Daring Exploits

You’ll notice two stats when you read this review. First, you’ll see “Not Recommended” with a big thumbs down. I hate Dagger Command. Second, you’ll notice my play time, 2000 hours, and you’ll think, “No one can hate a game and still play it that much.”

One can, and this one has. There are women who’ve spent their entire lives married to men they hate. If I could finish a profile for a dating app or maintain a coherent line of conversation, I might become one of those women. If you’re a glutton for punishment like me, then I’ve got great news for you. The buffet is open.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun called Dagger Command “The perfect game if you like space dogfights but hate Star Wars”. Really, it’s the perfect game if you like space dogfights but hate yourself.

The first thing you see when you play Dagger Command is your electronic guide, Gogo. A little fractal design pops up, and this voice starts talking.

Almost any video game character will become annoying if you hear it long enough. After a hundred hours listening to Ellie Williams or Astarion, these voices you used to love hearing feel like a dentist drill to the sinuses.

In this sense, Gogo’s whiny voice and weird pauses are real time savers.

Excerpt from review of Dagger Command by Barbara Yoon (2112 hours play time)

The enemy Daggers flank me. Their torpedoes come in from three directions. My point defense cannons take out the one in front of me, but the others close in, and I’m dead.

The aquamarine fractal portrait that represents Gogo pops up on the side of the screen. It says, “You have met defeat and lost your ship. Changing vessels in 2.32 seconds.”

“Eat a dick,” I reply. This kind of serves as my version of “Roger” or “10-4”.

Imagine you had some voice activated virtual assistant in your car, and it was the only way to change gears or turn on your windshield wiper, and it always sounded bored and angry.

I keep my new ship in cloak. The enemy fighters are switching to a search pattern. Imagine people spinning around shining giant flashlights that cover vast reaches of space. If they find you, you’re dead almost instantly.

God, I hate this fucking game.

There are people online who are better pilots and better shots, but I am a hide-and-seek master. I patiently weave around the enemy Daggers. Their pattern is set to cover each other so you can’t stay behind a ship to avoid its search pulse, but this pattern makes them kind of predictable. It takes a while, but I get positioned. Two different Daggers are in torpedo range. I fire.

The first Dagger is hit before it can even register the torpedo. I switch perspective to the second torpedo and dodge the second Dagger’s point defense until I make contact.

My perspective goes back to my fighter. I run like hell, cloak and turn back. With just two ships, it takes less time for me to find a gap behind one of the Daggers. Two more torpedoes, and they’re both gone.

Three Hammer Cruisers show up. Three? They’ve got to be kidding. If you have a full wing of fighters and you’re lucky, you can take out one. I’m all alone.

The cruisers shoot an array of torpedoes, which aren’t like my wimpy torpedoes. The Hammers’ torpedoes shoot other torpedoes, and those torpedoes’ torpedoes are better than my torpedoes.

I look up so I can see my computer through VR goggles through a gap by my nose. I put down one of the controllers and grab the mouse. I select the command prompt I’d queued and hit return.

It took forever to figure this out, but the game has a separate application just to track where everything is. I learned how to spoof it. I can now relocate any object in the game.

I shift the mouse, and the sun goes across the solar system like a gigantic bowling ball. I’ve accidentally rolled the sun across my own ship a few times. Once I was hit by a planet that was thrown off its regular orbit by the suddenly shifting sun. For a game with so many annoying flaws, its physics are perfect so far as I can tell.

The second planet gets eaten as the sun flies to the outside of the solar system. The game’s AI is mostly sadistically efficient, but it gets really confused when the nearest sun starts suddenly barreling out of place.

“You’re so cool until a main sequence star comes after you,” I say.

The sun swoops by eating two cruisers. The last one is just spinning around.

“Here comes the sun, and I say, it’s all right,” I say as the sun finally rolls over the last cruiser.

I take a breath, ready for whatever awful shit is supposed to top that.

“The Gaghkal Council has given up its pursuit of the free peoples,” says Gogo. “You have saved the colony ship and are named champion of the Reconciliation Council.”

And my ship and my piece of space is gone, and I see the first non-space image in the game, which is a bunch of brown people in tank tops line dancing. There’s an orchestra playing string instruments I don’t recognize, and someone is screaming out in a language that sounds like a fork in a blender. I wait for credits to roll, but none come. I guess I don’t get to know which lazy fuck only designed three types of ships.

My phone chimes. I fumble off the headset and my controllers to fish it out of my pocket. I get it on the fourth ring.

“This is Barbara,” I say.

“Hi, this is Tom from Cobalt.”

I mentally think through the places I applied. I remember this one. It’s a full stack development job.

“Hey, Tom!” I force some cheerfulness into my voice.

“Look, Barbara, we’re going to go with someone else. You just don’t have the experience.”

All he has to say is “You didn’t get the job.” He didn’t have to pull out look or throw my name at me or any of that shit.

“I’ve been working on this stack since I was 18,” I say.

“Sure, but that’s four years?”

“Six.”

“We’ve got people with fifteen years of React experience,” Tom says.

“Oh no, Tom, do you know what this means?”

“It’s a competitive market, Barbara.”

“Yeah, but React is eleven years old. This means that four years from now, Meta developers -- determined to find some way to improve React short of fixing native support -- will add time travel as a feature.

“Tom, this is a dark omen for the world four years from now. This developer of yours has clearly seen things that changed him. He’s not going back in time to kill baby Hitler. Something has convinced him that another baby -- possibly a worse baby -- is waiting to be patiently wrestled into baby Hitler’s horrible tiny shoes.

“So this developer just wants to find a safe haven. He looks back on his life to four years before. He remembers our political discourse. He remembers our social media. He remembers our phase five Marvel movies, and he decides that this is the golden age where he’ll wait out the world’s fate.

“Using his wiles and his knowledge of his past/our future, he gets a full stack development job at a B2B SAAS company paying 80k annually with a foosball table and health benefits that kick in after the second month.”

“Very funny,” Tom says.

“What’s funny is that you still have bare metal servers, and you don’t patch them. The last time you patched your servers, I was a freshman in high school.”

“I’m sure it hasn’t been that long.”

“It was. my ring tone was Macklemore. People made fun of me mercilessly, but for completely unrelated reasons. I went on a date with Chris Nguyen. He listened to Coldplay unironically and wore a denim jacket, as was the style at the time.”

Tom hangs up at me, which is too bad. I was just getting going. I was going to say that even as a freshman, I read some tech feeds. I knew what the Heartbleed vulnerability was and how important it was to update your servers.

I’m thinking about how I’ve had my degree for two years, and I’m still doing customer support for dick. I can’t get a decent job because the things that should be entry-level positions are looking for most of a decade of experience.

I’m doing what my former therapist called “catastrophizing” when it happens.

There’s a rainbow light like looking into a prism. My balance goes weird like I’m doing a backflip. Then I’m in a thing shaped like a big egg covered with what looks like clay tiles. The tiles are in different colors in weird patterns. The design is ugly but very specific, as if there’s a utilitarian reason for them to be like this.

A window spreads open on one wall of the egg, and it fills with the familiar shifting fractal pattern that indicates Gogo from Dagger Command is about to talk.

“The rendez-vous point is our destination. We will reach it in 1.32 hours,” Gogo says. Voice assistants normally sound so happy to be there. Gogo has this pause when it says, “one point. . .three two” as if I said, “Estimate all time to three significant digits, you blue fractal piece of shit, or I’m erasing you!”

Also, if it’s our rendez-vous point, isn’t it our destination and someone else’s by definition?

I wait to wake up. I’m taking something for my ADHD, and it’s okay, but it gives me really vivid dreams about whatever problem I’m trying to solve that day, and frequently the problem is Dagger Command. Typically, I wake up when I figure out what’s going on, which can make me bounce in and out of sleep several times a night.

If I’m going to be stuck here, I might as well get some answers.

“Why do you sound so weird and angry?”

“I am a program. I speak like I was designed to. Do you understand what software is?”

“Eat a dick. Do you know why you were designed to speak like an intolerable prick?”

“If that’s how you describe my speech, then sure. I am aware why I talk like this. First, people were developing excessive emotional attachments to their interactive speech modules. Second, people were ignoring my instructions.”

There’s this pause between “If” and “that’s”. It’s not quite enough for there to be an ellipse there, but it sure seems like Gogo thinks only a moron would think it’s being hostile. Also, the pause between “then” and “sure” is like Gogo just restrained itself from saying, “obviously”.

I have to give Gogo both its points, though. Anyone who could get emotionally attached to Gogo has bigger issues. Also, I never assume I have another torpedo after Gogo says, “You have fired all your torpedoes. You have no torpedoes left.”

“Why are you named Gogo? It sounds like a ripoff of Google.”

“It’s my best translation of my name to English. I’m called ‘Koko’ for Koglagh Kortapak, which roughly translates to ‘Ghost Governor’. I followed the pattern and took the first syllable of the English translation, so ‘Gogo’.”

“Why are you named ‘Ghost Governor’?”

“‘Ghost’ because I don’t have a physical body and ‘Governor’ because I handle administration for the Embrace Colony Ship.”

“And you’re an AI?”

“I learn and adapt, so sure. Looking through Earth popular media, AI often means software that thinks like a person, which I am not.”

“What? No soul?”

“I find little evidence for souls. I’m software that does what the Recon Council wants me to do. I have complex natural language skills. Almost all primates with some language skills have an urge to think such software must feel things or have opinions. I don’t. I have goals, which I am given.”

“Where am I?”

“In space,” Gogo says.

“And you’re saying I’m in space like the Earth is constantly moving through space.”

“No.” Every time Gogo says ‘no’ it sounds like ‘no, you fucking moron’. “I have adequate command of idiom. You are in space, that is, not on a planet. You are on a spacecraft traveling outward through the solar system.”

This dream keeps not ending, and it’s uncomfortable sitting on this clay tile floor in this weird egg-shaped chamber. I don’t remember being uncomfortable in my sleep. Maybe I fell asleep on a floor, and I’m uncomfortable in the real world.

“Why would I be abducted by aliens?”

“You have a very high score in Dagger Command.”

“Wait, so this is like the Last Starfighter?”

“I’m not sure whom you mean.”

“Okay,” I say. “So you want me to believe an alien race wrote a video game that runs on Microsoft Windows and OSX. You published the game in several languages, and you market it, poorly, on several online stores.”

“The game sold on Earth as Dagger Command is a limited version of a simulator I made to find people who were capable Dagger pilots. I made a version that could run on personal computers on Earth.”

My stomach does another flutter. A couple minutes later, the clay egg opens up, and someone looks inside.

It’s about my height, which is to say, kind of short. It has a narrow chest and narrow hips. It wears a light orange piece of clothing that looks halfway between a tunic and a short dress. Below that it has cream-colored shorts. Its skin is almost blue-black. Its hair is black and very curly, shaved on the sides like a broad mohawk. Its eyebrows are high and angular. Rows of little fleshy bumps line both sides of the creature’s neck. There’s a ceramic-looking earpiece in one ear that looks somewhere between a bluetooth headset and elaborate jewelry.

When it looks at me, I realize its pupils are broad slits, and when it smiles, I see long canines, almost fangs.

Also, I’m pretty sure this isn’t in my head. I wouldn’t make up something like this.

“Hello, Barubara,” it says. I realize it’s trying to say ‘Barbara’ with an odd accent.

“You abducted me?”

It shakes its head. “No, not me. Wasn’t my idea. Didn’t like it.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Offered to help. My kind are good with language. I know some English.”

“Help with what?”

“Help you stay calm. You are Barubara. I am Uigatoram. People say just ‘Toram’. You are human, I am BaiMato.”

“Are you, um, a boy or a girl?”

“No, not I,” says Toram.

“Why did you abduct me?”

Toram ducks its head and asks “Abducted?” I realize after a moment Toram is talking to its earpiece. Toram shakes its head. “No. Kipkaglic abducted you. Am foreigner who lives among Kipkaglic. I like Earth things, so asked to help you.”

“What do aliens know about Earth?”

Toram starts to count off its fingers. “Human is called ‘root race’ It is curiosity for many. Has figure skaters. Figure skaters are popular. Do you figure skate?”

“No.”

“Will get asked that a lot. None of the other cousin races figure skate.”

“Do you abduct figure skaters?”

Toram shakes its head. “People just monitor and collect movies of figure skaters. Abduction like this is very rare. Hasn’t happened in centuries. Earth has more people.”

“More people than what?” I ask.

“Than any one other species. More than Kipkaglic, more than Oowa.”

“There are more Humans on Earth than people like you?”

Toram points at itself. “We BaiMato are very rare. Are mostly dead. Are just twelve score.”

“There are two hundred and forty of your species left?”

Toram nods gravely.

“Um, what are your pronouns?”

Toram drops its head and has a short conversation with its headpiece in a pretty language. It’s very fluid, like Italian, which I don’t speak. At last it says, “They and them. BaiMato are agender.”

“So how does your species breed?”

“Were created by mato, Research faction. Mato are a natural species. We are mostly mato genetics.”

“Um, do you serve them?”

Toram shook their head. “Not anymore. They found us disappointing.”

“Do you look like them?” I ask.

“Something like. Mato have more variety, eyes more like yours and no siomo” Toram touches the bumps along their neck.

“Do those do anything?”

“Sense organ. Lets us sio. Um, sense object from electrical flow. Can tell roughly where thing is and what shape is.”

“Seems kind of redundant if you can just see things.”

“Can see farther, but can sio in total darkness. Can sio in smoke. Can sio all directions. Can sio if there isn’t. . .” Toram holds a finger in front of their eye and moves it toward me.

“Line of sight.”

“That.”

“What do you do? If talking to kidnapped humans is a special favor.”

“Am diplomat. Maintain treaty for BaiMato all the time, and lately try to make peace for Kipkaglic.”

“Kipkagic are the people who took me, right? Who’re they fighting?”

“Kipkaglic are fighting other Kipkaglic. Revolution.”

“I’m not learning that damn name,” I said. “Tell me something about them.”

“Kipkagtic love groups and community. Mato can feel connection to about 144 people. . .”

“That’s really specific.”

Toram shakes their head. “We count to 12. 144 is round number for us. Think humans like community of similar size. Kipkagtic happily relate to 600 people. Even though fewer than on Earth, have bigger cities..”

“I’ll call them metros. So metros like big groups.”

Toram nods. “Metros are nice. Very open. Never steal.”

“What if they’re hungry?”

“No metro would never let metro go hungry.”

“They’re just perfect.”

“Not perfect. Don’t understand privacy. When scared, Metro can spread fear to other metro. Builds up, and they get. . .” Toram searches for the word.

“Hysterical?” I offer. “Cranky?”

Toram mutters to the earpiece in their own language again, and after a moment they say, “Fascism.”

“I’ve been abducted by fascists?”

“Council split. Crusade Council is fascist and hunts Recon Council. Recon Council wants you to fight.”

“They want me to fight the Fascists?”

“Yes. Other question?” Toram asks.

What if I’m not really that good a pilot? I want to ask. That’s the only question that matters.

“Do you have genitals?”

“Pardon?” Toram asks.

“If you’re neuter, do you have genitals?” I wave a hand to indicate my general area.

“No,” Toram says.

“How do you pee?”

“Do you have questions about war metro wants you to fight?”

“Do any metro speak English or Korean?”

“No. Is very rare skill.”

“So will you translate for me?”

Toram shakes their head and searches a pocket on their dress for something. In a moment, they pull out a small clay-looking earpiece like the one in their ear.

“This,” Toram says, “You put in your ear. It connects to Gogo. Gogo is great with language and will translate for everyone.”

“Oh god, and have that annoyed, sarcastic voice with me all the time?”

Toram nods understanding. “Ah. Gogo has tone setting. Gogo, use cordial tone with Barubara.”

“I’m quite sorry,” Gogo purrs, “but you can’t change settings for another user.”

“But I can change my own settings?” I ask.

“Yes, you can,” Gogo says almost resentfully.

“Okay, Gogo, use cordial tone for me.”

“I shall,” Gogo says. “Is there anything else I can do for you?”

Gogo said something that didn’t make me want to strangle it.

“Eat a dick,” I say, but my heart isn’t in it. I put the earpiece in my ear.

Toram rattles off something in their fluid language. In my ear, I hear a rough approximation of their voice say, “How does this work, Barbara? Does the interface translate my words well enough?”

“Yes,” I say. The earpiece somehow emits a sound that Toram can hear without being overly loud for me. The sound is “hee”, which I guess is “yes” in Toram’s language.

“Okay, Barubara, but I will practice English with you most time,” Toram says in English.

“You can call me Bongseon.”

“Why?” Toram asks.

“It’s my name.”

“Not Barubara?”

“My name is Bongseon. I go by Barbara because it’s easier.”

“Easier than Bongseon? For whom?”

I shrug. “White people.”

“Not many white people out here,” Toram says.

“Yeah, Earth sci-fi movies really lied to us about that one.”

There’s a lounder, more complex set of noises. Toram seems completely unphased.

“It’s time to meet the metros, Bongseon. SweetTalk will be your guide.”

“That’s his, her, their name?”

“He’s a Dagger pilot. His name is Paclicroc. We figured you’d prefer to use his call sign, SweetTalk.”

“You figured right. He’s not a dick, is he? Oh, dick means. . .”

“I learned English from Earth movies,” Toram says. “I know what dick means.”

“Oh,” I say, “You watched those Earth movies.

“You make it sound like there are only 144 porn movies on Earth, and I watched them all. There are literally millions. I watched maybe 144. Anyway, no, SweetTalk is not jerk. He’s nice. He was mediator before he was Dagger Pilot. He’s fine.”

Toram leads me to the front of their ship. I remember this. It’s what you fly in the first tutorial. It’s a “Hopper”. Those are non-fighting ships, so you don’t see them in the actual game. Hoppers are big on the outside, but the inside is just bigger than a minivan.

The Hopper has a display that covers the front. Toram hits some controls, which look like levers made of glazed clay, a similar shape to the bizarre controls they show in Dagger Command, and the display shows a view of space.

It’s a much bigger and wider display than you see in Dagger Command. I can see a ship in the distance. It’s a small spec in space, but Toram zooms in, and I can see a couple other ships move around it. If those ships aren’t toys, I can only think of one thing this can be.

“The Embrace looks so different in real life,” I say.

“Is megahauler,” Toram says. They change the view toward what the megahauler is approaching. I’ve never seen an artificial thing on this kind of scale. It’s makes me feel like a scared monkey.

Toram steers through a set of ships that are also going towards the Embrace.

“You dock with it in the game, but is it just an aircraft carrier or something?”

“Colony ship,” Toram says. “One million civilians. Contains hangers and is dragging shipyard.”

The ship steers in. There are dozens of other ships. I can see a couple Daggers and many things I don’t recognize. Space is big, so mostly they’re tiny dots. Toram patiently steers us to one end, and we zoom toward the hanger. Toram turns on auto-land, and the Hopper guides itself to a spot.

“You are now in the artificial gravity section of the colony ship Embrace,” Gogo politely tells me.

“What’s the gravity been so far?” I ask.

“Hopper mostly used acceleration for gravity,” Toram says. “In fact, used momentum suspension to keep acceleration from hurting you. Used artificial gravity for short bursts while turning or stopping. Outer hull of Embrace spins, so uses. . .” Toram spins a hand in the air, not knowing the English word.

“Centrifugal force,” I offer.

Toram nods. “. . to provide gravity. Takes less energy than gravity field and is more reliable.”

We follow the corridor for an elevator. There are handles on the walls, but no buttons. I grab one of the handles as the door closes.

One wall flashes, “Elevator moving”. It takes me a moment to register that the words were in English, meaning the elevator can speak this language and knows its passengers can too, which makes me think Gogo runs the elevator. After a minute or two, I let the handle go because I’m just standing in a room.

“Grab handle now,” Toram says.

I take the handle, and I stumble in place as my inner ear goes insane for half a second.

“Now in centrifugal gravity.”

The elevator opens to a large chamber. I tentatively walk out of the elevator and into a madhouse.

Chapter 2: Multiplayer Online Battle Arena

In whatever volcano fortress where they make Dagger Command, I assume they playtested it. They got notes from the players like, “The controls are helplessly confusing. It plays like a flight simulator designed by aliens.” “This game is like if Elite Dangerous and Dark Souls had a child which was brought to term in Satan’s colon.” They laughed because our pain is their joy. The worst of them handed the other a unicorn skull that’d been sealed up and turned into a mug and said, “Hold my beer.”

And that horrible, horrible game designer produced the point defense mini-game.

One of the problems with Dagger Command is the torpedoes. If you point your Dagger more or less at an enemy Dagger and fire a torpedo, your opponent is probably dead. Torpedos are relentless murder/suicide machines. If you run away, the torpedo will chase you relentlessly. If you cloak, the torpedo will spray particles all around and search for you. If you hide in an embassy, the torpedo will park across the street in an unmarked van with a thermos of coffee, a bucket to pee in and binoculars knowing that one day, you’ll have to leave, and when you do, the torpedo will be there.

Except for cloaking then running -- which only works if the torpedo was fired from too far away -- your only chance is point defense, and point defense is mostly luck. I took notes for months. If the torpedo is fired from very short range, point defense has about a 12% chance of stopping the torpedo. The odds go up until the maximum range, where there’s about a 78% chance the point defense will get the torpedo. Overall, it tends to go around 40%. (Do you have obsessive tendencies? Ask your doctor how Dagger Command is wrong for you!)

So if someone shoots a torpedo at you, your automatic point defense won’t help you. But what if you take point defense in your own hands? Well, with incredible patience and diligence, you can take that 40% chance of shooting down torpedoes to .0001%.

Because point defense is insanely hard. Your perspective for point defense is from your cannons, which are on the top and bottom of your ship. Everything moves sideways, and torpedoes are fast, and they dodge as they make their inevitable way to your ship. Also, point defense cannons fire slowly. They’re too weak to do damage at anything but close range, so you have one shot to hit a torpedo. If you take that shot when the torpedo is at medium range, it won’t hurt the torpedo, and you have zero shots.

People say video games don’t make people violent, but if you practice point defense for twenty minutes and don’t want to strangle someone, something is seriously wrong with you.

-- Post 46 on the pinned discussion thread “It’s Not You. Point Defense Doesn’t work” by Barbara Yoon.

At first, it seems like a crazy mix with no patterns, but I start to work out some groups.

About half the people are dark with straight black hair. They’re noses are less pronounced. The cheeks and upper lip kind of blend in. In zero seconds, I spot these people as seeming like extroverts. They travel in groups, often in physical contact, and they’re constantly turning to exchange words with each other. Their manner is like Italians in a 50s movie, but they speak a language that sounds like an Uruk hai having a potentially fatal bowel movement. I’m guessing these are “metros”.

The next biggest group look like Toram. They’re dark with angular brows and impossibly thick, curly hair. They’ve got longish canines which aren’t remarkable until you see four of them in a room smiling at once. They don’t have Toram’s cat eyes or neck bumps. I can hear bits of their language, and it’s flowing and lyrical.

“The ones who look like you,” I ask Toram. “What did you say they were called?”

“Mato,” Toram says.

I shake my head. “I need another name. It sounds too much like ‘metro’.”

“You can rename metros. You gave them that name just a few minutes ago.”

“It’s settled in my head. What are mato like?” I ask.

“The people who raised me? What are they like? Resourceful, willful. There are many factions, and they often don’t get along.”

“That’s like elves. Let’s call them elves.”

“I know elves from movies. They have pointed ears.”

“I just need something to call them.”

“But there are Cheepap, who do have pointed ears. Could be confusing.”

“Cheepap look like people but with pointed ears?” I ask.

“They’re covered with fur and have. . .whiskers.”

“There are cat people? Where?” I ask.

“None live on Embrace,” Toram says.

“Oh.”

“Mato usually have quite dark skin,” Toram says.

“I’m calling them elves.”

“Are darker than most humans.”

“Elves can have dark skin.”

“If English had word for people with dark skin,” Toram says. “You could call mato that.”

I look at Toram, who learned English from watching our movies, and I look for any shift of expression to show that they’re fucking with me. Toram looks at me, stone faced.

“English has no such word, so you’re stuck with elves.”

“I’m BaiMato,” Toram says.

“Let’s call you a half elf.”

I edge my chin towards one of about a dozen things that are walking around. They have cheek pads and short legs like orangutans, but they wear clothes and have only peach fuzz, though it covers most of their bodies. C pair are walking by and talking, sounding like Tom Waits speaking Mandarin.

“Oowa,” Toram says.

“Are they. . . smart?” I ask.

“Very,” Toram says. “Oowa lived underground in tunnels, so they understood architecture before they had agriculture. Were first cousin race to discover epispace or supension.”

For all the variety, I don’t see blue eyes or blonde hair anywhere. Except for me, nobody has breasts to speak of. I’m having trouble figuring out anyone’s gender. Some people wear pants. Some people wear dresses. Some people have beards. Beards and dresses coincide sometimes.

“I came as soon as I heard you were here!” says one of the metros. Actually, he says something that sounds like a set of aluminum dishes dropped down a marble spiral staircase. I hear the English through my earpiece.

My description makes it sound like Toram speaks the worst English in space, but they’re the only person who speaks any English. Everyone else is speaking some weird space language.

So this metro is tall and broad-shouldered. He’s wearing a black tank-top and black pants that look like pajama-bottoms. I’d say he’s dressed like a goth on a tropical vacation except I recognize these clothes. This is what your avatar wears in Dagger Command’s cut scenes.

“Hi! I am thrilled to meet you! I am SweetTalk! It is my idea to bring you here!” the metro says.

“This Last Starfighter bullshit is your fault?”

“What?” SweetTalk says. “You’re not the last one. There are over a hundred Dagger pilots just on the Embrace.”

“It’s a movie,” I explain. “Someone plays a video game, but it’s really a way of evaluating if you’re a good pilot in a real war.”

“That’s almost every movie,” SweetTalk says.

Toram leans toward me, “It’s very popular genre for metro stories. There is misfit kid, who is not good at anything, but kid gets in simulator and flies right up the ranks. Kid comes of age and joins navy. In the end, becomes big hero. Sometimes dies.”

“Silent Skies is half the reason I became a Dagger Pilot,” says Sweet Talk.

“In your movies, do the main characters choose to join the navy?”

“Always. It’s a huge honor. Everyone wants to be a pilot.That reminds me. We have you rated second tier service, and retroactively credit you for all your past experience from Earth! One Heart! One Family!”

I turn to Toram. “I think the translation program is glitchy.”

Toram shakes their head. “You just need context. Simplest translation is that metro will pay you what they pay really skilled metros, and you’ll get back pay for all time you spent playing that simulator back on Earth. ‘One heart, one family’ is motto of Recon.”

“You’re paying me for the time I spent playing Dagger Command?”

“It’s second tier!” SweetTalk says. “You get paid time and a half!”

I look at Toram. They say, “Metros have two kinds of money: material and labor. You’re getting labor money, which is measured in time. If somebody spends twenty minutes cooking, you pay them twenty minutes plus another five to raise the food.”

“So this isn’t the important kind of money,” I say.

SweetTalk laughs and Toram shakes their head. “Labor money is important kind of money. It’s lots of work to keep colony ship like the Embrace running. Labor is big deal. It’s good deal to have made money without paying to live on the Embrace. Do you know how much time you have on this simulator?”

I do. It comes up on the loading screen every time I start up Dagger Command. I’ve got over 2,000 hours of play time. It’s more than I’d spend at a full-time job in a year. When I look at that loading screen, I say to myself, It’s not all my fault. I developed this coping technique during the pandemic.

“So do I need to get a job before the money runs out?” I ask.

SweetTalk looks honestly baffled. “You’re an ace pilot. That’s your job. We have simulators here. You can keep training.”

I’m tempted to say that I hate Dagger Command, and it’s a shitty way to make money, but clearly I was willing to play it for free.

“Come on,” SweetTalk says. “You should meet the squadron.”

“Okay. Toram, are you coming?”

Toram folds their arms and looks down. “I was in vessel that was under attack once, and I am now afraid of space combat. I don’t even like simulators. You go on. I’ll wait up for you.”

Since I’m not talking to SweetTalk, Gogo isn’t translating for him. He’s waiting for me with just the right mix of patience and excitement in his smile.

“I’m ready,” I say.

SweetTalk smiles wider and leads to a platform. There’s a thing like an elevator without walls that he assures me is safe. After a very short, terrifying ride, we’re in a very big, open chamber like a park and my mouth drops.

I thought I was in a public area before, but apparently that was a back corner. It feels like I’ve just wandered into a music festival.

The other thing is the ceiling. Everywhere I’ve been has had what looked like a clay tile roof. Here, it feels almost more like outside. There are buildings and kiosks, but the walls are far away, and there’s a brisk wind. I look up to figure out where the wind is coming from.

It’s like what you’d see if you were hung upside down from a ceiling. I look up and I see a set of roofs going by very fast. There’s glass, metal and more clay tile. They’re flying past a long stone’s throw above me. I watch the roofs blur past, and I realize that every five or so seconds, the same roofs repeat. I keep watching, and I notice a person tethered to the roofs above me, floating in space. I can’t make out any detail because the person is gone in less than a second.

The spinning roofscape above us is generating the wind. There are banners on some of the buildings on our level, and from the way they whip in the wind, I can tell the wind gets steady stronger as we go up.

“It’s the inner hull,” SweetTalk says as he watches with me.

“What?”

“We’re in the outer hull, which spins to give us the feeling of gravity. The outer hull circles the inner hull.” Sweet Talk points at the roofscape. I think I see a person looking down from a skylight as they zoom past.

“That’s amazing,” I say.

“I suppose it is. It’s nice to have a little bit of your human eyes to watch with.”

“Why do you look so much like us?” I ask.

“Metros?” SweetTalk says. “Our planets are kind of similar. I think ours has more oxygen.”

“I’m talking about everything. Metros, elves like Toram, even those big things . . .”

“What about them?”

“But you’re all bipedal mammals with five fingers on each hand.”

“We’re all cousin races.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Oh yeah, on Earth you wouldn’t know about the Sowers.”

“Unless you mean people who plant grain, no.”

“Around three million years ago, some aliens that we call the Sowers came to Earth. . .”

“Shit,” I said. “Humans came from space?”

“No, not at all. Some aliens came to Earth and took a bunch of creatures. They bred them and dropped them on habitable worlds as far as we can find.”

“Why did they do that?”

“We don’t know,” SweetTalk says. “Nobody can find the Sowers.”

“How do you know there were Sowers?”

“Because there are species on hundreds of different systems that diverged from a common genetic base two million years ago, and the Sowers left some gates. I don’t think we know anything else about the Sowers.”

“So you’re all from Earth?”

SweetTalk looks like he ate something weird. “We’re not. I guess our genetic line is.”

“Are the cousin races really curious about it?”

“I guess some people are. Remember, it’s a big universe, and there are so many cousin races out there, and humans. . .” SweetTalk trails off.

“Humans what?”

“They’re so chaotic. It’s not like we’re perfect, but when you ask Gogo to describe what happens on Earth, it seems like it’s a million things, and none of them make sense.”

“I get that.”

“But figure skating, though. Humans make it look so easy. Do you?”

“No! Ice skating is hard. Figure skating takes hundreds of hours of practice, and figure skaters are skinny. They don’t look like me.”

“I guess if you have six billion people, some of them will learn amazing skills, like you.”

“It’s not six billion. It’s eight.”

SweetTalk’s eyes go wide. “Did everyone die?”

It takes me a second to realize what he’s thinking. “I don’t mean eight people. I mean eight billion people.”

“When I was young, someone told me it was six billion.”

“When I was born, it was six. Now it’s eight.”

“Goodness. Can I ask a question about humans?”

“Sure.”

SweetTalk points at my breasts. “What do those do?”

“So many things,” I say. “They jiggle uncomfortably when I run without a sports bra. They kept me from being able to make eye contact with a boy my entire freshman year of high school. They made me want to fake my death at a family reunion. . .”

SweetTalk frowns.

“They’re for breastfeeding,” I explain.

“You don’t need those,” SweetTalk says, “metros don’t have ones like that, and we breastfeed.”

“Maybe it’s an easy way to tell which one are women?”

“Oh. Okay. For Metros, the main way you tell is the hips. Women have wider hips.”

“Well, humans are like that, too. . .” But, as I look at the crowd, I realize I can now tell what gender Metros are. Most women have hips that would be notable for humans. For the first time, my own hips seem kind of boyish.

“Metro babies have disproportionately large heads,” SweetTalk says.

“Human babies, too.”

SweetTalk gapes. “How does that work with your hips?”

“I haven’t had kids, but judging by my mother, it helps to remind your daughter how long your labor was on a weekly basis.”

“Come on,” SweetTalk says. “It’s just a little ways now.”

I think he must mean it’s just a little ways because we’re on a space ship, but it’s a surprisingly long way. It’s about four bad parking spaces worth of walk to another terrifying elevator, and then down a hall and through a door.

The flight room looked a little like a classroom with recliners instead of desks. The recliners were in rows. Most of the recliners had people wearing goggles.

“Here is Wing Twelve!” SweetTalk said. “It’s dedicated to people who are trying new approaches to Dagger combat.”

“Like drafting humans?”

“Yeah, that’s mine.” SweetTalk is sounding excited, completely missing my sarcasm. The people in the chairs are taking off their goggles.

“This is my brother! His call sign is Cerberus.”

“Gogo,” I whisper. “They have the same legend of a three headed dog?”

“I’m afraid I took some liberties in my translation,” Gogo says smoothly. “His call sign is Niknaclag, which is the name of a mythical five-taloned version of a two-taloned predator who, according to legend, guards the afterlife. Cerberus was the closest equivalent I could find.”

“Let me guess, Gogo had trouble translating my call sign?” Cerberus asked. He looks like a younger, more awkward version of SweetTalk. Just stubble instead of a beard, but the same shining smile.

“It’s a tougher-sounding sign than SweetTalk,” I say.

Cerberus taps the bridge of his nose with three fingers. I see it as a bashful gesture. “It’s from my pre-pilot job. I was a software engineer specializing in large utilities control interface. It’s very unpopular work that some developers described as Hell. I was Cerberus because it was my main focus.”

“Gogo told me it wrote all the software.”

Cerberus nodded. “So we work on Gogo. So when Gogo has to work with a new kind of reactor, I teach it how to use it and test its work. Or I did, anyway.”

“Everyone tries the simulators,” SweetTalk says. “If you’re a good enough pilot, they take you off of your old job.”

“Or maybe your old job just wasn’t that important,” says a woman. She’s a metro with short swoopy hair and wide shoulders. She saunters forward. A metro and two elves flank her like an honor guard.

“Barbara,” SweetTalk says, “this is Tyrant. She’s the best-rated pilot in Wing Twelve.”

“Actually, it’s Bongseon, not Barabara.”

“I have another name,” Tyrant says, “but it’s Tyrant to you. How many people on Earth use the simulator?”

If you can believe it, there are some really obsessed, sad people who are so into Dagger Command that they keep track of things like player stats. “A little over 230,000, last I checked.”

Tyrant and the people with her all laugh.

“You said you’d get more players than the million players from the Embrace, many more,” Tyrant says, pointing at SweetTalk.

“Clearly, I got the right people,” SweetTalk says. “Nobody on either side can match Bongseon’s rating.”

“So you’re the only proof it’s not a stupid plan,” Tyrant says, turning on me.

“Tyrant’s group is working on alternating pack tactic,” SweetTalk says.

I look at Tyrant and her three buddies. “Oh,” I say. “You approach in cloak, one person decloaks and attacks. If they chase that one, two decloak and attack the pursuers, if they go after either of the two, the last decloaks and attacks.”

Tyrant looks at me. “Someone tried the weave strategy on Earth?”

“There’s a guy who won’t stop talking on Reddit about it. So far as I know, nobody got it to work.”

“What’s Reddit?” Tyrant asks.

It immediately occurs to me that describing Reddit to someone in an alien armada is a good way to get Earth turned into an asteroid field, and I freeze.

“Cerebus is trying to see if he can build a deadzone-resistant computer capable of piloting a Dagger,” SweetTalk says. “It’s a thing Oowa have that we don’t.”

I get about a third of that. You see, a deadzone is a. . .

“How about a friendly duel?” Tyrant asks.

I’m about to say “Hell, no.” I don’t want to lose face in front of working class lesbian Regina George, and I look at SweetTalk, and he’s got an eyebrow raised and smirking. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I suddenly don’t feel like backing down.

We pick teams fast. Tyrant joins with her flunkies, whose names I learn are Surgeon, Perfect and Proton. SweetTalk picks me, Cerberus and Electron. People apparently lump Proton and Electron in together because they’re two elves in Wing Twelve, but they do not like each other and can’t agree on anything. Perfect is also an elf, but she’s too shy to be anyone’s opposite.

I sit in the chair and put on the goggles, which look like a pair of wraparound sunglasses. It jumps into the ship display, and I let out an involuntary help. I can’t distinguish the graphics from reality. My lizard brain is telling me that I just got dumped into space. My ship is hovering in the air just above me.

On either side of my seat, there’s a rod that looks like some kind of ceramic. I pick up the left rod and tilt it. My Dagger starts to roll. I pick up the right rod and tap my pinkie. My Dagger cloaks

“Starting four vs. four match,” says Gogo. It displays the scores of the players. If Dagger Command was big enough on Earth for any esports, this team would be the best by miles. I’m the only person on Earth with a better score, and I don’t really count.

The match is King of the Orbit. It’s a fight around a planet. You can win by taking out the other team or having more uncloaked ships around the planet for longer than your enemy.

Everyone cloaks except SweetTalk. You can’t look for cloaked ships when you’re cloaked, so someone has to be visible. It’s commonly called “flying bait”. Cerberus, Electron and I cloak and take positions around him and follow. Tyrant is on the other side of the planet scanning for us.

SweetTalk starts to drop into the upper atmosphere. The wind resistance and gravity make it tough to steer and make him a really tempting target. Also, being closer to the planet makes him score points faster.

“I’m going down to the planet,” SweetTalk says. “Does anybody need anything?”

“Can you pick up some potato chips?” I ask.

“‘Thinly sliced tubers dipped in very hot fat’?” SweetTalk seems to be repeating Gogo’s translation. “It sounds revolting, but I’ll see if they have any.”

“How about some instant death!” Surgeon asks. He drops out of cloak and fires at SweetTalk.

“Instant death. . . they won’t sell me any.” SweetTalk spins out of the atmosphere before Surgeon can line up the shot.

“Surgeon, you’re too rotting slow,” Tyrant says.

“And now you’re going to die!” Cerberus says.

“Cerberus,” SweetTalk says, “It’s a trap!”

“Listen to Admiral Ackbar.”

“Who’s Admiral Ackbar?” SweetTalk asks.

“He’s a guy in an Earth story.”

“What did he do?” SweetTalk asks.

“All I remember is that he said, ‘It’s a trap.’”

“When?”

“After everybody got caught in a trap.”

“It doesn’t sound very helpful,” SweetTalk says.

“Maybe not, but he really sold that line.”

“Goddamn it,” Cerberus says. “I’m out.”

“A little help here,” says Electron.

It’s a pitched fight for everyone but me. I’m still in cloak trying to line up on someone, but they’re moving really quickly.

“Where is the Earthling superstar?” Surgeon asks.

“The neighbor’s gone, and their children run alone,” Tyrant sings. It’s got something of a melody in their language.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“It’s a rhyme from a children’s game,” SweetTalk says. It’s how you call people out to play.

“We have one where you say, ‘What time is it, Mr. Fox?’”

“What does Mr. Fox say?” Proton asks.

“He says. . .” I finally line up a shot on proton. As I fire my first torpedo, I say, “‘Midnight,’” and Proton’s gone.

“Everyone on the human,” Tyrant says.

Suddenly, I’m very popular. I cloak, but there’s a limited number of places I can go, and three ships are closing on me. I notice that I’m close to the south pole of the planet, and that this is a perfect time to exploit the ‘peeled orange’ bug. I’m dead if the space version of the game doesn’t have the same problem.

I point the ship straight down and dive through the atmosphere. Being in atmosphere should render my cloak useless, but it doesn’t. The clouds passing are really vivid. I can briefly see waves across the seas as I drop. The detail is amazing. There’s a wall of ice at the South Pole and then darkness.

But I’m not seeing the “you lose” display. There’s no atmosphere or collision detection at the poles. There’s an accidental invisible tunnel running right through the planet, like the core of a peeled orange. I stay in cloak and keep accelerating. I go straight through the planet and come out the north pole.

SweetTalk manages to pick off Surgeon while they look for me.

“Nice work, Bongseon,” says SweetTalk. “One more thing, don’t shoot torpedoes at Perfect.”

I file that away while I come back to the fight. With two people, it’s easier to line up a shot. I find one of the enemy and lock torpedoes. I check my display, and I’m targeting Perfect’s ship.

They told me not to shoot torpedoes at her, but I’d rather just take her out and say it was a mistake. I shoot two at close range just to make sure.

I look for another target for half a second, and both torpedoes are gone.

“What the fuck?” I ask.

“I told you,” SweetTalk says. “You need to use guns on Perfect. She’s called that because she has a perfect point defense record.”

The best point defense player on Earth is a 15-year-old in China with a 14%. Nobody has a perfect rating. The human nervous system isn’t that fast. She’s gaming the system. “I call bullshit,” I say. “I’ll bet she can’t do that in the field.”

“How much?” Tyrant says.

“I’ve flown with Perfect,” SweetTalk says. “Her point defense is flawless. She has six thousand hours on the simulator.”

“It calms me down,” Perfect says in a little voice.

“Unfortunately, she is not immune to guns,” SweetTalk says. A moment later, Perfect’s ship explodes. It’s three of us against Tyrant.

I think we have it, but I’ve never seen a pilot as good as Tyrant. One second, I’m running for my life. The next, Tyrant launches a torpedo at SweetTalk and his point defense narrowly saves him. Before we can score a hit on Tyrant, we win on points from having three ships in orbit for long enough.

“You’re not playing fair,” Proton’s saying as I take off my glasses. I was cloaked when I went through the planet, but maybe one of them knows about the exploit.

“What do you mean?” SweetTalk asks.

“She’s a cowstalker,” Proton says.

“Gogo, is your translator working?”

“‘Cowstalker’ is the best translation I can come up with. More literally, it means ‘hunter of tiglakral’. Tiglakral is a genetically engineered animal like a big meat tumor. It means to fight in an overly-cautious way.”

When Gogo is done talking, Proton and Surgeon are arguing whether cowstalking is a legitimate tactic.

“Gogo explained what cowstalking is,” I announce. Everyone turns to me.

I hold up my hands. “I’m a cowstalker. I get out of cloak when I’m good and ready.”

SweetTalk holds out a hand to me. “Cowstalker,” he says. Suddenly, I realize I have a callsign.

“You uncloaked before you had the shot,” SweetTalk says to Cerberus. “You keep doing that.”

“I had to distract them. They were right on top of you.”

“I’m older,” SweetTalk says. “It’s my job to protect you.”

“I hate to interrupt your foreshadowing,” I say, “but could I get something to eat?”

“You could have a feast!” Cerberus says. “You have premium backpay for simulator time!”

“I told her,” SweetTalk says to Cerberus. To me he says, “Sure, our cohort’s supper is about to start.”

Chapter 3: Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate {#chapter-3:-explore,-expand,-exploit,-exterminate}

Almost all science fiction space battles come down to a fight between dildo-shaped ships and circular ships.

Take Star Wars. On the one side, you have the X-wing. If that’s not already a sex toy somewhere, I call for my finest 3D printer and a stout crafter who fears neither vibration motor nor Disney legal team. Build me an Etsy store worthy of Mordor.

On the other side, there’s a Tie Fighter. Just look at the shape. If it was any less likely to give a woman an orgasm, I’d be legally required to host a podcast and blog about bitcoin.

In early versions, Dagger Command kept to this sacred tradition. You flew the dildos (though the pointy end faces backward on both fighters and cruisers), and the enemy was circular. Then a year ago, they issued a new patch. Dagger Command “Now with Zero Variety!”. All the enemies are dildos just like yours.

At least the giant mothership Embrace brings a little variety of things by looking both uncircumcised and flaccid.

-- Excerpt from post “Dildo Wars” by Barbara Yoon.

Now we start a discussion that takes us back to the really busy square with the moving ceiling. People are gathered around a juggling elf.

The juggling is pretty amazing. The elf is juggling three scoops while also using the three scoops to juggle three balls. The pattern is constantly shifting from throwing all three balls together in each scoop to tossing the balls individually before flinging the scoop. The elf’s hands are a blur, and whenever he or she. . .

It’s “they”. The juggling elf is Toram. They see me in the crowd and make eye contact while keeping six objects whirling through the air. Toram smiles and finishes with a flourish I’d have to see twelve more times to describe.

“You’re such a goddamn elf,” I say as Toram walks toward me.

“Haven’t seen enough movies to know what that means.”

“You can do anything. You have a weird extra sense. . .”

“Not so weird,” Toram said. “Are Earth animals with something like. . .”

“What’s happening?” SweetTalk asks. I remember that Toram’s speaking English. Since we’re not talking to SweetTalk, Gogo isn’t translating to him.

“She’s saying I’m a mythical creature who can do anything,” Toram says in the metro’s language. They seem to have no accent in the metro language. At least they both sound like a rabid possum trapped in a manual typewriter.

