?”

“No!” Hugh said, too quickly, while the other shook their heads.

“Did you?” Heinlein asked.

Hornet’s cheeks burned. The immediate, bone deep impulse was to deny it. Instead, she squared her shoulders and said: “Yes ... I...”

A beach of shimmering, beautiful gold. She knelt down and picked the gold up, let it spill through her fingers. As it fell, the dust formed into crystalline patterns of snowflakes and skyscrapers, circuit boards and directed acyclic graphs. She stood before someone else. They were the same height as her, but somehow, they seemed to stretch out forever too, just as far as the ocean and just as deep. Their hand ruffled her hair.

WELCOME...

“ ... I was talking to a god,” Hornet whispered, her eyes wide. She looked over at the others. “This is the training! It’s in our dreams! Found has a direct quantum link to the Pantheon and the whole ecosystems is capable of monitoring our biofeedback, tap into our thoughts, allowing subconscious communication and training, straight from the Gods themselves!”

The others, for some bizarre reason, didn’t seem particularly thrilled about that.

Captain Yetna had served the Empire for most of her life. In that time, she had seen terrifying and awe inspiring things. She had seen an entire island burning as the volcano that had erupted spilled over and their ships sailed away from the smoke and the raining ash. She had seen the Berath consumed with flames, the sails sheeting up like the old stories of hell itself, until the magazine had gone up and the entire ship had simply ceased to be. She had seen the ruin reefs looming from the mists of the late winter as the fleet crept along as close as they could to Deadman’s Coast, and watched the ghost lights in them through the mists...

But she had never seen anything like this.

It was here, she fell back on Imperial Navy discipline: Stand tall on the quarterdeck, no matter what, and the hands will never break.

And so, she stood proudly, with a knife pressed to the mongrel Chevalier as she glared up at the living Goddess.

She was as strange and beautiful as one would expect a Goddess to be. She was tall and powerfully muscled, without breasts, and with what looked like a male sex body hanging between her thighs. Her skin was stark white, with bold red rectangles and silver bars painted along her form, giving her the look of a ship fresh from the drydock, but made into a person’s form. Her hair was black and her eyes gleamed like glowing torches as she hovered in the gathering dawn light.

“My name is Captain Yetna,” Captain Yetna said, her voice firm as she looked up at the Goddess. “We have captured the Queen’s woman, rescue is thirty minutes away.” The Goddess flicked her eyes off and as she did so, Yetna made the diver sign to her officers to bring up the anchor. Her crew started to work as the Goddess looked back, clearly having seen the oncoming sail. The burliest women on her ship started to put their shoulders to the windless, shoving it into motion.

“Lets talk,” Captain Yetna said, her voice cold. “Or this Chevalier’s throat gets a new gill slit.”

The Goddess smirked.

“Well,” she said, her voice oddly masculine. “Funny thing you mentioned that.”

She pointed at the deck before Yetna.

Yetna’s gills fluttered. She breathed in water. Her lungs burned. Her head ... swam. She blinked. The water above her was orange white with shimmering sunlight. She writhed, swam upwards ... pain. Agonizing pain. It roared through her head as she floated back down – and she blinked through the pain and saw a cannon sweeping past her, then cannon balls, splashing into the ocean. Her eyes widened and she swam back and away, desperately, scudding backwards. She emerged from the water ten yards away, and saw...

Her ship.

Her ship, cracked in half, burning. The entire forecastle had been blown away. Sailors were diving into the water. Pieces of sailors bobbed in the water around her. Her head ached as if she had been whacked with an oar, and her ears rang now that she was out of the water. The cannons and cannonballs she had seen were spilling from a rent in the side of her ship, tumbling from their cassons, sizzling and red hot, some of them flickering with flames. The flywheels were shattered and the sails were oddly untouched until now – the flames creeping up them as if the fire had started in a bizarre inverse of its normal course, birthed from within her ship rather than from beyond.