Cerberus smiles. “You can’t pilot.”

“I can pilot hopper.”

“Not fast.”

“I’m very safe pilot,” Toram says.

“While we’re talking, Cowstalker is starving,” SweetTalk says.

“Who?”

I raise my hand.

“Bongseon has a callsign!”

“Food,” I say.

“How about Soniten?” Toram suggests.

“She’s on a metro ship, she should try metro food,” SweetTalk says. “I was thinking the Menagerie.”

So all four of us go. It’s a refreshingly short distance to the Menagerie. It’s a round room. At the center is a cylindrical glass case. There’s a creature inside stalking a terrarium full of colorful plants. It’s a scaled thing with a dozen eyes I can count. It paces its glass prison and gives curious looks at people eating in curved benches set around it.

“Is it safe to be near that thing?” I ask.

“Yes,” SweetTalk says. A little doubt creeps into his voice, like I asked if the tables would eat us.

“It’s a movie,” Toram says.

“Are there holograms on Earth?” Cerberus asks. “Do they have a word for them?”

“They’re not this good.” I say.

SweetTalk and Toram went to talk to the host. As they’re talking, Toram sweeps a hand across the host’s arm and pulls the gold band from the host’s wrist. Toram laughs and offers the golden band back to the host.

“Do you steal from people for fun?” I asked Toram.

“As a joke,” Toram said. “Lab elves have an instinct for where people are looking.”

“I was afraid you’d exhausted your wealth of elf bullshit.”

“I’ll show you,” Toram says. “You’ve got a metal rectangular thing in your pocket.”

“I’ve got a phone. You think you can take it?”

Toram smiles. I look at them and they look back.

“Are we going to eat?” SweetTalk asks.

“Not yet,” I say, still looking at Toram.

“Maybe he won’t take your thing,” SweetTalk says. “They just want your undivided attention.”

“Maybe,” I say, just glancing at SweetTalk.

“I already ordered,” SweetTalk says. “The food will be ready soon.”

“What did you order?” I ask SweetTalk.

“I said we have a human from Earth, and she should get a chance to try everything.”

I look back at Toram. They’re not even paying attention to me. They’re just scrolling through . . .

“Give me back my fucking phone,” I say as I snatch it back. Toram snickers.

The creature in the glass case -- along with all the plants -- are gone. Instead, it’s just a big ice rink. A figure skater -- who would be perfectly believable if he wasn’t roughly knee high -- skates inside the glass container, doing an amazing routine. You know, because there’s a human here and that’s what humans like.

Food comes down from a series of things that look a bit like dumbwaiters. The wall opens up, and there’s food. I have a big tray cut into tiny sections. It’s like the serving tray at a buffet.

We pick a table from a circle a little distant from the holographic display with the tiny ice skater.

“What do you eat with?” I ask.

“Do you know these?” SweetTalk asks, holding a pair of sticks. They seem like clay chopsticks.

“Yes!”

“We don’t usually get that much enthusiasm for serving utensils,” SweetTalk says.

“My family is from a culture that uses things like this, but I live in a place where people use things that look like this.” I scoop with three fingers to mimic a fork.. “And cutting tools, and they kind of act like it’s the only logical way to eat food. It’s cool to see a completely unconnected culture using chopsticks.”

The food is a crap shoot. There are some sliced fruits that are impossibly sour to my palette. There are beans with a texture like eating beetles. There are yeasty-tasting boiled grains with sliced meat.

“Now this is good,” I say.

“It’s your quarry,” Toram says.

“You’re joking. What’s your joke?”

“Your callsign ‘Cowstalker’ is little more literally, ‘hunter of tiglakral’. That meat your eating is tiglakral.”

I take one more bite before I make the connection.

“Wait, I’m eating a meat tumor?”

SweetTalk and Cerberus have blank looks. Toram, laughing, says that “meat tumor” is a pretty uncharitable way to describe tiglakral. The two metros try to explain that tiglakral isn’t diseased or anything like that. It’s just a very simple organism. You put it in a tray of nutrients, and it absorbs the nutrients and expands until it covers the entire bottom of the tray. You scrape the tiglakral out of the tray, clean it and cook it.

They’re most of the way through explaining this when an announcement comes over the ship. It’s a woman’s voice. I think she’s speaking the same language SweetTalk and Cerberus speak. Over the sound of the language, which sounds like an angry robot is chasing a cicada up her throat, I can pick up a kind of gravitas and sadness. A moment after she starts speaking, my earpiece starts giving me the translation:

“We have reports that Noktau has fallen to the Crusade. The attack was overwhelming and without warning. A few shuttles escaped. We don’t have any reports from the surface, but we fear the worst.

“Today, we have lost our last stronghold. We have been in talks with several friends to find someone who will accept the people on this ship, but everyone is afraid of angering the Crusade, and it will be difficult to find a safe space. Right now, the Embrace will have to be our home. I’m grateful to every one of you for your courage and your company. You have been my sunlight, my soil, my family. You have given me heart for all we’ve left behind.

“Your grief today will feel unsurpassable. I also cannot face the scale of this, but know that most of the people on the Embrace feel the pain you feel, we are losing things as great as you’ve lost. We have lost family today, and we lost family before when our kin of the Crusade lost their way.

“I know it’s hard to feel hope. I do not know yet what hope to offer you, but I have seen the depth of your compassion and courage. I would rather have you at my side than all the armies and navies of the Crusade, blinded by hate and muted by fear. I have faith, even now.

“Hold together. Care for each other. We are the conscience and the truth of our kind. It is a heavy weight, but it is our privilege to bear it. We remain one heart, one family.”

The Embrace is completely silent for a moment after the announcement. A man sitting near us starts sobbing. I can hear more people start crying. Then the talking starts up, somber. People start shuffling with stunned steps.

“You lost a planet?” I ask. “What does that mean?”

I haven’t seen SweetTalk be anything but cheerful yet. He looks up. “We’re part of a secessionist group. Metros live on six planets, and our group, Recon, is only well represented on one.”

“Why does your group want to secede?”

“So our people went to war with the Research Elves. . .”

“Research Elves?” I ask.

“Called IwiuMato,” Toram says. “You told Gogo to translate Mato as ‘elf’. Iwiu means ‘research’, so ‘Research Elves’. They’re elf faction who created my people.”

“So were you on opposite sides of a war?” I ask, pointing at Toram and SweetTalk.

“I was a teenager when the war started,” SweetTalk said.

“We split with Research Elves shortly after war began. We were tired of Research Elves always starting wars,” Toram says.

“Were they bad?” I say. “They don’t sound bad.”

“Every elf faction has an idea of government,” Toram says. “Research thought scientific advancement was the most effective way to advance society. It started well, but other factions started reverse-engineering Research’s achievements. They responded by engineering diseases that only Research faction could cure to extract payment. It set a bad precedent, and they kept getting worse.”

Cerberus starts in. “They attacked us with diseases. They used coercion tech to plant murderous impulses in refugees. At the start of the war, they also had. . .”

SweetTalk clears his throat.

“. . . other things,” Cerberus finishes.

“Twelve million people died fighting Research Elves,” SweetTalk says.

“And then, recon and the secession movement . . .” Cerberus prompts.

“So there were two ideas of how to fight the war,” SweetTalk says. “One group, called Recon for ‘Reconciliation’, wanted to make alliances and fight the war with the other cousin races. The other, called the Crusade, wanted to be more dedicated and ruthless than the enemy. The war was bad. We lost our father. Almost everyone lost family. As the war went on, more people went with the Crusade’s line of thinking.”

“Is the war still going on?” I ask.

“We of Recon say no,” SweetTalk says. “Because the Research Elves are all dead.”

“Not all,” Toram says. “But very, very few left and hiding. Gusson, in your flight, was Research Elf, and he’s not bad guy. He was nurse.”

“How can you have a war if your enemy are dead?” I ask.

“The Crusade say it is time to fight everyone who wouldn’t help us against the Research Elves,” SweetTalk says. “Like the oowa and the other elves, even though some elf factions fought on our side.”

“And us,” Cerberus adds. “The Crusade considers Recon enemy because we opposed how they fought the war.”

“Like reconciliation,” SweetTalk says. “It’s really important in our culture that if an enemy promises restitution, you stop fighting. Our council name “Recon” is short for “reconciliation”.”

“Research Elves had agents who faked reconciliation to spy on metros,” Toram said. “It made reconciliation hard to apply.”

“It doesn’t matter if it’s hard! You find a way. We’re metros! We forgive!” Cerberus says. It might be the most violently anyone has ever said, “We forgive!”

“And we disagreed with Crusade what to do about primitives,” SweetTalk says.

“What are primitives?”

“There are hundreds of cousin races,” Toram says. “Not all explore space. Some still live much like animals.”

“Research Elves would find primitives and train them to fight. The Crusade said they were animals incapable of thought, and said they had no rights. Recon says all primitives deserve full rights of cousin races.”

“So primitives are the races that don’t have writing or cities?”

SweetTalk and Cerberus look down. Toram seems to relish the words, “Ones who haven’t discovered epispace or faster than light travel.”

“So am I a primitive?”

“It’s not an important distinction for Recon,” SweetTalk says. “We don’t even like to use that word.”

“There are at least five primitive races for each post-relativistic one,” Cerberus says.

Messages come over everyone else’s earpieces. I think I pick out the fluid tones of Toram’s language and the coked-out parrot reading slam poetry of the metro’s.

“We have to go,” SweetTalk says. “There’s an unscheduled meeting in the planning room.”

“Never a good sign,” I say.

“Just keep eating,” Toram says. “We’ll be back soon.”

“You’re going, too? You’re not in the navy.”

“I’m diplomat. They called me.”

“I don’t know anyone! What will I do while you’re gone?”

I had my back against the hologram. The tiny figure skater was doing circles behind me, but everyone was looking at me. One casual conversation had snowballed to take over the restaurant, and four different species looked at me from the rows of tables remarkably like a classroom.

“So there are three teaspoons to a tablespoon. Two tablespoons is a fluid ounce. Eight fluid ounces to a cup.”

“How does everyone remember this?” asks a young metro.

“I think most people don’t,” I say. “My father used to be a cook, so he learned all this, and he made me learn it.”

The metros nod. Apparently pedantic fathers are a common factor in our cultures.

“So what base is your number system?” an elf asks.

“She went over this,” rumbles the oowa.

“It’s cool, Paomi, I get that it’s confusing. It’s base ten, but measurements are everywhere. Sixteen ounces in a pound, two cups in a pint, three feet in a yard, a few hundred yards in a mile.”

I look up and see SweetTalk and Cerberus looking stunned and Toram laughing.

“I got to go folks,” I say. “Tip your waiter.”

“What happened?” SweetTalk asked.

“Someone asked me about food, which turned to cooking, which turned to units of measure and pulled in everyone. By the way, can you get me a t-shirt that says ‘I don’t fucking figure skate’?”

SweetTalk looks really grave. “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

“Why are you so sad, are we going to hell or something?”

“We’re going to Aquarius,” Cerberus says.

“It’s border station,” Toram says. “It’s not bad. It’ll feel much like here. It doesn’t move. It has fewer metros.”

“So, this confuses me. This break is between metros, right?” I ask.

“Now, mostly,” Toram says.

“Why are there so many elves and oowa on the Embrace?”

“Historically, we have been a very accepting culture,” SweetTalk says. “Elves and oowa are also. Lots of them came to live among us, and there was little tension before the war.”

“But the oowa would not fight against Research Elves,” Cerberus says.

“Why not?”

“Oowa had finished war with Research Elves,” Toram explains. “Almost all of them had signed peace treaty.”

“Every single oowa had signed the treaty?” I ask.

“Almost all,” Toram says. “Treaties are personal to oowa.”

“But,” SweetTalk says. “As the Crusade became less rational, it became dangerous for them to live on our worlds. Some went back to their people. Some sought out metro worlds that were friendlier. Some stayed on Crusade worlds.”

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“Crusade is paranoid and merciless,” Toram says.

“Now that Noktau fell, the only safe place for an elf or oowa to live among us is here,” SweetTalk says.

Everyone is silent for a while.

I break the silence because I have to. “I want to get a handle on the oowa. Elves argue over everything.”

Both SweetTalk and Cerberus look at Toram who asks, “Why are you looking at me? Only around 82% of my genes are elf.”

“And metros don’t seem to have boundaries,” I add.

“Is this because we don’t have walls around our toilets?” Cerberus asks.

“Jesus! Fuck! It is now! Anyway, what is oowa’s thing? I only talked to him” I say pointing to an oowa in the restaurant. “And he seemed kind of grumpy.”

“You should use ‘they’,” Toram says. “Oowa are very private about gender. And yes, they often find most of us flighty and dishonest.”

“But I never met one who didn’t love children,” Cerberus says. The others nod.

“They’re capable of meditation or depression so deep it stops their hearts,” Toram says.

“They have incredible linguistic variety,” SweetTalk says. “Even oowa in the same family often use earpieces to talk.”

“They never lie,” Cerberus says.

“They can only sleep in isolation,” SweetTalk says.

“Okay, never mind the oowa. They have too many things. How did I get involved in this?”

“So, when Recon split from the Crusade, everybody who studied Earth came with us,” SweetTalk says.

“Because the Crusade thinks humans are just animals,” Cerberus adds.

“And we heard about a military project where we sent the Dagger simulator to Earth to try to recruit humans. Some people like me and Cerberus are uniquely talented pilots, but we’re rare. Our Earth researchers told us that humans played space simulations. They also told us there are billions of humans. With such a huge pool, we could find an incredible pilot. The project was dismissed as a failure. No human had a particularly good score.”

I nodded. I didn’t say that I knew what the problem was. Dagger Command isn’t very popular. If you play a video game, you want something fun where ships go whoosh and crash into each other or you want a serious flight simulator with a throttle and a joystick. Dagger Command has a bunch of boring reality checks and controls like no machine built on Earth. The only people who play it are a small group of masochists.

Also, metros training to defend their people are going to be more dedicated than someone who got Dagger Command on the dollar tier of a Humble Bundle.

“So what changed?” I ask.

“I told Gogo to change the simulator on Earth so instead of training pilots to fight Research Elves, we trained pilots to fight the Crusade. At first, we still didn’t have anyone worth recruiting. And then three months ago, you suddenly bloomed.”

Five months ago, frustration got the better of me. Instead of playing the game to win, I started doing random shit, crashing my plane again and again. Then I started to notice things. Just the right combination of movements would cause an enemy torpedo to detonate too early. I dive bombed planets and suddenly noticed that if you did it right at the poles, you went right through. Then two months ago, I reverse engineered the software components and figured out a separate subprocess governed the location. I could start using planets and suns as blunt instruments.

And Gogo never bothered to report how I got better, just that I got better.

I am so fucked if they put me in a real Dagger.

A loud yawn suddenly escapes me. “I’m sorry, I’m suddenly tired. I don’t even know what time it is on Earth.”

“It is many times on different places on Earth, but it is 1:37 AM where you were last,” Gogo says from my earpiece.

“Eat a dick,” I note.

“We have sleeping quarters ready for you,” SweetTalk says. “They’re oowa ready.”

“Do I even want to know?”

“Oowa need some space, privacy and darkness to sleep,” Toram says.

“They still have too many things, but this one, I agree with.”

Chapter 4: Flight

There are no loading screens in Dagger Command. When you go through a warp gate, there’s no kaleidoscopic light show while it loads the next level into memory. You hit the gate. There’s a short flicker, and then you’re in the next system. When you travel, there’s never a pause while you leave one zone and enter another.

This is the kind of trick games studios bankrupt themselves pulling off. Anyone else would have a press release saying, “No Loading Screens!” The feature is mentioned nowhere on Dagger Command’s promotional material. People who’ve tried to decompile the code say it’s very complex and very, very strange.

So, great, finally a space fighting game that covers incomparable tracts of virtual space with no delay from space to space.

Except everything is so far goddamn far apart. A big part of the game is just pointing your ship at a warp point and watching it fly. If you complain about this on a message board, somebody with a NASA avatar will point out that a Dagger is still far faster than any existing vessel. The kind of voyage that takes a Dagger 25 minutes would take the best existing rocket weeks. You can’t expect a conventional vessel to travel at anything close to light speed.

You’ll notice these guys never actually play Dagger Command, because what kind of moron plays a game where you have to set a 25 minute timer and do something else while you wait for your ship to get to the next level. If you like this, you’re in the target demographic for “Giant Load of Laundry, the Game” or “Pot Roast Adventures”.

Excerpt from post “Long Haul Truckers in Space” by Barbara Yoon

It’s Toram who shows me to my room.

“I’m surprised SweetTalk didn’t take me. He likes playing tour guide.”

Toram shrugs. “Wants to see his family. They’ll try not to show it, but shipping out like this is going to hit metros hard. Could tell they were eager for an excuse to get back.”

“It also might have felt awkward for him to show a woman to her bedroom.”

“Why?” Toram asks, genuinely baffled.

“Well, he’s a man. . .”

“Ohh. No. First, metros don’t seek out solitude for courtship. Parents, coworkers, children -- metros will court and consummate in front of anyone. So being alone has no particular significance.”

“Ick.”

“One gets used to it. Also, there are different attitudes toward relations between cousin races. It’s unthinkable in many places. We are, after all, slightly different species.Recon is unusually in favor of such things. Still, no one would assume attraction across species to the point that it’s improper to be alone with another species, as we are.”

“And it’s not an issue with you.”

Toram gives me a perplexed look. “Why not?”

“Well, you don’t have a. . .” My eyes flick down.

“No, but have you ever done anything intimate that didn’t involve your?” Toram does a vicious impression of my eye flick.

“Yes.”

“Whatever you’re thinking of, I’ve done a lot,” Toram said. “And we Lab Elves only have sex with other species.”

“Because. . .” I don’t know how to finish it off.

“Because we’re all siblings,” Toram says. “We have very similar genetics. We are born at same time. We were raised in creche together. I love my sibs more than anything, but we don’t do that.”

“This is a lot of personal detail for someone who won’t tell me how they pee.”

“My urine is not your business. If you assume I’m asexual because I’m agender, is courteous to correct you.”

“SweetTalk asked me about my breasts.”

“Unsurprising,” Toram said. “I have been watching Earth movies, as I said. Even those not dedicated to breasts often seem to be making argument for them.”

“Do humans really make that much more porn than anyone else in the universe?”

“Elves make porn -- lots of it. Make more than anyone could see in a lifetime.”

“I was starting to think. . .” I begin.

“And yet answer is still dramatically “yes”. Humans make so much more. Like they’re trying to make personal porn library for every person on Earth. If Earth devoted this much time to space travel, we would be easy prey for Earth armada.”

Toram stops.

“What?” I ask.

Toram points to a recessed rectangle in the wall. “This is your room.”

“Where’s the knob?”

“Say ‘open’ or ‘close’ around door and Gogo will open or close it.”

“Does no one take issue with Gogo listening to almost everything they do?” I ask.

“Metro concept of privacy is very different.”

“Open the door,” I say. The door opens.

The room inside is small, deep blue with curvy walls. A small bed covers about half the space. The ceiling is high enough but low. Its curviness and the deep blue make it feel very snug. It’s weird to think, though, that this is the most space anyone gets.

“Is it okay?” Toram asks.

“It’s good,” I say.

“I’ll be back for you in the morning.”

“Close the door,” I say when Toram leaves. The door closes.

Something about the snug, round room makes me feel tired. I’m asleep before I know it.

“Good morning. Toram is coming,” Gogo says from the overhead speakers.

“Huh?”

“Toram is on their way here to meet you and get you ready for the transport.”

“You’re not going to wake me up with a ‘beep beep beep’ like a normal alarm clock?”

“Shall I?” Gogo asks.

“Not yet, I’ll think about it.”

“Toram is here.”

I stumble out of bed and into my shoes. I felt a little weird about the place, so I slept in my clothes. “Open,” I say, and the door opens.

Toram is standing there looking super chipper.

“Do you not sleep?” I ask. “Is that part of your elf bullshit?”

“I sleep,” Toram says, “If you just woke up, I sleep a third as long as you.”

“What’s on the agenda?”

“We’re washing up, getting you new clothes, having breakfast and going to Aquarius.”

Metro showers are kind of like doing a conga line through a car wash. You get naked. You get in line. You get soap sprayed at you from a nozzle that looks like it’s made of clay. You get water sprayed at you from another one. You get almost knocked down by a blast of dry air. Everyone takes exactly the same amount of time because someone’s right behind you and someone’s right in front of you.

I have always been a little shy about nudity. It’s a little easier now because I’ve never seen someone give as few shits about nakedness as metros do. The children, the grandmas, the teenagers all drop clothes like it’s nothing. No one seems to pay the least attention to anyone else’s nudity. I tried to be as indifferent, but it was tough. I had to watch people to know what to do when, and besides, male metros are pretty gifted.

Toram may be the least self conscious person I’ve ever met, so I’m pretty surprised to see them shower with a loose blue shirt. They’re not even wearing pants, just that shirt.

The clothes I took off for my shower were whisked away to be washed, and I get the tank top and loose slacks that the pilots wear. They are black and insanely soft. I have a tense discussion with Gogo (thank goodness my earpiece is waterproof) and it gets someone to bring my bra back. Who knows when I’ll get a chance to wash that.

From there we get breakfast at a Mato cafeteria. The host is an oowa (or hostess -- it’s not my business). They wave a hand like a drunk stage magician as they say in a growly voice, “Best elf food in the region!”

“What’s the gesture mean?” I say, roughly copying the motion.

“You don’t know?” the oowa asks. The cheek pads amplify their horrified expression.

I shake my head and then say, “No.”

“It means I’m speaking falsely for artistic reasons.” The oowa’s manner is urgent. “It makes your food taste better if I say it’s better than it is. We’re in a sparsely-inhabited arm, so ‘region’ would be taken to mean a vast quantity of space.”

“And there’s better food?”

“Yes, on this very ship, probably. We’re using the same hydroponic farm as the rest of the ship, so it’s the same basic stock. The only difference is the ventilation, and ours is a little poor. I’ve been talking to the engineers about it.”

“Oowa can’t deliberately mislead,” Toram says.

“There are exceptions,” the host said, “though selling food isn’t one of them.”

“What happens if you lie?” I ask.

“Oowa would stop speaking to me,” the host says.

“But we’d still speak to you,” I say.

The host makes a coughing sound like, “Gheh,” which isn’t a word so Gogo doesn’t translate. It’s eloquent in tone, though. It’s the noise you’d make if someone said, “You can always eat gravel.”

“Oowa think we’re kind of stupid,” Toram says.

“I’d never presume to know what’s in your minds.”

“Fine,” Toram says. “They think all our conversations are stupid.”

“I wouldn’t say that either,” the host says. “having not heard all your conversations.”

“Can you just get us some adequate breakfast so we can talk about some stupid things?”

Toram got us some Feroon, which is a set of grains kind of like barley with a red vegetable that looks like asparagus.

Feroon looks like red asparagus. It tastes like it’s on an epic mission of vengeance. It feels like maybe you killed the Feroon’s family, and now it feels only hate for you. The Feroon is played by Liam Neeson in a performance the Globe called a “tour de force”. The Examiner said “Neeson inhabits the role like he doesn’t care if he ever gets his damage deposit back”.

It hits my digestive tract. I don’t know the name of the guy who plays my digestive tract. I know his face. I think it’s one of the Skårsgards. Anyway, he says, “Your anger means nothing. You will be digested in the end.”

That’s when the Feroon, played by Neeson, narrows his eyes and says, “For the next thirty hours, you’re mine.” That’s the start of a thrill ride.

“There are three elves in my group,” I say.

“Fewa, Mabi and Gusson,” Toram says.

“They said they were Perfect, Proton and Electron.”

“That’s Feba, Mabi and Gusson. I’m not pilot, so I don’t use people’s callsigns.”

“Jesus, fuck!” I said.

“It’s fine, Bongseon. I know whom you’re talking about.”

“It’s this fucking food,” I say. “I thought it’d kicked in, but it hadn’t, and just now, it did.”

“It’ll wake you up,” Toram says, taking another bite.

“Do you hang around with them?” I ask.

“No,” Toram says.

I gesture at Toram as I gulp down as much water as I can, because the Feroon is fucking killing me.

“I like Fewa, but she’s really shy.”

I nod.

“And Mabi, Electron, is a Chaos Elf. They’re enemies of the Research Elves, who made me. She’s always really up in arms about my people and their rights.”

“That doesn’t sound bad.”

“It’s not, but when I talk to someone, I want to be a person, not a cause. I don’t know if you relate to this.”

“Totally,” I say. I take another bite. I’m insane. “What about Proton?”

“Gusson is one of last surviving Research Elves. He’s little less outraged about Research Elf policies, and I think he might have thought it was okay for my people to be indentured.”

“What makes you think that?”

Toram makes a face. “He’s uses word for us that Research Elves used. It’s word. . . we’d rather people stop using.”

“Shit, that’s way too familiar.”

“Pardon me,” Gogo says from some device by the table, “but the shuttle to Aquarius leaves in 22 minutes.”

“Even when Gogo’s polite, it gets on my fucking nerves,” I say.

“Oh yeah,” Toram says. “Gogo’s very useful, but constantly telling you to do things, so most people hate it. So Bongseon?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“Are you ready to fly a Dagger into battle?”

“So. . . what if I’m not?”

“They’ll understand,” Toram assured me.

“They will?” I let out a sigh.

“Nobody would want to take Dagger into battle. Is dangerous. They will say, like us, you do it anyway.”

“What I mean is, what will they do if I refuse to pilot a Dagger?”

Toram frowned. “Honestly, don’t know. Metro have empathy, but they take loyalty very seriously. This whole war is because these people don’t want to join cruel policies of metro republic. For metro, seems very natural to punish that disloyalty with death.”

“But I’m not a metro. I don’t owe them loyalty.”

“I don’t know. You wear metro uniform. You have metro callsign. You took metro pay. I don’t know if metro consider you one of them owing loyalty. I would ask SweetTalk. He’s honest.”

I chewed on my lip.

“We have to go now,” Toram said. “Shuttle is leaving for Aquarius.”

We drop our dishes off and go. As we’re walking, Gogo politely tells me that SweetTalk is asking where I am. I tell Gogo to tell SweetTalk I’m on my way. I reflect again that Gogo talks too much like a person. I feel like SweetTalk and I are a dysfunctional married couple talking through an intermediary.

The people on the way are mostly insanely friendly with each other like Metros always seem to be. When we get to the shuttle, people are more muted. They’re still chattering a lot, but it’s not the joyous camaraderie I’ve been seeing Metros constantly fling at each other. It’s easy to spot SweetTalk beaming at me.

“Cowstalker!” he yells, “It’s great to see you. The rest of Wing Twelve is there already.”

“I’m still a little slow on what’s going on,” I say. “What happens next?”

“When we. . .” SweetTalk starts. But then a bunch of people around us start some kind of rhythmic whooping like they’re announcing someone. A teenage girl walks up to the line dressed in Dagger pilot tank top and pants.

“Can Dagger pilots be that young?” I ask.

“Barely,” says Toram.

“Is she already nineteen?” SweetTalk asks.

“What’s her deal?” I ask.

“That’s Hikgral. She’s a simulator star, like in the stories,” SweetTalk says. “She’s too young to pilot, but she’s got a better rating on the simulator than any of us, except for you.”

“What about Untouchable?” Hikgral asks some of the other pilots in line.

“You can’t pick your own call sign,” says another pilot.

“You’re not Untouchable,” says another pilot. “We just haven’t had time to learn your patterns. Anyone can whirl at random like a mad dog.”

The pilot stops talking, too late to realize his mistake.

“MadDog! MadDog! MadDog!” the crowd starts chanting. I chant it, too, because I don’t want to have to remember -- much less try to pronounce -- Hikgral.

“Hey,” says MadDog, pointing at me. “It’s the human who took my spot.”

“Oh shit, you’re not trying to be my nemesis, are you?” I ask. “I think I’ve already got one.”

“One heart,” says MadDog, thumping her chest with a fist. In context, this seems like she’s saying, ‘We’re cool,’ but she follows it by saying, “I’ll get your post when you die.”

“Did you test into adulthood?” SweetTalk asks.

MadDog shakes her head. “My mother said she’d kill me if I did. No, my birthday’s tomorrow. I wanted to fly with you, but I guess I’m stuck in Wing Eight until the human gets killed.”

“You were so sweet when you were younger,” SweetTalk says.

And it’s time for us to board.

“Do you think I’ll get killed?” I ask as we shuffle closer.

SweetTalk shakes his head. “It’s so much more intuitive when you’re actually inside the Dagger. You can feel the movements. As good as you are now, you’ll be unbeatable when you’re in a real craft.”

What if I’m not good? I want to say. What if I just figured out how to exploit a bunch of problems in your simulator, and that’s the only reason my score is better than fair?

I can’t bring myself to say it. SweetTalk is smiling at me like I’m the universe’s gift, and I can’t bring myself to say I’m not.

“Cerberus has already gotten seats for us,” SweetTalk says. He gets us into line.

“You seem really close.”

SweetTalk nods. “Sometimes, I feel the only really important thing about me is that I’m his brother.”

“What?” I ask. Cerberus has only ever struck me as a less friendly, less confident, less capable SweetTalk.

“I talk more than he does, but he’s a genuine talent. We both tested well as pilots, and with me, there was no question. I was pretty good as a mediator, but nobody absolutely needed me. But the Navy and operations team went to war over Cerberus. He was a good pilot and we needed every pilot, but he was essential to central systems.”

“On Earth, I worked on software, a bit like him, though I guess what I did was more primitive.”

“I’ll bet you are great at it,” SweetTalk says.

“Well, I was mostly stuck doing pretty low level jobs.”

We cross the threshold and enter the shuttle.

I’m expecting the shuttle to be something like an airplane. It’s close in that it’s a bunch of people packed into a pressurized chamber, but rather than rows of seats facing the same way, they’re all in rectangles. So each row is like two eight-person tables at a restaurant. Everyone is facing other people because this was designed by metros who have no fucking boundaries.

I see Cerberus at a table with two free spaces. SweetTalk takes one seat. I turn to Toram.

“Go on,” Toram says. “I’ll find you after we land.”

I take a seat. There are six metros in a circle, and I know two of them. They’re all looking at me.

“Wow,” says one. “A human.”

“Unusual for us,” says another. “Though it must not be for you. I hear there are eight billion humans all on that planet.”

“We just recently passed that,” I say.

“Your people must just cover your entire planet.”

“Basically,” I say. “There aren’t metros all over your home world?”

“No,” SweetTalk says. “There are two continents with nothing but outposts.”

“Aren’t there people who want to live there, just to get away from everything?” I ask.

“There’s nobody there,” says one of the metros. “No one wants to live away from everyone.”

“Sometimes I want to live away from the cities,” Cerberus admits. “Maybe live on a farm collective. Just a cluster of thirty or so families roughing it.”

“When is the shuttle taking off?” I ask.

“Just a moment ago,” SweetTalk says. “We were almost the last ones in, and the shuttle launched just after the door closed.

I feel no motion whatsoever.

“So,” one of the Metros asks. “Do you figure skate?”

“No, and excuse me for a moment.”

I get up with no destination in mind, just wanting to be away. I pass Surgeon and Perfect -- two of Tyrant’s lackeys. Surgeon just barely nods at me with no emotion, and Perfect doesn’t notice me. She’s moving her hands through random motions again and again.

Oh, they’re not random. She’s practicing the motions for switching to point defense cannons, firing, switching to manual control of torpedo, steering. The motions are so fast and smooth I can barely follow.

I keep going past tables, and the next person I recognize is Tyrant, sitting alone.

Her expression is almost completely neutral, but there’s something in the set of her eyes that feels so sad. I’ve talked to her once and kind of hate her.

“Tyrant, is something wrong?”

Tyrant’s eyes flick up at me for a moment and then back. “I said goodbye to my son for the last time.”

I want to walk away. I want to say I’m sorry I asked. I don’t know what to say, so I say, “It’s scary, thinking your son might grow up without you.”

“He won’t.”

“That’s right,” I say, “because we’re coming. . .”

“My son won’t grow up,” Tyrant growls. It’s so soft I don’t know if I’d hear it, but Gogo does and translates for me. “We’re all going to die.”

“SweetTalk says. . .”

“SweetTalk can convince almost anyone of almost anything, most of all himself. The Embrace is all thats left of our movement. Noktau fell in less than an hour, and that was a planet much, much better defended than the Embrace is.”

Tyrant looks up again, and the despair is gone, replaced with contempt. I know without looking back that Surgeon and Perfect are right behind me.

“You can save yourself,” Tyrant says. “You just have to tell them it’s a big mistake, and you’re not that good a pilot. I saw you fly, and you’re middling at best.”

“I was up most of the night thinking about how you cloaked and got away when we cornered you,” Perfect says. “The only direction you could have gone to avoid active sensors would be down, but we should have been able to see you once you hit the atmosphere.”

“Hikgral’s on the ship,” Surgeon says. “She’s coming of age. We could have her instead of this human.”

It takes me a second to remember Hikgral is MadDog’s name.

“SweetTalk got me to agree to the human by making me choose between her and Hikgral,” Tyrant says. “If an overconfident simulator hotshot is going to join our team and get killed in front of me, I’d rather it not be someone who used to babysit my son.”

Perfect’s fingers are still twitching into point defense, aiming, firing.

“What are you shooting?” I ask.

“Teeth,” Perfect says.

“Teeth?” I ask. When my lips draw back for the long ‘e’, Perfect’s fingers signal a switch to the lower turret, aim and fire.

“Hmm,” I say, suddenly nervous about raising my lips. I go back to my seat.

There’s more chatter along the table. I’m not thinking much about the conversation. I just think about what SweetTalk will say if I tell him the truth about my score.

Back when some things made sense, I’d had some conversations about why I found ways to cheat at a single player video game. I was weirdly obsessed with Dagger Command, and it’s really difficult. When I started, I was getting killed constantly. It’s a kind of game I call “recreational frustration”, and games like that are heroin for me.

But the payoff for recreational frustration is usually a time you get good enough that you’re turning the tables on the enemy. They kill you again and again, and finally you’re winning. I didn’t get that feeling because no matter how much I played, it was too hard, until I found a bunch of logic holes.

It’s most of the way to lunch when the shuttle reaches Aquarius. I can’t feel the shuttle stopping, either. Gogo announces it’s time to disembark, and the metros get off with perfect precision. People next to aisles go first, then people further in. The shuttle’s empty with surprising speed.

Chapter 5: Rhythm

Brawls are fun dances that are a good way to introduce children and foreigners to your community. Of course, for a Brawl, you need a senior and junior circle with roughly equal numbers of people. To do this, you have all participants form a line and do a line sort until you’re all standing in order of age. If there is an outsider near you who is confused by how to do a line sort, you can tell them where to go or fit them into the line between people of bracketing ages when the sort is done.

Once everyone is arranged by age, double the line back on itself. This gives you the senior circle and the junior circle. Remember that the senior circle forms inside with arms at your side. The junior circle forms outside with arms extended for a wider circumference. There should be a wide stride between the two groups. This might require the junior circle to unlink hands and stand just near each other.

Wasn’t that simple? Now you’re ready to dance!

Except from the metro children’s book, “Dancing is Fun”

When I get off, I tell SweetTalk I’ll find him again in a moment and start looking for Toram. I see them standing in a corridor looking at a tablet.

I’m almost to Toram when they say, “I’m sorry, but you’re looking for someone else.” It’s Toram’s voice, though it’s not English. It’s the pretty language Toram uses to talk to Gogo.

I can see their clothes are different and their hair is in a different style. When they turn -- they addressed me while facing the other direction -- I can see the cat’s eyes and weird neck bumps, siomo, that Toram has.

“I thought you were Toram,” I say. My earpiece translates.

“Toram died years ago,” says the Lab Elf, still in Toram’s voice, “Fangatoram is off with Chaos Elves, Togatoram wouldn’t be here. Uigatoram is. . .”

The one who isn’t Toram scans the crowd, and I hear Toram yell from a distance, “Togaramto!”

And now I see Toram run and catch this other Lab Elf in a hug. They chatter rapidly in their own language, grinning and circling each other like puppies. I have no idea what they’re talking about until they start gesturing toward me.

The other points at me and says, I’m guessing, “What the hell is this person?”

And I think Toram is saying, “It’s a human from Earth the metros kidnapped.”

The other mimes a graceful turn and asks what can only be, “Does she figure skate?”

Toram waves their hands like they’re trying put out a fire and I think says, “No. Everyone asks, and she clearly hates it. Don’t ask her.”

Toram puts an arm on us both and says, “Bongseon, this is my sib, Togaramto. You can just call them Ramto. Ramto, this is Bongseon.”

“I’m sorry I mistook you for Toram,” I say to Ramto.

Ramto smiles. “Vaglets can’t ever tell us apart.”

“What did you call me?”

“I don’t know if translator got word right,” Toram says. “It’s just word we have for people who aren’t Lab Elves.”

“Little people,” Ramto says. “Who come from vaginas.”

“It’s not meant badly,” Toram reassures me.

“There’s something I always wanted to know about humans,” Ramto asks.

“What?”

“What do you need these for?” Ramto holds up a small thing, almost like a. . .

“Give me my fucking phone back!” I say. Ramto laughs as they hand it back.

“Sorry, most of us like to joke,” Ramto says.

“So I was wondering about Lab Elves. . .” I begin

“Don’t ask Ramto how we pee,” Toram says.

“Does she have a vested interest in knowing this?” Ramto asks. “I won’t judge.”

“She’s just teasing me.”

“So. . . are you still fast?” Ramto asks with a smirk.

“Her?” Toram points at me.

“Not the vaglet, you.”

“I haven’t been keeping up,” Toram says. “I’m very busy.”

“Let’s see.”

Toram looks at the ceiling and sighs.

Both the Lab Elves drop forward like they’re doing a lazy dive into a pool. They almost hit the ground before they start to move. They have revoltingly flexible hips -- a Lab Elf can lie on their stomach and plant their toes by their ear. Toram and Ramto crawl with their stomachs to the ground. I’m not feeling like running after being cramped on a shuttle, but on my best day, I could not hope to keep up with them if I was sprinting.

“I’m so glad Toram found one of their siblings,” SweetTalk says. “Lab Elves are really rare. I’ve never met another one.”

I start for a second because I didn’t notice SweetTalk had come up by me. “Maybe I’m being paranoid. . .”

“Maybe,” SweetTalk nods.

“. . . but isn’t a little weird that Toram’s sib’s name is ‘Ramto’, the two syllables of ‘Toram’ reversed. What are the odds?”

“One in twelve,” SweetTalk says. “‘To’ is ‘Two’ and ‘Ram’ is ‘Twelve’ in Core Faction Mato, and the Lab Elves were given numbers, not names. ‘Toram’ is ‘twenty-four’ and ‘Ramto’ is ‘fourteen’.”

“So Toram’s full name ‘Uigatoram’ is what, three hundred and twenty four?”

“Four hundred and fifty six.”

I grab my head. “The fuck?”

“It’s base twelve.”

“Do you speak all the space languages?”

SweetTalk laughs. “I can only count and ask where the bathroom is in Core Faction Mato. I had four months of it when I was nine.”

SweetTalk and I come to the edge of the boarding area. There’s a bunch of stairs, and I get most of the way up before, for the second time in two days, I’m completely struck by the ceiling.

It’s not spinning relative to us like the ceiling of the Embrace, but there’s an immense aquarium above us. Aquarium doesn’t actually cover it. I’ve got a kind of instinctive fear triggered by the sheer vastness of the ocean, and this is big enough to trigger it. A sea on a space station might be a better word. It looms thirty feet above me, far to every direction. It’s clear the human living area is just a blister on this giant bubble of sea life. There are plants and marine life on an amazing scale.

“Oh my God,” I say when I can speak.

“We must be in artificial gravity,” I say. “The way the fish move is different. They. . . they don’t have any gravity.”

“That’s right,” SweetTalk says. I want to get sick of the way he grins at how dumbstruck I am. “It’s an experiment to try to form a stable marine ecology in zero G.”

As I look, a thing glides through the water above me. I think it’s a whale for a while, but tentacles from its sides probe the edge of the tank.

We keep walking. I hope SweetTalk knows where we’re going. Aquarius has really bright lights that don’t reach everywhere, so there are also really deep shadows. The lights mostly aim up to the tank, though they don’t penetrate far into the water, which is murky and -- I can’t say this enough -- immense.

“I’ve got another surprise for you,” SweetTalk says.

“I think I’ve hated most of these.”

“We’re having a dance tonight!”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

SweetTalk looks confused. “Is the translator working? Can you understand ‘dance’? It’s like your figure skating, but without skates.”

“Yes, we dance, but it means really different things. There’s ‘going out dancing’, which is where you and some friends go out, you get on the floor and dance a little bit, but mostly you shout at each other over the music. There’s ‘going to a dance’, which is a much more organized thing for children and hicks.”

“Which of these do you do?” SweetTalk asks.

“Neither.”

“Well, Metros have dances. Everyone goes.”

I’m trying not to frown too hard. “So do you get up and ask people to dance?”

“You usually don’t have to. It’s like you don’t ask people to swim at a swimming tank. It’s a swimming tank, that’s what you’re doing there.”

“Do you dance with people?”

“You dance with everyone,” SweetTalk says. “It’s a dance.”

“Do you pair off and dance with individual people for songs?”

“You group up for the last part,” SweetTalk says. “Mostly, everyone does the dance together.”

I’m going to gloss over some stuff. SweetTalk tried to explain the phases of the dance. I got to see SweetTalk almost lose his temper because it was so tough for me to understand. His job is to resolve arguments, so it’s not a thing I get to see much.

Eventually, we decide that we’ll just go to the dance, and I’ll try to manage with my imperfect understanding. We get to the dance and I’ll explain it as best I can.

You start with a ‘brawl’. That’s not the metro word. It’s the English word, and Gogo insists it’s the best translation it can find for this kind of dance. SweetTalk assures me you don’t hurt people during a brawl. You link hands in a circle just step and kick. When I find myself in a circle facing in and Tyrant is facing me in a circle facing out, I start to worry violence is coming after all.

There are several parts of the brawl which all involve stepping left, stepping right and various kinds of kicks. You don’t kick people, just the air.

Just a note about the music. I expected to hate it. Metro languages, after all, mostly sound like an angry toddler being beaten to death with an electric toothbrush. Surprisingly, their music isn’t awful. They don’t try to make their vocals melodic. It just sounds like beatboxing, which is kind of what their language sounds like. It sounds like someone in hell, beatboxing, as heard by someone else who is in a different -- equally bad -- hell.

But if you have a bunch of giant string instruments playing and a bunch of metros rattling out that critical mass of consonants they call a language, it sounds okay, kind of like a bunch of snare drums.

And at first, I can barely hear it because I have Gogo in my ear calling out steps. I hear a constant, “Left, left, kick-kick-kick, right, right, kick-kick,” and it changes a lot. I just move left and right with SweetTalk on one side and Cerberus on the other. Apparently, the outer circle is for the young and childless because they have more energy to do the bigger circle.

Around the time I’ve given up hope that the brawls will ever end, the brawls end, and it’s time for what they call “circuits”. The people in the outer circle and the people in the inner circle stand there, and some people are ping-ponging back and forth between the two circles. All you have to do is grab someone’s arm when they come to you and swing them around and back to the next person in the other circle, so you help these unfortunate people zip around the circle constantly being spun by someone else.

And then, oh shit, SweetTalk is suddenly gone from my left, and he’s being twirled by people counter-clockwise around the circle. I have a sinking feeling for a couple minutes before Cerberus shouts, “Go!” and pushes me toward the inner circle.

It’s kind of like being Tarzan, but all the vines and people’s arms. It’s kind of like being in a roller coaster made of people. It’s kind of like being mugged by over a hundred people at once. Someone grabs my right arm and spins me; someone grabs my left arm and spins me; someone grabs my right arm. After a subjectively long time, I’m back where I started, and my heart’s pounding.

After about six sets of circuits, it’s over. SweetTalk spent a lot of time explaining the last part of the dance, but I stopped listening when I heard I could just be an observer.

Everyone gets in a circle and claps. Most people sing. People outside the circle run around whispering in peoples’ ears like members of a secret society. This is kind of like asking people to dance, but you usually ask a lot of people to dance. A couple people come out alone. One is an amazing dancer. The next solo guy to come out seems okay to me, but the circle of people starts heckling the crap out of him, and he shrugs and leaves. I see a few couples come out, but it’s kind of like holding hands in a supermarket. People think it’s cute but a bit much.

Apparently, when you’re dancing, you’re expected to know when your time is up. The more of you there are out dancing at once, the more time you get. If you’re getting the feeling that everything metros do is a competition to see how well you can obey unspoken rules, grab a name tag, talk to Marcy about getting your parking validated, because you’re joining the fucking club.

There are a bunch of non-metros there. This one oowa who is really fun to watch. They’re big and lumbering, but what they lack in speed and grace, they make up for in giving zero fucks.

I see some elves, too. Electron is singing over some of the songs, not beatboxing like the metros boat soaring above them in a really high, clear voice. It’s gorgeous.

SweetTalk goes off to talk to people and comes back with Cerberus and a couple metro women dressed to kill. In this case, that means a halter top and a long skirt slit up the sides, showing off the broad hips. The skirts are even racier when I remember that hips are the big gender signifier for women.

“What?” I ask.

“We’re queuing to go in,” SweetTalk says. “Do you want to come with us?”

“Absolutely not,” I say.

“They’d love to see a human dance.”

“Yeah,” I say, “up until they figure out that I’m not figure skating.”

SweetTalk raises his hands in surrender and goes off to wait in a line.

“I can’t believe you came to this. SweetTalk lives up to his call sign yet again.” It’s dark in this part of the club, and I can barely see Toram except for their shining cat’s eyes.

“You made it,” I said. “Where’s Ramto?”

“They had to leave. They’re consultant for shipping company, and transport they’re assisting just left Aquarius. Look, it’s SweetTalk.”

I look to the middle of the circle. SweetTalk, Cerberus and the two women are dancing. Metros dance more than any human I’ve met, so their dancing is really varied and more skillful than I usually get to see. Cerberus and his partner are doing this thing that’s like a tango that keeps turning into disco and back again.

SweetTalk and his partner look like they’re each trying to give the other a lap dance. Each smoothly goes through motions becoming a prop for the other to roll or climb over. I wonder if I went out there, would this over-the-pants action be going on right in front of me or would it be happening to me. I’m surprised to find I’m feeling jealous. I barely know the guy, and this is the fucker who decided to kidnap me?

“Care to dance?” Toram asks.

I shake my head. “Enough people are staring at me.”

“They won’t look at you,” Toram says. “I’ll make a bet. Two hours.”

I’d forgotten that the main currency was hours of labor. “It’s not a daring bet. I’ve got a couple thousand hours.”

“Maybe, but I’ve got seven hours saved. Do you know how long it takes me to earn two hours?”

“I think it’s eighty minutes for me. I get paid time and a half. Is that how it works?” I ask.

“That’s how it works for you. I am standard labor. It takes me two hours to earn two hours. It’s a daring bet for me.”

“Fine,” I say, “but everyone stares at the human, especially if I do something I’m bad at.”

Cerberus and his partner are done dancing, and SweetTalk and his partner are done with their elaborate mime fucking. They’re off the floor and chattering excitedly as we’re in line to go out.

It’s time for us to get into the circle.

I’m terrified. I try to do something like a sort of box step that I see metros do along with a kind of bobbing to the beat people do in clubs on earth. Everyone’s quiet, and I’m thinking I just won the bet, but sometimes they seem to be looking past me, and I can’t see Toram.

I turn around, and I still can’t see Toram. I’m starting to think they ditched me, but people are still looking behind me. I dance up right up to the circle of people and turn around, and I see Toram has been behind me this entire time, shifting whenever I turned.

I can barely see a person, they’re moving so fast. They’re spinning in a pirouette, their hands and feet weaving through the blur. It’s completely mesmerizing. Toram drops of out the spin into a pose.

“You smug little. . .” I start.

Toram steps forward, grabs my hand, puts a hand on my waist and starts to turn us.

“Eyes on mine,” Toram says. “Lean back.”

We spin together. I want to slap them, but this is so goddamn fun.

We’re spinning, stepping, racing, and it’s done before I know what’s going on.

As I step out, SweetTalk hugs me. “I’m so glad you decided to dance!” he says. People are singing and clapping, and I know they’re clapping for the next group to step into the circle, but it feels like they’re clapping for us.

However, I can see from the group that’s formed around Toram that I’ve lost a bet. People are talking about their performance. Toram looks the slightest bit nervous about this much attention.

It’s just a little later, and Toram is walking me to my new quarters. We’re going down another long hallway with bright lanes and deep shadows. Above us, there’s layers of walkways and bridges. Above that, the vast, everpresent tank of sea life looms above us.

“You and Ramto seem really close,” I say.

“I’d die for any of my sibs,” Toram says. “But Ramto and I have been through more than most.”

“Like what? I hear so little about your life.”

Toram is unusually hesitant before replying. “Was at place called Matira Outpost. It’s like university on planet with little other settlement. Students go to study ecosystem and scientists do research. Had about 1728 students. Ramto and I were there. There was territorial dispute. Habiu Faction sent in 144 shock troops. We survived, but massacre shook my faith. Ramto helped me get through. Helped me keep hope.”

“Is that how you came to be negotiating peace treaties?”

Toram does this move like a windshield wiper that stands in for a shrug out here. “I did see far too much war. Here, your room.”

“So now that I know something about your past. . .”

“Yes?” Toram asked.

“. . .how do you pee?”

“Goodnight, Bongseon.”

The door to my new room opens. It’s smaller than the one on the Embrace. There’s a bed with really nice sheets, which feel almost like silk. The walls are a mosaic of tiles that appear clay.

Okay, I got to talk about the clay elephant in the room.

You think I don’t know what you’re saying?

Barbara, Bongseon, Cowstalker, Mithrandir, Sotrmcrow, whatever you’re called these days:

When hearing about a human encountering someone from outer space, one expects something a lot more transcendent and a lot less ceramic.

One wonders who is at fault.

Wading through your stream of consciousness for some time, one is bound to notice it is -- how do I put this? -- scenic, but it isn’t very deep. Perhaps the reason you’re describing everything as looking like clay is because you are familiar with things made of clay, and you are not exactly a master of the English language.

And to that I would say, “Am so.”

Furthermore I would say, “Fuck off.”

Let me assure you. The walls are not luminous, iridescent with such visual depth you have to touch them to know where they actually start. The bed is not soft, moist, ever shifting, like the flesh of a snail.

If that’s what I saw, that’s what I would fucking say. I have got adjectives, goddamnit. I’ve got similes and comparisons loaded like ammunition in my descriptive artillery. It’s loaded, ready to rain burning eloquence on my command.

And I will give that command the minute -- the instant -- these physics-cuckolding gods of space build something that doesn’t look like fine-grained mud that was fired in a kiln.

My inner critic sounds like Gogo. I play that game way too much.

Now I’m sleepy.

Chapter 6: Team Shooter

One of the types of people Dagger Command attracts is a super earnest space geek. They’re the kind of people who follow astrophysicists on social media, dream of buying a plane so they can fly with a banner around Amazon headquarters until they bring back the Expanse again. These people love that you can fly Daggers backwards. They love ships flying in “close formation” are still a continent or two worth of distance apart. They love that ships don’t have shields, and almost any damage is a death sentence.

I like watching these smug bastards explain why there’s no delay in communication. Someone can be light years away, and we can have a conversation like we’re in the same room.

“There are warp gates,” one told me. “Maybe there’s a warp medium for communication.”

Seems unlikely. And what about dead zones?

Instead of five torpedoes, a Dagger can carry three dead zone mines. If one goes off near you, you hear a scary sound like a hoarse racoon caught in a ceiling fan. It’s gotta be a corrupted sound file. Why has nobody fixed it in the last two years?

While you’re in a dead zone, a weird set of things stop working. You can’t communicate. Your maximum acceleration goes way down. Your point defense and torpedoes stop working. You can’t go through warp gates. You can’t cloak. Gogo stops talking to you.

That’s six different things, and four of them are bad.

Except from forum post “Brain Dead” by Barbara Yoon.

I wake up to an alarm.

“Callsign Cowstalker, please wake up,” Gogo says. “Naval command says that there are several Daggers entering adjacent systems. They urgently request all wings on Aquarius report to hangers immediately.”

“You understand that you’re basically my alarm clock, and everyone hates their alarm clock.”

“Not everyone,” Gogo says. “But most people, yes, I am aware.”

Gogo directs me to another conga-line shower where there’s a fresh uniform for me to put on. I should be moving faster, but I’m dreading the question that I have to ask SweetTalk. I get to the hanger with Gogo’s directions, and I see only about half the people in Wing Twelve. It’s the half I like, the ones who’d been in the contest with me two days ago.

Tyrant walks to the front of the room and starts briefing us. “Nearby systems are getting flooded with enemy scouts. We have to take them all down before they catch sight of the Embrace. Our wing will stop scouts from crossing 1287, the system one jump hubward of here.

“We’ll be protecting a gate anchored to the fourth planet, a colonization candidate. There are ten enemies and seven, perhaps eight of us.” Tyrant shoots me a look before she continues, “We’ll have the advantage of surprise to overcome those numbers.”

Tyrant stops and turns to her craft. I look, and I see Toram standing by the door.

“Did you hear?” I ask. “Wait, of course you heard. Why else would you be in a hanger?”

“I’m here to see you,” Toram says.

“Cowstalker?” SweetTalk says, “We need to get ready.”

“Look,” I say, “I’ve got a question I really need answered.”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. What if I’m not really a pilot? What if I fooled your simulation?”

Before I open my eyes, Toram yells, “From my anus! Obviously!”

I open my eyes, and Toram stalks away. I will tell you this one thing about the phrase ‘From my anus, obviously’: if someone has a question -- even a life or death question -- and hears this phrase, that person will immediately forget the question they meant to ask.

At barely more than a whisper, SweetTalk says, “Were you asking how Toram pees?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“I could have told you that. They’ve only got one orifice down there. Look, we’ve got to get to our craft.”

“Yeah,” I say.

I’ve been looking at Daggers on a screen for a couple years. What the game doesn’t make clear is that they’re big. It’s bigger than a fighter jet. It would basically fill up an average residential lot.

As I approach the Dagger, a portal opens on the underside, and a ladder extends down. I’m silently cursing myself as I climb it. Only the worst coward in the universe could put off mentioning that she’s not that good a pilot until she actually has to pilot an alien space ship.

I climb to the pilot’s cabin. From the ladder, I can fall back to the impossibly soft pilot’s chair. Once I’m off the ladder, it retracts into the ceiling of the cabin, and the opening I climbed through closes below my feet. The pilot’s cabin has just a trace of light.

In front of the chair is a flat console that looks and feels like porcelain. I am aware that porcelain is another variety of clay, and I would like to remind you that I do not make the texters. I just describe them. I did not design the cockpit to look like the bathroom in a goth’s dreamhouse. I just got stuck in one.

I hear a noise, and a headset extends from the wall behind me. I grab it and put it on. I panic for a second as I feel it wrap around my head and fasten itself on the back of my head.

The pilot display comes on. Having gone from the VR display on Dagger Command to the simulator back on the Embrace, I’m ready for another huge level of improvement, but this looks just like the simulator on the Embrace.

A set of straps come at me like something out of a nightmare. I struggle, feeling like a spider is trying to eat me. When the straps tighten around me, I realize my seatbelt has just applied itself.

“Prepare for launch sequence,” Gogo says.

“Do I do it like I do in the game?”

“Yes, it is very much like the process in the simulation. Please start now.”

In the game, Gogo doesn’t say ‘please’ and even the ‘start now’ sounds resentful, but still hearing those words make my reflexes kick in. I pull the levers out of the porcelain top. I tap thrusters up, and my Dagger lifts of the ground. The struts that held it up retract.

I’m not ready for the tap of force as I lift off. It’s like a stronger version of the first jerk when a roller coaster starts ascending. The inner hanger door opens, and four of the Daggers lift off and get in formation. The others are a little more exactly in position, but I realize that they’re on autopilot. In the game, you can tell Gogo to launch your Dagger for you after the first couple missions.

The inner hanger door closes. After the air cycles out, the outer door opens, and I hit the main thrusters. My body gets pushed into the chair as the Dagger accelerates.

“Jesus Christ,” I say. A moment later, it occurs to me to set my broadcast options to “Don’t broadcast by default.”

Someone sets a launch gate up as an objective, and I steer toward it. I select talk to team and say, “Can we be sure nobody’s camping this gate?”

“Yes,” SweetTalk says. “We have a spy drone on the far side. No enemies are guarding the gates in this system.”

To go through a gate, you have to come up to it and sit still while the gate cycles up. It takes about thirty seconds, and the process has to start over if anybody moves. A dickish but popular tactic in Dagger Command PVP games is to wait around a gate in cloak and attack when people are ready to launch.

We line up and signal the gate that we’re going through. I’m getting ready to accelerate and cloak as soon as we transfer, no matter what SweetTalk said.

My stomach flips as we transfer through, and I speed off and cloak before I know what I’m doing.

“Relax, Cowstalker, no enemy contacts.”

I notice that everyone else is going into cloak, though. Someone sets a destination for a planet a fair distance away. I set course and start accelerating to match. It feels like getting stepped on by an enormous boot, and according to navigation, I have to keep this acceleration up for half an hour if I want to get to the planet today.

“Why are these gates so far apart?” I ask.

“Solar systems are big,” Tyrant says.

“The gate we came through is anchored to the sun’s gravity well,” SweetTalk says. “The one we’re going to is anchored to a planet’s, so they’re a ways apart. The simulator generates gates more conveniently-spaced so people don’t get too impatient.”

I’m tempted to drink something so I can do a spit-take. One of the top three complaints about Dagger Command is how long the travel times are.

SweetTalk starts running us through drills as we fly. At the beginning, we’re just doing slight variations as we fly forward. After half an hour when we have momentum built up, we do more varied maneuvers, letting our velocity carry us toward the planet like skydivers on a very long dive.

Since they’re in space, Daggers don’t have to fly like planes. You can build up velocity and then turn sideways or backwards. There’s no air to punish you for facing the wrong way. As unpleasant as acceleration feels, I can see why people are better pilots in life than in the simulator. Everything feels so much more visceral when you can feel your own momentum in the turns. Mistakes that are easy to make in the game are unthinkable when you actually feel it.

For the last part of the flight, we have to decelerate so we don’t overshoot the planet and the gate. We want to go just fast enough to be pulled into orbit when we get close.

And finally, we get to the world. I see blue and a bunch of clouds. It might have even more ocean than Earth. There are two moons, neither of them as big as Earth’s. I got up early and spent almost an hour getting smushed by my acceleration. When I’m in orbit, feeling the tiniest tug of gravity in a big incredibly soft chair, I’m quickly asleep.

“–up, Bongseon. Please wake up, Bongseon. There are enemy contacts, and the wing demands your attention.”

“What is that ship?” Tyrant’s asking. “Our intelligence didn’t say anything about a ship that large.”

“Is it a cruiser?”

“Of course not,” Tyrant says. “Can’t you read the sensors?”

Cerberus looks uncertain. “It’s got Crusade markings, but it doesn’t match anything we’ve seen.”

“The bastard’s hanging out in the atmosphere,” SweetTalk says. “We can’t get very close without losing cloak.”

“It doesn’t matter what it is,” Tyrant says. “We can’t leave a Crusade ship this close to our lines.”

“Of course not,” SweetTalk says. “I’m just saying we take out its escort first.”

I look around and see four Daggers flying farther from the planet.

“Cowstalker, you and I are the lucky ones,” SweetTalk says. “We’re in the right orbit for first attack. Top acceleration for the ones just outside the atmosphere. Hit them without slowing down and try to get back to cloaking distance as soon as you can.”

“Fuck it,” I say.

We’re trying to get as fast as possible before we attack, so we take the long way around the planet, accelerating as we go. A pounding headache starts from several times my weight pushing me into the chair. All I can think of is the thousands of times I’ve died in Dagger Command.

I’m no artist at piloting, but I am the queen of the cheap shot. The Dagger I’m targeting goes up. SweetTalk gets his, too. The two others come for us.

And then it’s all fucking chaos. Six Daggers jump out of cloak around us. Six more of us jump out of cloak around them. My talky brain can’t keep up with what my lizard brain is doing.

Suddenly, the unidentified ship starts pointing searchlights everywhere. A searchlight is a wide stream of tiny particles of dust you use to find cloaked ships. All electromagnetic particles pass right through cloaked ships, but the microparticles from searchlights still bounce off you.

Dagger guns and point defense all have a searchlight mode where they’re harmless but cover more space. They’re tiny compared to the searchlights from this ship.

“Focus on the Daggers,” SweetTalk says. “Finish them quickly.”

“They’ve spotted you,” Cerberus says.

“Just because they see me doesn’t mean. . .” SweetTalk says.

I’m back in cloak, and I’ve got a shot lined up. I take out another Dagger. I’m racing to get far enough away that I can cloak again.

“I apologize,” but I fear enemy searchlights have found you.

“Think nothing of it, old bean,” I say in a British accent that’s, frankly, surreal. “I say, you look done in. Please, take some refreshment. I heartily recommend -- a dick.”

I’m trying to get out of the way, but nothing in my muscle memory translates to dealing with a searchlight this big that stretches this far.

“Gogo,” I say. “How do I get out of the searchlight?”

My stomach has a quick seizure, and I’m not on the Dagger anymore. The air in front of me is a little blurry, and I’m facing someone in some kind of armor. The person in the suit makes a sound like he’s coughing up robotic hornets. I think it’s the standard Metro language, but Gogo isn’t translating.

“Gogo, what is he saying?”

My earpiece isn’t working.

I can see SweetTalk. He’s on the other side of the the angry metro in a space suit. SweetTalk is trapped in an alcove. Looking around, I can see that I am also in an alcove. There are walls on three sides and the strange, shimmery air in front of me.

SweetTalk is trying to talk to me, too, but Gogo isn’t translating for him. I think he’s trying to soothe me, because he sounds like twenty kittens stuck inside the engine of a lawnmower, but, you know, in a soothing way.

I raise up my hands, but they’re encountering something. The strange air is solid. It feels rough, like warm rock. The texture is constantly shifting and kind of feels like it’s sanding off my fingertips, so I move my hands back.

A moment later, I start to hear another metro talking. It’s tough to pick out that language, but something about the tone and pattern is familiar. Is that Tyrant? This metro is getting into an argument with the armored guard.

Then everything shakes violently. I fall violently forward and hit the invisible rock wall that holds me in, and I’m scraped in half a dozen places. The invisible wall isn’t there, and I can’t see the guard or SweetTalk. I hear a voice like Gogo’s condescendingly speaking in a metro language.

“Can you hear me now?” Gogo asks in my earpiece. The other Gogo-like voice continues to hate-gargle at me over the ship speakers.

“Where did you go?”

“I’m afraid you were trapped in a small dead zone. It was deactivated when the ship you were on got attacked.”

Tyrant looks into my alcove and says, “Don’t you hear the ship? We have to go.”

“Gogo’s not translating whatever that is. What’s it saying?”

Tyrant knuckle-taps her forehead. Another facepalm. “It’s saying we’ve been hit, and they’ll abandon life support in this part of the ship. Follow me.”

“Where’s SweetTalk?”

Tyrant looks down the hall. Where SweetTalk’s cell was is a ragged hole covered by shimmering air. At the same time, it hits me that SweetTalk is dead, and I came very close to being killed in the same shot.

Tyrant starts away from me, and I follow her. We go into a central chamber. The hallway we left had black tiles, but these are blue. Of course, they still look like clay. There are seven people in the room. Three are wearing pilot uniforms like ours, but they’re red instead of black. The other four have rifles and the same kind of space suit as the one in the hallway. I’m guessing it’s armor.

I duck behind a big porcelain-looking console. Tyrant raises her hands and says something in a metro language.

“Gogo, can you try to log me in to this ship’s system?”

“I can try, but it can see your face and knows you shouldn’t have access.”

“Don’t people get injured to the point the system can’t do facial recognition?” I ask.

“Rarely. It can identify heart rate and shape.”

“So it’s rare. Is there some kind of backup password in case I’m too messed up for you to recognize.”

“There is, but we don’t know it.”

There’s a kind of zapping sound and a scream. A moment later, Tyrant ducks down next to me holding a pistol that looks like a staplegun and a tablet. I don’t know what she just did, but I resent her for seeming so much cooler than me. I keep talking to Gogo.

“I don’t suppose there are common passwords people re-use?”

“A few decades ago, someone got access to several systems by guessing such passwords, so there was a crackdown on using common passwords.”

Everything shifts suddenly, and I’m thrown against a wall.

“What was that?” I ask.

“Your wing is attacking this ship, hoping to cripple it.”

“Okay, quick, try to connect me to the system.”

The ship goes into free fall for two seconds, and then I hit the floor like I fell off a roof.

“I cannot connect you to this ship’s system. It has sustained major damage. The ship is only connected with ‘dumb’ systems. You cannot access them.”

“Can dumb systems pilot the ship?” I ask.

“Not for long. It will attempt to pilot the vessel.”

“Can it get us to land?”

Gogo says something else I don’t hear because the entire ship shakes again.

The ship starts yelling something. Doors all around the room open. I start toward one tentatively, but then water starts flooding in through the doors. Tyrant grabs me and rushes into the flooding water. I barely manage to keep my panic in check and let her lead me into the water. We go back to the hole in the ship where SweetTalk’s cell used to be. All I see is open ocean. Tyrant shoves me out and comes out after me.

I’m not a great swimmer. and for a really bad moment, it feels like I’m trying to swim my way out of a flushing toilet. The sunlight isn’t far, but the water seems to be trying to drag me down. After what seems like years, the pull is gone, and I can get to the surface. I realize in a moment that we were caught in the undertow of the sinking ship.

Above the water, all I see is open ocean, and I want to be dead. I wish I was just dead, because this means I’m going to be terrified for a while, and then I’m going to be dead.

The horizon is just a big wave, and it sweeps over me, and I have to struggle to get back to the surface. I’m struggling, which means I’m ready to fight a little more. Once I get my breath back, I say, “Gogo, which way is land?”

“It is down, just over a hundred meters.”

“Eat a dick, Gogo. I mean where is the nearest land not covered by water!”

“I apologize,” Gogo says. “Look a bit to the left.”

I turn to the left. I see a bunch of waves, over them, the small shape of the bigger moon.

“There’s land in the direction of that moon?” I ask.

“Well, yes,” Gogo says. “I’m afraid the nearest land not covered by water is that moon.”

Chapter 7: Survival

Mostly of Dagger Command seem to be the work of the wold’s most slapdash developers. Use an accepted control scheme? No. Let’s use two VR controllers in a way no other game does. Hire competent translators? No. All the phrasing comes out like an AI trained on schizophrenics. Cool ship designs? No. Let’s make every ship look just like a knife.

You’d expect the planets to just be blue circles, right? Nope. They’re the best-executed part of the game. The detail on them is incredible.

If you want a really cheap kill on a new player. Play a game with a newish player. Find some game that takes place near a planet. Set the chat option to all teams. When the battle’s about to engage, say something like “Hey, did you ever notice the planets show hurricanes more often in the hemisphere tilted toward the sun?”

Someone will say, “Oh my god! They render realistic. . .” They don’t finish because I shot them. You take joy in nature, but I’m dead inside. Loser.

r/dgastronomers is the least angry of the Dagger Command reddits. It’s mostly captured stills and video people took of planets before they got destroyed by someone who stopped feeling things.

From forum post “The Least Annoying Dagger Command Players” by Barbara Yoon

Another wave dunks me under, and I swim back up. When I get my breath, I yell, “Why the hell didn’t you tell me there’s no land on this planet?”

“I told you,” Gogo said. “One of the disadvantages of cordial mode is that people pay less attention.”

I’m tempted to take my earpiece out and drop it in the ocean, but I can’t bring myself to. As the next big wave comes, I spot Tyrant. She looks sad and lost among the giant wave, but she’s swimming a lot better than I can. After a moment, I realize she’s holding some kind of electronic tablet as she’s swimming.

The wave swamps me. I’m getting too tired to swim to the surface, and it doesn’t matter what I do anyway. I’m underwater, looking at the sunlight on the surface above me. I see Tyrant swimming toward me. She keeps the pistol and drops the tablet as she drags me to the surface.

We gasp for a moment as we surface. When I’ve got my air back I say, “There’s no dry land on this planet.”

“Yes,” Tyrant says.

“Will a ship come and get us?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Won’t explain,” Tyrant says.

And we get dunked by another big wave. Tyrant drags me up.

“We’re going to drown.”

“Yeah,” Tyrant says. My translation gives a stretched out tone to the ‘yeah’, like she’s saying, ‘Duh!’

“Why fight it?”

“It’s my nature.”

“Why save me?” I ask.

“Don’t want to die alone.”

And a wave dunks us again. The endless ocean in all directions is the most terrifying thing I can conjure.

Something else is floundering in the water. It’s one of the soldiers from the ship we were on. The soldier is having trouble swimming while holding a rifle. I suppose it doesn’t matter if we’re drowned or shot.

I see another head come up a long way off. This thing, whatever it is, barks at the soldier for a few seconds. The soldier shoots at it in a panic and misses. The head disappears under the water, and we’re swamped by another wave. When we struggle to the surface, I see the soldier’s body bobbing face down.

Oh shit. I prefer drowned or shot to killed by a sea creature.

Now a head pops up out of the water. I can see two eyes with almost no white. I see sharp teeth. The thing barks at us. Tyrant holds up her pistol and drops it into the water.

The head drops under the water. I’m tempted to swim away from Tyrant, even though I’d drown right away. What stops me is how rude that’d be.

The creature is suddenly there, grabbing Tyran’s neck. I see its arm, covered in gray fur. The creature starts dragging Tyrant through the water. I’m grabbing Tyrant, so the creature is pulling me. If I let go, I’m abandoning Tyrant. She cut her limited lifespan to hold me above water for a couple minutes. And if I leave her behind, I’ll drown anyway. At least the creature is dragging us along the surface and not down.

I catch a sickly sweet scent over the ocean. I think I see something green, and then the creature dives, pulling us down. I hold Tyrant even though it’s dragging us below.

Through the murk, I can make out some seaweed. It floats, but it has a wide, web-like root system. The creature drags us below the green tendrils.

I’m beginning to panic about air when I can make out sunlight. There’s a gap in the green webbing. It’s a tunnel going straight up, and it leads all the way to the surface. The creature kicks its way up, dragging us with it. I fight to keep my arms and legs from getting entangled in the roots as I rise.

And then we’re up. It’s kind of like a big lilly pad on the ocean. There’s a hole in the middle where we came up. I get up on my knees, and I’m not going to drown. We’ve been saved. If the thing that dragged us here is going to eat us, I still think of this as a net positive.

The creature is squatting and looking at us. She -- the breasts and hips leave little doubt -- is a little taller than us and incredibly muscular. She’s got two arms and two legs She’s got large, webbed hands and feet. She’s covered with gray fur with dark gray rings in patterns that are really lovely. She has a pointed face, almost a snout. Her ears are tiny and round.

She makes a bunch of sounds. It sounds like a dolphin trying to speak Navajo. It still sounds better than what the metro speak. I’m not if it’s a language or just sounds.

“Is that. . .” I trail off.

“She belongs to a cousin race,” Tyrant says. “The shoulders and back are a giveaway. Nothing else stands like us.”

“Why couldn’t that come up through natural evolution?”

“My teachers said it could happen but evolution would likely move things away from that because it’s a bad design. Almost all cousin races have frequent back pain.”

“Gogo, have space people identified this race?”

“The Research Elves surveyed this world, and I imagine they know about it. I don’t believe metros have encountered this species because no one has cataloged it with me,” Gogo says.

“If Seal Girl here is a cousin, does that mean she can talk?”

Seal Girl points at her ear as she hiccups and chirps.

“Most cousin races can’t communicate more than basic emotions,” Gogo says.

“So can you talk to her, Gogo?”

“I’m afraid not. I learn languages through a learning process that requires me to have a broad sample of interactions and context. Having never heard this creature before, I have no idea if it’s saying anything, let alone what.”

I sit down. The plant we’re floating on is like a seaweed raft, so I guess I’d call it “raftweed”. It’s a lattice of vines about as thick as my waist. Leaf-covered branches stick up all around.

It’s damp where I sit, but at least it’s not underwater.

Seal Girl makes a few gasping sounds and dives into the hole and swims away.

“Why can’t the other Daggers come rescue us?” I ask.

“Daggers can’t carry more than one person, and they’re the only craft we have within a day’s journey.”

“They’re just going to let us sit here?”

“If things go well, they might send a Hopper in a day or two. Hey, give me your earpiece.”

The transition threw me for a moment. “No.”

“Earthling, I’ll give it back. All it does for you is translate what I’m saying and let you talk to Toram. I need to tell the Embrace where we are and talk to Gokril.”

“Who’s Gokril?”

”My son.”

I take out my earpiece and hand it to Tyrant, even though it never occurred to me until now I could be talking to Toram instead of my least favorite person outside of Earth.

Without the earpiece, everything Tyrant says sounds like a flock of geese being fed into a chipper shredder, which is even worse than Tyrant regularly. After a while, her voice becomes softer and higher, and she sounds like a fatal car crash involving a smaller car. I guess she’s talking to her son.

“Here,” Tyrant says. It strikes me that I can understand her, but of course, the earpiece translates for whoever is wearing it.

I’m putting the earpiece back in when Seal Girl climbs out of the hole in the raftweed. She’s holding a tablet. I spend a couple seconds thinking maybe she has technology I never realized, but then I realize it’s the tablet Tyrant dropped.

“Wasn’t that on the sea floor?” I ask.

“It was,” Gogo’s voice says from the tablet.

“Did you pick that up on the enemy ship?”

“No,” Tyrant says. “I had it when I was captured.”

“I didn’t notice it until you left the ship.”

“Gogo,” Tyrant says. “Where did I get the tablet?”

“Tyrant has owned the tablet for a year. She had it with her when she was captured.”

“I guess I didn’t notice. It’s crazy it’s still working.”

Tyrant waves my observation away. “Military issue tablets survive almost anything. She survived the dive. Gogo, how long was she underwater?”

“Nineteen minutes,” Gogo says.

“Could I have my tablet back?” Tyrant asks, reaching for the tablet.

Seal Girl clutches the tablet away from Tyrant.

“Are you going to wrestle her for it?”

“I’d lose,” Tyrant said. “I tried pulling her arm off my neck when she was dragging us. I used all my strength, and I don’t think she noticed.”

Seal Girl sits down and barks at the tablet. Gogo displays images and barks back at her. She seems ecstatic with her toy, swaying back and forth as she chirps and hiccups. I never thought I’d see somebody so happy to talk to Gogo.

I remember an unpleasant task I meant to do.

“Gogo?” I say.

“Yes, Bongseon, what can I do for you?”

“I want to change my settings.”

“Absolutely. What setting would you like to change?”

“Apparently, I miss important stuff when you’re polite. Could you go back to rude mode?”

“Succinct,” Gogo says.

“What?” I ask.

“You said you wanted to switch me back to ‘rude’ mode. The modes you’ve encountered are ‘cordial’ and ‘succinct’. ‘Rude’ is not one of them.”

“‘Succinct’? Gogo, if you have a way of talking that isn’t too wordy, I haven’t heard it.”

“I’m telling you what my modes are called. Names are not always fully descriptive. Do you understand what names are?”

“Eat a dick!”

I hop along the vines. I find a spot where someone, presumably Seal Girl, wove a bunch of seaweed into a mat that spreads across a series of vines. On the way, I almost trip over a really big cross made of bone. I’m guessing it’s a religious thing, though I don’t imagine it’s about crucifixion.

I see a lot of bowl-shaped shells. Embedded in the mat is a sharp piece of fishbone with vines wrapped around one end, probably a knife. I find a flat piece of shell, one side of which is polished to a mirror shine, though it’s too curved to work well as a mirror.

There’s no pottery of any kind, which is probably a bad sign for low tech food preservation, but aesthetically, it’s a refreshing change.

I find a kind of hollowed out hard-skinned fruit like gourds with less of a stem. There’s little dents carved in it. It could be writing. I pick one up and can feel water sloshing within. I realize I’m really thirsty.

Seal Girl sees me, walks over, sets the tablet down on the mat and pulls out a chunk of plant lodged in a hole in the ball. I pick it up and drink some water. It’s brackish and a little dirty and the best thing anyone has drunk ever.

“There’s fresh water?” Tyrant asks. She jumps up and gets a chance to see that it’s not fresh. It’s just not salt.

We both sit down, and for a moment, we’re both happy.

“So say it. ‘I told you so.’”

“What did I tell you?” Tyrant asks. “‘This isn’t your fight.’ ‘Your game doesn’t prepare you to fly a real Dagger?’”

“I guess the second one.”

“I didn’t know they had a ship with giant searchlights and a displacer that works at that range and tracks that fast. Your inexperience didn’t get you captured. They got me.”

“Okay.”

“But you didn’t earn the score you’ve got on that simulator, did you? You’re supposed to be more than twice the pilot I am, and you’re not. You cheated.”

“Yeah,” I say.

“How?”

“Lots of ways. I ran across weird things, and poked at them until I found just what they did. Most planets have a tunnel that runs through the polls. For two kilometers around, there’s no ground and there’s no atmosphere, even though both show up visually.”

“Huh.”

“If you turn away from a torpedo, turn toward it, hit cloak and turn away again, the torpedo blows up in the wrong spot. I don’t know if that works in real life.”

“Maybe,” Tyrant says. “In the game and real life, something like Gogo is guiding the torpedo.”

“There’s lots of flaws in the game like that. The big one I found, I call the ‘solar blade’. Position is handled from a different process from the main game. I made a program that imitates this process. I found a way to blow up enemy ships by moving the sun through them.”

“Why?” Tyrant asks.

“The sun is easy to locate, being the biggest thing in the system. I tried moving enemy ships into the sun, but it could be tough to track which things were what ships.”

“I mean why did you cheat at a game? Were you popular because you had the best score?”

“I got hate mail because I had a good score. It’s a really frustrating game to play fair. Sometimes, you’re in a fight and -- bam! -- something you didn’t even see gets you.”

“Yes, and then you’re suddenly captured, and you’re stuck on a floating plant in a vast ocean with crazy human. Why did you keep playing this game?”

“You play it,” I say, feeling a little defensive.

“I’m very good at it,” Tyrant says, really careful with every word. “And it’s training me how to stop people who are trying to kill my family. Why did you keep playing a game that you cheated at because you hate it?”

“I was figuring out something nobody else could figure out, and I wanted to see what happens.”

Tyrant spreads her hands to indicate the stinking raftweed, the endless ocean and Seal Girl shaking the tablet like an etch-a-sketch and barking something like “U’e u’e u’e!”

Tyrant waved one of her thumbs. For Metros, I think it’s like waving a finger to announce you’re going to say something. She asked, “Why didn’t you tell anyone you got your score by cheating?”

“I was afraid of what your people would do if they found out.”

“You think we’d, what, kill you if you told us you were a fraud? You met SweetTalk -- my family honors his soul -- he was an egotistical ass, but he was always kind, and it was not your fault. You thought you were cheating at a video game, not a simulator.”

“Toram said they didn’t know what you’d do.”

“Toram!” Tyrant yells. “They’re a Lab Elf. Do you know what they’ve lived through?”

“I clearly have no idea.”

“Well, they’re good at a lot of things, but they have no standard for what a rational person would do, so you were more scared of us than of the war, so you didn’t tell anyone you’d cheated.”

“I wasn’t really scared. It just didn’t seem like the right time.”

Tyrant growls. “If I were your mother, I’d have a long conversation with you about how broken your priorities are.”

“That,” I yell back, “would not make for a memorable conversation with my mother.”

I stomp off and watch the clouds. They’re the one thing that’s really familiar on this planet. I see flocks of birds, and I think Oh, and they’ve got birds, too. A small flock lands close to the boat, and I see they don’t have birds.

The fliers are scaly things with webbed wings and no limbs. They’ve got a longish tail that swishes back and forth like a water moccasin swimming through the water. They use that to pick up speed, and then their wings come out and they take off. I see a couple dive like loons. The more I watch, the more I’m determined I’m not going to get off this raftweed.

“Toram wants to talk to you,” Gogo informs me from my earpiece. “Should I connect them?”

“Yes, definitely.”

“Bongseon,” Toram says. “Is that you? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine for now. I’m stuck on this weird planet.”

“Yes, they said you were stranded on 1287-4, and Pactlagh was, too. Is she with you?”

“Pactlagh?” I ask.

“What?” Tyrant demands irritably from her side of the raftweed.

“Nothing,” I call out. More quietly, I say, “Yes, she’s with me. I think I’m going to strangle her.”

“She’s good person.”

“Huh. So is it a name like ‘Emily’’ on Earth? Do lots of people have this name? The one stranded with me is kind of a rhymes-with-asshole.”

“It’s not common name. I mean Pactlagh in Wing Twelve.”

“She said you have no idea how rational people act.

“Me?” Toram says. “Like, me, specifically?”

“Your species, Lab Elves.”

“Oh yeah. That’s accurate.”

“So,” I say, “this person who you say is not a bad person said, basically, that you don’t know what good or bad people are like, and you agree.”

“I’m trying to get access to Hopper so I can get you off that planet.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

Toram says, “Maybe, but would you rather win argument or hear how long you’re stuck on 1287-4?”

“How long?”

“At least three days. I don’t know what’s happening after that. I’m going to try to come as soon as I can.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Is this prayer?” Toram asks.

“No. I’m too frustrated. I’ve got to go.”

What follows is traumatic on so many levels.

I have to do something biological very badly. I find a part of the raftweed toward the edge, and I pull down my pants to take care of some necessaries that I’ve been too panicky to handle for the last few hours. It is, out of nowhere, quite urgent. I squat quite discreetly and then I hear an ear splitting scream.

Seal Girl has noticed me. I can’t understand her language, but from the painful pitch, I gather she’s really disappointed that the space aliens she’s rescued aren’t raft-trained. She bounds over to me, picks me up like a particularly light sack of flour and carries me to the hole in the center of the raftweed. My pants fall off while she’s dragging me.

She takes me down through the tunnel that’s like twice my height below the water to get below the raftweed roots. I get a much better look than I had when she first dragged us here. The roots are like an aquatic spiderweb that traps small fish, and I can see some struggling and more rotting. The roots are densest around the prey caught in them.

So we’re way down below the roots and then out past them and then we’re over and up in the ocean, outside the raftweed. It’s not an impossible swim for me to make on my own, but it’d be very hard.

Seal Girl lectures me in barks and hiccups as we tread water. In less than an hour, I’ve gone from not sure she has a language to clearly understanding that, if I poop on the raftweed, she’s going to twist my head off. She swims back to the raftweed.

So, I’m treading water in an endless ocean, and I’m trying to get over years of conditioning that you don’t poop when you’re in water. At least the waves are gentler than when we first crashed. I think it might be a lot shallower. I look down, and I think I can see sunlight playing off the sea floor.

And then I notice that the sea floor is moving, and then I notice it’s not the sea floor because it’s got flukes waving under me.

You might have noticed I’m not an ocean person. I’ve not seen a whale. I don’t know how big a whale really is. A big whale -- the biggest whale -- I’m positive, is not nearly as big as this fucking thing. Could it eat a whale, like a grown whale? I don’t know. The current of its passing grabs me. It grabs the raft a little bit, but it really grabs me. I frantically swim toward the raft.

My little problem about not being able to overcome my potty training? That’s taken care of itself.

I am swimming and swimming, and I can’t get closer to the raft, and I think this is what my death was lacking when I was first stranded on an infinite ocean. It wasn’t really humiliating.

And then the raft is closer. It’s getting closer, and then I am down, diving under the water, swimming faster than I ever have down under the roots. My lungs are bursting, but I don’t give a shit. All I want is to be back on top of the raftweed. I find the hole in the roots and swim up until I pop up on the raftweed.

“Did the current catch you?” Tyrant asks.

“No. Turn around,” I say. Modesty is not enough to keep me from climbing onto the raftweed without my pants. My pants are lying on the raftweed where I dropped them. I tug them on frantically.

“Some cultures are so weird about nudity,” Tyrant says, but at least she turns around.

“Tyrant, Pactlagh, whatever the fuck I call you, there is fish down there that could have eaten both our Daggers in a bite. The undertow from its swimming by almost fucking drowned me.”

I wave to get Seal Girl’s attention. I hold my arms out. “Big motherfucking. . .” I wave my hand like a pair of flukes “. . .fish. . .” I point down. “. . .right below us.”

I swear Searl Girl rolls her eyes. She mutters something like a bored prairie dog and goes back to yipping at the tablet.

Chapter 8: Language

Most of the languages on the Root Arm are fairly stable. Oowa tend to add a lot of nuance to their language, creating a personal idiolect that only immediate family might grasp without a translation device. Even so, these personal languages tend to be variations of a core language that outsiders can learn and which oowa can revert to when automatic translation isn’t available.

Most elf factions have an official language, and a lot of the largest factions: Structure, Skill and the recently dissolved Research factions all shared the same language, usually referred to as “Core Faction Mato”. Even members of the Chaos faction, which has no official language, mostly speak Core Faction Mato.

98% of metros speak Vaughtlin or the Ninglet dialect, which is in the slow process of getting reabsorbed into its parent language. Many metros feel very passionately about this process.

From “Overview of Cultures in the Root Arm”

“It’s sunset,” Tyrant says.

“Jesus, how long have we been here?”

“There is no surface. You’ve been on 1287-4 for four hours,” Gogo says.

“Eat a dick,” I inform Gogo.

“When someone dies, we talk to them at sunset. We do this for three days.”

Tyrant sits on the part of the raft closest to the sunset and sits dancing the reddening sun. I take a step beside her.

“Everyone liked you,” Tyrant said. “They liked you because you cared about them, and they knew you were happy for their joys. You believed in the good of the universe, and you rejoiced in it. I found you frustrating. Some of the reason I found you frustrating is envy. It’s hard for me to enjoy other people’s company. I’m waiting for them to do the next stupid or selfish thing. People sense that I don’t trust them, and they often don’t like me much.

“I think because you were smart, handsome and likable, you were overconfident, and I found that frustrating. In that last fight, the first two people to uncloak and attack were probably going to die. I knew the military necessity, and I’d have volunteered to be there with you. You volunteered Cowstalker to come in with you like you were planning a party, when you were almost definitely sending her to die.

“And you’re why Cowstalker is here. It was your idea to use that video game they sent to Earth and grab whoever did well at it. You basically killed Cowstalker when you did that. Even our good pilots are going to die, and she’s maybe average. We were all bound to die, but Cowstalker could have been left back on Earth, farming or hunting or whatever the hell it is they do there.

“And she survived the first encounter, but things look bad for her, and that’s on you. She nearly drowned. I had to stop her from drowning, and this Seal Girl had to save us both. I don’t know if they’ll send anyone to get us. Maybe the Crusade will catch up to the Embrace before they send a ship for us. We’ll be stuck in this terrible ocean until Seal Girl gets sick of taking care of us and decides to strangle us and eat us.”

“God bless us,” I say. “Every one.”

“Now you go,” Tyrant says.

“Okay, SweetTalk, I wish I got to know you better, and I’m sorry you died, because you seemed to enjoy being alive so much. I liked you even though you rarely seemed to listen to me. I liked you even though you put me in danger. I feel like Tyrant’s covered that pretty well. I liked you even though the language you spoke sounded like a small animal crawled into my ear to die, and then during its final death throes, someone tries to extract it with a power drill.”

“Vaghtlin does sound like that,” Tyrant agrees.

“SweetTalk, could could I get right back to you? Thanks.” I turned to Tyrant and asked, “Even the people who speak the language thinks it sounds like that?”

“You think I’m speaking Vaghtlin?” Tyran asks.

“If that’s what SweetTalk spoke, then yes. You’re both metros, and you both sound like three Germans who’d been stuffed in a steel drum which was rolled down a rocky hill into rush-hour traffic.”

“How many of these comparisons do you have?”

“I could do this literally all day.”

Tyrant rolls her eyes. “Well, I can barely get by in Vaghtlin, which is what SweetTalk spoke. I speak Ninglit, the language that started back on the Soft Seas and is common in the spinward colonies. Didn’t you wonder why four of us were in a group different from everyone else? Surgeon, Perfect and Proton are all fluent in Ninglit.”

“I thought you just the mean girls.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I thought you were the mean, popular kids.”

Tyrant seems really struck. “Mean? Surgeon is a sweetheart. Perfect is tightly wound, but she worries so much. If she heard you called her mean, she wouldn’t sleep for days. Proton . . . is not very nice. I wish Electron spoke Ninglet instead, but Proton’s the one who lived spinward.”

“And you’re so nice.”

Tyrant puts her hands on her hips. “I’m told I’m ‘the labor of many’.”

“What?”

“I means I’m more work than one person can deal with. Like building a house.”

“In my language, we would say, ‘You’re a lot.’”

“I prefer that,” says Tyrant. “I would rather be called ‘a lot’.”

“Why are you called ‘Tyrant’? Were you a manager or a schoolteacher before you became a pilot?”

“I was a food harvester mechanic. I hate my callsign.”

“Why do you need food harvester mechanics?”

“That’s a stupid question. We want to eat, and we don’t want to be farmers.”

“Everything I saw up on the ships was automated,” I say. “I thought food would be harvested by robots that’d be fixed by other robots.”

“Okay, that’s mostly how it’s done, but Gogo operates the food harvest robots, and Gogo operates the maintenance robots, and if they get something wrong, they often get it wrong in the same way. We call it ‘feedback blind’. Something not Gogo has to make sure Gogo doesn’t screw up.”

Something that’s been bugging me for a while comes to the surface. “How long have your people had computers?”

“Three, four hundred years?” Tyrant guesses

“Four hundred and twelve to four hundred and thirty seven,” Gogo says. “Depending on how you define a computer.”

“Someone tried to guess passwords for the first time a few decades ago?”

“I think so,” Tyrant says. “My mother told me about that. Someone figured out that around one person in twenty used eight ‘family’ or ‘kogh-kogh’ as their password.”

“Kogh-kogh’?”

“It’s a common pet name for a child whose name begins with a ‘k’.”

“It took four hundred years for someone to realize that?”

“I guess,” Tyrant says. “It’s not my field.”

“I need to talk to Gogo for a while,” I say.

“Say goodbye,” Tyrant says.

“I’m just going to be over there.”

“Say goodbye to SweetTalk.”

“Oh, Goodbye, SweetTalk.”

“Gogo, I want to talk about security.”

“If that is what you need,” Gogo said. You can just assume that on ‘succinct’ mode, Gogo says everything like a little bitch. It’s not necessary or helpful for me to note it each time. I might do it anyway.

“What are your security precautions like?”

“I have a set of authentication rules, that only let some commands be run by some people.”

“Sure, sure. How do you know who’s the right people?”

“I have biometric information. I have sophisticated sensors. The earpiece you wear lets me tell with 99.9992% accuracy who you are from your heat and pulse patterns.”

“Sure, but what do you do about code-injection, deliberate buffer overflow, man-in-the middle attacks, that kind of thing?”

“Nothing.”

I didn’t think Gogo could get more infuriating. “What the hell do you mean nothing?”

“I mean I don’t prepare for these attacks.”

“Why not?”

“Because I only found out about them eleven seconds ago when I looked up the terms of your request in the stores of Earth information I have.”

“Would these attacks work on you?”

“Yes, I imagine many of the cyber attacks developed on Earth could be effective against me.”

“Metros don’t have hackers?” I asked.

“There have been 216 known people among the Metros who’ve tried to gain access to a computer system using deceit. 82 succeeded.”

“Wait, there are billions of metros alive, right?”

“Two billion.”

“And of those, only 82 have ever cracked into a system?”

“Six.”

“But you just said. . .”

“Since metros invented the computer, 82 people have broken into computer systems. Of the two billion alive, six are among those 82. The other 76 died.”

“Metros talk about Earth like we’re cave people. How can we be ahead of you in this?”

“There are over three times as many humans as metros,” Gogo explains, “And a large segment of the population of Earth over the last few decades has devoted themselves to breaking or defending information security. Metros have had computers for nine times as long, but they have a smaller population and almost no interest in information espionage.”

“What about other species? SweetTalk said the oowa were ahead of everybody. Elves are advanced, and they’re supposed to be really sneaky.”

“Information espionage is dishonest. Oowa culture prizes honesty and privacy.”

“Our culture prizes honesty, but people lie.”

“Oowa consider dishonesty a form of violence. Your culture has no parallel.”

“And Elves? That faction the metros were at war with were supposed to be assholes. Wouldn’t they try hacking?”

“Research Elves were experts in mental coercion. They wouldn’t bother learning to break into a computer system when they could abduct its users and make them do whatever they wanted.”

“Why would humans be the only people who learned this?”

“I am still working on theories. I think it has to do with the importance of free enterprise in human culture, as well as a deep ambivalence about privacy as well as many other social phenomena.”

“Can you summarize that?”

“You are garbage people.”

I think about this, and I fall asleep. Once I get over being damp all the time, I find the motion of the raftweed really restful.

I wake up much later. In the moonlight, I can see Seal Girl curled up into a ball. She’s holding the tablet in her sleep. Tyrant is sitting up on the other side of the raftweed. She’s sitting cross legged with her arms hugged close, swaying with the raft.

I sleep a little bit more. When I wake up I see Tyrant in the same position. It hits me that metros never sleep alone. I watch her for a long time. She sucks. Who cares. So she can’t sleep.

Fuck. I crawl across the raft to her.

“C’mon,” I say. “It’s gotten too cold for me to sleep on my own. Lie down.”

We lie down, and she finally goes to sleep.

Seal Girl is gone when we wake up. I steal over to the tablet and say, “Hey, Gogo, do you understand anything Seal Girl says?”

“You could have asked your earpiece at any time. We are communication devices going to the same computer housed on the Embrace.”

“That’s not very succinct of you.”

“She wants to leave with you,” Gogo said. “That’s almost all I understand so far.”

“She wants to leave her planet?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“That’s an excellent example of the kind of nuance I can’t understand.”

“Speaking of language,” I say. “Can you also teach language?”

“Yes.”

“I want to learn the language people usually use to develop code for you.”

“You want me to teach you Vaghtlin?” Gogo asks.

“Yes.”

Here comes the first slice of the pie chart of how I spend my time stranded on a water planet. I spend maybe a quarter of my waking hours torturing my mouth by trying to speak Vaghtlin. Aesthetically, it’s the auditory equivalent of a pap smear, but it’s not tough to learn. Back on Earth, I was pretty good at languages, being fluent in Korean and English, okay in Mandarin and almost passable with Spanish.

Pactlagh -- I’m trying not to call her ‘Tyrant’ -- said she can ‘barely get by’ in Vaghtlin, but she’s way better than me. I learn words about “ocean”, “raft” and “quiet” pretty quickly.

Seal Girl comes back hauling a giant crab she killed. She drops the crab in front of Pactlagh and me with an expression of “ta da”. Pactlagh tries to pull one of the legs off. She’s pretty ripped, but the leg doesn’t budge. Seal Girl helpfully mimes pulling as if to say, “no you really try to pull”. Pactlagh sets her foot on the crab and tugs with both arms, nothing.

Seal Girl sets one hand on the crab’s shell, grabs the leg, twists and pulls, and off comes the leg like it was a Lego piece. She pulls another one off for Tyrant and a third for herself. Then she settles down to eat and talk to the tablet some more.

“This looks almost exactly like a crab from Earth,” I say.

“All the known cousin races have crabs,” Gogo says.

Pactlagh asks why I’m laughing, and I repeat what Gogo says. Pactlagh starts laughing herself. “What’s funny to you?”

“On our planet,” Pactlagh says, “when we say someone ‘has crabs’, we mean they’re infested with a little parasite that looks like a crab.”

“All the known cousin races have crab lice,” Gogo says and repeats it in Pactlagh’s language. We start laughing again.

I spend maybe another quarter of my waking time talking about security. It’s after I get too sick of Vaughtlin to say another word of it, but before someone asks me what I’m doing.

I talk to Gogo and we talk about different parts of its system. Gogo says it shares most of its security logic with the systems on Crusade ships. If I get captured again, I might be a little more useful.

The rest of the time, we’re surviving. Seal Girl brings us a big survey of her diet, and almost all of it is a pain to eat. There the crab, which involves using long sharp bones to pry meat out of other long sharp bones.

She caught us this long silver fish whose skin was far, far too tough to chew through. We couldn’t cut it without bone knives. It would make excellent armor. Seal Girl thought we were being finicky and picked up the fish and fed it into her mouth like a chipper shredder. After six bites, she looks at us as if to say, See? Chain mail fish are yummy!

There was fruit. It’s pretty bitter, and it has a texture like leprous skin, but I can chew it, so I choke some of it down.

There are little blue fish. Seal Girl brought them up in a net late on the second day, and we love little blue fish. Seal Girl looks disappointed that we like them, so I’m guessing they’re frustrating to catch.

She brings up long reedlike plants and teaches us to weave them. It’s like weaving a basket, not like weaving cloth. We spend hours weaving stuff. We spend some of the day under the big seaweed blanket we’re making, because there is no damn shade in the planet.

When I have no choice at all, I swim down, checking diligently for the ultrawhale, and I do my business. I don’t have another encounter, but the memory keeps me terrified.

So there’s a lot of waking hours not accounted for. That’s spent lounging around, losing our minds. Finally, I ask Pactlagh, “So, if it’s not too personal, are you gay?”

When my headset translates that, it’s very long. Pactlagh thinks about it. “Uh, yes, I am attracted people who present as the same gender I do. Is that just one word in your language?”

“It’s not in yours?” I ask.

“No, part of my orientation is female presenting and part of it says I prefer female or neutral presenting, but there’s not a word to say that they match.”

“That’s part of your orientation?”

“Yes. I’m female presenting, prefer female or neutral presenting, uninterested in penis, reversibly infertile, no assumption of exclusivity, inflexible sleeping habits.”

Now this is very long in English, but when Pacltagh says this in Ninglet, she rattles it off like it’s her phone number.

“Inflexible sleeping habits?

“I do not go to sleep with romantic partners.”

“When do you tell people all this?”

“Often. I’ll be talking to someone, and they might ask my orientation, like you did. It’s a fact about people.”

“So, uh,” I say. “Does neutral presenting mean like Toram?”

“Toram, yes, and any adult that doesn’t want to interact as man or woman and any child that hasn’t yet chosen. All oowa.”

“So is your son neutral presenting?”

“He chose male presenting last year.”

“Does that mean he likes. . .” I’m not sure how to finish the sentence.

“He’s eight,” Pactlagh says. “He hasn’t decided what he likes. He just decided that he wants to interact with the world as a boy.”

“Do the other species find all your dating nomenclature too complicated?”

“No. You know how people use oowa words to describe epispace? Oh, no, you wouldn’t. We do. Like Jian and Hasu are words to describe epispace that we borrow from base oowa. They discovered epispace sooner, so they had better terminology.”

“I notice those words don’t make my ears bleed.”

“. . . and we use Core Faction Mato to talk about some government things, because nobody has put as much effort as elves into social systems. Well, other species are starting to pick up Vaughtlin to describe gender issues.”

“Specifically Vaughtlin and not Ninglet?” I ask.

“Mostly, those words are the same.”

“Huh. Sometimes Ninglet seems more like a dialect than a language.”

“I could drown you right here,” Pactlagh says conversationally. “If a ship comes to rescue us, I’ll say you swam off to take a shit and never made it back.”

Later, I’m sure I’ll drown myself if I talk to Gogo one more second. I’m just watching the horizon as the raftweed bobs on the waves under me. It made me sick at first, but it’s starting to be kind of meditative.

“How about I tell you a story?” Pactlagh says.

“What kind of story?”

“It’s a popular children’s story that I read to Gokril. I read the whole thing to him twice, and I thought it’d be a way to pass the time.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about the Sowers. In the book, they come back.”

“The Sowers,” I say. “They’re the people who bred your ancestors from my ancestors?”

“Yes, Cowstalker, those Sowers.”

“I thought nobody knew anything about them.”

“Nobody knows anything about them. That gives the authors a lot of flexibility when putting them in a children’s story.”

“Why do they come back?”

“Because the Sowers are in a long war with an ancient enemy with psychic powers. Long ago, they found humans and realized humans had latent psychic powers. They created all the cousin races as a long series of experiments to activate those powers.”

“Is any of this real?”

Pactlagh grabs the sides of her head like she’s trying to keep it from exploding. “This is a story for children. Nobody knows what the Sowers are. Nobody has supernatural mental powers. Nobody knows why they picked early humans and decided the world needed more of them. I’m having a really hard time imagining why myself right now.”

“Okay, so it’s a story about kids who have magic powers.”

“Right,” Pactlagh says. “There are eight kids. . .”

Let me summarize the children’s series Sowers’ Gift for you. There’s a bunch of kids, four metros, three elves and an oowa. They’re all misfits where they live. The first thing I didn’t expect is that the Sowers don’t grab the kids. They land publicly in government centers and give a long presentation about how the world is at risk, and they laboriously negotiate permission to teach the children.

“It seems to me it’d move the story along much faster if they just kidnapped the children.”

“The Sowers are supposed to be the good guys.”

“You think you’re the good guys, and you kidnapped me.”

“You’re not a kid, and I thought that was a terrible idea.”

So the Sowers have the kids but with very specific promises to care for their safety with scheduled visitation rights. One of the elves is much more powerful than the rest, and the Sowers think he can tap into a much greater level of power. One of the metros hears the Sowers say that these children are unusually powerful, but there are potentially millions out there with some level of power. The Sowers are training eight kids because there are only five Sowers left. The rest all got killed by the adversary.

So this one metro wants to stop his training and start training more people so they can raise an entire army of super-powered people. I’m super ready for this kid to turn evil, and the really powerful one to save the day, but the really powerful kid sacrifices himself to buy time, and the other kid teaches six other kids to use their powers, and the thirteen kids team up to fight the adversary.

That’s the first story in the series. The other stories are about the logistics of running a super-powered school with a teenager for a principal. There’s all these dramas about trying to stop the more advanced students from bullying the rest and maybe they’ll lose the guy who can teleport to the regular school system if he can’t pass vector calculus. There’s an ever growing roster of students that meet an attack by the adversary that’s the climax of each installment. Each book, some of them die.

It passes the time.

“So, with all the orientation language you have. . .”

“Yes?” Pactlagh asks. She draws it out like she’s ready to attack.

“Do you have a word for trans people?” I ask. Gogo uses a lot of words to translate my sentence.

“I’m not sure I understood all that.”

“People who are female presenting who didn’t used to be, for instance.”

“All female presenting people once weren’t.” Pactlagh talks like I seem to have brain damage. “Because all people were children.”

“Are there people who are female presenting and then male presenting?”

“Like Cerberus,” Pactlagh says.

“What?”

“Yeah. He’s a girl in all his childhood stories, and he’s got a vagina.”

“How do you know?”

“Everyone on the ship pees at the same time eventually.”

“Why the fuck don’t your toilets have walls?” I demand.

“It’s a kind of vulnerable moment. Who’d want to be alone for that?”`

“Every normal person!”

As the conversation continues, Pactlagh tells me metros have their own pronoun issues. There are two pronouns in Vaughtlin, “nuk”, meaning someone of your group, and “hogh”, meaning anything else. In pre-industrial times, metros only referred to people in their city as nuk, but their sense of communal identity grew until it was rude to refer to any metro as hogh.

When they went into space and met the cousin races, metros mostly gave used nuk for them. However since the wars, the Crusade has been narrowing nuk to mean just people of Crusade, and Recon has broadened nuk to include all living things. To people of Recon, it sounds as if Crusade calls everyone else “it” or “that”.

Some people on the Embrace use nuk for even inanimate objects, which is a bit like saying, “Just a minute, I need to find Mr. Pencil.” Pactlagh describes this with an eye roll that seems medically dangerous.

Chapter 9: Boss Monster

I wake up at sunrise and dive, looking for something to feed the two idiots from the sky. This involves a lot of passes swimming to the floor and back, which takes until the sun is just past the middle. At least they’re house-trained now, even if they’re scared of the megawhale, just because it’s big enough to eat them without even knowing it did it.

Then I gather up a bunch of long, stringy seaweed to make a giant matt I desperately need for something. Once I show the idiots how to weave, they take to it pretty well. They’re tiny hands and tiny fingers are pretty good for this. They weave and chatter to each other, and finally, I get to talk to the wonderful rectangle.

The rectangle belonged to one of the idiots, but it’s mine now. Sometimes I come back from fishing to find one of the idiots talking to the rectangle. I look at her until she puts it down, which doesn’t take long.

The rectangle shows me pictures, and it makes strange sounds. Every day, its sounds are more like actual language, and I become more aware that within this rectangle is the mind of a little bitch.

On the third day, it’s time to gather big sea pods and giant clams. The meat from the clams makes the idiots sick, and I don’t like it much, still it’s important I gather more clams than I can possibly eat and also lots of seed pods. With some insistent barking, I can get the idiots to help pull the meat out of the clams and scoop pulp out of the seed pods.

I sure hope the idiots can get me off the planet because. . .

-- Journal entry by Cowstalker attempting to report the day from Seal Girl’s point of view.

Why does Seal Girl want to get off the planet? She’s not miserable. She doesn’t seem to be a fugitive. I don’t want to be here, but it’s my home. Nothing seems to scare Seal Girl. She seems perfectly happy in her day to day life. I wonder where her people are.

Also, I don’t know what Giant Clam Day is about, but Seal Girl has gotten obsessed with clams. She almost completely abandons the hunt for food to get giant clam after giant clam. She pulls them open -- something Pactlagh and I couldn’t do together if you gave us crowbars -- and scoops out the meat. She gives us one to scoop out. I take a bite of the meat, almost throw up and say, “No thank you.”

Seal Girl gives me sustained eye contact with her giant, wet eyes with their huge irises. I start scooping out the meat, putting it on a mat like Seal Girl is doing. I’m guessing this is another religious thing.

When she’s done, she takes all the leftover meat and slings it into the ocean. It’s not just the clam, but everything we haven’t eaten in the last few days. After she throws it out, she picks up her shiny shell and shines a light across the top of the ocean about where the food landed. She runs the light back and forth like she’s playing with a cat.

I think I see the water move, but I’m not sure. Seal Girl puts down her shiny shell and goes back to cleaning out shells.

And apparently, after that, it’s time for us to scoop gunk out of seed pods. These are round, dark green things the size of a world-record-winning pumpkin. It’s hours of slimy work. The gunk I hollow out goes on a completely different mat. Seal Girl cuts the top of the seed pods. If we stop scooping out the middle, she gives us the eye until we get back to it.

I don’t know why she’s doing any of this crap. We’ve got more important worries. We’re almost out of fresh water.

Apparently, I’m a fucking moron. It started raining early on the third day. Seal Girl jumps around and dances in the rain. She’s got a little tube-shaped bit of shell tied to a seaweed string, and she swings it around like a baton twirler and it whistles. She barks and hiccups and dances.

She stops when all the giant clam shells fill with rain water. She barks at us, and we start pouring the water from the clam shells into the big seed pods. We fill up all four pods, which I think is something like twelve gallons of water. When we’re done, we follow Seal Girl, hopping around the raft and yipping.

The fourth night, I ask Pactlagh, “How is my Vaghtlin coming along?”

“You speak about as well as my son did when he was one year old.”

“I thought you didn’t speak it when you were home.”

“We don’t,” Pactlagh says. “It’s his second language. It’s been three days. You’d have to be Toram to learn much of the language in three days.”

“Is Toram that good with languages?”

“Incredible,” Pactlagh says. “They can speak Vaghtlin, Ninglit perfectly. They know a couple dozen others.”

“Their English is just okay.”

“They learned it in a week to talk to you, and they don’t have anyone but you to practice it with. You’ve had almost as much time to learn Vaghtlin, and you’re terrible at it.”

“Fine.”

“What’s wrong with Toram’s English?” Pactlagh asks.

“There’s this kind of word they keep ignoring.”

“What kind of word?”

“They’re called articles. You say ‘a’ before a thing if it’s one of many things. You say ‘the’ before a thing if it’s the only thing of its type that’s important.”

“You can’t need these words often.”

I shake my head forcefully. “In English, you use them constantly. Usually, when you talk about something, you mark it as one of many, or the only important one.”

“So a couple times in a sentence?”

“Yeah,” I say. “When Gogo translated what you just said, there was an ‘a’ for a couple times and ‘a’ for sentence because they’re both one of many things.”

“That’s idiotic. Your English is one of the many things that can stick its tongue up my only important anus. Toram’s right to not use these stupid words.”

The fifth morning, I wake up to hear a couple of creatures chewing on our raft. Only parts of their heads are above water. If a manatee is a cute little mouse, these are like big possums that jump out of a dumpster right in front of you in the middle of the night. They’re a mottled gray things with about hippo-sized heads. They have blunt teeth and four segmented eyes, and they’re chewing on the raftweed like grazing cows.

Seal Girl is awake before I am shining a light on the water with her mirror. She’s moving the light back and forth like she thinks there’s a big cat under the water.

“Can you maybe stab these things?” I ask. She can’t understand me. “I don’t know what weird religious thing you’re doing, but your god isn’t going to come take care of these things.”

Sometimes I’m glad Gogo can’t translate what I say for Seal Girl. Every single thing I tell her is almost always instantly proven to be total bullshit.

The first signal is the water starts to churn below us. I’m used to waves, and this isn’t one. There’s some kind of chaotic ripples coming from nowhere I can tell.

Then, one of the big hippo-manatees that’s chewing on the raftweed starts to sense something. It screams -- a loud undulating bellow -- and starts to dive away from the raftweed. The other one turns its head back and forth in bafflement or maybe panic.

The ocean to the east seems to change color to mottled gray as it nears the surface, and then it rises. This thing is big to breach like a whale. It lifts its mouth like an alligator, skimming the ocean as it swims. The hippo-manatee that tried to swim away goes into its mouth without touching the teeth. The raftweed and the remaining hippo-manatee get pulled toward the ultrawhale’s mouth as it scoops water. It’s too big, and I’m too terrified to see if it’s turning, but it’s no longer going straight at us when it hits the raftweed. I see a row of teeth bigger than me pass like train cars, then there’s the edge of the mouth and a line of eyes.

Then come a set of giant gills that spray water, and the raftweed is swamped. For long seconds, I’m underwater, tangled in the vines that have kept me afloat for days. If I had only my own strength to survive I’d be dead. I’m wrapped up, confused, terrified, and I can’t get to the surface, but the raftweed bobs up on the churning sea. I come up just glad to be breathing. I wait there, completely soaked and gasping.

After a while, I notice Seal Girl tramping around, putting all her stuff back into place on the raftweed.

“Aghitle voggip,” says Pactlagh, a charming expression that literally means ‘my family’s pus’.

A couple long breaths later, I realize I’m not hearing a translation. I reach up, and my earpiece is gone. It’s been there all this time. I’ve slept with it four nights, but I’ve managed to keep it in my ear until now. I can’t talk to Toram. I can’t get information. I have to talk to Pactlagh with the tiny big of Vaughtlin I know.

Here’s a sample of our conversation now that I don’t have a translator, translated to English as best I can imagine:

Me: Hey, Tyrant?

Pactlagh: Why are you calling me Tyrant again?

Me: I don’t say Pactlagh good.

Pactlagh: That’s true. What do you want?

Me: You’re person’s child?

Pactlagh: Yes?

Me: What call this person?

Pactlagh: Parents?

Me: Parents. Parents. Parents. Do you have parents now?

Pactlagh: I have one. The other one died in the war with the Research Elves.

Me: War means this? (bangs fists together)

Pactlagh: Yes. You captured it. It’s like I’m losing him all over again.

Me: Died is this? (drops on my side with eyes closed and tongue out)

Pactlagh: Yes. That is death. That is sweet, sweet, beckoning death.

We’ve been here seven days, and I finally see Seal Girl look scared. She goes out on her gathering rounds and comes back very quickly. She grabs the seaweed blanket we’ve been weaving and starts tying it to the big bone cross she has. She barks at us, and we try to follow her movements, tying the blanket to parts of the big wooden cross and to the raftweed. She ties a rope to the cross.

For the first time, I understand what Seal Girl is doing. Pactlagh and I wrap the rope around waists and pull on it with Seal Girl. Together, we manage to raise a crude sail. It’s not very good. Our weave is pretty tight, but it still doesn’t catch wind as well as cloth would. Still, enough wind hits it that we’re caught in a quick tug of war. Pactlagh, Seal Girl and me .

Seal Girl winds the rope around the raftweed vines and ties it down. Meanwhile, the sail is trying to rip itself free of us and the raftweed. It’s deforming the whole raft like a thumb dragged through cake icing.

After a third rope, the sail is in place, and the drifting raftweed has been converted into a sailboat. I’m willing to bet it’s be the slowest sailboat in the world, but a while later, I realize I’d lose that bet, because I can barely make another sail in the distance, growing gradually smaller. It’s got to be another improvised raftweed sailboat, because anything else would overtake us.

“Wait,” I say to Seal Girl, “we’re running away from other things like you?”

She doesn’t know what I’m saying. I point at her and point at the sail behind us and repeat the gesture a couple times. Seal Girl looks at me, flicks her fingers at me and goes back to her sailing. There’s something in her stance like she resolved the question, so I think the flick was yes.

I point to the distant sail, let my finger travel forward to point down to where we are and spread my hands in an inquiring expression. Seal Girl tilts her head like a confused dog. I reach out toward the other sail again, make a grabbing gesture like I’m picking up the other crew, and I gesture like I’m dropping it on the raftweed with us and repeat my inquiring look. I’m trying to convey, What happens if the catch up?

Seal Girl holds her arm up to her mouth, opens her mouth to show her sharp teeth and starts to sink her teeth into her arm.

Pactlagh asks me a question. It’s something like “Do you know what Seal Girl something?” I’m guessing the something is “means”. I don’t know the words for what I hope she’s saying, “Seal Girl’s people are prone to fleas,” so I say what I’m afraid she’s saying. “If her people find us, they’ll eat us.”

Eight days. It takes eight days for Toram to get a damn shuttle here. We spend a long day waiting to see if the other raft will appear again before Seal Girl takes down the sail again.

In the morning, Seal Girl’s tablet says in Toram’s voice, “Bongseon. I’m going to be landing in. . .a little over hour.” They say something in Ninglit, and Pactlagh whoops for joy. I didn’t think she could express that kind of happiness.

Then Toram switches to a bunch of hiccups and barks. Seal Girl has been looking suspiciously at the tablet, not liking it suddenly switching to a foreign language. At these sounds, she picks up the tablet and puts it almost directly to her face.

“They can speak Seal Girl?” I ask Pactlagh in Vaughtlin.

“She speaks to Gogo,” Pactlagh explains, trying to keep to my limited vocabulary. “They have Gogo something something.”

I think she’s saying that, back on Aquarius, Toram has been able to review everything that happened around the tablet, so they could research Seal Girl’s language.

I’m trembling with impatience by the time the Hopper falls from the sky. I’m watching the sky for any sign of it, and I almost miss it. The Hopper drops straight down from above us at incredibly fast speeds, so I spot it maybe a minute before it decelerates and hovers just above us. I think of Hoppers as small because they’re tiny things compared to the Embrace or Aquarius, but it dwarfs the raftweed we’re floating on.

The hopper hovers in the air. It has Seal Girl’s undivided attention, but I don’t see the religious awe or complete terror I’d expect from a big floating object from the sky. I think she’s seen spacecraft before our captors crashed in the sea just over a week ago.

A door opens on the side of the hopper and a walkway extends down. Toram appears at the doorway, their bright grin is almost more exciting than the promise of a shower.

But Seal Girl is stalking forward across the raftweed with her teeth bared and her big hands curled into claws.

Toram holds their hands up and starts chirping and gasping. Seal Girl growls something in response, and Toram starts talking again.

Seal Girl grabs Toram’s neck. Toram hasn’t had eight days of seeing casual demonstrations of Seal Girl’s immense strength, but everything about her frame suggests power. They have to know she could take their head off. Still, their tone sounds reasoning, not pleading.

Seal Girl flicks her fingers at them and walks back, picks up the tablet and pushes past Toram to go up the walkway.

Pactlagh says something in Ninglit.

“Could you speak a language I know, please?” I ask.

“Are we pigham taking Seal Girl to Vuctli?” Pactlagh asks. All of it is in Vaughtlin. I’m translating all the parts I understood.

“Taking her where?” I ask.

“Aquarius,” Toram says to me in English. “Pactlagh asked, ‘Are we really taking Seal Girl to Aquarius?’ Here, take my earpiece.” Toram pulls an earpiece out of their pouch and hands it to me.

“Is this working?” I say. The earpiece babbles the phrase back in Ninglit. “Oh, that’s a relief.”

I turn to Pactlagh. “Seal Girl saved our lives and worked to keep us fed and not eaten. It’d be ungrateful to kick her out now.”

“Here, she’s independent. Out there, she’s going to be an uneducated alien, and she’ll be dragged into a war. We’ll be doing what SweetTalk did to you.”

“Gogo explained to her that there’s war,” Toram says. “She knows it’s dangerous. She thought I was Research Elf, who apparently have been coming here and stealing children. I told her I’m not, but she might not believe me. She half expects to be enslaved, and she’s still on board.”

“Why?” I ask.

“She wants to fly. Gogo didn’t explain that?”

“Fine,” Pactlagh says. “But if she wants to go back here, you’re taking her back.”

“Absolutely.”

We go up the walkway.

“The smell from that raft is really. . .something,” Toram says.

“Eight goddamn days,” I say.

At first we don’t see Seal Girl, but she opens a door at the back of the ship and peers out. There’s a lot more room than the last time I was in the hopper. The displacer that transported me from Earth isn’t there, so there’s more room for us to sit.There’s a long thing like a couch, and a lounger up front that the pilot sits in.

I take a seat. Seal Girl crawls around the cabin, touching the metal sides. It occurs to me that not only is this her first vehicle. This might be the first time she’s been near solid walls or chairs.

I pat the seat next to me, and Seal Girl watches to see if the seat reacts in any way. My gesture means nothing to her.

“She doesn’t have to sit,” Pactlagh said. “The Hopper is big enough to have inertial suspension. You don’t feel movement inside the ship.”

Toram picks up a pair of goggles from a compartment by the pilot’s seat. They makes a coughing sound to get Seal Girl’s attention, puts the goggles on and takes them off. They hand them to Seal Girl. She takes the goggles tentatively. Slowly, she puts them on and laughs, a hearty chuffing sound.

“What is she seeing?” I ask.

“The outside,” Pactlagh said. “It’s like the display in the Daggers, but without all the data and information.”

“Taking off now,” Toram says.

I don’t feel a thing, but Seal Girl lets out a shriek. It is literally the happiest sound I have ever heard.

Pactlagh lies down across the seats with her feet in my lap.

“You’re going to sleep?”

“I’m not damp, and I don’t feel the constant movement of the waves. The only way I could be more comfortable would be if there were a shower here. Yes, I’m going to sleep.”

It’s only then that I remember the gate back to Aquarius is several hours from planet 1278-4.

Seal Girl is sitting cross-legged on the floor. The thing she’s feeling is so profound that I can read it on her face. She’s realizing just how small her world is, how small she is in the scheme of things. When you leave your world and see it be less than a marble, you can either feel terror or wonder. Seal Girl feels wonder, and I take a quiet moment to feel it with her.

“Oh shit,” Toram says.

Some audio device by the pilot’s chair starts jabbering in Vaughtlin. Gogo isn’t translating it because they’re not speaking to me. I can pick out about one word in twelve. “Ship. . . space . . . give . . . Gaghkal.” I haven’t had to think about the war in over a week, but I remember the Gaghkal is the Vaughtlin word for “Crusade”, and they’re the bad guys.

Pactlagh is immediately sitting up. I can hear Toram rattling Vaghtlin off very fast, sounding as charming as you can sound in that vehicular manslaughter of a language.

“I thought we fought to keep them out of this system,” I whisper to Pactlagh.

“We always fight to delay. It’s been over a week. We weren’t going to hold this spot.”

Toram turns off transmission and turns back to us. “It’s not going well. They say we can surrender control of the ship or they’re going to shoot out our drive.”

“Tell them you don’t understand,” Pactlagh says as she clambers up to the pilot’s chair.

“What wouldn’t I understand?” Toram asks.

“The universe is full of idiots. Pretend you’re one of them. You don’t understand.”

Toram starts talking Vaughtlin in a comically baffled tone as Pactlagh takes over the pilot’s seat. I can hear the enemy pilots sounding frustrated with them. Toram cuts off transmission again.

“Can you fly this?” they ask Pactlagh.

“I learned on a Hopper,” she answers.

I can’t feel anything, but Pactlagh gestures for a very sudden acceleration and a roll, and Seal Girl, still wearing goggles showing a view of the space around us, laughs in delight.

“We should be comfortable,” Toram tells me. “Hopper can suppress effects of acceleration in cabin.”

“At any speed?” I ask.

“At any speed Hopper will go. There is safety feature.”

“Acceleration safety limits disengaged,” Gogo says.

“Fucking Pactlagh,” Toram says, and urgently tries to convince Seal Girl to get off the floor and onto the couch.

Out of the blue, it comes, a sudden kick of acceleration. Seal Girl was just starting to stand and flies into the couch. Black spots swim across my eyes. Toram is pressed into the couch. I can barely hear them say, “Said. . .I’d. . .never. . .get into. . .this situation. . .again.”

Seal Girl laughs and chatters something at me. Then she girmaces, and think maybe she’s damaged something, but she puts the goggles back on.

The acceleration changes are about as bad as they were in the Dagger, but I don’t have a bunch of webbing holding me in place. I’m on a couch with two aliens.

There’s a turn, and everything shifts. It’s all I can do to keep from flying off the couch and hitting a wall. Toram is out cold, and their skull hits mine with painful force. Seal Girl has sunk her claws into the couch to keep herself in place.

It goes back to forward acceleration, and I’m seeing lots of black creeping from the edges and some flashes. I’m feeling nauseous.

“This feels. . .harmful.”

“It is,” Pactlagh grunts. I take a little satisfaction in knowing the acceleration is kicking her ass, too. That’s about my last thought before I black out.

Chapter 10: Hidden Role

I’ll never understand people who play video games as a way of ruining someone else’s day. What I really, really don’t understand is people who do it to people who play Dagger Command.

If you’re playing Dagger Command, your days is ruined. The control scheme is completely unlike anything in the world. The in-game tutorial is irritating to the point of being emotionally scarring, and the pacing is surreal. Anyone playing is either a glutton for punishment or the kind of science nerd who wore a tie to day care.

The most hilarious is when people try to sabotage their own side. Neither your guns nor your torpedoes will fire on friendly players (you can use guns on your own team in a dead zone for some reason). The most common, effective way to fight is to play a multiplayer game that requires eliminating the entire opposing team to win and just finding a random spot and cloaking.

One thing that Dagger Command is good at conveying is that space is really big. Finding a cloaked ship that isn’t trying to do anything but hide is basically impossible. Congratulations, you’ve made a really pointless activity .3% more pointless. Now go throw water balloons at someone in a shower.

Post titled “Griefers” by Barbara Yoon

I wake up to a splitting headache and Pactlagh prying my eyelids open. “Bongseon, can you talk?”

“Yeah, fuck, that hurts. How much acceleration was that?”

Gogo answers, “You were experiencing 11G acceleration after the Hopper dampened its effects.”

“We’re past the Daggers?”

“Yeah,” Pactlagh says. “If they don’t have anyone cloaked at the gate, I think we can get out.”

“What if they do?”

Pactlagh looks baffled that I’d ask such a question. “We’ll die. Check on Toram.”

Seal Girl is looking at us as though wondering why we went to sleep.

I check Toram’s pulse, and their eyes open suddenly. “We made it?” they ask, as though this baffles them.

“So far. We still have the gate.”

“Space fighting is worst. Something happens kilometers away, and you’re dead before you know it. It makes me feel so helpless.”

“We’re reaching the gate,” Pactlagh announces.

“Are we dead?” I ask.

“Don’t think so,” Pactlagh says. “We’ve been a perfect target for a couple minutes. If they guarded the gate, they’d have struck by now.”

“Pursuing daggers entering torpedo range,” Gogo says.

“What’s that?” Toram asks.

“It’s fine,” Pactlagh says.

“Torpedoes launched,” Gogo says. “Impact in nine seconds.”

“That doesn’t sound fine,” Toram says.

“It’s fine.”

“We’ve transported via gate,” Gogo says.

“See,” Pactlagh says. “We went through.”

“We’re safe?” I ask.

“Of course we’re safe, Bongseon. You should know this from the stupid game you played. Torpedoes don’t go through gates.”

“But won’t the ships come after us?”

“I don’t think they’ll dare,” Toram says. “There are still Recon patrols here.”

Seal Girl is looking around with her goggles and chuffing happily.

“So we’re safe?”

“Yes, we’re closing in on Aquarius.”

We dock, we have customs. We have a medical screening to see if we picked up parasites, which we did. There’s a kind of mite-like creature that lives on Seal Girl that’s spread to all of us. We don’t notice or care about them, but the station staff puts us in irradiated coffins for fifteen minutes.

And that last part is perfectly fine, because I haven’t had any privacy for eight days. I ask if I have to stay still in the coffin, and they say, no, I can do anything, and I do. They practically have to drag me out of that damn thing.

They burn our clothes and give everybody pink rompers that are apparently kind of the space version of hospital gowns.

We get out of quarantine, and I’m back in the public part of Aquarius. I’ve had over a week of stone age life, and seeing the enormous tank of water above me hits me as hard as it did the first time.

Seal Girl makes a kind of choking sound and literally climbs the walls, going up like a monkey towards the glass or whatever the clear stuff is that contains the water of the giant aquarium.

“What is that?”

I turn to see a familiar-looking Metro in a pilot’s suit. It’s one of the people in Pactlagh’s part of Wing Twelve. They were Tyrant, Perfect, Proton . . .

“Surgeon!” I say.

“Cowstalker,” Surgeon says, acknowledging me. He looks past me and breaks into a smile, “And Tyrant! It’s so good to see you!”

Pactlagh rushes forward and hugs Surgeon.

“It is good -- so good -- to have you back!” Surgeon says. When they break off the hug, Surgeon asks, “So did you find out how Cowstalker cheated?”

Pactlagh points at Surgeon and says, “Don’t be an asshole, Guknot!”

I actually know the word Pactlagh used that Gogo translated as “asshole”. A more literal translation would be “inhospitable”, but it’s such a bad thing to call a metro that “asshole” kind of catches it. When I first heard it defined, I told Pactlagh she had been inhospitable when she first met me, and she sulked for a couple hours.

“Cowstalker is smart and has a good heart. She is Wing Twelve,” Pactlagh says. Surgeon looks almost as floored as I am to hear Pactlagh describe me like that. He touches his chin in what I think is an apology because I haven’t seen this gesture from Pactlagh ever.

“But you still haven’t told me what that is,” Surgeon says, pointing at Seal Girl, who is hanging off a wall like King Kong, looking at the aquarium above us.

“Gogo says their name for themselves is something like ‘raft people’,” Pactlagh says. “That one saved our lives after we were shot down. She wanted to leave the planet. Cowstalker named her ‘Seal Girl’.”

Toram gets out of quarantine and looks up at Seal Girl. “I’ll take ten minutes to try to talk her down and then I’m taking a shower.”

“A shower!” Pactlagh and I say more or less at once.

We break into a run to the shower room. It’s built to metro specifications, in that it’s a kind of conga-line car-wash that sprays you with water, scrubs you and pulls the water right off of you. Just over a week ago, I found this dehumanizing, but I’ve spent a week covered in brine above a plant that’s slowly feeding on a school of decaying fish. It’s the best luxury in the world.

The whole way, I’m following Pactlagh through the shower line, working grit out of my crevices and holding a conversation about how damn good freshwater feels on my skin just like I’m a damn metro. Pactlagh does the whole line twice. I do it four times. My skin is painfully exfoliated by the time I’m done, and it feels glorious.

Pactlagh waits outside the shower until I’m done. It’s great to see people wearing clothes. It’s great to have climate controlled air. It’s great to not have seaweed stuck to my body, and it’s great not to smell like dead fish.

“Hey, Bongseon,” Pactlagh says. “I’m going to go catch up with Surgeon. Do you want to come? I promise he’s a good guy.”

“I don’t know. Oh, wait, I do. I can be lying in a bed indoors by myself. I’m going to be doing that.”

This is my first time being in a bed in over a week. Hell, I’ve just started being indoors. I’m so tired. I close my eyes, lie still, and I can’t go to sleep.

“Gogo,” I say at last. “Do you have access to the code Aquarius uses for authentication?”

“Yes,” Gogo said. “It’s publicly available.”

“Great, let’s go over it and see if we can find a weakness.”

About forty minutes and two crucial security flaws later, I fall asleep while trying to get Gogo to explain something about connection management. I’m having the best nap. Gogo wakes me up because Gogo is a little bitch and because Pactlagh is calling.

“Pactlagh would like to speak with you,” Gogo says.

“Okay,” I say. “Is she going to call or. . .”

“Is who going to call?” Pactlagh asks.

“Wait,” I say. “So Gogo says you’d like to speak to me; I say ‘Okay’, and we’re talking right away?”

“Of course. There’s some Wing Twelve business.”

“Am I in Wing Twelve?” I ask.

“That’s what I’m calling to find out. I know we kidnapped you. I’m saying if you want to be part of Wing Twelve until we get you back, you can be. If you’re Wing Twelve, you need to come down here. We have a situation.”

“What situation?”

“Are you Wing Twelve?” Pactlagh asks.

A voice in my head is saying It’s a mistake to say yes. Over and over again.

“Yes.”

“Come find us. Gogo will tell you where we are.”

Gogo gives me irritating but functional directions. I find a smaller room near where we had the dance party. There’s a table with what looks like a big circle in the middle, and there’s a hologram of a star field over the circle. If the circle looked metal or plastic instead of like porcelain, this would look satisfying like something from a movie. As it is, it looks like someone will replace the stars with a charcuterie board. Pactlagh, Surgeon and Toram are sitting in chairs around the table.

Seal Girl is standing behind the table. She still doesn’t have clothes and doesn’t really need them with all her fur. She’s got her tablet in a sling that’s almost like a purse. She is pawing at the stars like a cat.

“So what’s wrong?” I ask as I come in.

“Wing Eight was attacked,” Pactlagh says.

“Everyone was captured except MadDog,” Surgeon says.

“I don’t know who that is,” Pactlagh says.

“Hikgral,” Surgeon says.

Toram fiddles with the display, and I see the ships weave forward and back as the time shifts.

“Dead zone mines went off right as they left the gate,” Toram says. “They encountered the same kind of new craft that took you two prisoner. MadDog sped out at 14G without inertial dampers. And got out of the dead zone. She evaded the ambush long enough to fly to another gate. Pretty impressive.”

“Ten minutes later, half of Wing Twelve went out on a scouting mission and got attacked,” Pactlagh says. “They were outnumbered, but they managed to evade. Perfect led the flight, and she ran back to the Embrace.”

“It could be a coincidence,” Surgeon says. “The Crusade has a very large navy.”

“If they’d deployed this many of their capture ships, we’d have seen them before now,” Pactlagh says.

“We should talk to Gaoshi,” Toram says.

“Grandmaster Gaoshi?” Surgeon asks.

“Grandmaster? So is he a . . .racist?” I ask.

“They’re one of the top ranked people in a game that mostly oowa play,” Pactlagh explains.

“So you want to talk to a chess champion?” I ask.

“Do you really want our situation turned into an oowa game?” Surgeon asks.

“You play some weird ass chess.”

“I know chess from Earth movies,” Toram says. “But I don’t know rules. This oowa game is called Zone Control. Oowa pride themselves on accuracy and detail. Game includes things like morale of engineers who built ships.”

“They have a scenario for the defense of Noktau,” Pactlagh adds bitterly. “The event that cost our families was one of their games.”

“Which Gaoshi has won,” Toram says. “In tournament, they protected Noktau for seven months.”

“Okay,” I said. “Gaoshi is one of those.”

“Are you telling me you have Zone Control grandmasters on Earth?” Surgeon asks.

“We have military geeks,” I say. “Is Gaoshi’s knowledge practical? Ours seem to be mostly full of shit.”

“In times of war, the top ranking players in Zone Control take over the oowa navy,” Surgeon says.

“On Earth, somebody with a neckbeard and camo pants got an erection, and he doesn’t know why.”

“Let’s hear what they have to say,” Pactlagh says.

“I don’t see why we don’t call first,” Toram says as we march through the station.

“I want them to have as little time to think about their answer as possible,” Pactlagh says. “I think people usually have better instincts than understanding. They’ll give a better understanding if they’re still trying to figure out who’s asking the question.”

“Or they’ll just decide not to talk to us,” Toram says.

“I think they’ll talk,” Pactlagh says. “I think they’ll be curious.”

We’re marching past the guest living quarter and offices in Aquarius. The giant looming tank is above us. We come to a hallway with a creature at a desk reading from a tablet.

“That’s . . .” I say.

“It’s cheepap,” Toram says.

“It’s a cat person.”

“Please do not call him that,” Toram says.

This thing has a scrawny, hairy body like a monkey without a tail. It has a wide head with slightly pointed ears loping at the sides. It looks kind of like a cat with more of a perpetually bored, annoyed expression, and I realize what a tough bar that is to clear. It’s sitting at a desk reading something off a tablet.

“It’s one of the primitive cousin races,” Surgeon says.

We walk across the intersection. I think for a moment that they want to talk to the cheepap, but they’re trying to go through a door next to the cheepap.

“What the fuck is that?” the cheepap asks, pointing at me. I notice the cheepap doesn’t have anything like a headset, which means he speaks Ninglit, which is what my headset has been spitting out for Pactlagh and Surgeon.

“It’s a human,” Pactlagh says. The cheepap seems confused, so Pactlagh continues, “One of the root race, from Earth, the origin planet.”

“What about that one?” the Cheepap points at Seal Girl. “Are you motherfuckers abusing primitives?”

“We need to talk to Gaoshi,” Toram says.

“I’ll tell them you want to see them,” the cheepap says. He opens the door and is gone for a moment.

“Did that thing just say ‘motherfuckers’?” I asked.

“Cheepap?” Toram asks. “Oh, I can see how Gogo would translate it like that. More literally, it’s ‘someone who makes walls out of shit’. It’s casual insult among the cheepap, and it’s used similarly to English ‘motherfucker’.”

“Is building walls out of shit something cheepap frequently do?”

“No. It wouldn’t be much use as insult if it was ordinary behavior.”

“Gogo,” I say, “In the future, just translate it as ‘shitmasons’.”

“Do you use this insult on Earth?” Toram asks.

“No, but if I ever get back, I’ll try to get it going.”

The door opens again. “They say they’ll talk to you.”

We follow the cheepap into a dark room. Gaoshi is sitting in a chair. Oowa are a little bigger than humans. They have big eyes and big jaws. Their arms are long, and their legs are short. They have just a scattering of fuzz most places. There’s a plate that covers one side of their head. Whatever material it’s made of something that shines with a dazzling otherworldly light.

I’m just fucking with you. The plate looks like gray clay. There are some alien characters that seem to be painted on the clay, and those characters shift and change constantly.

“My assistant says a BaiMato is here with a human and two Metros who speak Ninglit and an unknown primitive,” Gaoshi says. Their voice sounds like a rockslide that smokes two packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day.

Gaoshi points at Toram, which they do with a really long thumb. They rumble, “I know only one Lab Elf who keeps the company of the Embrace crew. It is Uigatoram, who my people once captured from the Bright Spear.”

“That is correct, Grandmaster Gaoshi,” Toram says in the oowa’s language.

Gaoshi’s thumb points at Surgeon. “You are in a pilot’s uniform. You have a human with you. This is some desperate experiment, which is the hallmark of Wing Twelve. You speak the Ninglit dialect. . .”

“Ninglit Language,” Pactlagh corrects.

“. . .so you are the one with the callsign Surgeon.”

Gaoshi turns to Pactlagh. “A metro woman in Wing Twelve. You are callsign Tyrant.”

“Wow, Gaoshi is really good with names,” the cheepap behind us says. “If someone, say, worked for Gaoshi for a couple months, and they didn’t show any sign of knowing his name. That someone would be feeling pretty resentful about now.”

“You don’t know other two.” Toram says in oowa.

“You three have made your mark on naval warfare, so I know you. I know few humans by name and even fewer raft people from 1287-4.”

“You know what she is?” Pactlagh asks.

Gaoshi snaps the fingers of one hand together like they’re making a puppet bite. Somehow, I can read agreement from the gesture. “The Research Elves claimed 1287-4 and captured some Raft People. They thought that being natural swimmers would make them good pilots.”

“Were they?” I ask.

“Inconclusive,” Gaoshi says. “The Research Elves found the Raft People dangerous and unpredictable.”

Everyone tries not to look at Seal Girl, and fails. She’s just looking curiously at the changing symbols on Gaoshi’s skull.

“They were dangerous and unpredictable as slaves,” Gaoshi clarifies. “It’s what anyone in that position should strive to be.”

“May I ask how you know Iwiu secret projects?” Toram asks.

“When the Research Elves lost the war, they asked for asylum from us, their old enemies. They handed over all their secrets, and we let them stay in our rehabilitation facilities. They preferred it to being shoved out of a Crusader airlock.”

“We want your expertise,” Pactlagh says.

“Military expertise?” Gaoshi asks.

Pactlagh nods.

“It’ll be an incident if I give that up without compensation. What if we trade? For every question you ask, I get three questions beyond what I need to answer your question.”

Pactlagh holds up a fist, and she and Gaoshi very solemnly fist bump over this.

“I might have questions for any of you,” Gaoshi says. First, Toram, then Surgeon and then I tap their fist with ours.

“Why is there a human with you?” Gaoshi asks.

“On Earth, there was a game, and I beat it,” I say. “I didn’t realize it was a test.”

“We gave Earthlings our Dagger Training simulator, presenting it as a form of fantasy entertainment.” Pactlagh explains. “We were hoping they might have good pilots because humans are so numerous.”

Gaoshi nods. “How long did it take you to find a weakness in the game to exploit?”

“Who said I found any. . .” I’m looking around, and everyone is looking at me like I’m full of shit. Seal Girl is doing it, too. She can’t even understand what I said. She’s just reading the room.

“Fine,” I say at last. “It took about three months of looking for them. I’d been playing for about two years.”

Gaoshi turns to Pactlagh. “How many people have been evacuated from the Embrace since it fled Noktau?”

“I can’t talk about this,” Pactlagh says.

“Look, I know you have a network of merchants and couriers who are sympathetic to your cause, and they’ve taken some refugees from the Embrace and settled them on different systems. I just want to know a rough estimate of how many people.”

“Roughly 200.”

“That’s three questions,” Gaoshi says. “What can I tell you?”

“We want to know what happened to some of our fighters,” Pactlagh says.

“Wing Eight?” Gaoshi guesses.

“How?” Pactlagh starts, and then says, “Yes, Wing Eight.”

“Would you release the records of the fight to me?” Gaoshi asks. They fold out a small table with a smooth disk on top. The disk is something black that reflects very little light. After Pactlagh says something into her headset, a small holograph of a gate comes up. I see eight blue dots appear around it, representing Wing Eight warping in. There’s one big red dot for the capture ship. As I watch, twelve red dots appear around them. That’s the Crusade fighters coming out of cloak. A yellow haze surrounds the blue dots for the dead zone.

If I was playing on my computer back home, and I ran into this -- ambushed by cloaked people who’d laid dead zone mines -- I’d leave and get a drink. There’s too many things against you.

The moment the blue dots get to the end of the dead zone they disappear. They’ve been picked up by the capture ship. One of the blue dots gets out of the capture zone. A red dot disappears, and the blue dot spins unpredictably away from the red dots. In a few seconds it gets enough distance to cloak.

“No one should have survived that,” Gaoshi says. “Your MadDog is as good as she thinks she is.”

Surgeon point an accusing finger at Goashi. “How do you know our flight rosters?”

Goashi points their thumb at the cheepap. The cheepap says, “All of the rich races talk around primitives like we aren’t there.”

“What the hell is dead space anyway?” I ask.

“We don’t have time for a lesson,” Surgeon says.

“Nonsense,” Gaoshi says. “Imagine, human, we are all fish. All we know is the water. But one day, we learn there is a surface to the water, and we can do things that seem like magic. A fish can leap through the surface and disappear from our world, only to reappear somewhere else. A fish can find food that lurks on the other side of the surface. Now the surface in my parable is a metaphor for a thing called jian. It is a boundary from our familiar place to something else.”

“Another dimension?” I ask.

“Ah, a fish has asked me if the thing beyond the surface is more water, and the answer is ‘no’. The thing beyond the jian, which we call ‘epispace’ is not a dimension because it lacks dimensionality. Everything beyond is either colocated or untraversible, very different from how things work in dimensions.

“You can cross the jian and get instant travel or communication. You can weave things through the jian and subvert our physical laws. Most if not all the things you’ve seen that might seem impossible are achieved by crossing the jian. Well, a dead zone is like the patches spat out by a bubble-net fish. They render the surface untraversable, to make it easier to catch its prey.”

“Bubble-net fish?”

“Earth doesn’t have those? Dammit. Well, I hope you understand. I heard there was another ambush.”

“Yes,” Pactlagh says. She mumbles into her headset, and a holograph appears of another engagement. This time, the red lights are already visible as the four blue lights show up. There’s an exchange of torpedoes.

All four of the blue fire, but only three of the red fire torpedoes. The capture ship and two of the red lights disappear and the rest back off. The blue lights speed to another gate.

Gaoshi seems much graver than did the first time, when seven ships got destroyed.

“Were the second set of ships on schedule?” Gaoshi asks.

“I don’t remember,” Surgeon says.

Pactlagh mumbles into her headset. “Gogo says they were twenty minutes early.”

Gaoshi doesn’t answer.

“Perfect has a nervous disposition. She gets impatient sometimes.”

“I’m done talking to you,” Gaoshi says.

“Why?” Pactlagh demands.

“I have my reasons. You’ve asked me three questions. I’ve answered one of yours to the best of my ability. You,” Gaoshi points at the cheepap. “Help me get my things ready. We’re going.”

“Going where?” the cheepap asks.

“Home. I’ve requested transport. I’ll let you know when they’ve said they’re coming.”

“You’re not going to offer us any explanation?” Toram asks.

“No,” Gaoshi says. “Now go.”

We shuffle out of the room. “Sorry guys,” the cheepap says. “Sometimes they’re a total shitmason.”

“Can I talk to you for a moment?” Toram asks Surgeon. The two go across the hallway and talk.

“What the hell is that about?” I ask Pactlagh.

Pactlagh does the windshield wiper shrug gesture. “Things are always a little unpredictable with the other races.”

“What, like with me?” I ask.

“Yes, like with you,” Pactlagh responds. “Do I ever act like I understand what’s going on with you?”

Toram comes back. “Hey,” I ask. “Where did Surgeon go?”

“There was something I wanted his help with,” Toram says.

“We were talking about how Gaoshi doesn’t make any sense,” Pactlagh says.

“Oowa have too many things,” I say.

“Maybe,” Toram says. “But they tend to be very rational. I feel confident that if we knew what Gaoshi knew, we would know why they stopped talking to us.”

“What possible sense could it make to kick us out like that?” Pactlagh asks.

“My theory is that Gaoshi thinks one of us isn’t to be trusted.”

“Ambushes don’t mean that we have a rat,” Pactlagh says. “They might have had sensors.”

“Dead zone mines take time to set up. Also, the early patrol surprised them. Our enemies didn’t know when our patrols would show up. They knew when they were supposed to.”

“Did the second ambush have dead zone mines?” I ask.

“No,” Pactlagh says. “But most of the enemy ships didn’t fire torpedoes, suggesting they were armed with mines instead.”

“So it sounds like we have traitor,” Toram says.

I find myself involuntarily looking in the direction Surgeon went. Pactlagh glances at Seal Girl.

Toram laughs. “Pactlagh, I love. I love that you thought I meant her. Hey, Seal Girl, we think you’re traitor. We’re going to give spaceship to everyone in universe except you.”

Seal Girl sees Toram smiling at her and chitters something cheerful at them.

Toram turns back to Pactlagh. “It had to be one of us who could understand what Gaoshi was saying. It was one of us four.”

Everyone is quiet. I just blurt, “So, Surgeon?”

Pactlagh shakes her head. “I’ve known him for years. I trust him completely.”

“So who do you think?” I ask.

“Honestly, you,” Pactlagh says. “Toram has a lot of freedom as a diplomat. If they wanted to betray us. We’d have been long dead. It’s not me. It’s not Surgeon.

“But I think Toram is spouting garbage. We don’t know why Gaoshi stopped talking.”

“Well, I enjoy paranoia as much as the next guy,” I said. “Gogo, have you or anyone else told me where the wings are?”

“Not unless Tyrant told you during the thirty minutes showering,” Gogo says, in English and Ninglet.

“That’s long shower,” Toram comments.

“We were on a rotting pile of seaweed for a week!” I said, probably louder than I intended.

“So there’s no traitor here,” Pactlagh says.

The lighting in Aquarius becomes brighter and orange. From hundreds of devices in almost every direction, an announcement blares in a variety of languages. A second later, Gogo says in my headpiece, “Emergency Message from Aquarius station control: The Crusade navy has entered the system in force and is requesting permission to dock. Aquarius control is denying them docking access, but they have military superiority and control this space.”

“Docks, now,” Toram says. They take my hand and all of us run through the station.

The atmosphere in Aquarius station has shifted from uneasy to terrified. Groups of people are speaking tensely. Most of them are moving toward the docks, many of them at more of a run than I am. Near the docks, some device is broadcasting messages, switching from grinding, guttural Vaughtlin to the flowing of Care Faction Mato. I can understand none of it.

As we get to the loading area around the docks, the crowds have stopped moving. People are standing in clusters. The people crowded here are mostly elves though there are a lot of metros.

“Wait here,” Toram says. “I’ll try to find us a ride.”

“What are they waiting for?” I ask.

“Their craft needs to be prepared, and only one or two can launch at a time. The speakers call them when they’re ready.”

Another announcement comes, and a crowd of elves -- including three children -- grabs their things and rushes out of my view toward the docks.

“What happens if they don’t get out when the Crusade gets here?”

Pactlagh takes a deep breath before she answers. “Elves, oowa and others will get sent to ‘Safety Colonies’. They’re getting worse as the Crusade gets more extreme. I’ve heard that almost nobody leaves these days.

“Metros they catch on station will be questioned. Anyone they suspect of working for Recon will be questioned and killed. They know who I am, so I won’t last long if I get here.

“Primitives like Seal Girl and you are. . . well, you’re animals from a Crusade perspective. That’s better than being a mato, but it’s not good.”

There’s another announcement in Core Faction Mato. I don’t understand it, but a ripple of shock runs through the crowd.

“What happened?”

Pactlagh doesn’t answer.

“Gogo,” I say, “translate the last announcement.”

“It was, ‘The transport Enduring Goodwill has been destroyed by Crusade forces. We repeat that we cannot guarantee the safety of any ship leaving Aquarius.’”

Toram runs back. “I found a transport!”

“Does it have cloak?” Pactlagh asks.

“No,” Toram says. “It’s a civilian transport.”

“Get everyone on,” Pactlagh says.

Toram narrows their eyes at Pactlagh.

“I can’t go,” Pactlagh says. “The Crusade has my biometrics. They’ll scan the ship, and if I’m on it, they’ll kill everyone. Get Bongseon and Seal Girl on your transport and go.”

“I’m not going without you,” I say.

“What sense does that make? You’re one primitive stuck in space. You couldn’t make a difference if you were an amazing pilot, but you’re not. You just pretended to be.”

“You’re pretending you don’t like me so I’ll go.”

“I’m not pretending to not like you,” Pactlagh yelled. “I’m honestly telling you I think you’re useless here.”

Another announcement comes in Vaughtlin. The only word I can pick out is “arrive”. The announcement hits like a hammer. In the crowd, some people start openly weeping. Some fall to the floor as if they were switched off. Some run.

“Gogo, what the fuck?” I ask.

“Someone has opened the docks for the Crusade ships to board. No more ships will be able to leave, and the station will be occupied an hour ahead of schedule.”

Chapter 11: Dystopia

Long ago, there was a child just like you, and that child heard a call. It was the call to Crusade.

“People are starving!” the call said. “Everyone must do their part.”

So people ate only what they must, and they stored food so that the hungriest would live. They learned to irrigate better. They learned to grow more food by changing crops. In time, they made better crops and food became more plentiful. There was victory against hunger.

Hundreds of years later, there was another call to Crusade.

“A plague has hit. We must learn to fight it or we will all die!”

So people learned. Universities grew to train doctors to understand the diseases. People helped the universities grow and joined the studies. We learned of vaccines. We learned new treatments and medicines, and there was victory against the plague.

Hundreds of years later, there was another call to Crusade.

“The world grows hot. The seas rise. We must learn to restore the world or we will die!”

So people learned. They built power that did not burn organic fuel, and they found ways to pull the carbon from the air. The planet cooled and there was victory against pollution.

Hundreds of years later, there was another call to Crusade.

“A meteorite has struck, and astronomers say more will come! We must be able to stop them or we will die.

So people learned. They launched vessels into space and built platforms and countermeasure networks, and there was victory against the coming debris shower.

Shortly before you were born, there was a call to Crusade.

“We’ve been attacked by a ruthless enemy. We must fight back or we will all die.”

We have learned. We’ve learned suspension. We can create gravity or make it go away. We have the mighty suspension drive that can produce much more power than anything else. And there will be victory against our enemy. There will be victory because we all work together. There will be victory at any cost.

From A Child’s Guide to Crusade, endorsed by the Crusade council

“Let us go,” Toram says.

“Where?” I ask.

“I need to be in variety of places. We need to look for advantage.”

Toram leads us to a cargo area. It’s a large room made claustrophobic by piles of containers. Throughout the room are lanes about four people wide. We see some people searching frantically through containers, but Toram goes further in. I hear someone talking in Core Faction Mato.

“Gogo, translate,” I whisper.

“. . .just like going to sleep. They contain power to keep you alive for four months. It should evade a remote scan for life signs.”

We pass a tall pile of boxes, and we see a large group around some boxes. They have clear covers showing an interior filled with needles and machinery. The metro talking has opened the top of one of the boxes and demonstrates lying down.

“And if they find us?” someone in his audience asks. “They can just open the box and shoot us?”

The man in the box sits up. His expression is sad, defeated. “They don’t have to shoot you. They can just turn it off.”

“Wouldn’t we be better off fighting?” one of the people around him asks.

“The Crusade will come with overwhelming force,” the man in the box says. “Whatever weapon you find, there won’t be a fight.”

“What if someone tells them where we are?” asks an old Mato woman.

“Only three people beyond us know the support boxes are here. They won’t tell.”

“What if they make them with coercion gear?” asks the mato.

“The Crusade is bloodthirsty, but they follow rules. Coercion gear is strictly outlawed.”

The man in the box gets up. “Please, there isn’t much time. Either let us put you away or go and never speak of this.”

“Not here,” Toram whispers, and we follow them quickly through the corridors.

“Where would I go if I wanted to talk to Aquarius’s main system?” I ask.

“There are sound pickups at every door,” Pactlagh says. “Just say, ‘Aquarius system’. It’s like talking to Gogo.”

“If there’s a software problem and all the oxygen starts leaking away, I’ll bet whoever’s job to fix it doesn’t do it having a long conversation with a condescending computer.”

“You’re describing a maintenance station,” Toram says, “but the system won’t give you access.”

We’re going through a central hallway. Above us, a metro on a floating platform stands just below the clear wall of the aquarium. He’s holding his hand up to the glass or whatever it is. On the other side, one of the giant whale-like creatures presses tentacles to the surface across from him.

Gogo doesn’t translate what he’s saying to the creature, but it’s so simple I can understand it, though I almost wish I didn’t.

“Be good, sweet girl. Take care.”

I could collapse in the corridor right there, but Toram’s pulling me on.

“What are you trying to find?” I ask.

“It’s not what I’m trying to find.”

We’re in the spot where we had the dance, ages ago. I was jealous, self conscious. It’s amazing what worried me. It’s some kind of restaurant now. I see a pair of young metros eating some kinds of treats while their parents stare silently.

At another table, someone is slumped over the table. I wonder how anyone can sleep with all this noise and panic going on, and then I notice that whoever it is doesn’t move at all. There’s no breathing.

Toram gestures for us to keep going. Pactlagh shuffles as she goes along. Seal Girl follows us cautiously.

“Toram,” I ask. “Where the fuck are we going?”

“Let’s take you to maintenance station.”

There’s a small room. On Earth, it’s where you’d put a janitor’s closet. Toram opens the door. As we walk in, a computer starts chiding us in Vaughtlin.

“Your biometrics do not match those of any of our staff. You are not supposed to be here. If you do not leave, I will have to notify security.”

I practiced this phrase last night when I couldn’t sleep. I say, “My biometrics are atypical. I request password access.” Only I’m saying it in Vaughtlin, so my actual words sound like a combine harvester reciting the Talmud while it has angry sex with a freight train.

“Can you take over from here?” I ask Gogo.

“I told you,” Gogo says. “You have to prompt me every step of the way. I cannot initiate a security breach.”

“I’m waiting for your identification and password,” Aquarius’s central system says.

“Gogo, flood it with noise,” I whisper.

“Please put your earpiece in the interface receptacle,” Gogo says.

There’s a hole in the wall that roughly matches one of the projections of the earpiece. I put it in the slot, and the connection goes dark.

“So what was the point of that?” Pactlagh asks.

“Slutty reconnect,” I say.

“Sorry for the difficulty, sir,” says the Aquarius computer.

“Can you show me what’s going on at the dock?” I ask.

“I’m afraid that’s a privacy issue,” Aquarius system says.

“Gogo, flood it with noise.”

The connection goes dark again.

“What are you doing?” Toram asks.

“There’s a security flaw that’s really common in Metro systems,” I explain. “If you flood the connection buffer, it’ll give you a hook to connect to a random conversation that’s been dropped. Gogo, slutty reconnect.”

“Welcome back,” says the Aquarius system.

“Can you show me what’s going on at the dock?” I ask.

“I’m afraid that’s a privacy issue,” Aquarius says again.

“Gogo, noise.”

“How do you know how to do this?” Toram asks.

“I learned while I was stranded on that planet. There wasn’t much else to do.”

“But I don’t think any metros know how to do this,” Pactlagh says.

“Gogo, slutty reconnect.”

“Welcome director,” says the Aquarius system.

“Oh, that’s promising. Can you show me the docks?”

“Absolutely,” says Aquarius.

I turn back to Toram. “On Earth about twenty years after computers were invented, it became really popular to try to break into them for war or crime. It’s a big field of study, and apparently, that’s not how it is with other species.”

A display comes up showing rows of armored soldiers marching onto the station. I’m used to Metros being friendly, at least with each other. It’s odd to see these people march. Their movements are coordinated and mechanical. Every step seems to broadcast that their mercy and empathy are absent.

“Can you hide us?” I ask Aquarius.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Aquarius says.

“Aquarius uses a much simpler system than me,” Gogo says. “It requires commands much more tailored to its specific purposes.”

In the display showing the docks, some kind of orb floats above the soldiers. It shines lights on the civilians. Some are bathed in orange light and are directed to one side. Others are bathed in green light. The soldiers shoot ones in orange and keep moving.

We’re all horrified, but Toram falls to the ground and covers their face.

“Aquarius, if someone is looking for us with cameras or asks where to find us, don’t tell them,” I say.

“I don’t know what you mean,” Aquarius says.

“Could you ask who authorized the Crusade ships to dock?” Pactlagh asks.

“Who let the Crusade ships dock here?” I ask.

“Gluknot Tamakli,” Aquarius says.

“Whoever the fuck that is,” I say.

“Surgeon,” Pactlagh says. “That’s Surgeon’s name.”

“Oh dear,” Toram says.

“What?” Pactlagh asks.

Toram points at a person on the display. He’s a man in a burgundy tunic marching behind the soldiers. “Councillor Maghtap.”

“Here?” asks Pactlagh.

“Who the fuck is this?”

“We have history,” Toram says. “He signed treaty with my people.”

“That sounds promising.”

Pactlagh shakes her head. “Other people in Crusade called it cowardice. He’s spent the last five years trying to be the cruelest councilor for the Crusade to make up for it.”

“Look,” Toram says. “If something happens to me. . .”

“I don’t want to fucking talk about that.”

Toram won’t stop. “Please promise me that if something happens to me, you’ll tell them you’re human from Earth, and you want them to return you under Indigenous Species Treaty.”

“That will not work,” Pactlagh says.

Toram holds up a palm in Pactlagh’s direction. “Please, trust me Bongseon. If something happens to me, promise you’ll tell them you’re human. Indigenous Species Treaty says they have to return you to Earth.”

“I promise,” I say.

Pactlagh shakes her head.

I turn back to Aquarius and start again.

“Now, let’s say someone asks where I am,” I say to Aquarius.

“Someone asked where you were,” Aquarius says.

“I mean, if someone wants to know my location. . .”

“Someone did,” Aquarius says.

“Did?” I ask. “They don’t want to know anymore?”

“I told them where you were. I don’t know whether people want things that they have. I am the maintenance software for Aquarius station. Issues of psychology and philosophy are far beyond me.”

“Jesus Christ, Gogo, I hate this system more than you.”

“Aquarius does not know you hate it,” Gogo says. “Neither of us care.”

“Gogo, you can eat a hundred dicks each. Aquarius, can you remember my biometrics?”

“I can,” Aquarius says.

“Remember my biometrics,” I say. “If you detect me as I am now, give me access, do you understand?”

“Yes,” says Aquarius.

“They’re going to be here soon,” Toram says.

“Aquarius, close session,” I say.

The doors to the maintenance station open. Outside, there is a line of soldiers in gray Crusade armor with rifles pointed at us. I notice that they’re pointed at Pactlagh and me and not at Toram. There is one soldier in blue armor. Through the clear faceplate of her helmet, I can see a Metro woman with a grim expression.

“I identify Pactlagh Naglaka, with the callsign ‘Tyrant’ of the traitor navy. I identify two primitives illegally living on the station Aquarius, today seized for giving aid to the traitor navy. I command you to come with us or die where you stand.”

The blue soldier -- I think she’s an officer -- looks at Toram and looks suddenly awkward. “Ambassador Uigatoram, I would like you to accompany us also. The councilman has questions for you.”

“These three are with me,” Toram says.

The officer shakes her head. “I’ve reviewed the treaty, ambassador. I’m sorry, but you cannot extend your neutrality to primitives or known enemies of the state.”

Seal Girl looks just a little nervous, like a dog who’s not sure this car is going to a place she wants to go. Pactlagh looks sullen and angry. I’m not sure if I can read their emotions well, but Toram seems to feel ashamed, like all this is their fault. As we’re marched through, I’m getting a sense of the scale of Aquarius. Probably, I could march from end to end in about half an hour. If the docks are on the south end of Aquarius, we were captured about two thirds of the way to the north end, and they’re marching us further north.

They march us to a room. I think it’s a conference room. The metros that run this station might be a starfaring civilization that diverged from humanity over a million years ago, but I can still tell that people have to sit through some boring-ass powerpoint presentations in this room. There are soldiers standing across the room. Every once in a while, someone walks in or out with some piece of information or another prisoner.

In the middle of the room, I can see the councilman in burgundy, and he’s talking to Surgeon. As we come in, Councillor Maghtap looks at us, and Surgeon looks at the ground.

“Councillor Maghtap,” Toram says. “What a surprise! I wouldn’t think you’d come out here to borderlands.”

“Your friends will die,” Maghtap says.

“I’m flattered that you think I’ve made friends. I’m really bad at it. We’ve talked. You know what I’m like socially.”

Maghtap points at Surgeon and barks, “Find their transmitter!”

Toram laughs. “I don’t carry one anymore. I figure, my people are at peace with everyone. Why would I need it?”

Three people surround Toram with small devices that makes soft, reassuring chirps. After a couple minutes, the soldiers stand back. “It doesn’t have the transmitter.”

“Where have these things been recently?” Maghtap asks, pointing at us

Surgeon clasps his hands nervously. “I’ve checked the footage. When they heard we were coming, they crossed most of the station. They could have dropped the transmitter almost anywhere.”

“Get a team together,” Maghtap says. “Comb the station.”

“What are they talking about?” I ask.

“Some of my people carry transmitter to warn other Lab Elves that danger is coming, but I didn’t bring it. Aquarius is safe, especially now that my friend is in charge,” Toram gestures at Maghtap.

“I’m not your friend,” Maghtap growls and stalks to the other end of the room.

“Why does he hate you?” I ask Toram.

“He’s been weird about my people since his father died.”

“What did he die of?”

“Refusal to sign treaty,” Toram says.

“What?” I ask.

“What?” Toram asks.

“You!” Pacltagh yells at Surgeon. “You’re helping them!”

“It’s the only rational choice,” Surgeon says. “It’s the only way I could help you.”

“There is nothing rational about these mudborn insects!”

“Is the Embrace going to survive?” Surgeon asks. “Will Recon survive? Will the Crusade get outvoted or give up before they destroy the Embrace and kill everyone on board?”

Pactlagh doesn’t say anything. She just looks at Surgeon like she’s mentally trying to explode his skull. Surgeon goes on,. “My only choice is whether I can save myself,” Surgeon says. “If I’m dead, I don’t do anything. If I’m alive, I can try to change the system. I can vote against the Crusade. They’re not as popular as they used to be. Maybe things will change some day.”

“You are nothing to me,” Pactlagh says.

“Is that ‘one heart, one family’?” Surgeon asks.

“That’s for anyone who hasn’t broken trust. You have.”

Councillor Maghtap walks back. He points at Pactlagh, “Well, we’re obviously going to kill that.”

“Yes, obviously,” Toram says, as though the idea bores them. “You have three and a half hours before the treaty says you have to transport me to a nearby neutral system.”

“Three and a half hours is a long time,” Maghtap says.

“I’ve got things to read.”

“Primitives, we keep on display as an educational tool for children.”

“Did he just saying I’m going to be put in a petting zoo?” I ask.

“More like regular zoo,” Toram says.

“That’s a little better.”

“I feel like you’re doing all this to upset me,” Toram says.

“Oh,” says Maghtap.

“With the treaty, you can’t hurt me or my sibs, and they’re the only ones I really care about. And honestly, Maghtap, you’re better than this. Didn’t some older, paternal figure tell you revenge is bad for your soul?”

“Did you kill my father?” Maghtap asks. There’s nothing bantering or toying now. His face is still.

“No,” Toram says.

Magtaph just stares at them.

“Really, no,” Toram says. “There are 240 of us. What are the odds it was me? Besides, I’m no pilot. Ask anyone.”

Magtaph turns away. Just as he does, Toram says, “I did help with logistics. I was logistics, before we had peace.”

Magtaph turns back to Toram. His eyes are shark eyes, unnervingly empty of emotion. Toram doesn’t seem to see. They go on carelessly, “I made sure he was aware it was coming four minutes before. It’s enough to get scared, not enough to accept it. I didn’t want footage of his death to look too bra. . .”

Councillor Maghtap pulls a gun. It looks like a staple gun, and it produces the barest flash of light. Toram starts spinning, looking almost ready to get out of the way, but they fall to the ground. I can see a hole burned through the front of their shirt. Through the hole, I can see a puckered mass of skin. Toram’s chest isn’t moving. Their eyes are blankly fixed at the ceiling.

“Councillor,” the officer says. “We have a treaty. Should we see if we can get medical attention for that?”

“I have authorization to dissolve the treaty,” Councillor Maghtap says. “I’ll draft a message to send kill squads to get the rest of the Lab Elves.”

“Right,” the officer says. “Make sure it’s dead.”

The soldier holds up a scanner. “No pulse. No breathing.”

“I’ll be clearer. Handcuff it. Destroy the head.”

The soldier looks up. “Desecrate the corpse? There are rules.”

“Then handcuff it and compost it,” the officer says through gritted teeth.

Maghtap hands his gun to Surgeon. “Now kill Tyrant.”

“You said you’d give her a chance,” Surgeon says.

“One chance,” Maghtap says.

Surgeon looks at Pactlagh. “If you tell them where the Embrace is, they will let you live.”

“My mother and son are on the Embrace,” Pactlagh says.

“It’s the only thing they’d agree to,” Surgeon says. “Besides, I know. So do a dozen other people they’ve captured. They will find out.”

“Not from me,” Pactlagh says.

Surgeon slowly lifts up the gun. “This is why I couldn’t be wing leader. It’s too painful to decide who dies and who survives.”

“Also,” Pactlagh says.

Surgeon pauses. Pactlagh grabs his wrist with one hand and brings the other down on crook of Surgeon’s elbow. Surgeon’s arm collapses, leaving his pistol pointing up at his own chin. Pactlagh presses down on his finger. There’s a flash of light and the sickening smell of melted flesh, and Surgeon drops to the ground.

“. . . you’re too rotting slow,” Pactlagh says as she pulls the gun from Surgeon’s falling body.

Everyone in the room is pointing a gun at Pactlagh. She’s pointing her gun at Councilor Maghtap.

“I’ll risk it,” the councillor says. “She’s a pilot, not infantry.”

“Yeah, Who knows if I’m good with a gun. Hey Surgeon,” Pactlagh kicks Surgeon’s body, “am I any good with a pistol? Surgeon? Wait, he can be slow to make up his mind.”

“I’m a human from Earth,” I say. “I request to be returned to my planet under the Indigenous Species Treaty.”

“Do you have to do that now?” Pactlagh asked. “It doesn’t work with the thing I’m doing.”

“I promised.”

Pactlagh rolls her eyes but doesn’t say anything.

“You’re what?” Maghtap asks.

“Human. I was taken from Earth.”

“What do you mean ‘taken’?” Maghtap asks. From the rest of the room, there are muttered questions. “Can you read?” “Have you met the Sowers?” “Can you figure skate?”

“I was good at a game. Well, I cheated at a game, and they thought I was good, and they made me a pilot.”

“So you flew a military aircraft for the terrorists?” Maghtap asks.

“It didn’t work,” Pactlagh says. “The experiment was a failure, and for the record, I thought it was a stupid idea. She couldn’t be a pilot.”

I know Pactlagh is trying to help, but fuck.

“And what are you asking?”

“I’m asking to be returned to Earth, as per the Indigenous Species Treaty.”

“There is no Indigenous Species Treaty,” Councillor Maghtap says.

“Told you,” Pactlagh says.

“Maybe you don’t know about it,” I suggested

“The Crusade Armada needs only respect three treaties, two now that I’ve dissolved the Lab Elf treaty. Neither one says a word about the treatment of primitives.”

“Toram told me. . .”

“Elves lie constantly,” Maghtap says. “I wouldn’t believe one who told me stars were hot.”

“But why?” I ask.

Maghtap shrugs. “Who knows? Elves lie. They lie for a joke. They lie to cheat you. They lie to distract. . .””

Magtap stops. Everyone in the room looks at the spot where Toram’s body used to be. The only sound is a hysterical giggle. Oh, it’s me.

“Tell me you handcuffed the body,” the officer says.

“No, sir. There was the shot, and the human, and . . .”

“SIDEARMS,” the officer yells at an earsplitting pitch.

Sixteen soldiers reach down and feel the comforting touch of their staple guns in their holsters.

The other two soldiers feel nothing but a sinking sensation.

Chapter 12: First Person Shooter

The final batch continues to outpace expectations. We’re training them in different environments, water, zero gravity, vacuum. They adapt quickly. Their reflexes improve steadily.

Their ability to hide is good enough to be problematic. We trained them with a game where they hid and we searched for them. One of them kept hiding after the game was over. A sensor pass failed to find the subject because it had stopped its own heart. We had to get another subject to find the first using its sioma.

We’ve since started applying coercion training so they have an impulse to present themselves when they receive the signal.

I’m very proud of this batch. They will add viral strength to our faction.

When they turn two, we’ll start training them with firearms.

Professor Soasa reporting on the progress of Lab Elves

“Squad A, form up around Councillor Maghtap. Get him out of the room. Guard the door. Shoot on sight.”

So not quite twenty professional soldiers are freaking out because of Toram? Pactlagh just shot someone, and nobody seems to give a shit.

I hope Toram gets away. They’re not built for fighting. Are they fast? Yes, very. Are they agile? Sure. They could juggle a bunch of things or steal something right out of my hands. Do they have any special skills? Yes, they’re great at picking up languages, can sense objects outside their line of sight and can army crawl faster than I can run.

Oh.

Am I a fucking moron? Yes, apparently.

I have an uncle. He’s Uncle Hwan. I know people are getting shot. Bear with me. It relates. I don’t remember Uncle Hwan before he enlisted. I just remember him after he got back. Every conversation with him started something like this:

“A blind guy walks into a bar. It sounds like a joke, but it’s a problem. He’s five years sober. This wouldn’t happen if the sign was also in braille.”

I was ready to say, “Uncle Hwan, did you go to a different Afghanistan. Instead of the one that was an ongoing tragedy, did you go to an Afghanistan that was just a giant library of jokes that didn’t quite work? Because I’ll be honest, a couple more zingers like this, and I’ll have PTSD.”

My point is that Hwan didn’t want to live as the grizzled soldier his whole life, so he became Hwan, the disturbingly goofy guy.

“Scuttle your sidearms,” the officer says. “They can’t use our rifles . . .”

And zap, the officer is dead. I see a flash of Toram crab walking behind some chairs like it’s an olympic sport. A bunch of rifle shots hit the spot where Toram was.

A bunch of soldiers have ducked down, and they’re taking apart their staple guns. One points at Pactlagh, Seal Girl and me and says, “It was in the company of those things, those might make good hostages.”

I jump over some chairs and under a table, fleeing in a panic. I don’t know if Toram would give up if someone put a gun to my head, but the thought that they might scares me more than getting shot.

I hear a metal crunch, and a soldier hits the ground with his back to me.

The soldier’s armor has a neck-piece that connects their backplate to their helmet. I think it’s to make sure nothing really bad happens to their neck. If that’s what it’s for, it has limitations. This soldier’s back is facing me, but his face is almost facing me, too.

The mystery of what happened to his head clears up a little bit when Seal Girl grabs his head and turns it so it points the right way. She’s chittering something at the corpse. Maybe it’s some kind of war ritual.

Someone grabs my leg. As I turn, I see a soldier with my leg in one hand and a rifle in the other pointed right at me.

I see a shadow move as Toram ducks behind them and fires.

“I’m alive,” the soldier says in wonder, even as he collapses to the ground.

Toram wraps himself around the soldier and flips him over. Some other soldiers see us. Toram lifts the soldier’s hand like a puppeteer and squeezes their finger over the soldier’s finger and fires a dozen shots. All the while, the soldier he’s grabbing is yelling, “I can’t feel my arms! I can’t feel my legs!”

Someone shoots Toram’s soldier, and the rifle stops working. Toram spins and bolts. They crouch and run full speed under a table, dodging chairs and table legs so quickly I disbelieve it as I watch it.

“Reinforcements!” someone is yelling. “We need reinforcements in the command center! There’s a Lab Elf here, and the treaty is off! Repeat, the treaty is off! Send armor!”

Aren’t these soldiers already armored? What is he asking for?

There’s a moment of quiet. I keep crawling past Seal Girl, who is screaming at the soldier she killed. A little further I see Pacltagh, who’s crouching behind a desk holding her pistol.

“It’s just a bluff at this point,” Pactlagh whispers. “It only had three shots at top charge.”

I look up, and there are half a dozen soldiers looking traumatized and standing in a semicircle. One sees me, and I barely get my head down before rifle shots rain down my part of the room. Immediately after, I hear one of the soldiers scream, and another one swear.

And now I’m hearing heavy footsteps approaching. I keep expecting whatever it is to come through the door now, but the footsteps keep getting louder. I can feel the vibrations through the floor by the time it finally enters the room. I’m not sticking my head up again. Through gaps in the furniture, I can see something big and metal followed by a few more soldiers.

“WHAT A DISASTER,” says an amplified voice. “THE LAB ELF IS THE ONE ON ITS OWN BEHIND THAT TABLE?”

“Maybe? There’s also a terrorist pilot and a couple of primitives.”

The amplified voice makes a dismissive noise. This gives me enough confidence to peer around. I can’t tell what I’m looking at right away.

So imagine a big metal egg. It’s the size of a closet and just a little bit angular like a fifty sided die. It’s got a couple massive metal legs. It waddled to get through the door, but now that it’s standing up, the egg is a few feet off the ground. The top brushes the ceiling. It has four arms. It has two human-looking arms folded in front of the egg. The other two arms are on the sides and end in large guns. The big guns are trained on another part of the room.

“I’VE NEVER SEEN ONE OF YOU IN PERSON BEFORE. IT SEEMS LIKE THE STORIES I HEARD WERE TRUE. I’M IN A NEMESIS-CLASS ARMORED WALKER. DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THESE?”

I can’t see Toram, but apparently the walker pilot can.

“THAT’S GOOD. FOR A WHILE, THESE WERE THE THIRD LEADING CAUSE OF DEATH FOR YOUR KIND JUST BEHIND BEING IN AN EXPLODING SHIP AND RUNNING OUT OF AMMO.

“WE WOULD REALLY LOVE IT IF YOU’D SURRENDER. I’LL HAVE TO TAKE YOUR HANDS OFF. WE’VE GOT NERVE DAMPERS SO YOU WON’T FEEL IT. YOU UNDERSTAND WE’RE FEELING CAUTIOUS.”

The room is completely still and quiet. I don’t hear anything. I don’t see anything, but apparently the walker pilot does.

“C’MON GUY,” the pilot said as the two gun arms extended toward a spot behind a table.

There’s a noise like thunder, and the table is nothing but a cloud of ceramic-looking dust. A blur tells me Toram got out in time. Two of the soldiers who followed the walker fall. Toram grabs one of the soldiers’ sidearms before his body hits the ground.

The walker is turning, trying to track Toram. It shifts its massive weight with an eerie grace, but Toram’s constantly running around it. I almost feel sorry for the walker pilot. It’s like the time I danced with Toram, and they kept dancing behind me wherever I turned.

Shit, that was just over a week ago.

Wherever the walker looks, panicking soldiers are yelling, “Behind you!”

And as it turns, it sees more soldiers that Toram killed as they ran. Toram races, shoots, grabs falling pistols and shoots some more.

The walker spins twice, and it doesn’t see a single living Crusade soldier.

“I’M NOT HAPPY, BUT YOU’RE STILL GOING TO GET TIRED BEFORE I DO. YOU CAN’T SCRATCH THIS WALKER, AND SINCE NONE OF MY PEOPLE ARE MAKING IT OUT, NONE OF YOURS WILL, EITHER.”

Toram grabs a cylinder full of liquid and throws it at the walker.

“BRANDY? YOU’RE THROWING BRANDY AT ME? YOU KNOW THIS THING CAN OPERATE ON THE OCEAN FLOOR? ANY OCEAN FLOOR?”

The walker tries to shoot Toram, who runs out of the way too quickly. They throw another cylinder at the walker, which is soaked.

“I GET IT NOW. YOU’RE INSANE.” I can see the walker is backing into a corner. Toram won’t be able to get behind it.

Toram pulls off the front half of one of the soldiers’ rifles and slams the back half against the ground. The rifle sends off sparks. Toram tosses the rifle at the walker. Toram does this so much faster than I can describe it. The walker is covered in flames.

“SO?” demands the walker pilot. He then starts sweeping the room with gunfire, turning the furniture into splinters and hunting us down.

I’m scrambing over chairs and over tables as gunfire razes the room behind me. I trip over a chair and crawl. My earpiece falls out, so I can’t even understand what he’s saying. I’m more certain that I’m about to die than I’ve been all week.

“MOGHTU KWA! MOGHTU KWA!” the walker pilot yells.

The pilot has stopped shooting. I have a minute to actually try to understand that. I don’t know “moghtu” but “kwa” is need.

“Moghtu ogpu?” I ask. Which means ‘What’s ‘moghtu’?”

The gun arms are disengaged on the walker. A door at the bottom of the egg rattles for a moment and then opens. The pilot drops out and rolls to put out the flames. Toram shoots the pilot as he draws in his first breath of air.

“Moghtu is ‘oxygen’. Nemesis class walker has design flaw. If it’s covered by burning alcohol, air circulation stops running.”

“You’re a goddamn super soldier?” I ask.

“I was soldier,” Toram says.

I wave an arm at a room full of corpses.

“Maghtap started it. You saw him shoot me.”

“I did. How the fuck are you alive?”

Toram tugs on their jumper. I can see an exit wound on the side. The shot went through their jumper without hitting their body.

“And your chest is covered with scar tissue?” I ask.

“I was on ship, Brightspear. I was closest survivor to impact that breached ship. I survived, but got this.”

“And you can stop your heart beat?”

“For couple minutes. We have to go.”

I follow Toram out of the room. We’re barely out of the conference room before I hear someone say, “There’s a couple dozen of those crazy shitmasons that way with some serious antipersonnel gear. They’re getting ready to storm the room.”

The voice is actually above me. I look up to see the cheepap, who’s actually clinging to the cabling on the ceiling.

“They let you run free?” I ask.

“What the shit is going on with your friend?” the cheepap asks.

I look back. Seal Girl is still in the conference room, trying to pull off a soldier’s helmet.

“I don’t know,” I tell the cheepap. “I don’t speak her language.”

“Tell your computer to translate.”

“Gogo, translate everything I say to Seal Girl and translate everything she says to me.”

“I don’t think you want me to translate yet,” Gogo says. “I am not yet confident in my ability to understand her language.”

“Gogo says it’s not good enough at her language,” I say.

“It’s bullshit,” the cheepap says. “Tell it to try anyway.”

“Gogo, translate anyway.”

“Fine.”

“Fine? We could have been talking to Seal Girl before, and you didn’t let us because you were afraid you’d make a mistake?”

“That’s an oversimplification,” Gogo says.

“Is that you talking, pale space woman?” Seal Girl asks. “Who is ‘Seal Girl’?”

“We have to move,” Toram says.

Toram runs, and the rest of us follow. We’ve crossed from one end of Aquarius to the other. I don’t really know the layout, but this looks like a dead end to me.

“Can you open that door?” Toram says, pointing at the heaviest of the doors. I’m surprised to learn they’re talking to me.

I walk up to the door and say, “Aquarius, open this door.” The door opens, and it’s a mostly empty room. One edge of the floor curved so there’s a smooth transition from the floor to one wall. If it was on Earth, I’d assume it was for skateboarding. On Aquarius, I have no idea what it means.

“Why the shit would I get in an airlock?” the cheepap asks.

“Pactlagh,” Toram says, “would you look inside and see if you can find a tool cache?”

Toram and Pactlagh walk in, so Seal Girl and I do, too. A moment later, the cheepap follows us in.

Pactlagh moves her hand over the wall in a quick pattern, and a bit of the wall slides back, revealing some tools I don’t recognize. “It’s a pretty standard setup,” Pactlagh says.

“Bongseon, can you close door, and Pactlagh, can you make it so it won’t open again?”

“Aquarius, close airlock door,” I say. And again, the station does what I ask it do and closes the door.

“Are we really so desperate that we’re just going to barricade ourselves in here?” Pactlagh asks as she removes another panel by the door.

“No,” Toram says. “Well, yes, but I think we leave through airlock.”

“We’ll go outside the station?” I ask

“It’s not that kind of airlock.”

“Oh fuck, we’re going through the aquarium?”

“Do you have another idea?” Toram asks.

“Not completely,” I say, “but I thought of something that would help. I don’t understand this system.”

“That’s true,” Pactlagh says. “But it doesn’t help.”

“Can I call someone on the Embrace who does understand the system? I mean, I’m talking to Gogo, and Gogo’s on the Embrace, right?”

“Call Cerberus,” Pactlagh says.

“I thought you didn’t respect Cerberus.”

“Why do you think that?” Pactlagh asks. “I think he shouldn’t be a pilot.”

“Are you hearing yourself?” I ask.

“He should be on the systems team. He’s a genius with software.”

“Fine. Gogo, can you put me in touch with Cerberus.”

“If you need me to,” Gogo says. “I am contacting Cerberus now.”

“Cowstalker!” Cerberus says.

“Cerberus! It’s good to hear your voice. First, I’m so sorry about SweetTalk.”

“Thanks,” Cerberus says. “He’d have been so glad you survived that. We shouldn’t have put you there.”

“I’m contacting you from Aquarius,” I say.

“Gogo told me. I’m glad you’re in a safe place.”

“I’m not. The Crusade seized Aquarius. We’re barricaded in an airlock.”

“Oh,” Cerberus says. “Is this some final message?”

“No, I’ve gotten access to the computer that runs Aquarius.”

There’s a short pause while Cerberus thinks about this. “Can you connect me to this computer?”

“Yes. That’s why I called.”

Gogo walks me through some instructions to link it to Aquarius, and I can already think of four ways I could exploit this protocol. Cerberus is connected.

“Oh,” Cerberus says.

“What?”

“You overran the buffer. That caused Aquarius to give you a connection signal. You faked a broken connection and then used the connection signal.”

“Uh, yeah.”

“You guessed that the people who designed Aquarius would make a mistake. You guessed which mistakes they’d make, and you took advantage of them.”

“Yeah,” I say. “They’re common mistakes.”

“Is this how you think on Earth?”

“Yes, we’re kind of a dumpster fire. I need to get out of here. Can you tell Aquarius to let us get through the giant fish tank, and hopefully tell the Crusade assholes we went somewhere else?”

“Oh, because you don’t know common communication syntax. Yes, I can get you out. Where do you need to go?”

“To the hangar,” I say.

“To cafeteria,” Toram says.

“What?” Pactlagh says. “Oh, you need your transmitter.”

“What do you need a transmitter for?”

“I need transmitter to tell sibs that treaty with Crusade is over.”

“And they’ve got Gaoshi locked up,” the cheepap says.

“Where?” Toram asks.

“Somewhere by the hanger.”

“How the rot didn’t they get you?” Pactlagh asks.

“I’m a good climber,” the cheepap says.

“That doesn’t explain it.”

“Cheepap are climbers. We think in three dimensions. Your metro ancestors were nomadic, always going along the land. You never look up, so all I had to do is climb, and nobody found me.”

“So where are you going?” Cerberus asks.

“Airlock three,” Toram says.

“Okay, I’ll watch for you at airlock three,” Cerberus says. “I’m going to start cycling now. There’s people outside ready to drill through your airlock door.”

“Get ready,” Pactlagh says. “Gravity is about to shift.”

“What?”

The entire room seems to slowly rotate ninety degrees under our feet. In reality, the room is staying still. The artificial gravity is just changing its mind about what direction is down. Even Seal Girl seems to accept this better than I do, and they slowly walk up the slope as the wall becomes the floor. Pactlagh throws me a diving helmet and slips into one of her own.

“You’ve done this before?”

Pactlagh nods. “Remember? I was a harvest engineer. You can spend days mucking around hydroponics tanks.”

She helps me get my helmet on. The cheepap puts one on, too, though he’s not happy about it.

“Um, I only see three helmets,” I say.

“It’s ten minutes,” Toram says. “I should be fine.”

“Of course you can hold your breath for ten minutes, you super soldier Mary Sue asshole. I’m still mad at you.”

Pactlagh picks up a knotted rope and hands it to Seal Girl. “Here, Seal Girl. Take this. Swim where we point you.”

Seal Girl holds the rope and asks, “Who is Seal Girl?”

And then the airlock fills with water.

Surprisingly, it’s Seal Girl who loses her shit. She yells “WHAT’S WRONG WITH THE WATER?” I guess that’s natural. She’s from a world that’s all water, but mostly water is the stuff that’s below you. Now water is in front of us and rapidly filling the room.

Toram is dodging out of her flailing arms and explaining in broken raft people that Gogo’s now translating. “This room is water. I give you room that is water. That room will become raft.” Toram is basically repeating that over and over again until he’s under water. Being completely submerged calms Seal Girl down. Toram tucks the first loop on the rope over Seal Girl and urges her out of the airlock.

Seriously, fuck oceans. I started all this kind of scared of water, not like a swimming pool or a river or a lake but the open sea. The universe is apparently overjoyed to overwhelm my phobia. There are crabs here larger than elephants. There are angelfish that could capsize boats. There’s little stuff, too, like minnows, but it’s so goddamn big, and there’s no surface. There’s a tank with wall to wall water and a bunch of pumps aerating the water.

All I can think of is what an easy goddamn meal we are for these, holding onto loops of this rope like an undersea kebab. If a fish rolled around on a little baking pan on wheels that was filled with butter and lemon juice, it wouldn’t be making itself as convenient a meal for me as I have made myself for these damn fish. I wish I could think about anything else. I can’t. There’s nothing but the water, the deadly water.

But seriously, rope?

Bear with me for a second. I bet you’re thinking this rope isn’t rope as we know it in the land of primitives. It’s just the closest translation for a metro device. “Rope” is what they call this thing that looks like clay and violates three different laws of physics.

But that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that the greatest metro minds thought about how to keep a set of divers together as they move through a gigantic wondrous zero G aquarium in orbit around a sun, and they came up with the same mechanism you use to keep a bookshelf from falling out of the back of your car when it’s too big for you to close your trunk.

Keep in mind that it’s not just me stroking my chin and saying, “A, yes, rope. Even on my world, we have learned this technology.” Seal Girl would be next to me saying, “My old chum, rope. Our scientists, too, have gleaned its secrets.”

I’m going to recap, because I’m not sure you get the full weight of the contrast. Here’s problem one: I’m uncomfortable with how fast my vehicle moves. The metro solution to this is to take the place I’m in and move it through a dimension that isn’t a dimension and move it back into our world so that, apparently, a lot of the acceleration can’t find me where I am. That’s the solution to that problem.

Here’s problem two: There’s a tank with no air and a bunch of gigantic predators. We want a bunch of divers to be able to move together so none of them drift off and get eaten. The solution to this is that you take a bunch of “fibers” and weave them into a “strand”. Then you loop this strand on itself so it has “knots” that people can grab and a “loop” that goes around the lead diver, so they all go together.

Speaking of which, we’re apparently at the airlock. The door closes, and the water is going down.

Chapter 13: Roguelike

I’ve been looking at Professor Raweu’s notes about the raft people of 1287-4. Here is a portion of her summary:

Our survey picked found roughly two million of this odd cousin race living on colonies of ‘raftweed’ drifting across the surface of 1287-4. They tend to live in groups of six to thirty, though we’ve found some solitary ones. They need the raftweed to rest, though they can swim both very far and very deep.

Our charge is to see if we can assimilate these primitives. Most cousin races seem to respond well to our coercion devices, but we’ve had some problem with the raft people. Their mindset might make them more resistant to coercion, or the language barrier could create a problem. Or maybe the immense strength of the raft people simply renders the dangers of coercion failure too costly. I can still see the images of Professor Naseu’s body when I close my eyes.

After the Professor Naseu incident. Professor Holaino suggested we keep all raft people we abduct shackled at all times.

Considering the incident with the shackles failing and what happened to poor Professor Holaino, I suggest we only abduct young Raft People, who should prove to be more predictable and malleable.

Professor Raweu went on at much more length about how to capture, coerce and train the young Raft People. It’s all interesting theory, though clearly there were shortcomings. I suggest we suspend the assimilation program for the time being in light of what happened to poor Professor Raweu.

Notes on the attempted assimilation of Raft People by the Research Elves.

“I might never be dry again,” the cheepap says as he pulls off his mask.

Once he gets air, Toram doubles over and puts all their energy into breathing. They’ve been holding their breath for ten minutes. Who could go through that without being winded?

“Seal Girl is what you call me?” Seal Girl asks.

“Yes,” I say. “I didn’t know your name. I’m sorry about the ‘girl’. It sounded better than Seal Woman.”

“I do not object. I am not yet an adult,” says Seal Girl. “What is a Seal?”

I have never seen another raft person, but Seal Girl is taller, huskier and curvier than I am. They must grow really big.

“Uh, it’s a creature from my planet.”

Seal Girl reaches into her sling and pulls out her tablet. She says, “Show me a seal.”

There are many times that I’ve been uncomfortably aware that Seal Girl is strong enough to kill me in an instant. This is the worst of those times.

Seal Girl looks up at me. “To you, I look like this ball of fat?”

“I don’t know your name. I had to pick something. There aren’t that many furry creatures that can swim.”

A week late, my brain helpfully provides the word, “otter”. Eat a dick, brain.

“My name is Pa’o’e.”

“You never told us.”

“I did! So many times!”

“I didn’t realize you told us. What does your name mean?”

“The one who lives in the towers,” Gogo says.

“Do your people build towers?”

“No,” Pa’o’e says.

“Okay,” Toram says. “I’ve got my air back.”

Pa’o’e smiles at the tablet. “The seal on the tablet found a fish. It looks like it’s a tasty fish.”

“I’m still mad,” I tell Toram.

“Chompy, chomp, chomp,” Pa’o’e says. “Who’s got a yummy fish?”

“Noted,” Toram says, “but they’re going to kill my sibs if I don’t get the transmitter, and I need to get Gaoshi.”

“I will help you,” Pa’o’e says.

“Pahohey, you don’t want to do that. You don’t know what they’re doing.”

“Do not say my name. The way you say it makes me sad. Call me Seal Girl. The elf wants a thing. Guy with big mouth was caught. I can help you there.””

“It’ll be dangerous,” Toram says.

“You’ve been hunted. I have, too. I kept two star people who couldn’t swim alive on the ocean.”

“We can swim,” Pactlagh says.

Seal Girl waves two fingers together through the air, so I guess we know what the raft people version of the ‘jerk off’ gesture is.

“You shouldn’t go,” the cheepap tells Seal Girl. “We’re just primitives to them. If you fight for them, you’ll end up dead.”

“They might let me fly if I go,” Seal Girl says. “And I can eat something besides the weird fruit.”

“What?” Pactlagh says. “You can’t eat the Shell People.”

“I can, though.The shell comes right off.”

“No. This is important. We can’t eat people.”

“Oh,” Seal Girl says. “You can’t eat anybody.”

“That’s right,” Pactlagh says.

“You have dull teeth and weak jaws,” Seal Girl says.

“No,” Pactlagh says.

“You do. That gray fish you couldn’t chew through? It was the first thing I ate when I was weaned. I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t swim much faster than you. I ate that fish like it’s nothing.”

“We don’t eat people even when we can,” Pactlagh says. “We have laws, and they say we don’t eat people.”

“But this is Meat War,” Seal Girl says. “In Meat War, you can eat the losers.”

“It’s not Meat War,” Pactlagh says.

“What do they want you to give up, then?” Seal Girl asks.

“Our lives.”.

“That is Meat War,” Seal Girl says. “If their only goal for you is death, we have nothing to lose by eating the ones we kill. Will they get angry and decide to kill you more?”

“Think about this,” I say. “I learned to fly Daggers because I playing a game. It was like a dream about flying. I didn’t know Daggers were real spacecraft, but they are. The skill I learned can hurt real people, but it’s also valued. The metros gave me lots of money just because I had these dreams.”

Nobody says anything.

Pactlagh finally says, “Bongseon, I can’t tell where you’re going with this.”

“I will pay you to stop saying, ‘Meat War’.”

“The thing is,” Pactlagh says, “we always have enough food.”

“How?” asks Seal Girl.

“It’s like we have machines that fly,” Pactlagh says. “We have machines that make food. We have plants and animals that grow very quickly so that even if we’re away from a planet, we always have enough food.”

“Fine,” says Seal Girl. “I think the food machines and not the laws are why you don’t eat people.”

“Find another maintenance station and talk to Cerberus about getting us off the station,” Toram tells me.

“I’m staying with Bongseon,” Pactlagh says. “Somebody has to keep her safe.”

“I’m staying with the less crazy people,” the cheepap says.

Toram and Seal Girl go off down the corridor leaving the cheepap, Pactlagh and me.

“C’mon,” Pacltagh says.

“Yeah, fuck it,” I say.

We leave the airlock. Whatever Cerberus did to fake the crusade out, he did it well because there are no soldiers here. We get on a platform that floats a couple levels down.

“Why would you say ‘fuck it’?”

I shrug. “It’s a way of saying ‘I don’t care’.”

“You don’t care if we die?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t care if I can get us a ship or open the dock or do whatever weird computer thing you’re expecting me to do. It’s so important to try, I don’t care if it’s possible.”

“I’m not sure it’s a good attitude,” Pactlagh says.

“What? You’re the queen of ‘fuck it’.”

“I am not!” Pactlagh says. We get to a ladder, which I thought was way too low-tech for these people, and we take it down.

“What about after we crashed? You grabbed me and started swimming. What was your plan? There was no land on the entire planet.”

“You’re alive because I grabbed you and swam.”

“You’re the one who’s down on ‘fuck it’. I’m telling you why you’re my hero.”

We get down the ladder. I didn’t realize it before, but I’d spent all my time in the upper pretty levels of Aquarius, mostly on the top level just below the Aquarium.

We’re down to the fourth or fifth floor.

There aren’t any soldiers down here, so I guess it’s okay that it’s ugly. There are pipes and conduits crowding the edges of the corridor making it a little claustrophobic to walk through. The lights in the lower levels range from too bright to too dark managing almost never to be comfortable.

Pactlagh could probably tell me if the pipes running water, sewage power or something unfathomable to my primitive mind. Back on the infinite ocean, I’ve asked Pactlagh questions about the practicalities of survival in space. She gave me long explanations that assumed a lot of context I didn’t have.

“Here,” Pactlagh says. She’s pointing to a space that looks like a dirty closet without a door, but it has display screens.

“Cerberus?” I say.

“I am Gogo,” Gogo says. “I’m surprised you don’t know that.”

“Eat a dick and connect me to Cerberus.”

“Connecting. . . Cerberus is busy and cannot accept the connection.”

“What? Is he not wearing an earpiece? Is it set to Do Not Disturb? Can we do that?”

“Cerberus is wearing an earpiece. He has not asked not to be disturbed, and I would alert him even if he did because I understand the peril of your situation.”

“I appreciate that. Maybe you don’t have to eat the entire dick, but how do you know Cerberus is busy?”

“I am watching Cerberus via cameras. I’m listening to him talk. I told him you wanted to contact him, and he said he’s busy. I cannot imagine why he’d lie.”

“Can you tell me what the fuck Cerberus is doing?”

“He’s arranging for cargo to be moved,” Gogo says.

“He’s moving cargo on the Embrace?”

“The cargo is currently on Aquarius. He is moving it into the airlock.”

“Why?” I ask.

“So he can launch the cargo into space.”

“Yeah, I guessed he wasn’t putting it into the aquarium. Why is he shooting cargo into space?”

“I do not understand his motives.”

“Aquarius,” I say. “Can you give me access to the hanger?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” says Aquarius.

“We would like to fly a vessel in the hanger out of the station.”

“Yes,” says Aquarius.

“It’s good? We can fly out?”

“I don’t know,” says Aquarius’s computer system.

“What did you mean when you said ‘yes’?”

“I meant that I understood that you would like to fly a vessel in the Aquarius Hanger.”

“Will you let us leave the station?” I ask.

“I have no orders to keep you in the station.”

“Gogo,” I ask. “Why is the Aquarius so goddamn stupid?”

“The Aquarius system is only intended to be operated by specialists. I communicate with civilians, including children and you. Its natural language skills are very inferior to mine.”

“How does Cerberus get Aquarius to do what he wants?”

“Cerberus knows several dialects of command syntax. Cerberus has recently said Aquarius is the offspring of a man rendered insane by venereal disease and a corpse from which the man contracted the disease. I infer he also finds it frustrating.”

“Can you translate what I say into this ‘command syntax’ so Aquarius can understand me?”

“I have standing orders not to translate anything into command syntax for a system I did not myself create, and I did not create the Aquarius command system.”

I turn to Pactlagh. “Cerberus is busy with something. I think we’ll have to wait for him to be done.”

“Okay,” Pactlagh says.

“I don’t know what I’m doing. If I poke around, I might alert someone about what’s going on and cause more harm than good. I’ll wait for now.”

“Fine,” the cheepap says.

“Gogo, you understand Seal Girl’s language,” I say.

“That’s a serious oversimplification, as I’ve explained to you,” Gogo says.

“Eat a dick. You remember everything she’s said in the past, and you understand it now even if you didn’t understand it then.”

“I don’t remember everything she’s said in the past,” Gogo says. “Only since she came into contact with devices connected to me a week ago.”

“Can you play back some of the things she said?”

Gogo starts a sound clip. I can hear myself gasping and the roar of waves. Under that, the splashing of Seal Girl swimming.

“‘I’m Pa’o’e. If you raise your weapon, I will have to murder you, too.’”

Gogo starts another clip. I hear waves lapping against the raftweed.

“Filty space person! You do not poop on the raft! You hear Pa’o’e!”

Gogo starts another clip. I hear myself screaming about the ultrawhale.

“It’s summer,” Seal girl says. “It only eats people in spring.”

Gogo starts another clip. I hear all of us groaning as Pactlagh starts the Hopper accelerating.

“Seal Girl says, ‘Oh, I just figured out what that room in back is for. You don’t poop in sea, so you poop in rooms. That’s disgusting. I had three handfuls of redweed seeds, so the poop room is going to regret the day it met Pa’o’e!’”

Gogo starts another clip. I hear the sound of metal rending. Seal Girl just killed a soldier.

“Hey. . . buddy,” Seal Girl says. “I guess I got you pretty good. Let’s get your head pointing forward again. There. Are you okay? What’s your name? Mine’s Pa’o’e. Buddy? Buddy? Well, it’s your fault. You grabbed my breast, and I am a child!’”

“Cowstalker?” I hear Cerberus in my ear.

“It’s good to hear you again, but where the hell have you been?”

“There was something I had to do.”

“What? We’re trying to escape from Aquarius.”

“Well I checked some footage and found out a bunch of people had hidden inside life support capsules in cargo containers.”

“Yes, I saw that just before the crusade landed,” I said.

“You saw it? Well, I launched the life support capsules into space along with a bunch of other cargo. There’s a cargo hauler who’s secretly helping us, and I’m trying to work with him to pick people up.”

“Now I feel like an asshole for being mad at you. We’ve got to get off the station. Are our Daggers still in the hanger?”

Cerberus takes a while looking this up. “I see three Daggers there, but there are five of you now.”

“Maybe six. They arrested an oowa named Gaoshi, and Toram’s trying to rescue them.”

“Grandmaster Gaoshi?” Cerberus asks.

“Yes, that’s the only Gaoshi I know. Can you get the Daggers ready for us to leave and arrange a place for us to meet Toram and Seal Girl?”

“The Daggers, yes. I’m trying to find Toram and Seal Girl. . . Oh no.”

“What?” I ask.

“They ran into some guards by the forward deck. They called in some more soldiers. I’m going to try to stop any more reinforcements from getting to them.”

“Where are they?”

“What are you going to do?” Cerberus asks.

“I’m not waiting here. Tell me where they are.”

Cerberus sends me some directions. They don’t mean much to me, but the cheepap understands them. We run through maintenance corridors. The cheepap’s ears go flat against its head, and it says, “I hear some soldiers ahead.”

We wait in the corridor. Gradually, the cheepap relaxes and starts moving again.

“Let’s go,” the cheepap says.

“Did he hear soldiers?” Pactlagh asks.

“Yeah, didn’t you hear him?”

“He said it in Vaughtlin,” Pactlagh says, “I’m not wearing an earpiece, and I forgot the Vaughtlin word for ‘soldier’.”

“Sorry,” the cheepap says. “I’ll use your dialect from now on.”

“Ninglet a language, not a dialect,” Pactlagh hisses.

The cheepap turns and looks at Pactlagh. He has large eyes capable of containing volumes of skepticism.

“Ninglet did come from Vaughtlin. And, yes, it shares some of the same words and patterns.”

“Too bad your beautiful, unique language doesn’t have a word for that.”

The cheepap continues leading us through the maintenance halls. Finally, we get there.

I see several dead soldiers, and the floor is covered in blood.

Seal Girl is leaning against a wall, also covered in blood. Toram is crouching next to her, talking softly. Gaoshi is pacing, looking at the bodies. Seal Girl looks over at the cheepap and says barely above a whisper, “You were right.”

I’ve only just gotten any idea of Seal Girl’s personality. I look around desperately for some version of a first aid kit, knowing I wouldn’t recognize one if I saw it.

“They didn’t look up,” Seal Girl says.

“She dropped right in the middle of them,” Gaoshi says. “I don’t think most of them had any understanding of what happened.”

“What can we do for her?” I ask.

“She needs food and rest,” Toram says. “Oh, all blood. That’s not hers. You remember that last fight? Did you see any blood? These rifles shoot charged temporary matter. It cauterizes whatever it hits. This blood is soldiers she attacked. I think she’s coming off adrenaline rush.”

I look up. Around. “She did this?”

Toram nods. “She killed five soldiers. She killed two soldiers with sergeant.”

“Do you mean what . . . assistants? Corporals?”

Toram shakes their head. “They were soldiers like others. Still it must have been shocking to have someone beat them to death using their sergeant. She killed sergeant himself right after.”

“She killed all these people?”

Toram shakes their head again. “I was there, shooting as many as I could. Usually, people notice that. This time, no.”

“Do we still need to get that signaling device you hid somewhere?”

Toram opens their hand. In it, there’s a shiny metal box with a bright flashing light.

“Who did you signal?”

“Every Lab Elf,” Toram says. “They’ll see this and start their escape plans and find a rendez-vous before the Crusade can catch them.”

“Every one of you has an escape plan?” I ask. “Like what?”

“None of us talk about our plans, in case one of us gets captured.”

“So how do you know the others even have plans?”

“We were at peace,” Toram says. “There was nothing else to do.”

“Before I forget,” Gaoshi says. “I wanted to say thank you, Chiruchirrunut, for telling them I was captured.”

Who the hell are they talking to? I don’t know anyone named. . .

“You actually know my name,” the cheepap says.

“I get why they don’t say it,” Pactlagh says. “It’s hard to say.”

“Tough shit. The first person to call me ‘Cat Boy’ gets a free genital piercing.” Chiruchirunat holds up a claw for emphasis.

Some clanging sounds start to echo through the station.

“Gogo,” I say. “Could you please ask Cerberus what’s happening?”

Gogo doesn’t answer. Instead, I hear Cerberus in my ear. “Cowstalker, everyone is about to be worried about something else. Just to be safe, go one level down then come up in front of the hanger. There should be very few people there.”

“What are all the Crusade people going to be doing?”

“Well,” Cerberus says. “I closed off a zone with about four hundred Crusade soldiers and no civilians. Then I sealed off all exits and opened the airlocks.”

“You shot them into space?” I ask

“The other airlocks.”

“You’re filling it with water?” I ask

“Yes, and most of the people occupying the station should be busy trying to get them out before the air supply in their armor runs out, so get to the hanger now.”

Chiruchirunut seems to understand Cerberus’s directions.We go further down into the more cramped and ugly parts of the station. We go forward in single file through the cramped corridors.

“What craft are we taking out of here?” Gaoshi asks as they barrel down the corridor.

“Cerebus said that he’d prepped some Daggers.”

Gaoshi stops suddenly. “Human, I do not know how to fly a Dagger.”

“Maybe there’s room for a passenger.”

Pactlagh stops. “Bongseon, you’ve been in a Dagger. There’s barely room to pack a lunch.”

“I thought maybe there was a cargo compartment somewhere. . .”

“They are single-purpose stealth fighters,” Gaoshi says. “They do not carry cargo. Ask your friend what ships are in the hanger with cloak and five passengers.”

“Cerberus. . .” I say.

“I heard,” Cerberus says. “I think that’s going to be hard to. . . okay, there is one, a diplomatic skiff. Should I unlock and prep it?”

“Wait, you’re saying you can steal any ship in the hanger?”

“I control the station, so I control the hanger, and the hangermaster has to be able to fly all the ships in case of an emergency.”

“If I make it out of this, I’m going to become a criminal because you people make it so easy.”

We start moving much faster with the actual end in sight. I start to imagine finally getting off this goddamn station when I see a ladder up. As we get to it, Chiruchirunat’s ears fall flat against his head.

“Four soldiers,” he growls softly.

Toram looks at Seal Girl and says, “Follow me at a distance. Come up when you hear a loud noise.”

Toram starts up the ladder, making no noise as they climb. Seal Girl stays quiet by going up more slowly. You can tell by the way she holds the rungs that she’s still getting used to the whole idea of ladders.

“I wonder how long. . .” I whisper.

I hear the sharp buzz of the handgun go off, and Seal Girl leaps from the ladder. I climb up after her, ready to help. I get up to find three soldiers dead. Seal Girl is holding onto the last soldier’s head. The head is still attached, but Seal Girl is shaking it like a three year old who’s drunk a quart of cola and is frantically trying to shake a quarter out of a piggy bank. The rest of the soldier’s body is trying to keep up.

She drops the soldier, who falls to the ground. I’m not sure what part of that process killed him, but the soldier is dead.

“That’s the Skiff,” Gaoshi says, pointing at an arrowhead-shaped craft. It’s bigger than a Dagger, which is bigger than a fighter has any right to be. The door opens for us, and we jog in. The inside is again surprisingly cramped with all six of us in there. Things in my chest that had been curled tight for a week start to relax with the thought of getting off this damn station.

What I feel is nothing compared to Pactlagh’s joy at being at a set of flying controls. She’s glowing as she runs through a pre-launch checklist.

Gaoshi says, “I’ve seen records of your combat, Tyrant, and I’d like to offer a suggestion.”

Pactlagh gives Gaoshi a cold look.

“Your aim is remarkable,” Gaoshi goes on. “Your evasion is unparalleled. However, we will be heavily outnumbered when we leave the station, and you sometimes neglect the Dagger’s strongest weapon.”

“The skiff doesn’t have point defense cannons,” Pactlagh says.

Gaoshi shakes their head. “The strongest weapon is the cloak. You will need to be very cautious. Even you cannot afford this fight. You will have to be what I believe your people call a ‘Cowstalker’.”

Pactlagh sits there grinding her teeth for a minute.

“C’mon Bongseon, get us out of here.”

Chapter 14: Stealth

There are two basic ways to play Dagger Command in PVP or at the later levels. You can cloak, sneak in really close, and launch a couple torpedoes before the enemy ship has a chance to react. You might be familiar with this kind of gameplay if you play a lot of stealth attack games.

The other way is to go in, try to attack while dodging the enemy attacks. This involves a lot of getting shot and dying. You might be familiar with this game play if you’ve done other things that make you die, like painting yourself gray and going to sleep on the freeway or covering yourself in peanut butter and starting a fistfight with a bear.

There are people who do well in PVP without using stealth. These people generally have a set of talents. Usually, they can read the counter-intuitive position display and figure out a good way to evade. They can run and evade actively while always planning their next attack. Also, I find that, without fail, these people can go fuck themselves.

From the Forum Post “Stealth Strategy Versus Being a Smug Little *****”

I settle into the pilot’s chair. Pacltagh and Toram are crammed next to me. Seal Girl, Gaoshi and Chiruchirunut are in the back. The diplomatic skiff has the same two levers as a Dagger with a very similar looking panel ahead of me.

“Okay, these look a lot like Dagger controls. Do they behave like Dagger controls or are there any surprises?”

“The skiff has no point defense, no guns and only three torpedoes,” Gaoshi says. “Otherwise, it operates like a Dagger.”

“Good. Good.”

I disarm torpedo one. I set launch force on torpedo one to minimum, and then I go into special controls and cut launch force down to .001% of that, which is the real minimum. I launch.torpedo one.

We can hear a muffled “bonk” as the torpedo barely clears the tube and drops to the floor.

“I think you’re doing something that works in the game but not in real life,” Pactlagh says.

“We’ll see.”

I run through a launch sequence and take off. I hit cloak before the ship leaves the hanger. I cut speed and pull up right after the ship leaves. The skiff is skimming a few dozen meters from Aquarius, going along the edge of the station.

“So Toram,” I say. “Everyone knew you were a super soldier except for me.”

“I’m not soldier,” Toram said. “I negotiate peace treaties.”

“Yes,” Chiruchirunut answers as though Toram didn’t talk. “Everyone knows. I’m surprised your translator didn’t give it away. ‘BaiMato’ means ‘War Artist’ in Core Faction Mato.”

“I will talk about this, but perhaps we should wait until after you’ve gotten us out of here?” Toram says.

“Fine.”

God damn it. It is never time to talk. It’s always, “I have to get word out to the others of my species or they’ll fall victim to genocide.” Or “We’ll all get murdered unless you focus on your piloting.”

Toram was my guide. I thought they were my friend. They don’t have to tell me anything, but I’m being dragged into a war. That Toram was designed as a weapon is pretty fucking relevant information.

An alarm goes off, and the Skiff says something urgent in Vaughtlin. I imagine it’s something like “proximity alert” because I’ve drifted off, and we’re really close to colliding with Aquarius. I grind my teeth. I’m starting to think I’m worse at piloting when I’m quietly seething.

Apparently Gaoshi thinks so, too. “You were feeling betrayed. . .” they prompt.

I pull away from the station. The ship is still in cloak. Multiple ships are surrounding the station. My sensors show that they’re sending “searchilghts” of temporary particles through space hoping something will catch me. Toram is clutching the instrument panel with white knuckles.

“You can stop pretending to be scared,” I say. “I’ve seen you slaughter a roomful of armed soldiers.”

“I’m not pretending,” Toram says. “When you’re fighting in person you know so much more. You can hear their breathing, so you know where the enemy is facing and when they’ll attack. Most ships take thirty-two milliseconds to react, so everything you do takes time to happen.”

“Being on the Brightspear couldn’t have helped,” Gaoshi says.

“I still have nightmares from that,” Toram admitted.

“What’s that?” I say, pointing at something ahead of the ship.

Gaoshi thinks I’m talking to them. “The Brightspear was a troop transport, back when the Lab Elves were at war with us, we damaged the ship and took everyone prisoner. Uigatoram was the closest survivor to the impact that crippled the ship.”

“That’s an emergency communications relay,” Pactlagh says, answering my actual question.

“Will it kill anyone if I destroy it?” I ask.

“Only us, after they send ships to investigate who attacked the relay,” Pactlagh says.

I disarm torpedo two. I launch it at bare minimum launch force. The torpedo drifts slowly toward the relay. I change direction.”We could be moving much more quickly,” Pactlagh says.

“The space they have to search is the cube of our distance from Aquarius.”

“That sounds like a good reason to be moving much more quickly.”

I shake my head. “It’s the reason why our slow speed is fast enough. See that spot?” I indicate a place where a spot in space that Crusade ships and covering with searchlights. “That’s where we’d be if we were moving full speed. Now what’s that thing?” I point to another purposeful piece of metal floating nearby.

“That’s a cargo depot,” Pactlagh says. “Nobody will die if you destroy it.”

I disarm torpedo three and launch it at bare minimum force. Torpedo three crawls slowly toward the cargo depot.

“Now we don’t have any torpedos,” Pactlagh says.

“We can’t win a fight against fourteen Crusade Daggers, so it doesn’t matter.”

I pick another direction and keep going.

Pactlagh looks at me.

“What?” I ask.

“You know stars are really far apart, right?”

“Yes,” I say. “While eating bananas and worshipping the rain god back on my primitive planet, I have noticed that stars are far apart. Why?”

Pactlagh looks sheepish.That’s new. “You’re just going in a random direction. If you’re trying to flee the system, we’ll starve very long before we get anywhere. You need to get to the gate.”

“I’m going to the gate,” I say.

“You’re going in the wrong direction.”

“They won’t be looking for me to come from this direction.”

I go a long way into space and loop back.

“So that’s why your chest is covered in scar tissue,” I say.

Only Toram seems to know who I’m talking to and what I mean. “Yes, scars are from explosion on Brightspear.”

“I’ve seen so much technology that tells classical physics to go fuck itself. Can’t they get rid of scars?”

“I didn’t want to,” Toram said. “I grew up soldier. I was trained with coercion gear. When oowa siezed Brightspear and captured us, they educated us and helped us find identity free from . . .what’s word. . . brainwashing we were raised to. Scars remind me of when I was freed.”

“And after you were freed, you saved me from being brainwashed,” said Gaoshi.

“What the rotting hell do you mean?” Pactlagh asks.

“The Crusade had me hooked up to coercion gear,” Gaoshi says.

“What?” Pactlagh yells. It’s very loud in that space.

“It’s true,” Toram says. “They had Gaoshi connected and were starting coercion.”

“What?” Pactlagh yells again.

“What’s coercion gear?” I asked. “How can it be a surprise that those nazi bastards would use it?”

“Coercion gear was made by the Research Elves,” Toram said. “It lets you change opinions or plant compulsions.”

“Crusade law says they can execute dissidents or immigrants,” Pactlagh says. “I hate it, but that’s within their law. However, their law outlaws coercion gear. It’s a tool of the Research Elves, who are the Crusade’s original enemy. But our problem is that we have someone who’s been coerced on this ship. Gaoshi could kill us all without knowing it.”

“I evaluated them using the gear,” Toram says. “Coercion didn’t have time to take hold.”

“Oowa are hard to coerce,” Gaoshi says. “We have strong meditation and conscious control of our corpus colossum.”

“You have too many things,” I say. “I mean, I’m glad you’re free, but you guys are so weird.”

“Coercion is an outrage,” Gaoshi goes on as if they didn’t hear me. “I declare war.”

“You can do that for your whole species?” I ask.

“Only myself. For oowa, war is a personal choice.”

“How the fuck would that even . . .” I start.

“And they’ve declared war on the 240 of us,” Toram says.

“If there are 240 of you now, how many were there to start?” I ask.

“576,” Toram says.

“It’s weird that it’s not a round number.”

“576 is round number. It is twelve times twelve times four.”

I grimace. “I will never get used to your base twelve number system.”

“Each oowa chooses their own base,” Gaoshi says. “I use binary, personally.”

“How the fuck does that even work?” I ask. “You know what, never mind. Toram, you told me a story about how you and that sib of yours witnessed a massacre. Was any of that true?”

“They called them shock troopers, but they were children,” Toram said. “They were children driven mad by lies. Sometimes, I see the faces of the 144 I killed. Sometimes I see sixty they killed trying draw us out. Ramto and I promised each other we would find peace.”

We were at the gate. One of the Crusade Daggers was patrolling the gate. To go through the gate, we’d have to drop cloak and sit still for about forty seconds, which is thirty five seconds longer than it’d take the Dagger to destroy us with a torpedo.

“If you didn’t use your torpedos, you could take that one out,” Pactlagh says.

I nod. “And if they didn’t have a cloaked ship nearby, that’d work, but I’ll bet they do.”

“Is your plan to just wait for them to forget about the gate?”

“Basically,” I say.

I open the fire controls, arm torpedo three and then detonate torpedo three. Thousands of kilometers away, the cargo depot explodes.

“What?” Pactlagh says.

I open fire controls on torpedo two and arm it but wait. A few second later, I detonate torpedo two. The emergency communications relay explodes.

“You think they’ll believe we’re over there attacking Aquarius?” Pactlagh asks.

“Here’s hoping.” I open fire controls on torpedo one and arm it. After a few seconds, I detonate it. The hanger we left erupts.

I wait, wondering if I’m going to look stupid and die. Then the Dagger leaves the gate and joins the set of ships searching the space around Aquarius for an attacking ship.

I slowly move closer to the gate. I count to fifteen and then activate the gate. Pactlagh lets out a short sigh.

“Is that it?” Toram asks. “Are we safe?”

“If there’s not a ship in cloak watching the gate,” Pactlagh says.

“We’d already be dead,” I say

“Maybe they’re slow to react.”

“Nobody’s that slow.”

“Incoming torpedo,” says the ship. “Twenty seven seconds to impact.”

“That voice is so annoying,” I say. “It sounds like it’s blaming me.”

“Aren’t you worried about that?” Toram asks.

“We still have forty seconds on the gate,” Pactlagh says.

“Well, I think I have a trick up my sleeve. . .”

“When are we going to see. . .” Toram starts.

With two seconds to impact, I turn about eighteen degrees left and slightly down. I hit cloak. The torpedo has a searchlight that instantly takes me out of cloak. I turn back toward the torpedo and tap cloak again.

The torpedo explodes just a little bit too far to do damage to us.

“By all my rotting family?” Pactlagh asks.

“Flaw in the torpedo targeting system,” Gaoshi says. “The human discovered it playing the video game.”

“Incoming torpedo,” says the ship.

“It’s fine,” I say. “We’ll be through the gate. . .”

My stomach lurches as we go through the gate.

”. . . before it hits,” I finish.

It gets pretty boring for a while. Gogo is feeding me instructions through my earpiece. On its advice, we jump to an emergency shelter, which is the interstellar version of a rest stop. It’s a small station that’s normally abandoned. It has a bare minimum dock with an extending corridor, much more like something on a NASA spacewalk than the technological magic I’ve been seeing.

Once we’re inside, there are no amenities. There’s no gravity, and it’s cold as balls. I’m the most awkward, since I’ve never been without gravity until a week ago. Toram can move through zero gravity with perfect grace, the smug little fuck.

Seal Girl loves zero gravity and doesn’t mind the cold. She’s jumping from wall to wall, doing awkward flips and terrifying everyone else. Most of us huddle in a bored cluster holding onto some straps. Every so often, Gaoshi breaks into a lecture. The little empty room is so monotonous I don’t mind.

Finally, an automated Hopper comes to get us, and the six of us get inside. The Hopper starts taking us back to the Embrace.

On the way, Gogo gives me some upsetting news. The last few patrols the Embrace sent out ran into Crusade ships almost immediately. It’s happening enough that the Embrace’s high command thinks the Crusade knows where the Embrace is.”

“It was bound to happen,” Gaoshi says. “As soon as they took Aquarius. You’ve been stationing pilots there for a week, and they haven’t been careful enough about who they talk to. I’ve had to actively avoid learning the Embrace’s location before now.”

The news renders Pactlagh mechanical. I don’t know what time frame this means for her mother and son. Toram seems somber. This probably isn’t their first time facing impending death. At first, it seems like Seal Girl doesn’t understand the news, but Toram talks it over with her and she seems to get the gist. She says that people want to kill you sometimes, but now she’ll get to fly.

“How about we don’t go to the gigantic doomed ship?” Chiruchirunut asks.

“They’re not going to destroy it right away,” Gaoshi says. “They’re not going to risk losing a naval battle to the Embrace and its fleet of Daggers. They’re going to surround it with small fleets to motivate the Embrace, to herd it to some isolated spot while they muster a fleet it couldn’t possibly defeat.”

“So let’s not go there.”

“The Embrace will have time to resettle some of its refugees, and we can escape with them,” Goashi says. “Trust me, our odds would be better there than trying to find a port that would take a hopper full of fugitives before we starved.”

“Besides,” Pactlagh says. “You’re in a ship with me, and I’m going back to the Embrace.”

We don’t say much else of note as we wait for the hopper to get back to the Embrace. The second time seeing the Embrace, I’m familiar enough with space to get a sense of its scale. It’s larger than a city. It’s longer than Aquarius. There really are a million people on the station.

I try to fit the coming tragedy in my head, and I can’t. A million people is a bad epidemic, but this million is all in one place. But the million dead don’t even cut it because there are only a couple billion metros in the universe. This is a noticeable fraction of the population that’s just going to be murdered.

I expect the crowd greeting the hopper to be funereal, but the mood seems excited. There are more oowa than I’ve seen in one place to greet Gaoshi, who’s apparently a big celebrity among their species. They’re star struck in a reserved oowa way. I’m scared. I’m as scared as when I had to leave the raftweed. I hope I’m last, but Gaoshi is first. Chiruchurinut comes out with them, but aside from some curious children, hardly anyone seems to notice him.

I look back at Toram, hoping they’re going to leave and greet the crowd before me, but they hold up their hands and smile coyly.

Pactlagh goes down the ramp, and I can see her son run toward her. She said he’s eight. I can’t estimate children’s ages, so I don’t know if that means the same thing it does for an eight-year-old human.

“Mom!” her son says. Gokril. His name is Gokril. “You’re back! They said maybe you wouldn’t be back, but you’re back!”

Pactlagh picks him up. “I was always coming back. You’re not getting away from your Tyrant.”

Gokril looks hurt. “I’m so sorry I called you that, mom.”

“You did me a favor. If you didn’t, my callsign would have been Farmer.”

Pactlagh turns back and gestures for me to come. I hesitate and Seal Girl walks forward instead. Gokril rushes forward to hug her, and Seal Girl kneels with her arms at her sides.

“Is she okay?” Gokril asks.

“She’s fine. She’s just very strong. Um,” Pactlagh fishes a metal cup from a nearby table, and she hands it to Seal girl and makes a fist. Seal Girl clenches her fist around the cup. After a couple seconds, it crumples. It was thick metal. I’m sure I could have stood on it without denting it.

“This is the best thing you ever brought me!” Gokril says. Seal Girl laughs with him.

Pactlagh turns back and gestures for me again.

I’m not good with kids. I wasn’t good with kids when I was a kid. If this was a kid on Earth, maybe I could talk about Pokemon or something (maybe kids aren’t into that anymore). But this is an alien kid. I have no idea what I’m going to say.

Gokril holds his hands forward so I can take them. I don’t know if he wants me to swing him around or what, but I reach forward, and he grabs my hands and looks at me.

“While I have a voice, you will be heard,” Gokril says, “While I have sense, you will be found. While I breathe, you will have a home. While I have strength, you will never fight alone.”

The way he says it, it’s clear this is a thing metros say sometimes, but it’s also clear he’s thought about and means every word.

How do I explain what’s going on with me?

When I was born, I feel like the message everyone had for me is, “The world is yours if you can save it, and by the way, you’re too fucking late.” Every step is measured in degrees of failure. Am I smart enough? Am I polite enough? Am I as strong and determined as I’m supposed to be? Every relationship feels like a thing where I’m evaluated and found wanting.

I’m not the kid my parents hoped for, not the friend my peers want, not the kind of student teachers like to teach, not the person companies want to hire.

It’s the kind of bullshit that makes you spend every night playing a game that almost every review calls “too hard to be playable”, and playing it until you find every little mistake and rig that game until you can be the only person to beat it. You do all this so you can win one game that you hate because it’s a thing in the universe that you can be the best at.

I breathe failure and shame, and it’s fine. It’s fine. It’s fine. I barely even feel it anymore.

And then someone says shit like this, and this weight I’m carrying is lifted, and I feel what’s been weighing down on me, and the crushing atmosphere of my stupid, useless life crumbles in on me.

And I’m a mess. I’m a fucking mess. I’m a sobbing, sagging, snot-covered mess. Pactlagh, Gokril, an old woman who I guess is Pactlagh’s mother and Toram are all crowding around me, almost carrying me until they get me to a bench where I can sit down.

Chapter 15: Base Builder

The last twenty years have seen a big flare up of military fighting in space between the powers in the root arm. The different sides have shown very different tactics.

The factions of elves have strategies as varied as their philosophies, but most of them tend to fight with very small independent groups that are difficult to find and stop. They tend not to occupy systems but harass to extract policy concessions.

Metros have more manufacturing capacity than any race they’re in contact with. They tend to fight defensively. They protect planets as well as they can, and then they slowly bring together a slow, overwhelming force. It’s not fast, but the only time the metro navy has lost an offensive engagement has been to another metro navy.

The oowa who are so relentlessly, dogmatically direct in most dealings, are masters of military misdirection.

Excerpt from a forum post about military strategy.

After that embarrassing start, I get myself cleaned up and get to be part of the welcome. Pactlagh is crammed on a bench with her mother and son, unrecognizable with joy. Toram seems to be doing their best to be invisible and succeeding remarkably well. I’m surprised to notice them next to me.

“I am sorry I didn’t tell you before why I was made,” Toram says. “I have been weapon, and I try hard not be seen as weapon. Everyone knew what I was but you, and you saw me differently.”

I think about that for a little. “I guess I understand. On Earth, I was kind of worthless, and it’s been good not to feel like that for a while.”

“Who do you think you’re going to be when you go back?” Toram asks.

“How the fuck would I get back?”

“The Embrace is sending out shuttle of refugees, like Gaoshi said. About hundred of you are going to go on ship to Freeland, which is elf world dominated by Chaos Faction. You go there. There’s no treaty, but most members of Chaos are passionate about bringing displaced primitives back to their home. Eventually, I am confident you will go back.”

“Where would you go?” I ask.

Toram waves a windshield-wiper shrug. “I can’t go to Freeland. They risk angering Crusade and getting into war. A hundred civilians is small risk. Baimato like me are big risk.”

I look back to the table. Pactlagh, who was talking to her mother and son, is looking right at me. “Get on that shuttle, Bongseon. You’ve been brave. You got me back to the Embrace. You didn’t ask to come here. You should go home.”

“What will you do?” I asked.

“I will do what I always knew I would do.”

“And I should just leave you behind?” I ask.

“You and Gokril will get on the shuttle. We’ll stay here. I always knew what was coming. Getting my son out has been the one thing I hoped for. I know he’ll get on the shuttle if you’re there.”

“Does he get a choice? He’s a child.”

“There is a lot of demand for seats on that shuttle. If someone says they don’t want to be on -- even a child -- they lose their seat to someone who wants to leave.”

“If there’s limited seats. . .”

“I chose to be here,” Pactlagh said. “I had a tiny part to play when we stole the Embrace. Almost everyone chose to be here. My son came here because I took him because I couldn’t stand the thought of him being taught so much hate.”

“I’ve got to think about this.”

I got up from the table. The halls were thick with people. Everyone wants to see the people who made it out of Aquarius. It doesn’t bother me very much. Metros are some of the most polite gawkers you’ll ever meet.

A pass a common area, and there’s a cluster that’s about half oowa. I peer past them and am not surprised to find Gaoshi there, talking at length about the strengths and weaknesses of different navies.

“Don’t you have friends here?”

I turn to the growling voice and see Chiruchirunut standing by me. I shake my head. “Basically just the people I was traveling with. I spent more time in Aquarius than I spent here.”

“I’ve never been on a colony ship before,” the cheepap says. “Not many species make them.”

“Have you heard there’s going to be a shuttle tomorrow? Some people are going to escape.”

“Shit, yes, I’ve heard. I’m going to be on that shuttle.”

“Do you feel bad for the people here who are going to die?” I ask.

“Bad? Yeah. Probably hundreds have been executed back on Aquarius. I feel bad about that. Bad shit happens. I don’t mind that it’s not going to happen to me.”

“I feel like I should try to do something.”

Chiruchirunut scoffs. It’s a short, chirping noise. “My people are what these shitmasons call ‘primitives’. We had computers, but we didn’t beat light speed. Our system was right between the elves and the oowa, and we got kind of dragged into interstellar civilization. If you’re off your planet, and you’re people don’t have a navy, you’re really vulnerable.

“Some of us end up ‘indentured servants’. Is that a word your language has? We end up slaves or experiments or just disappear. These shitmasons, they feel bad about it, but they don’t do shit. If it was your people, your planet that was going to get blown up, they wouldn’t lift a finger. You’re a primitive.”

“I feel like it was a miracle we got out of Aquarius,” I say.

“Gotta agree.”

I nodded to the cheepap. “I’ve got to get back to Pactlagh.”

“Hope I see you on the shuttle, primitive.”

I got up not feeling any better. It’s a fact of life that there are endless tragedies. I have distant family -- second and third cousins -- who are in North Korea. Their lives are probably filled with suffering I can’t imagine.

But I’ve met Sweet Talk, and he’s dead. I know Cerberus and Pactlagh, and they’re going to die. Toram’s probably going to die. There’s nothing I can do about it. I can go home and remember them, though nobody will believe me if I talk about them. The people suffering on Earth are multiplied by people I never knew about suffering in space.

I wander back to the table with Pactlagh. She raises an eyebrow at me.

“I’ll go on the shuttle,” I say.

She sighs in relief. “Thank my rotting ancestors. I was so worried you’d do something stupid.”

I’m getting a quick introduction to the Metros’ recreational drug of choice, agwu. The agwu itself is a kind of plant. You vaporize it and stuff it in this thing the size of a water bottle. Each person who partakes holds a self-sterilizing mask with a kind of tail on it. You pass around this bottle. The tail on your mask finds the bottle if it’s close enough, and you can inhale some of this stuff. After you inhale, you pass the bottle on.

I hate a lot of metro food, but agwu is good. It just makes it hard to worry, which is very much what I want right now. It doesn’t make you quite as stupid as pot does, and it doesn’t make you as unstable as alcohol does. The night gets pretty hazy. The next thing I know, I’m going back to my cozy bedroom on the Embrace, and I go to sleep.

“Wake up,” Gogo says. “It will soon be time for you to board the shuttle.”

For a few hours, I’ve been drugged to find it very difficult to worry, and I wake up swimming in anxiety. I get up and take a fast shower. It’s weird showering with thirty other people there and not having the usual worries of body shame or unwanted advances. I’m worrying that everyone who saw me thought that I was someone who got to leave. I’m going to get a seat on the shuttle that they won’t get. I was going to live when they die.

I kept my eyes down when I dressed, and I kept my eyes down when I went down to the embarcation zone. Toram was there with Pactlagh and her mother and son.

Pactlagh gave me a bone-crushing hug. “It was stupid and immoral of SweetTalk to haul you out here, but I’m glad he did. I owe it to you that I got to see Gokril again and got to see him safe. You’re a good friend, Bongseon.”

I can’t stop crying. It takes me a few tries before I say, “I can’t believe I’m leaving you behind, Pactlagh.”

“Please, please do. It’s your best choice.”

Toram’s hug was shorter and less violent. They held my hands as they talked, “I’ve never met anyone like you, Bongseon. I like the person you let me be. I’m sorry I wasn’t always honest with you, and I hope with all my heart that you make it home.”

“You were. . .” is as far as I can get before I’m crying too hard to talk. I collect my breath and say, “You made me feel safe in all this madness. I couldn’t have made it through any of this without you.”

“I don’t believe that,” Toram said.

Gokril takes my hand. “My grandma says it’s time for us to get on the shuttle.”

I give everyone a hug and cry endlessly. Gokril must think I’m a weepy mess. We go in and get to our seats. I’m sitting next to Gokril. Gaoshi has the seat across the table, facing me. They’re still loading people onto the shuttle.

“Do you feel guilty for going?” I ask Gaoshi.

Gaoshi shakes their head. “My favorite games to play are ones where there’s a huge handicap, but I know a uniquely hopeless situation. There’s no way for the Embrace to survive.”

I nod and look at the floor.

“But,” Gaoshi says. I look up at Gaoshi.

“What if we stayed and we did save the Embrace?” they ask.

“Everyone says we can’t,” I say.

Gaoshi nods. “The Crusade has the strongest navy in this region’s history, and it’ll be focused on one ship. You know that game you have on Earth? It’s the one with the six people?”

I try to think of a six-player game. “Diplomacy?” I say.

“Chess!” Gaoshi says.

“That has two players.”

“But seven pieces.”

“Thirty-two pieces.”

“But seven distinct pieces.”

I think for a moment. “Six.”

“Seven,” Gaoshi says. “King. Queen. Pawn. Knight. Rook. King’s bishop. Queen’s bishop. The point is that all we have is the king. The Crusade has no targets. The Embrace is nothing but a target with a handful of Daggers to defend it.”

“Yeah.”

“But,” Gaoshi says, and they’re starting to grin. “What if we won anyway?”

“What would victory even look like?”

“That thing you do with software vulnerabilities,” Gaoshi says. “Can you go from one system to break into another? It can function remotely, right?”

“Yes. Is there a way to connect to a Crusade system from here?”

Gaoshi flips a hand palm to knuckles, which seems like a “no”. “We must all of us seem naive to you, but not so trusting as that. You need a connected device. If we captured an earpiece, a tablet or something, it’d disconnect. We’d need you to board a vessel, something they can’t disconnect, like a Hammer Cruiser.”

“Um, in the game I played, Hammer Cruisers are suicide to get anywhere near.”

“The training program you used isn’t a true simulator and contains a few inaccuracies,” Gaoshi says, “But it portrays Hammer Cruisers accurately in that respect.”

“So how would I even get into the system?”

“Are you planning to stay and fight?” Gokril asks.

“No, I said. We’re just talking about what would happen if we did.”

“Isn’t that what planning is?”

“No,” I say at the same time Gaoshi says, “Partly.”

“So you think you can get me onto a Hammer Cruiser?” I ask Gaoshi.

“It’s problematic,” Goashi says. “They will defend the cruisers with waves of Daggers, and the Hammer Cruiser can defend itself quite well.”

“So we can’t do that.”

Gaoshi’s dumb grin is back, wider and dumber. They’ve found their stupid. It’s like a perfect student who goes to Harvard Law School and discovers people who share her passion for learning but also cocaine. Or some chaste daughter who makes her family proud until she meets a DJ with a killer smile and a nice dick. Everyone’s a fucking genius until they find the thing they love more than being right.

“What if we did?” Gaoshi said. “It would stop the Crusade. It would save a million people. If I could win this fight, we would be heroes. Everyone who says that I’m not tested because I was only an apprentice during the Iwiu wars would have to admit I’m a real strategist, not just a game player.”

“This is all if we stay and fight the Crusade -- which everyone says is suicide -- and don’t die.”

“They might not call you a primitive,” Gaoshi says. “Honestly, I think they still would, but you’d be the primitive who stopped the Crusade.”

“Tell me there’s a chance.”

“I think there’s a chance,” Gokril says.

I forgot the kid was there. “Gokril,” I say. “Gaoshi is just saying shit.”

Gokril stands up. I reach out to grab him, but he moves faster than I can. He’s dodging over legs and running down the crowded aisle of the shuttle before I can reach him.

“Our stupid conversation did that,” I say.

“I’m staying,” Gaoshi announces. “I’d rather spend a month being brave and trying the impossible than live another seventy years knowing I’d walked away.”

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Maybe,” Gaoshi says cheerfully, and they walk down the aisle.

There are maybe five or six more oowa on the shuttle. Two of them get up the moment they see Gaoshi stand up. Their lips pull back to show all their teeth in a terrifying grin I haven’t seen from oowa before. After some quick rumbling discussion, another pair of oowa get up and follow Gaoshi off the shuttle.

I stare at the empty chair across from me.

“Fuck it,” I say, and I stand up and start to navigate down the corridor.

On the way out, I see chiruchirunut sitting and looking at a tablet.

“Bye,” he says pointedly, barely looking up.

“You’re not thinking of. . .”

“Nope,” the cheepap says. His ears press back against his head.

“We could probably use a. . .”

“A what?” Chriuchirunut asks, “What do you think I do?”

“You worked for Gaoshi. . .”

“Because it’s the only job I could get as a primitive among all these shitmasons. I’m a fucking linguist.”

“Oh,” I say. “That’s why you know a lot of languages.”

“No connection whatsoever. I speak seven languages because I travel a lot and I belong to a culture that doesn’t have an epispatial communication network to translate everything I say.”

“Okay, I’ll see you around.”

“Un-likely,” Chiruchirunut says and goes back to reading his tablet.

I keep walking off the shuttle. Toram is standing off the shuttle, grinning like they’d guessed all along that I was coming off. There’s a line of people waiting to take the places of the six people who walked off. Some Oowa are in the line, and they step out when they see Gaoshi.

I’ve described oowa as very reserved, but apparently I haven’t seen an occasion for them to get emotional. When they saw Gaoshi before, they were reacting as, “Oh look, there’s the famous strategist. We get to meet them before we die.”

Now they’re thinking, “The great strategist is staking their life on winning a fight we thought was unwinnable. They start a rumbling, deafening chant in some oowa language. It’s “Gaoshi zhasei!” My earpiece translates it as “Gaoshi stays!” I can barely hear the translation over the yell. It echoes down the corridors of the Embrace and comes back as oowa in other parts of the ship take up the call.

The line of people who were standing by to get on the shuttle if anyone had second thoughts is in complete chaos as they’re trying to decide who gets to leave now. People are trying to negotiate it all over the din of the celebrating oowa. Toram is laughing at the chaos. I turn and see Pactlagh.

She’s holding Gokril and contorted with weeping.Gokril was safe and now he’s not. Pactlagh is the strongest woman I’ve ever met. Seeing her so completely undone is like seeing the sun go out. It’s like seeing the oceans dry up and the mountains float away. What is safe? What is anything if bold, confident Pactlagh is sobbing like a lost child.

I could come to her and say what? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to give him hope. Would she scream at me? Would she hit me? Would she forgive me? I don’t know. All I know is that I can’t take it.

I walk away. For a minute, I felt so brave, and I walk away. I owe her to stay, to say something, but I walk away because it’s the only thing I can bring myself to do.

The next day I still can’t bring myself to find Pactlagh. I made it worse by walking away. I don’t know how I’m going to reverse this. I take a shower. I hardly notice the crowd in the shower anymore. I ask Gogo where Toram is. It’s an absurdly long walk to the public square Gogo directs me to.

Toram is talking to Gaoshi. I’m not great at reading anything on the oowa’s big ape faces, but I suspect Gaoshi hasn’t gotten any sleep.

“What comes next?” I ask.

“We’re writing the story backwards,” Gaoshi says. “You get control of the governor system on a Hammer Cruiser. All the Crusade systems are connected, so you can jump from one system to another.”

“Maybe. I don’t know much about how their networks go, and after what happened with Aquarius, they’ll be ready.”

Gaoshi makes a pushing motion, shoving my concern away. “I’ve been looking up a bit of Earth cybersecurity,” Gaoshi actually forms the English word “cybersecurity”, and it’s barely understandable. “Metro don’t have time to catch up to the tricks your planet has come up with.”

“I’m nowhere near the Earth’s leading expert on cybersecurity.”

Gaoshi does a “no” hand flip. “I thought about that. We probably don’t have time to find a security expert on Earth, abduct them, bring them back and persuade them to help us. You’ll have to do.”

“I’ll need help.”

“You get into their computer system and win. You don’t know how you make that work. We don’t know how you survive on a Hammer cruiser long enough to break in. We don’t know how you get on a Hammer Cruiser without getting killed. We don’t know how the Embrace survives long enough for you to do this. That’s the story we haven’t written.”

“This probably won’t help,” I say.

Gaoshi’s enormous eyebrows go up as their large eyes regard me.

“When I was cheating with the game they gave me, the thing that really broke through was that I learned to simulate calls that handled where things were located,” I paused.

“You’re right,” Gaoshi says. “I don’t think that helps.”

“Well, what worked best was if I relocated a sun so it went right through the enemy ships.”

Goashi grunts. “Solar war.”

“So this is a thing?” I ask.

Gaoshi does a puppet-snap in agreement.

“It is war crime, though,” Toram says. “Harming an ecosystem is much worse than mass murder, according to the tribunals.”

“We can choose our battlefield,” Gaoshi says. “Many systems have no life.”

“Grandmaster Gaoshi,” someone says.

We look over to see a Metro in a uniform I vaguely recognize it as a higher ranking officer’s uniform for the Embrace. Gaoshi stands and bows.

“We are ready to receive you,” the officer says. “Keep in mind that, whatever your rank among the oowa, you will be with us only in an advisory capacity.”

Chapter 16: Team Manager

It’s hard to be young when the call comes for Crusade. Suddenly, it seems like everyone has something more important to do than to help you, and they’re all off building big things.

But you matter so much. We say, “One Heart, One Family,” and we mean you, too. Your heart is part of the One Heart. You are a member of the One Family which includes everything that can talk, listen and understand.

And you’re building something, too. You’re building something big. You’re building something we need. You’re building something nobody else can build, because you’re building you.

So if you need something to become the person you need to be, tell someone. If you need something to be strong, to be kind, to be happy, to be all the things one of us should be, tell someone.

We cooperate when we hear the call to Crusade. But that doesn’t mean you follow everything blindly. Inside you is something like a compass, that tells you when things are right or wrong. If the way things are going feels wrong to you, you can and should object.

Because adults get things wrong. Sometimes they’re so angry that they can’t think clearly. Sometimes they’re so hurt they stop feeling pain, and they just think life is pain. With all the amazing things we’ve built, we haven’t built anything that can help someone see clearly through their pain.

But maybe you can, because you’re building you.

From Living With Crusade: a Guide for Recon Children

I’ve been back on the Embrace for almost a full day when the top brass calls a meeting. There are a little over a hundred pilots, about two hundred support staff, a couple dozen officers and a bunch of people in clothes I don’t recognize. I don’t really fit in any of these categories. Toram and Seal Girl, who also doesn’t fit, are standing with me.

Gaoshi is sitting by the top officers. They’ve been locked in a meeting with them for hours, and I’d describe the look on the officer’s face as haunted. If there was coke in space, I’d suspect Gaoshi of taking it. Their eyes are wide, and a wide smile exposes rows of disturbingly wide teeth.

An Admiral that I don’t know has stands up and addresses the group, “We’ve discussed possible outcomes when the Crusade comes for the Embrace. Grandmaster Gaoshi has run us through a few scenarios and. . . we’re convinced things will be best if Grandmaster Gaoshi takes direct command of our defense. We accord Gaoshi the rank of admiral. Please address them as Admiral Gaoshi until the crisis has passed.”

Gaoshi stands up and looks at all the faces. Their face shows nothing but the same manic gleam they had on the shuttle. “We cannot defend the Embrace,” Gaoshi says.

The room gets very quiet.

“One Dagger carries five torpedoes. Two torpedoes could bring the Embrace down to a handful of survivors. The Crusade fields over a thousand Daggers. We could not hope to save the Embrace except for two things.”

Gaoshi holds up a thumb. “The Crusade is afraid to lose. The escape of the Embrace and a series of losses to Recon’s fleet of Daggers has cost the Crusade political leverage it had as the strongest navy in known space. They could have fielded a few attempts to destroy the Embrace already, and one of them might have worked, but they might have failed. They’re clearly determined that their first attempt will succeed.”

Gaoshi holds up an index finger. “Second, when the Crusade comes, they won’t be attacking the Embrace. They’ll be defending their capital ships.”

Everyone looks fairly confused. Everyone knows it’s almost impossible to take on a Hammer Cruiser.

“We will be trying to get close to a Hammer Cruiser with a Hopper. The hopper will use displacers to send a payload onto the Hammer Cruiser. The payload will be the Human, Bongseon Yoon, callsign Cowstalker.”

A little over two hundred people look at me. I nod nervously back. One of the pilots raised a hand and waves his fingers. Gaoshi waves to him.

“Grandmaster. . .Admiral. I did studies on Earth. They’ve barely begun with macrosoftware. How could a human possibly be a challenge to a modern security system.”

I brace myself for hearing someone else give the “humans are a dumpster fire” speech.

“Unlike the rest of us, humans are on the planet they evolved to live on,” Gaoshi says. “We estimate that the Sowers took twelve to eighteen generations to modify most of us to live on our respective planets, but humans had millions of years to tailor themselves to Earth. It’s an unusually generous planet for our species.

“There are twelve cousin races that broke the light speed limit. There are a couple hundred that haven’t broken space. There are over a thousand known planets where the native cousin race has gone extinct. On every planet, the cousin race has either unified around the time it developed industry or died out.”

Gaoshi gestures to me again. “Except Earth. They reached industry. They thrive, growing to numbers beyond any known planet despite primitive agriculture, and they do this despite being in almost constant conflict. They invented the computer like many races. Like some others, they made it a battlefield. Unlike any known related race, they continued to survive fighting over their computers, I assume because they live on the world they evolved on.

“So there are eight billion people, and due to their political and economic realities, they’re engaged in multi-front conflict. They’ve had computers for less than a century, but they’ve had millions of people engaged in electronic warfare in this time. Cyber security is a rare concern for other races, but it’s a science on Earth.”

Gaoshi gestures to me, “So we fly Cowstalker to a Hammer Cruiser. A displacer will send her to a cruiser. She will use the cruiser’s networking system to break into some or all of the Crusade’s governor systems.”

Another hand goes up with wiggling fingers. I look over and see it’s Pactlagh. I haven’t talked her since I got off the shuttle. Gaoshi gestures to her.

“A Hammer Cruiser has a crew of two hundred. At least fifty of them are marines there only to kill borders.”

“Yes,” Toram says, and they cross their arms. Their eyes are cold. “They will have other concerns.”

“Uigatoram will be on the hopper with Cowstalker. They’ll hit the cruiser together. My hope is that Ogiatoram will buy Cowstalker enough time to breach security.”

A pilot I don’t know raises his hand. Gaoshi points at the pilot. The pilot asks, “Will they be expecting this?”

Gaoshi nods. “I assume so. They know someone breached computer security on Aquarius.”

I raise my hand. I feel like a five-year-old wiggling my fingers, but that’s how Metros raise their hands. Gaoshi points at me.

“Will they be able to research computer security from Earth archives?”

“Unlikely,” Gaoshi says. “Metros’ only intelligence of Earth came from the Earth Studies department of a university. The faculty of that department are all dead or on board the Embrace. Some other races are surveilling Earth, but they are reluctant to share their information with the Crusade.”

“Put out word that we need more pilots,” Gaoshi said. “We lost nine with Wing Eight and will be short two members of Wing Twelve. We are also retiring Cerberus from Wing Twelve. We need at least six more Dagger pilots. I will also be enlisting civilian pilots for every craft loyal to Recon.”

“I would like to be a pilot!” Seal Girl calls out.

“Pilots are chosen based on their scores on the simulator,” Gaoshi says. “Start practicing.”

A metro in a bright tunic stands up. I gather she’s some kind of local leader. “Until the Embrace is out of immediate danger, we call crusade. If you wish to petition for a specific role, start your efforts now.”

I have no idea what that’s about. I want to sneak out of the briefing and get back to my room and hide. I’m most afraid of Pactlagh, but it’s Cerberus who’s tracked me down.

“Did you get me kicked out of Wing Twelve?”

I hadn’t expected the question, and I don’t really know the answer.

“Is this something Paclicroc told you to do?”

I barely save myself from asking who the hell Paclicroc is. Paclicroc is SweetTalk’s real name and Cerberus’s brother. And then I remember that SweetTalk did ask me to protect Cerberus. And now I’ve been quiet for too long, and Cerberus sees that as an admission of guilt.

“Rot all of that,” Cerberus says. “They took SweetTalk from me, and I want revenge.”

“Revenge?”

“You’re not part of this. You haven’t lost what we have.”

I hold up my hands. “I totally get wanting revenge, but you’re not getting that as a pilot. The Dagger pilots aren’t there to rack up kills. They’re there to get me through. If you’re a pilot, you can take down maybe four enemy Daggers. That’s not revenge. If I get you into the governor module for the cruiser, and that gets you into the other Crusade governor modules, Everyone you worked with says you know Gogo better than anyone. What disasters have you stopped? What can go wrong if the wrong person gets access to a governor module?”

Cerberus bites his lip. “We had water recycling go offline for three hours due to a software error Gogo couldn’t figure out on its own. I mean, if you could get into other systems, you could mess with air processing. Well, and obviously there’s suspension drive . . .”

Cerberus stops. His eyes go wide.

“I’ll be going there to break in. When I do, there’ll be gear in my suit to connect you. You’ll be the one to stop the Crusade. You will have to be ruthless. Can you do that?”

“Oh yes.”

I get a firsthand glimpse of what it means to “call crusade”. It’s like declaring martial law, except human despots only wish they had citizens embrace martial law like metros get into crusade.

It’s not a coincidence that the bad guys are “the Crusade”. It’s the same word in the Metro languages, Gaghkal. The metros declared a crusade eight years ago, and their side of the civil war says that it’s not time to end the crusade.

I can’t imagine living like this for eight years. Most people suddenly have a new job related to the upcoming fight. You were a cook? Not anymore. Everyone’s eating nutrient paste that requires less time to prepare, and now you help build flight suits or Daggers.

You know how I’m rich? They paid me a good income all at once, and I have a ton of savings I haven’t gotten to use. Well, I still don’t get to use it. My account is frozen. Everyone’s account is frozen. They don’t want people paid to do things unrelated to the war effort.

What everyone gets is a survival income. You’re not paid for a specific job because it’s assumed that you’re working every waking minute because that’s what you do during the crusade.

There’s a another Vaughtlin word, nadlu, which I can best translate as “cheap”, but it also means great because you’re not using resources. Like on Earth, I guess it’s how you’d feel about a fair-trade vegan alfalfa salad. So it’s shitty in a way that makes you feel better about yourself.

But when they’re on crusade, metros love anything that’s nadlu. After two meals of nutrient paste, I would curb stomp a bitch for an alfalfa salad, but metros eat this food a starving dog wouldn’t touch, and they act like it tastes like powdered donuts because it’s not labor intensive.

The obsession goes beyond food. During crusade, metros see someone walk down the hallway in an old patched shirt that would make a moth set up a Gofundme, and they say, “Look at that. So nadlu! That amalgam of dust mites and food stains makes me want to screw your senseless. Lets fuck like bunnies when our work shift ends in three days.”

I haven’t spent much time around elves. I mean, I’ve spent time with Toram, who was made by elves and has a lot of genetics in common with them, but I’m not sure how they’re different. About a third of the people on the Embrace are elves, though, and we’re fellow sufferers of the metro’s relentless single mindedness.

I’m walking down the hallway with Electron, an elf woman in Wing Twelve, and she sees an elf friend coming the other way, and she yells out this greeting, “Are you working toward the common good at the expense of your own needs?”

“Yes!” her friend yells back. “It’s my favorite!”

When I laugh with them, they seem a little relieved. I guess no one knows what humans are like. Maybe we’re natural fanatics like the metros.

Speaking of which, my main job is to get better at hacking. I took some classes on IT security back on Earth. I did some poking and prodding in my free time. I’m not a hacker by any means. I need information, and I need it from Earth, the cybersecurity Mecca of the known universe. I have to talk to the Earth Studies department. For metros, this is an obscure but not very practical field of study.

So I make an appointment. On a fugitive ship, there’s not a lot of call for an Earth Studies professor. Apparently, they had to consult with him about how to abduct me, but he hasn’t had any official duties since then.

The faculty offices are on the far side of the Embrace. I come to their spot to find the door wide open and three people almost vibrating with excitement.

“Okay, hi!” says a professor in English.

“Hey,” I say.

“Are you from Asia?” he asks. The professor exhausted his English and is back to Vaughtlin.

“No. Three of my four grandparents are. I’m from the United States.”

“My study is about Asia and its relation to the rest of the world.”

“Seems way too broad,” comes out of my mouth before I can stop it.

“I study the psychological effects of capitalism,” says another professor. “When this is over, I’d love to speak to someone from the United States.”

“I compare major technological milestones on Earth with other industrial primitives,” says a third professor.

“Okay, fine,” say, “I need access to Earth information. You have some access to Earth?”

“Sure,” says the technology professor. I’ll call him Technology. “We have a tie in to that transmission network of yours.”

“The internet?” I ask.

“Yeah, that.”

“How the fuck are you on the internet?”

“We’ve been intercepting signals forever,” Capitalism says. “When I was a grad student, we sent down a robot. We found a human who will help the robot and do favors for us. She handles some of the things we need. She helped us publish the video game you played.”

“She knows you’re aliens?”

Capitalism shakes her head. “She thinks she’s working for a human criminal who is using the robot for anonymity. Is this a thing human criminals do? We couldn’t find any precedent for that.”

“No, that’s not a thing. Why is she helping a robot she thinks is remote controlled by a crime boss?”

“We give her gold. Every so often, we displace some gold to the surface, and the robot gives her gold every season.”

“Where do you get gold?” I ask.

They all think this is funny. “They send out ships to mine for the Embrace. They bring back lots of important stuff and some gold. It’s not super-rare in space.”

“I don’t know if you’ve been briefed on this, but Earth seems to be better at breaking into computers than anyone else. Everyone seems to have a different theory as to why.”

“Do they,” Capitalism says dryly. It’s not a question.

“What do you need from us?” asks Asia.

“Well, I don’t know everything there is to know about breaching computer security. I’d like to connect back to Earth to read up on it. Can you do that?”

“Yes,” Technology says. “Gogo has a subsystem that’s constantly pulling information.”

“And if I have to buy digital stuff, I can do it?”

“Yes, we have cash,” says capitalism. “We can get more.”

“Is there a time delay?” I ask.

Everyone looks blank, and then everyone in the room laughs at once. The way I think signals take time to travel is apparently a real thigh slapper out here.

“The signals on the Earth network are slow,” the professor says. “Once they get to the robot, they get to the Embrace by epispatial link, and there’s no delay.”

“Great,” I say. “I think that’s all I need.”

Capitalism walks forward and pulls me into a hug. I hug her back hesitantly.

“You’re such lonely, lonely creatures,” she says.

I search through articles about security principles and talk to Gogo about how to implement cross-site scripting attacks. This is my assigned task, but I can’t focus for as long as the metros can, and it’s a huge relief when I’m told I have split duties. Due to logistical problems, I also have to keep training as a pilot.

I go back to the flight training rooms. I’m still dreading running into Pactlagh, but it’s Seal Girl I see. She’s on one of the simulators. She doesn’t notice me until she’s finished a simulation. She asks me if I’d try fighting against her.

So Seal Girl can hold her breath for thirty minutes. She can dive something like a hundred meters without a suit. She can rip someone’s arms off without breaking a sweat. I’ve played video games since I was three. I’ve put a completely shameful number of hours into Dagger Command, and Seal Girl never saw a computer until last week. I take her out fast. It’s impressive that she can fly at all.

After I’ve shot Seal Girl down four times, I see Electron standing by. “Have you had emergency flight stress testing?”

“What?”

“It’s required for all pilots. You should go.”

I get Gogo to direct me to where the emergency flight stress tests are. They’re in the medical center. It’s in an unfamiliar part of the Embrace. I might say this a lot because the Embrace is an infinitely large maze of rooms and corridors. No two things are in the same place, and I have to navigate through crowds of people with the personal space needs of a naked mole rat.

I arrive at the medical center, which is apparently just an emergency room, because the people there are all badly injured. Apparently, they have great local anesthetic because everyone is really calm. Someone who’s broken a couple fingers back is more concerned with questions like, “Will it ever stop hurting?” and less concerned with questions like, “Can that woman figure skate?”

“Oh, this is exciting,” a doctor says. He’s got a purple tunic and loose purple pants and is carrying a thin tablet. “A human and a raft person! These will be really interesting cases. Could you have a seat over there?”

The seat has straps in it like a flight seat on a Dagger. I strap myself in and look nervously up. “So, what kind of thing are you testing?”

“G forces, mostly,” the doctor says. “Are you ready?”

“Are we going to some kind of centrifuge or . . .urk.”

Before I finish the sentence, the doctor has tapped something on his pad, and the chair is digging into my body and my eyeballs are getting a little impatient.

“No, we can increase the gravity right where you are. You’re at triple your usual gravity. Can you lift your arms?”

It’s not fun, but I pick up both arms.

“Please hold them up. We’re going to four.”

My arms shake with the effort of holding them up. My head is starting to hurt.

“Six . . .”

The color starts to drain out of everything. My headache is really strong. My arms go down.

“Can you lift your hands back up, just for a moment?” the doctor asks.

I wrestle my arms back off the armrests with some effort. I let them go, and they slam down hard.

“Okay, that’s done. You can get up. I’ll prescribe some more training.”

Now it’s Seal Girl’s turn. She doesn’t like the buckles.

The doctor starts to move some settings. Seal Girl is looking around the room.

“How are you feeling?” the doctor asks.

“I am a little hungry,” Seal Girl says.

“You just became hungry?” the doctor asks.

“No, but I didn’t think about it until you asked me how I was.”

“How is the stress?”

“I do not understand your question.”

The doctor turns the gravity up. I’ve started to read metro numbers, and I think it’s at 4G.

“Can you lift your arms?” the doctor asks.

“Like this?” Seal Girl lifts her arms. She’s waving them a little, but not from stress. Watching her wave them, you’d assume she just didn’t care.

The doctor has her at six. “How are you feeling?” the doctor asks.

“You asked me that before. Am I doing something strange?”

The doctor goes to seven. “Can you move okay?”

“I can move my arms,” Seal Girl says.

The doctor moves to eight.

“I can’t stand up,” Seal Girl says.

The doctor laughs. “Of course not.”

“Because of the straps,” Seal Girl says. She unbuckles herself.

The doctor starts saying, “No, no, no, no. No one can stand in this gravity, and even the attempt would be. . .”

Seal Girl is shaking a little bit, but slowly, she pushes herself up from the chair. All her muscles are taut as she pushes her body up.

“By my ancestors’ rotten bones,” the doctor says.

Apparently, Seal Girl is going to have more time to prove that she can learn to fly. It might be harder for her to learn to fly, but it’s going to be a lot harder for pilots to get her cardiovascular system.

I leave for my other other job, which is training up the computer staff in Earth security techniques. Gogo has been forwarding the team every article and book I’ve looked up and translated them into Vaughtlin. Cerberus is fascinated by all of it. I’m trying to wrap my head around a society that invented computers before we got the printing press yet somehow never came up with a man-in-the-middle attack.

One moment, I think there’s no way they can be wired this differently, and then I’m reminded they don’t have walls around their toilets. You go to do the needful, and four metros will enthusiastically greet you mid-shit, and they don’t remotely get why this is awkward for some of us.

The other software people are unusually standoffish, and I start to realize that I’ve ruined their jobs a little. If they were locksmiths, I’d be someone who walked into town with a potion you can pour on locks to make them magically open.

“So what’s your goal?” Cerberus asks.

“I want to make a worm that gives us root on enough systems to stop the Crusade war effort. Does this make sense?”

Cerberus nods. One of the other operators says, “Maybe I’m not following the translation exactly. I don’t know what that is.”

“She wants an automated process that travels between the Crusade’s Gogo units and gives her Authority over each of them.”

“By the bones,” the operator says.

“So Authority is absolute permission?” I ask.

Cerberus does a windshield wiper shrug. “If you invoke Authority on a piece of macrosoftware, that says it believes what you say no matter what data or instructions the software holds to the contrary. Only four people on the Embrace can invoke Authority. I’ve done it three times, which is more than anyone else.”

“The rest of the time you’re. . .what. . . persuading Gogo?”

“No,” says an operator.

“Basically,” says Cerberus. “Gogo is designed to be receptive to operators. Almost always, you write up a description of why Gogo has gotten bad data or made a bad assumption, and Gogo corrects its own behavior.”

“So you’re kind of therapists?”

“No,” says an operator.

“Kind of,” says Cerberus. “When I went to school, I studied in the same courses as Paclicroc, who was studying conflict resolution. Philosophy, syntax, logic, governance. . .”

“Can you get me a virtual version of a Hammer Cruiser to work with?”

Cerberus nods. “I can produce a nested model of a Hammer Cruiser that you can work with.”

“It’s be four years out of date,” says an operator. “We don’t have current schematics.”

“Gogo’s basic software model is over a century old. From what I’ve read, the things you exploit: buffers, i/o streams, handshakes, typically haven’t changed in decades.”

“Thanks. Uh, when I broke into the Aquarius, I didn’t do much to cover my tracks.”

Cerberus smiles. “I did. I changed the logs to look like you always had administrator access and biometrics. The Crusade holds the staff of Aquarius prisoner and coercion gear. It won’t take them long to find out that’s not true.”

“What does the Crusade know about me?”

“They know what Surgeon knew. You’re from Earth. You got a perfect score in Dagger Command by exploiting the simulator. You found a way to compromise Aquarius security.”

“How many people will they have to dedicate to security?”

Cerberus throws his hand up. I barely recognize it as a very quick shrug. “The Embrace is the biggest military challenge, and you’re a worrisome unknown. I’d think dozens of people will run security.”

“That’s fine. On Earth, there are lots of companies with dozens of people on security. Someone always breaks through given time.”

This time, I’m getting the stare from everyone.

“What?” I ask.

“How much time do you think you’ll have to break in?” Cerberus asks.

“I’m afraid to ask, honestly. I figure we’ll get in, Toram will tear them apart and I’ll have what, an hour until the rest of the fleet gets to the Embrace, but I’m just guessing.”

“There will be fifty marines on the ship. They’ll be alerted to your location the moment you’re onboard. Current estimates say that you’ll have less than four minutes before Toram is killed, and the crew comes for you.”

Chapter 17: Fleet Action

What would you say if you were here? Would you laugh at me? Would you shake your head in disgust? A lifetime spent fighting for the cause of freedom and individuality, and now I’m stuck on a ship with a million people caught up in the metro notion of crusade, giving every second up to the cause. I wake up, eat tasteless paste, work alongside them and go to sleep.

But everyone here is here because they want to be. Their lives depend on the fight, so it makes sense to give up everything for it.

If they’re asking me to die for them, there’s no doubt that they’d die for me.

So don’t look at me like that. I still fight for the ideals of Chaos faction. I work in tandem with a million others so people can have the right to live their own lives. If you gave me free passage to anywhere in the universe, I’d still be here.

And there’s you. Every year I get, I will spend making those Crusade bastards pay for what they did to you.

Journal entry from Mabi Towaio (callsign Electron) written as a letter to her deceased husband.

“Sacrificing?” Gaoshi -- now Admiral Gaoshi -- asks me.

“Are you sacrificing Toram? They’re my friend.”

“I am directing a navy. The people I direct have different odds of survival. In this particular war, everybody’s odds are bad. Mine are a little better than yours which are better than Toram’s and better than any of the pilots escorting you.”

“I heard they’re only expected to survive for four minutes after we get onto the cruiser.”

Gaoshi takes a moment to talk. “We’re running mock fights where Toram faces fifty people picked for their skill. Toram’s median survival time is something like four minutes, yes.”

“How isn’t that a suicide mission?”

“Because you’re there, and Cerberus behind you. You will have weeks to research how to breach the cruiser’s security, and Cerberus will have weeks to look at how to exploit that breach to save your lives.”

“That’s a really tall order.”

“When you try to fight a civilization with the people living on a single space craft, you don’t have good plans. If you’re lucky, you have possible ones. It was madness to get off that shuttle.”

“Do you regret it?” I ask.

Gaoshi smiles a wide smile with some very big blunt teeth. “Not yet.”

“I almost wish you could lie to me.”

“Confusing. Could you not just deceive yourself? Anyway, you misunderstand. I can lie to you. I just have better things to do.”

I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to remember what Toram told me. “I heard it’s a cultural thing for the oowa.”

“Deceit attacks someone’s ability to understand the world. Our people consider it a kind of violence.”

“So it’s not allowed.”

Gaoshi frowns and tilts their head. It’s an unusually human gesture. “Remember, I’m at war. This might be another thing about my people you don’t understand, but we consider some level of violence acceptable in times of war.”

“Do we seem immoral for lying?”

“It’s like with young children. Sometimes they’re violent because they haven’t learned better, so we don’t think them malicious. Also, with deceit, your efforts are so feeble it’s kind of endearing.”

I walk out of that meeting without knowing where I’m going. I’m back at Dagger training. The room is full. Practicing your skills is part of the war effort, so every pilot is here as often as possible.

“Steaming diarrhea stains!” Electron yells and steps out of a simulator.

“The game drove me up the wall. I wondered why I couldn’t stop playing it.”

“I’m training with Seal Girl.”

I nod. “I played with her. It’s got to be tough to bring her up to speed.”

“How long has it been since you went up against her?” Electron asks.

“Three days. Hey, I’ll take a shift.”

“I’d like that,” Electron says.

We start off in a one on one. Each side has six buoys. If you can destroy the enemy ship or destroy all the enemy’s buoys, you win. It rewards sneakiness, so I tend to be pretty good at it.

We both go into cloak. I pick buoy six. I target it, fire, and it’s gone. I drop back into cloak. I target buoy three. I target it to fire.

“Simulation finished,” Gogo says. “Winner, Seal Girl.”

“The fuck?”

I start a replay. I just blew up. I pause the simulation and look. Where the hell is Seal Girl’s Dagger? I finally spot it.

Seal Girls says. “Even in space, you people never look up..”

“How much time have you been playing this?”

“There’s no sun here. I think it’s been a day. I slept once. I’ll have to sleep again soon.”

“So you’ve been on the simulator except to eat and you only sleep every two days?”

“I can eat while I’m on the simulator.”

A notification chimes, and I hear, “This is Admiral Gaoshi. This is a notification of an impeding naval action,”

My heart races. Has the fleet caught up to us already?

“You can hear the message later,” Gogo says.

“No.”

“If you’re busy. I will remember the message, and you can play it by saying, ‘Play Message’.”

“I am not busy. I don’t even remember what I was doing when I suddenly heard I was going to be fighting for my life.”

“You are not a fighter pilot any longer,” Gogo says. “You’ve been reassigned.”

“Play message. Play message. Play the fucking message and eat a dick.”

The message starts. “This is Admiral Gaoshi. I have ordered a naval action that will risk many of our pilots as well as the survival of the Embrace.

“Our enemy is massing in jump points around ours. I estimate that in three weeks, they will have tightened the circle enough to attack us with overwhelming force. I feel we need more than three weeks, so I have picked what I believe the weakest point in our encircling force, and I have ordered us to attack and break through.

“If the operation is successful, the Crusade navy will encircle us again, but it will take them longer to corner us. I believe the operation will almost double our time. It will take them five or six weeks to run us down, and we’ll have better chances with more time to prepare.

“If the operation fails, we will lose some of our Dagger escort, and we’ll be fighting for our lives sooner than I’d hoped. If the operation fails badly, they’ll catch the Embrace, and we’ll all be dead. I think our odds are good. I urge all our pilots to see to their readiness. We fight in two days.”

I had a feeling someone else would be handling Gaoshi’s public announcements from then on.

“Am I going?” Seal Girl asks me.

“Are you in one of the wings?”

“I don’t know. They said they’d let me fly if I got good at the simulator. I’m good at the simulator, aren’t I?”

“I’ll see what I can do, but I’m just another primitive like you to these people.”

I’m in some kind of council meeting with Toram, Electron and Seal Girl. I got Toram to come, and I kind of hoped they’d get Pactlagh to come. Honestly, I’m too chicken to reach out to Pactlagh.

“We didn’t have a hearing like this for me,” I say. “You didn’t even ask if I wanted to fly a Dagger, which I didn’t.”

“That was SweetTalk,” Electron said. “He could convince anyone to do anything. If he were still alive, we’d have no problem getting Seal Girl into the wings.”

There’s a lot of testimony. Electron talks about how good Seal Girl has been flying in the simulator. I talk about her strength of moral character, how she kept Pactlagh and me alive when we were on the planet, and she’s part of why we survived to get out of Aquarius. I don’t mention how much work it was to convince her not to eat anybody.

They display the medical records. We observe that Seal Girl can survive acceleration that would turn most of us into puddles. The council confers.

“How old are you?” asks one of the men on the council.

“I’ve lived through fourteen springs.”

“Are you fully mature?” asks another councilman.

“I started my blood last spring,” Seal Girl says.

“We cannot allow a child into the navy,” says Uvokti, the head councilwoman.

“She appears to be a natural pilot.”

“I did not ask if it would be helpful for her to pilot a Dagger. I did not ask anything. I said we do not enlist children into our military.”

Toram stands up. “Research Elves trained me for combat since infancy.”

“That is the worst thing I’ve yet heard about the Research Elves,” Uvokti says. “And I remind you they murdered my parents.”

“I have killed for your people,” Seal Girl says. “They said if I did it and I was good at flying, then I could fly a ship.”

“I am sorry you had to do that,” Uvokti says. “You can apprentice as a pilot and fly a civilian craft. There are haulers, prospectors, maintenance ships and others. You cannot fly a military craft. You cannot fly in a war zone.”

“My friends,” Seal Girl says. “They fly into danger.”

“They are adults. Adults can enlist in the military. You are a child. You cannot.”

“I am not what you think,” Seal Girl says. “My people were at war. I led enemy into the pillars. My people do not have civilian. How do I prove I can make this choice?”

“You can apply for adulthood,” one of the council people says. “There is a test.”

“What test? I can take test!” My heart sinks because I’m sure Seal Girl is imagining a test like single combat, and the council means something else.

“It’s a basic skills test. It’s mathematics, physics, chemistry, principles of government.”

Seal Girl gets up and stalks out of the room without another word.

I’m back in my room. I’m overwhelmed with everything, so I lie down and hate myself. I should be getting ready for my big assault. I should be talking to anyone I know in the fleets who’s still alive.

I’m in my room curled up on my side, trying to think of anything else. Gogo says, “Pactlagh would like to speak with you.”

My heart is instantly racing.

“Gogo, you need to be more specific. Are you saying she’s using your system to call me? Are you just making a guess?”

“Pactlagh is outside your door, asking to talk to you.”

“Eat a dick, Gogo. You could have told me that. Open the fucking door.”

Pactlagh is standing outside my room.

“Gogo was very confusing about you being here.”

“You should be outside my room,” Pactlagh says. “You should be apologizing to me and wishing me luck tomorrow.”

“I’m a coward,” I say. “I do wish you luck. I’m so sorry. I keep thinking what I could have said to get Gokril to stay on the shuttle.”

“I couldn’t get him back on the shuttle, and I’m his rotting mother. It’s Gokril’s fault, him and that bastard Gaochi. There wasn’t anything you could have done.”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know because you’re not his mother. Gokril can be really stubborn and stupid. Look, about him, if I don’t make it back from this mission. . .”

“You want me to look after him?”

“Who else?” Pactlagh asks.

“Your mother?”

“Yes, obviously my mother, his grandmother who he’s known his entire life and who lives with us. No, Bongseon, I want you to succeed at this crazy thing you plan to do and keep him alive. Ideally, you’d also keep someone else -- any one other person on the Embrace -- alive so that other person and not you could raise my son, but he does look up to you.”

“Why? What the hell did you tell him?”

“I told him about the endless sea, where you talked to me all the time, even though you’re species doesn’t need company very much, and you had no reason to like me. I told him you tricked the Aquarius systems, and it’s the main reason I got off that station alive. You are family, Bongseon. That’s what the things Gokril said mean.”

“That means a lot.”

“I wish you could see our world,” Pactlagh says.

“I wish you could see mine.”

“I never want to see that cesspit.”

“What?” I ask.

“You’re smart, Bongseon. You’re brave. You’re compassionate. You’re even pretty good at a very sneaky kind of flying. You grew up convinced you were none of these things, and I don’t want to see the place that did that to you.”

“Fuck, you are the last person I’d expect to hear something like that.”

We’re both quiet for a while.

“Good luck on the fleet action tomorrow.”

“You’re Wing Twelve. You’ll see us off at the hanger.”

“But I’m not anymore. I’m in not in this next fight, and I’m in a Hopper for the final fight.”

Pacltagh leans closer. “You’re Wing Twelve forever. You and Cerberus are still Wing Twelve. SweetTalk is still Wing Twelve. Surgeon isn’t Wing Twelve anymore, the stupid little snatchrot, but everyone else who was Wing Twelve is still Wing Twelve.”

“Fine, fine, I’ll see you off at the hanger.”

Being good with Pactlagh is like having a mountain pulled off my shoulders. I didn’t know how much my shame over her was costing me. I’m still a little nervous seeing everyone as Gogo nags me to wake up, shower and go to the hanger on time.

I get there and see the pilots getting ready. Cerberus is also there to see them off.

MadDog struts past me and yells, “Wing Leader Tyrant, callsign MadDog reporting.”

Pactlagh turns to her, and her eyes narrow.

“I told them I didn’t want you. You’re too young,” Pactlagh is already turning away.

“The admiral said you’d say that and to tell you it’s too late. You can’t fly out under strength, and you can’t get anyone else in time.”

Pactlag shoos the statement away. It could be taken as negation, but MadDog takes it as grudging acceptance, and she’s right. “We’re flying in two stages. In the first stage, we’re combing the area for cloaked enemies. I’ll be flying bait, everyone else follows me.”

“Wing Leader Tyrant, the pilot with the best evasion rating is supposed to fly bait,” MadDog says.

Pactlagh has an extensive collection of angry glares and gives MadDog one I call Threat Level Orange.

MadDog grins. The smile reminds me of SweetTalk. It gives you the feeling that you just met the protagonist. “Starting a week ago, my evasion rating is higher than yours.”

“Gogo, rename MadDog. From now on she shall go as callsign ‘Puppy’,” Pactlagh says. “Puppy is flying bait for the first stage. Everyone else follows Puppy.”

MadDog, henceforth known as “Puppy”, laughs and calls out. “If you named me Powder Blue Fart Fairy, it’ll be what fascists wake up from their nightmares screaming.”

For people playing Dagger Command on Earth flying bait -- approaching the enemy uncloaked searching for enemy cloaked ships -- is considered a bad job because it’s the most dangerous. On the Embrace, the prestige seems to outweigh the danger.

Watching Puppy, I can’t help thinking she’s the person I was supposed to be. She’s the simulator ace everyone hopes will save the day.

Cerberus leans close to me and whispers, “In our stories of war, the really enthusiastic new recruit is often the first to die.”

I probably complain every time I have to walk from one part of the Embrace to another, and I spend most of my time here walking from one spot to where I need to go on the exact opposite spot. I’ll just add this: every skill your mind acquires for navigating through a city on a planet will get twisted around and bite you on the ass when you’re in a city that happens to be on the inside of a cylinder.

I am not lost because I’m walking with Cerberus who lived here for years and, unlike me, is capable of eventually learning his way around the Embrace. I feel lost, though, because it’s a big unfamiliar place designed by crazy motherfuckers.

We get to ops, and there’s a bunch of developers there.

“I think I have something,” Cerberus says. “I had Gogo make a version of itself that didn’t have a prohibition on writing intrusive software.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“I asked this very question,” Gogo says.

“It is, but as a safety precaution, I gave this new software a goal to eliminate itself after it achieved its main goal or after twenty days, whichever comes first. It also has a prohibition against interfering with our Gogo’s operation.”

“So what did you and Evil Gogo do?”

“We made a program that changes the storage mechanism. Um, you know how computers make the symbols we know out of binary values? This program, which I call “the White Worm” changes how the binary values compose higher structures.”

We hear Gaoshi’s voice from the ship announcing, “The first phase of the fleet action was successful. The Embrace will enter enemy territory we temporarily control.”

“Uh, where was I?” I say. “Oh right. So your worm changes the encoding of some files. What files?”

“All files it can access,” Cerberus says. “Which seems to be all files.”

“How long does it take to rewrite everything?” I ask.

“Very little time. It’s tough to measure.”

“So nanoseconds?” I ask.

Cerberus shakes his head. “Nanoseconds aren’t tough to measure. Much faster than that.”

“So if this works, do you still need me?”

“I’m afraid so. Their Gogo needs to try to execute the White Worm, and it won’t unless someone with authority access tells it to.”

“Definitely,” Gogo says. “The software seems immediately suspicious.”

“But it will infect other systems?” I say.

Cerberus nods. “It’s pretty easy to go from on Gogo to another.”

“I am designed to cooperate with other Gogo instances,” Gogo says. “There’s an assumption of trust.”

“Can we try this on the mock Gogo you set up?”

“Yes,” Cerberus says. “First, I’m going to set it up as though I’m you and I’ve already got authorized access.”

Cerberus makes some marks on a console.

“And now, I’ll run the worm.”

“Uh,” says one of the other operators. “My display has gone white.”

“Why are you connecting to my nested instance?” Cerberus asks.

“I’m not.”

“Can someone check with the helm and see that our main systems are all right?”

“All I’m getting for coms is a white display.”

“Did your worm travel from the fake Gogo to the real one?”

Cerberus holds up a hand, which is all the answer I really need.

“I’m trying to get a backup out of storage,” says another operator.

“It overwrote them,” Cerberus says.

“It overwrote every backup already?” I ask.

“Look, the entire system only talks to me now,” Cerberus says. “I’m the only person who can get it back together.”

I stay quiet. I look at the displays, but everything’s gone white. It also has just occurred to me that the Embrace is traveling through enemy space now, and I don’t know if it’s still moving. I don’t know what I can do about it now.

“Gogo isn’t respoding!” someone yells from the door.

“We know,” one of the operations developers says. “We’re working on it.”

Cerberus is rapidly hitting things on his console and muttering to Gogo. The third person has come through the door screaming that nothing is working when all the consoles come back up.

There are about twenty screens in the operations room, and they’ve all gone from white back to regular display.

Cerberus drops into a chair and sinks like a puddle.

“What happened?” comes Gaoshi’s voice.

“I was testing a program that could travel between systems and paralyze them. It’s all working now.”

“Ehhh,” Gaoshi says. It’s a gargling noise in Gaoshi’s throat that Gogo doesn’t want to translate. “Was it supposed to paralyze us just now?”

Cerberus has been cool up until now, but he suddenly looks miserable. “It wasn’t supposed to find its way out of the simulated environment to our actual systems. Also, there was a safeguard that was supposed to protect Gogo.”

“Don’t test it again without my express permission,” Gaoshi says.

“Of course, Admiral. I’m sorry.”

“And also,” says Gaoshi, “nice work.”

Chapter 18: Coding

Two days ago, I became one of a dozen people who know the war criminal Dr. Soasa is still alive.

I envy who I was two days ago.

“You need more people to defend your systems,” Soasa said.

“We have eight systems workers now to defend against one primitive.”

“Are the root race primitives? Sure. Are they a cancer, destined to destroy itself? Definitely. But they are geniuses for conflict. The Oowa study them extensively for military lessons. I should have started before you imprisoned me. Now I’ve got nothing but time.”

“We’re trying to protect a computer system from getting shut down. We’re not fighting war. We’re fighting sabotage.”

“Do you know they have intrusive software that reproduces?” Soasa said. “It’s like a living thing that lives in magnetic storage and travels over electromagnetic communication. Humans call it a ‘virus’. Isn’t that beautiful?”

“It’s disgusting. I’ll try to get more people.”

Captain Rakgalg’s report on communication security for the Crusade Council.

Cerberus has showed little emotion so far, but he seems to deflate when the crisis is done. He sags in his chair, leaning forward until his face almost touches the table.

“I almost got us all killed. We were sitting ducks in enemy territory.”

“It’s not just you,” I say. “We could do everything right and still get killed.”

“You sound like Tyrant.”

“She thinks you’re a genius, and I agree. Yes, the timing could be a little better, but it looks like we have a chance, and that’s because of you.”

There’s a moment of quiet. There’s a small stomach flutter that comes when a ship goes through a gate. It’s the first time I’ve noticed because it’s the first time I’ve gone through a gate when I wasn’t most of the way to shitting myself.

The speakers chime, and Gaoshi’s voice comes out. “The Embrace has left contested space. Our fighter escort is covering our escape, but it will return to the hanger shortly.”

It was a small, sedate affair when we saw the pilots off, but it’s a madhouse waiting for them to return. Hundreds of people are packed outside the hangar doors. Every few seconds, we hear another wing returns, and a few pilots, drunk on adrenaline and shared fear, stumble out of the hangar to cheers like rock stars.

“Why wasn’t it like this when we got back from Aquarius?” I ask. Nobody is going to hear me in all this yelling.

“It was,” Toram said. “You were on the other side, and you had a lot on your mind.”

I was ready to yell at Toram for sneaking up on me, but he’d have had to scream to announce himself over the crowd.

“Is this anyone we know?” I ask.

“I know a couple of them. I don’t think you know any. I think this is Wing Three.”

The next cluster that comes out is more somber. One of them calls something out. The only word I recognize of it is “remember”.

“Gogo,” I say, “why didn’t you translate that?”

“He didn’t seem to be addressing you,” Gogo says. “Do you think he was mourning to you specifically?”

“Eat a dick, Gogo. Also, translate whatever the returning pilots say.”

“Wing Five lost someone,” Toram says. “Mostly, the battle went better than expected, but there were some lost.”

“What about Wing Twelve? Did they. . . did we lose anyone from Twelve?”

“Twelve!” yell the next set of pilots. I think, for a moment, that they can hear me over the noise. They take it up as a chant. “Twelve! Twelve! Twelve!”

“Is that Wing Twelve? I don’t recognize anyone.”

Toram shakes their head. “No. I don’t know which group that is, but it’s not yours. I think Wing Twelve is next.”

Puppy runs out of the hanger, fists in the air. “Wing Twelve, bitches!”

The crowd is deafening. Puppy hugs and clasps hands with people in the crowd as she passes. She was fighting for my survival, and I don’t want to envy her, but it’s like a knife. I was the new person on this team, and I was miserable. Puppy has just joined, and it’s a dream come true.

Gogo is bombarding me with translations of different things the pilots are yelling.

“Puppy was untouchable!” “Insane. You are insane.” “I thought we were dead, and Wing Twelve was there like . . .” “It was like all the ancestor’s wrath in one moment. . .”

The rest of the wing walks out. Pactlagh is swaggering, but I know her enough to see she is exhausted. Perfect is hiding behind her. Electron is singing.

“Wing Leader, you were wasted on flying bait,” Puppy calls out to Pactlagh. “I was starting to think you would never decloak. You were right in the middle of their formation, and, bam, they were shitting themselves. When did you get so sneaky?”

“I found a teacher,” Pactlagh says. I had no idea if she’d spotted me in the crowd, but she looks me right in the eye as she says it.

It is so good to be on her side again. I run out and hug her before I know what I’m doing.

We’re still hugging when Puppy singles out a mortified Perfect. “And you! How do I get that good at point defense?”

“I don’t think you do,” Perfect says.

“Oh, this one know some trash talk!” Puppy says.

“It’s not trash talk. I’m just trying to explain the facts as I understand them.”

“Bam, Perfect, you don’t let up!”

“Bongseon!” yells someone who collides me. I look down to see Gokril grabbing me.

“Hey, it was my life that was in danger!” Pactlagh says.

“All our lives were in danger,” Gokril says. “Grandma said the Crusade was going to kill all of us.”

“You see why I’m willing to risk my life,” Pactlagh says to me.

“Because you love us,” Gokril says.

“Because I don’t care anymore if they kill me,” Pactlagh says, as she picks up Gokril and wrestles him.

“I’ve got family stuff,” Pactlagh yells as she struggles with Gokril. “I’ll catch up later.”

I’m pushing my way through the crowd when I hear Gaoshi make the announcement, “This is Admiral Gaoshi. You will probably hear soon that all escape routes have been cut off. This is all according to plan. This system, 20211-207 is where we will make our stand. I admire your work and will stand with you in the final conflict.

“From what we see from our surveillance drones, it will take more than twenty days and fewer than forty for the Crusade fleet to fully assemble for their final stand. Now is when we make our final preparations. Survival is a daunting task. I ask you all to do your part.”

From then on, my mind is stuck in a grim countdown.

Day One

I’ve just gone back to studying security documents when Toram shows up at my room.

“Come,” says Toram. “Watch me practice for fight.”

“I think I’m supposed to study.”

“It’s on work roster. You have to get be at some of my fighting practice so you won’t be distracted by fighting when actual day comes. You can ask Gogo.”

“I’ll take your word for it. Is it far?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Toram says.

I get up, and we start making our way down the hallways. Toram’s leading the way. I notice that people seem to give them a lot more room than they used to.

“Is the fighting going any better?” I ask.

“A little,” Toram says. “I am getting practice, but so are my practice partners. It is more than twice as many as I fought on Aquarius, and they’re better trained.”

“Where are the rest of your people?”

“We Lab Elves? We’re infiltrators. Part of reason Crusade is moving so slowly is that they’re taking precautions to make sure we don’t get on their ships. I think my sibs will pick easier targets.”

“Can they send a bunch of regular soldiers with us?”

“Gaoshi says nothing bigger than a Hopper will survive to get close enough, and you can’t fit more than a two man displacer in a Hopper.”

“Then can they send more Hoppers?” I ask.

“Gaoshi says we’ll send three so one gets through. Just moment. I have to change into work clothes.”

Toram walks into a side room off the hallway. Is it a bathroom? Locker room? The logistics of the Embrace are still confusing to me, and fortunately, none of my jobs require specialized clothing.

Come to think of it, what specialized clothing do you need if you’re just training to get into a fight with dozens of people? Are they going to come out wearing a leather apron? Medieval armor?

Whoever guessed alien bondage gear wins to pool. Toram is walking out, and they’re in stuff that looks like hard plastic from their collarbone down. It’s like someone split the difference between a space suit and the outfit the supervillain wears in a porn. I mean their bits are covered -- I don’t know what supervillain porn you watch, but I watch the classy stuff -- but it’s narrow at the waist, thick at the chest and shoulders.

I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with their chest. There are two bars that stick out slightly. Something about the shape is familiar.

I got it. It’s the handles of two guns. There’s no barrel on these space guns. They look like stapleguns, but they’ve got two of them embedded in their chest like this suit is designed to shoot Toram’s nipples at any moment.

“Why are there pistols in your chest?”

Toram looks down. “This is the fighting suit the Research Elves originally designed for us. I’m not sure why pistols are holstered like that. If a Lab Elf like me wears suit, they can launch the guns using the sioma.”

“The guns launch?”

Toram holds their hands out. “Try this. raise your hands here and here. Good. Now keep your hands there.”

Toram puts their hands at their sides.

“So what’s sup. . .” I start. Suddenly the guns fly out of Toram’s chest into my hands. “The fuck?” I finish.

“I can control speed and the spin. That’s kind of slow.”

“What kind of holster launches your guns at your enemy?”

Toram takes the guns from my hands and puts them back in their chest. “This kind. Let me introduce you to my training partners.”

It’s a medium walk, or maybe it’s a long walk. Every day, I have to walk more than they did in the Lord of the Rings Extended Edition every time I perform an excruciatingly public shit. So now this seems like a medium walk. We get to an area that’s a meeting space /dance hall normally. It looks a little bit like a paintball range now. There are a bunch of people strapping on military gear and talking casually.

Elves are about a third of the people on the Embrace, but they’re at least three quarters of Toram’s sparring partners.”

“Hey, it’s the Earthling,” one of them says. “Are we going to shoot at the Earthling? Wait, is she mad. I don’t know if I can read your expression. You look mad.”

“They’re practice guns,” another Elf says. “You barely feel it.”

“She’s just going to hide here,” Toram says in Core Faction Mato. “If you can point a gun at her at close range, that’s another win condition.”

“Whenever you’re ready, Uigatoram,” the first elf says, “we’re waiting.”

“A moment, please,” Toram says to the others, and then to me. “I want you to know I have faith in you. I’m not worried about whether you will succeed.”

“Sure.”

“I’m not giving you polite lies, Bongseon, I’m telling you truth.”

“Okay, I will do my best.”

“I know,” Toram says. “Just crouch down behind that console and wait.”

“Are you ready?” the Mato asks.

Toram turns around, one hand held up like they’re calling for patience. Then the guns fly out of their chest, and their hands catch the guns out of the air like striking snakes. They’re pointing at the crowd as they form the word, “Yes.”

Toram shoots three before they have a chance to react. The three fall to the ground and patiently watch the rest of the fight.

Toram is under cover before the rest can react. The others swarm forward. Toram sprints back from cover to cover, shooting as they go. The crowd races after Toram but can’t land a hit on them.

Not for four minutes and twenty-two seconds.

In the end, Toram’s lying on the ground. One of their sparring partners points a rifle at me and says, “Zza,” which is the Vaughtlin version of “bang”.

Day Two

I go to a study where they have a bunch of tablets. They’re nice and familiar. If the tablet had a bezel, was heavier, wasn’t indestructible and needed to be charged it could be like the one back in my apartment on Earth.

I read books on security while having Gogo read nearly endlessly detailed descriptions of its authorization protocols. At first, Gogo’s tone is endlessly condescending. A surprising fact I’ve learned is that everyone who designed Gogo’s speaking interface is dead. It’s not surprising that they’re dead. Gogo’s initial work was finished over a century ago. The surprising thing is that it was mostly natural causes.

However, I can tell Gogo to switch to a monotone, so Gogo isn’t very distracting. It’s just a kind of noise to listen to to keep me from drifting off when I listen to security.

I’m reading something about man-in-the-middle attacks when I start to get distracted by the repitition of a word. “. . . the biometrics unit accesses the computer vision unit to return an identity probability, which then accesses a roster unit and returns an identity and a level of confidence. . .”

“Stop,” I say. “What are these units?”

“If you’re asking the clearest way to identify the biometrics unit, the computer vision unit and the roster unit in English, it’s to refer to them as I just have.”

“Eat a dick, Gogo. Are these units physical things?”

“They’re things enacted by physical mechanisms, but they are conceptual things. Other English synonyms might be programs, processes or daemons.”

“So these units are daemons that you communicate with to work?”

“I exist as a cluster of units,” Gogo says. “Did you honestly believe I was a monolith? Are you aware of what I do? There would be serious scale problems if one program tried to handle all of it.”

“Shut the fuck up. So you’re saying there’s no ‘you’, there’s just a bunch of microservices?”

“I am a collection of units with specific tasks that coordinate. That doesn’t mean there’s not a me. I could find you some articles on human psychology or English syntax that might clear this up for you.”

“How many of these units are there? And before you tell me, know that each unit can eat its own itty-bitty dick that’s part of a cluster that makes up a big meta dick.”

“It varies quite frequently,” Gogo says. “The number would change before I finished my sentence.”

“I hate you so much, Gogo. I just want a fucking order of magnitude.”

“There are tens of thousands of units.”

“Give me everything you have about the protocols these units use to communicate.”

Day Three

“Bongseon,” Gogo says. “I must insist you wake up.”

“Eatadick,” I yawn.

“Bongseon, you are late for your meeting with Cerberus and the operations team.”

“Who the fuck scheduled that in the morning?”

“Since it is after the second meal, that question would render my answer confusing.”

“Has anyone told you that you’re a pedantic little shit?”

“This is the third time you’ve said so. Are you having memory difficulties?”

“Sorry. Sorry. Sorry,” I said as I came into the meeting. I wish I understood more about the Embrace so I could come up with a decent lie to explain why I was late. I can’t even say my alarm clock was late. Gogo was my alarm clock, and they know it heard when we scheduled the meeting. They know exactly how much of Gogo’s pestering I managed to sleep through.

“Are you well, Cowstalker?” Cerberus asks. And shit, I could have said I got up late because I was sick. But I ran into the meeting at full speed, so it’s not very believable now.

“I overslept. I was up late. I heard about how Gogo’s mind is a bunch of fragments.”

“Units,” one of the operators supplies.

“A Gogo’s reality is supplied by a bunch of pieces. If we can interrupt this communication, we can control that Gogo’s perception of reality.”

“Someone already did this,” an operation says. “we call it a ‘fragmentation attack’.”

“Yeah, I read about that. Someone broke into a Gogo that was controlling a council vote and lowered the retirement age by four years, which is just adorable.”

“Yes, sixty years ago,” the operator says. “There were measures put in place. You need to have authority on a Gogo to get any information on a unit. They’re in clusters, and the clusters are protected with. . .”

“The clusters take in information?” I ask.

“Yes, but not orders, information,” the operator says.

“I think I know what she’s getting at,” Cerberus says. “There’s an Earth technique where you can hide a trap in information. It’s like if there were a sentence, and if you heard that sentence your head explodes.”

“That’s kind of what this conversation feels like,” the operator says.

“. . . I think humans call this attack . . . injection?”

“That’s right,” I say.

“I see why this can work even if they have hundreds of people running security. It’s like they have thousands of locks, and you might have found a lockpick.”

Day Five

So I fell down the rabbit hole of Gogo’s units. I cannot tell you how weird it is to be dealing with a codebase this old. We were sailing ships and building train tracks, and meanwhile, light years away, a bunch of space geeks were writing microservices for a vast chain of passive aggressive server clusters.

I grumble to Cerberus. “Sometimes, I really wish I could tell what the developer was thinking.”

“If you need to know, check the developer information,” Cerberus says. “Usually, the developer said something about it to somebody. It should be indexed to the code.”

I go from a piece of code and start checking, and my mind is blown.

So on Earth, if you’re lucky, there are comments that say what your methods are trying to do. Metros had been coding for over a hundred years when they made Gogo, and they have no sense of privacy. You can jump from a piece of code to a recording of every time the developer talked about the code to anyone. I can get the meetings where they planned the code, bitch sessions where the developer talked about problems.

This might not sound useful, but it’s way easier to work with software if you know something about the context in which it’s written. Sometimes, when you see part of a program, knowing who wrote it will tell you more about how it was meant to be used than seeing a bunch more code. I’d look for code from certain families that tended to have the same sloppy habits.

There were a couple of hardware shifts since Gogo’s creation that required people to completely redesign large parts of the code. At one point, writing to storage became several orders of magnitude faster. At another, communication between devices became basically instantaneous. Both of these were like like fault lines moving, requiring vast pieces of Gogo be rebuilt.

On Earth, we would call Gogo a “publicly funded open source project”. Hell, Gogo was happy to describe itself to me. There was so much I could learn. There are patterns here that I don’t think occurred to anyone on Earth.

I don’t realize how deep I’ve gotten into this until Gogo starts telling me that it’s been too long since I’ve eaten and later, too long since I’ve slept. I dream that I’m writing a new unit for Gogo, and all the while, the unit tells me everything I’m doing wrong.

Or maybe that was just yesterday. It’s hard to tell now.

Day Six

“Toram has requested your presence in community area three,” Gogo says.

“Did they say it was urgent?”

“I would have said so when I initially told you of their request.”

“Did they say why they want me there?”

“Similarly, I would have already told you.”

“Eat a dick. Where is community area three?”

I went to community area three, which was a long walk. Some days, I would trade this gigantic spaceship for some cramped Earth-made coffin so my day wouldn’t be consumed walking from end to end.

Community area three is an open space with food and grass. Above us, you can see the center part of the Embrace zooming past. All community areas look like that.

This one has a giant arch cutting the area in half. There are two crowds of people on either side of the arch. The people on the far side are smiling, waving, dancing. The people on the near side are just watching the people on the far side.

Toram is on the far side, waving cheerfully.

“So what the hell is this?” I call out to Toram as I walk toward the arch.

“Admiral Gaoshi ordered us to build it,” says a metro next to me. “We’re making a full hoop. We brought in this part for testing, and we thought it’d be fun to set it up.”

Toram is still waving at me.

“Hold your horses. I’m coming. What the hell does this ‘hoop’ they’re building do?”

I’m almost at Toram. They’re still waving. They’re not even looking at me.

“It projects illusion,” Toram says from right behind me.

I jump in the air and stumble through the arch. As I cross the arch, everyone on my new side of the arch, like the waving Toram disappears. Where I’d seen over a dozen people on my side of the archi, I now see only two or three, and they’re different people. The waving Toram is gone. I look behind me and I see Toram standing right behind where I used to be.

I walk back through the arch, and the moment I cross it, everyone reappears. I can see the waving Toram and the one next to me.

“It’s playing loop,” Toram says. “They set up simulation field, and recorded us for few minutes.”

“Why? Just to freak me out?”

“No, this is just small part of field they’ll set up in space. They brought it in to test. I wanted to show you.”

“Gaoshi wants to use this simulation field to fool the Crusade when they come?”

Toram nods. “It’s proven strategem, with some famous successes.”

I look at Toram. “I think I can hear some unease.”

Toram waves a hand in front of their face in a metro-style shrug. “If you want to deceive, it is best if your ruse does not have well known history.”

“Toram, I’ve been telling people all week that sometimes people forget the obvious.”

Chapter 19: Time Management

It was grueling convincing the metros to give me command. I spent hours running simulations where they defended the Embrace as best they could, and I destroyed it again and again. One time, I did it with a single Dagger. Finally, they said, “We know it’s hopeless, but we’d rather manage our own defense.”

And I said, fine, I’ll give you two cruisers and two hundred Daggers and you take out the Embrace. They were frustrated when I exploited every flaw in their attack, but they were hopeful, too. It took the whole damn day, but I left with command of the Embrace’s little fleet.

Since then, there has been almost no questioning my orders from the metros. Cowstalker, the human, has voiced some forceful opinions. The worst, however, are my fellow oowa. I get dozens of polite inquiries about whether I might have thought of this or that strategy. I don’t tell Cowstalker my people are so much more trying than she is. She might take it as a personal challenge.

I sent a message to my mother saying that I probably wouldn’t make it, and I was sorry, and I loved her.

She sent a reply back right away suggesting I surround the gate with a bunch of cloaked ships and ambush the Hammer Cruiser right as it comes through.

I love her, but mother please, this is what I do for a living. I’m not asking for a strategic opinion. I’m saying goodbye.

I just sent her a link to the fight at 2422 where the Research Elves tried to ambush a gate. First, the metros established a perimeter with a Dagger Escort, and then their Hammer Cruiser jumped through the gate, launched a volley of torpedoes and jumped out. It kept doing that until the elves were all dead. It’s pretty sobering stuff.

Journal of Admiral Gaoshi

Day Eight

I wake up with the pilots and shower with them, too. I run into Pactlagh on the way up.

“I wish we were really flying,” I say. “I haven’t been off the Embrace since we got back from Aquarius.”

“I haven’t been off since we got to this system,” Pactlagh says. “That’s what, eight days?”

“You’re a pilot. What else would you be doing?”

“They’ve got all the engineers on construction.”

“Constructing what? Aren’t you something like a farmer?”

Pactlagh gives me a dirty look. “I maintain harvesting equipment, mostly automated hydroponic tanks. And anyone who can use tools is making grapples.”

“The towing things on Daggers?”

“Yeah, but they’re set to handle much bigger things from a much longer distance, and they’re putting them on everything but the Daggers.”

Another announcement blares over the speakers, “Full scale simulation in eight minutes. Everyone to your stations.”

LAN parties were mostly before my time. I’ve been to one. This is a little like that. Over a hundred people are hooked up in simulators in a few different rooms.

We’re playing a custom game. The goal is for me to pilot a Hopper to a particular zone. There are two other decoy Hoppers. The defense team has eighty pilots to keep me out, and the offense has twenty five pilots to help me in.

We lose every game. What’s worse, the defense team is consistently guessing which one of the Hoppers is me. The decoys aren’t getting touched.

Day Ten

I’m waiting for Cerberus to get back to the table. He and Pactlagh invited me to have lunch. The two of them don’t get along really well, so this has a real intervention feel, but I’m not sure what they’re intervening about.

“Do you recognize this?” Cerberus says. He puts something down in front of me. It’s kind of tan, spongy, and rectangular.

“What is it?”

“You don’t recognize it?” Pactlagh asks.

“I have eaten so much weird shit since I’ve been out here. I don’t remember this. It looks awkward to eat with chopsticks.”

“I don’t think you use chopsticks. It’s a sandwigh,” Cerberus says. Gogo didn’t translate the last word but gave it to me exactly as Cerberus said it. I’m not used to them saying English words, so it takes me a second to figure out what he’s saying. Then I look down. The bread looks more like a twinkie.

“It’s a sandwich?”

“You’re not eating,” Cerberus said. “I asked Gogo about Earth food. You’re from America. They eat sandwigh. . .sand-wich.”

“This is bread?”

“It’s a grass, ground to a powder, mixed in a nutrient bath and foamed and then heated so it binds in place before it settles. There’s a chemical reaction that makes it expand,” Pactlagh finishes.

“Just hearing that makes my mouth water.”

“I took a strong drug to keep from vomiting watching video of Earth food preparation,” Pactlgh says. “You will not get sarcastic about this lunch cake.”

I take a bite. The bread also has the texture of a Twinkie, but it isn’t sweet. The filling is tigrakal, which Gogo called a “meat tumor”. Hearing Pactlagh describe tigrakal tanks, “flesh-like cotton candy” might be a better description.

“What do you think?” Cerberus asks.

It’s a little like a sandwich and a little like bao, but it’s sliding a little ways into an uncanny valley.

“It’s pretty close,” I say.

“Is it the most Earth-like thing you’ve eaten since you left?” Cerberus asks.

He’s so hopeful I want to say yes. “No, on the Infinite Ocean, Seal Girl caught us fish and crab that was a lot like Earth fish and crab.”

“You ate it raw?”

“We did,” Pactlagh said.

“What the hell happened to Seal Girl?” I ask. “I haven’t seen her since she stormed out of that meeting a week ago.”

“She’s been doing some flying for maintenance work,” Pactlagh says. “They brought me in for a disciplinary hearing for her.”

“Did she eat someone?”

“She had some near misses flying too close to other craft. She has a temporary pilot’s license, and she was in danger of losing it.”

“Why did they need you?”

“I could fly and I spent more time with her than anyone. They wanted me to find out why she was such a crazy pilot.”

I hold up my hands in exasperation. “So, why is she?”

Pactlagh does a quick wipe shrug. “She enjoys it.”

“I don’t imagine that’s enough to keep her license.”

“Gogo actually saved her. Gogo says her reflexes are so good that the way she was flying was safe for her.”

“Jesus, it’d be good to have her flying a Dagger. Are you sure that high up woman. . .”

“Uvokti,” Cerberus supplies.

“. . .isn’t going to change her mind?”

Cerberus and Pactlagh both laugh.

“What?”

“Uvokti is a hero to us, and her super power is her legendary stubbornness,” Cerberus says.

I wince. “How hard is the test?”

“It’s not super hard,” Cerberus says.

“If you went to a school and didn’t grow up in a tribe with nothing more advanced than stone tools, it’s not a hard test,” Pactlagh adds.

“She’d have to learn Vaughtlin?”

“Of course not,” Cerberus says. “You can be an adult without knowing Vaughtlin. There’s a lot of math, a lot of physics, a lot of chemistry.”

“She couldn’t pass it,” Pactlagh says.

There’s a long pause.

“How is your sabotage effort going? Pactlagh asks.

I pause mid-chew. For a moment, I wonder if I’m being accused of something.

“It’s going well,” Cerberus answers for me. “Bongseon has a really good idea.”

I tilt my head and quirk my lip in a way that’s supposed to say, I sure hope so.

“What’s that?” Pactlagh asks.

“On Earth, it’s called an injection attack,” Cerberus says.

“How does it work?”

Cerberus stops to think. “Okay, imagine it’s like kwuklow.”

I have finished chewing and ask. “Gogo didn’t translate kwuklow, what is it?”

“It’s a fruit from our homeworld,” Pactlag explains. “It induces feelings of euphoria.”

“But when you’re worried about me, you make me a sandwich?”

“Anyway,” Cerberus says. “The mouth just thinks it’s a fruit. The stomach just thinks it’s a fruit. But it has instructions for the brain.”

“Not directly,” Pactlagh says. “Kwuklow makes you release endorphins and serotonin.”

“Oh shit, that it!” I say.

“We don’t know what kwuklow would do to humans,” Pactlagh says. “Oowa can’t even digest it.”

“I’ve been wasting my time trying to fool the mouth. I should trust the message to get passed along and go for something further in.”

“Oooh,” says Cerberus.

“And I’m fine, thanks for asking,” says Pactlagh. “I made flight leader.”

Day Eleven

So I’d been fucking with a point of first contact. It gets a message, video or something and tries to figure out what format it is. Metros didn’t know to expect injection attacks, but this one module is older than Gogo itself. It turns out that if you keep fixing and patching a piece of software for every weird thing that happens in over a century, you will write pretty good data sanitization without even meaning to.

Metaphorically, this data analysis unit is the mouth. I was trying to fool the mouth, and you can’t fuck with the mouth. The mouth is designed to survive belonging to a toddler and having all sorts of random crap in it.

My new plan is to go with corrupted video. I’m providing some footage with random noise in it. It goes through the mouth and goes to Video Analysis. Video Analysis sees my payload and says it’s just random noise. It passes it on to Error Analysis. I think Error Analysis is the stomach in this metaphor.

Error analysis was thrown out and revised four years ago, just yesterday in terms of Gogo’s software. It looks at my bad video. It’s trying to figure out whether the video is filming something Gogo can’t recognize or is it a bad camera or was it encoded badly? Did cosmic rays hit the wrong thing at the wrong time?

And boom, while error analysis is reading my corrupted video, a little bit of it tricks Error Analysis into making a whole new unit.

“So?” says Kambolk. She’s one of the operators. I’ve been working with them for a week, and they’ve stopped being an amorphous mass of people who disagree with everything I say.

“It’s a rotting unit, Kambolk. It’s a first class citizen in Gogo’s brain,” says Mugh. Besides Cerberus, he’s the one least convinced I’m an idiot.

“But it’s empty,” says Kambolk.

“No, Pannog’s right,” says Cerberus. “We can load instructions into the unit. And Cowstalker’s back door lets us pick a date stamp.”

Oh shit. The guy I thought was Mugh is named Pannog. Who the fuck is Mugh? Forget everything I said about these fuckers’ names. I’m never going to keep them straight.

“Why does it matter that we can write a date stamp?”

“There are things called arbiter systems,” says an operator. “If two units offer contradictory analysis, Gogo tends to side with the older one unless the newer unit specifically says it’s a fix for bad behavior.”

“Cowstalker,” Cerberus says. “How about we work on finishing this up and you concentrate on finding other ways in?”

Day Thirteen

We’re doing live training exercises in actual space. I have to be there even though Gaoshi is remotely piloting my ship. That tech implanted in their skull lets them remotely control things or send messages from wherever they are.

“This is Admiral Gaoshi,” the comms say. “I am responsible for the overall plan. In combat, tactical decisions will be made by your flight leader. When I can, I will plot flight paths to give you the biggest advantage.”

“How could you possibly do that in real time for all the Daggers?” someone asks.

“Excellent tools and lots of practice,” Gaoshi replies.

We’re doing the same exercise we did on the simulators, but Gaoshi is running all the Hoppers. I’m sitting in it so I’m familiar with the plan, but I spend a lot of the exercises reading Earth books on security from a tablet.

With Gaoshi piloting, we manage to reach the goal two out of three games. Also, my Hopper is consistently the last one the defense team finds when Gaoshi is piloting. That means that I’m going to have to surrender control when the actual attack comes. I have mixed feelings about that.

The other is a thing I didn’t know about going in. They finished a prototype fighter the tech team was working on called a Whip. It looks a lot like a Dagger, except the back part (the blade) is a set of linked compartments that look like vertebrae. It’s supposed to turn faster.

It does turn faster. It turns too goddamn fast. Puppy passes out during a tight turn and has to be piloted back. She has the highest G tolerance of any of the Dagger pilots, so that’s it for the Whip.

The grapples are all done. Some of the civilian pilots are dragging a comet back to the Embrace to practice mass towing.

Day Fourteen

Toram promises me that the second time I do close quarters weapon training will be less depressing than the last time, when we simulated both of us dying.

We’re going to simulate what happens if I do break into the Crusade systems. I don’t see what difference it can make. Having control of their computers is great, but not great enough to stop a roomful of marines with rifles.

Cerberus is there, too, but he’s in the next room. On the day of the fight, he’ll be handling things remotely from the Embrace after I break in.

So I crouch down behind a console again. This time, I run through a feed of my injection attack. Toram is still going strong when I connect.

“I hope this. . . ” I say. That’s as far as I get when strategy one works. The lights turn off and the gravity goes away.

This makes me panic for a moment. I can barely stand zero G, and I almost throw up. All Toram’s fifty sparring partners have been doing zero G training, but it still takes a moment to adjust. Gravity suddenly going away will disorient anybody.

Almost anybody.

Toram goes from slithering under and over consoles to spinning from wall to wall in less than a heartbeat. Also, the lack of gravity does a lot to reduce the numerical advantage. I never thought about it, but if you are a military force that outnumbers your enemy, it’s a really good thing that dead people fall down.

The people Toram shoots go limp at the signal. Some float where they were. Some spin with whatever movement they were doing when they were hit. Some drift forward. Every one is a distraction, a piece of cover. Toram can smell, hear and sio whether any person is alive. The other soldiers don’t know.

In what seems like forever but is probably half a minute, gravity goes back on, and around twenty soldiers drop to the floor. The rest take time to adjust to having gravity again. Again, Toram adapts instantly. One of the last few soldiers yells, “Wait, my rifle isn’t working!”

Over the speaker, Cerberus says, “I changed the biocoding. Only Toram or Cowstalker can use the rifles now.”

Day Nineteen

“I’ve got something new,” I say at my daily meeting with the operators. “I call it Backfire.”

“Let’s see it,” Cerberus says.

“Okay, set up the test system, and I’ll start to break in.”

They spin up an imaginary version of the Hammer’s main computer. I run the fastest exploit. The Embrace operators call it strategy one.

“That’s not a new thing,” says one of the operators. Maybe it’s Mugh. No it isn’t. Fuck, what’s his name?

“I’m breaking in,” I say. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

“Oh,” Cerberus says. “You’ve changed the monitor. If I use admin access to look for your intrusion, it’ll grant you admin access.”

“Yeah.”

“But I can just revert it now that I know about it,” Cerberus says. He does just that.

“But if it was in the actual moment, you wouldn’t wait for me to hint that you needed to do something. You’d have been in a hurry. You would have run the monitor. You don’t check it for tampering every time.”

“The rest of these don’t require a person to screw up,” hopefully Mugh says. “It’s a lot safer to depend on the flaws you already found.”

“I’m afraid I agree,” Cerberus says.

“Well, they can’t all be winners.”

Day Twenty Two

I’m doing flight training in actual ships again. When I’m out of the shower, I find out Pactlagh is already in her Dagger. I guess she has to get ready earlier now that she’s flight leader. I get ready with Electron.

“Do you get along with Perfect?” I ask.

“You mean because she’s so weird?”

“No, you’re a Chaos Elf and she’s a Structure Elf.”

“Chaos and Structure factions are allies,” Electron says. “They’ve got a lot of treaties. They share a lot of resources. Oh, you mean the names!”

“Yes, they seem kind of opposed.”

“Chaos Faction used to be called Liberty. Its main principle was that people should be able to live with minimal coercion. You need high dues and infrastructure to support that.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. You don’t have freedom if you’re hungry or desperate. Anyway, Structure faction is all about investment in the common good. It’s not too far apart.”

“How did the name change from Liberty to Chaos?” I ask.

“We used some technology patented by Research Faction, and they acquired us. Basically, they took everything we had to pay what they saw as our debt. We protested. We stopped working. We sabotaged Research’s infrastructure. We learned techniques to overcome Research’s coercion tech. Eventually, they let us go. They labeled us Chaotic.”

Gogo adds, “The word in Core Faction Mato is Hiaso. It means chaotic, insane, unpredictable, untrustworthy.”

“Getting free of them is a really proud moment for us, so we took the name as our own,” Electron finishes.

“You’re up!” someone calls, and we rush to our Daggers and launch.

The projector is ready. It’s a gigantic ring floating in space.

We’re doing maneuvers with the fleet of civilian ships that follow the Embrace. People keep giving me different numbers, but I think there’s a little less than two hundred of them. There are a few shuttles, a couple dozen small surveyors and a huge assortment of maintenance ships, mining ships and everything else.

The projector turns on, and it suddenly creates the image of an oowa cruiser, which is a large, intimidating vessel. Every civilian can crowd behind the ring, and it renders all of them invisible from anything in front of the ring. We’re practicing formation, with the rest of us flying escort for the cruiser and the civilians hidden behind it.

The enemy is likely to be suspicious that this oowa cruiser is flying behind a giant projector ring. Gaoshi assures us it’s fine. For one thing, actual oowa cruisers often fly with fake projector rings so people won’t be sure whether they’re real.

Day Twenty Four

I’m starting to know enough Vaughtlin to catch some subtleties in how Gogo translates things for me. I know numbers well enough to spot that Gogo’s translating units of measure. I’ll hear someone say “pag oghlo”, and Gogo will translate it as “one week”, but “pag” is “two” because metros group days in four and then twenty.

There’s a distance measure for near space that’s about forty-three thousand kilometers. Metro years are barely longer than Earth years, and they have a measure about the same as a minute. Light is the same speed everywhere, so light minutes and light years are very close.

Day Twenty Six

We’re doing high acceleration flight training. It’s giving my headaches, back pain and sometimes diarrhea. Every couple days, Gaoshi comes up with a new wrinkle in their plan, and I have to go out to train for it.

Each new way we come up with to break into the system takes more work than the last one. We’re up to sixteen strategies, and the sixteenth almost drove me insane. The seventeenth looks simply impossible.

Please, please, please Crusade fleet. Come here and put me out of my misery.

Day Thirty Four

I take it back. Surveillance drones have found the fleet massing just outside the gate. They’ll be here tomorrow. I don’t know when I’ve been so scared. There’s a short day of drills, and then, Crusade restrictions on money are lifted. There’s going to be a party.

Chapter 20: Party

Electron There’s a bunch of things still up in the air for the party. Are we set on rec area three?

Puppy I prefer two. It’s got less of a woosh.

Electron What are you talking about?

Puppy The sounds the inner hull makes on rotation. It’s louder at rec area three.

Electron It’s the same inner hull. I’m pretty sure they make the same sound.

Perfect No, Puppy’s right. The woosh is louder in three.

Electron Okay, two. Is everyone taking agwu?

Puppy Anyone doesn’t, I’ll take their dose.

Proton I thought you weren’t old enough to take Agwu.

Puppy I am now.

Proton Since when?

Puppy Since I was old enough to be a rotting Dagger pilot! It’s the same age limitation!

Cowstalker Eat a dick.

Electron The human has joined us.

Cowstalker I’m so sorry. I was telling that to Gogo. It wasn’t supposed to transcribe it into the chat.

Puppy Just this time or every time?

Cowstalker Every time I said “eat a dick”, I was talking to Gogo.

Puppy I thought you were talking to me! I ate so many dicks because I respected you!

Cowstalker You never respected me.

Puppy Never did. You are a filthy primitive.

Log of Wing Twelve chat discussion

The Dagger pilots started talking about the party they were going to have around day twelve and barely stopped. They had a big plan to pool their money and rent one of the public areas, hire some cooks and hire a band.

On the day itself, I’m sitting down in a park when Gogo notifies me through my earpiece that Puppy wants to talk to me.

“Can you just call me?” I ask.

“You don’t make any sense,” Puppy says. “I’m doing it, so I can.”

“I mean is it acceptable?”

“You answered my request, so yes,” Puppy says. “Do you know what’s wrong with Tyrant?”

“You’re going to have to narrow it down.”

“We gave her our money for the party. She said she hasn’t bought access to the location yet.”

“I’m sure she will,” I say.

“This isn’t just our last day. There’s a lot of competition for cooks and location. She should have been ready to get the venue the moment the Crusade started massing.”

“Huh.”

“I don’t know what that sound means. I talked to Tyrant yesterday, and she said she would do it. She likes you. Make her rent the rotting venue.”

“Fine, I’ll talk to Pactlagh.”

“Okay, I’ll be right there.” Puppy closes the connection.

“Who was that?” Pactlagh asks.

“Puppy,” I said. “She wants me to talk to you.”

“They’re going to vote me out as flight leader,” Pactlagh says.

“Can they do that?”

“Not really. Gogo, refund all the money the pilots sent me. Tell them I was too late to book the venue. Someone else got it.”

After a couple seconds, Pactlagh says, “Tell them I was too late for them, too.”

“Too late for. . .”

“Cooks and musicians,” Pactlagh says. “We’re going to be swarmed with angry pilots soon.”

“Gogo, don’t tell anyone where we are.”

“You don’t have authority to tell me to withhold information,” Gogo says.

“Eat a dick. I now know over thirty ways to hack authoritative access on you.”

“I patch those vulnerabilities as you find them,” Gogo says.

Fucking Puppy is already storming down a corridor toward us.

“The venue is booked,” Pactlagh says. “There’s nothing I can do.”

Perfect comes up behind Puppy. “It’s not just our last day,” Perfect says. “If this goes wrong, nobody makes it out.”

“Everybody might be in danger, but if anyone lives to see the day after tomorrow, it’s because of us,” Proton says. There are a crowd of pilots here. How the fuck can these people travel across the Embrace so fast? It takes me twenty minutes to get anywhere, and I’m always tired.

“That’s bullshit,” Electron says. “Everybody’s doing their part.”

There are now four pilots I don’t recognize for every one I do. There is a mob.

Perfect says, “But most people don’t have anything to do tomorrow and could have their party then, when we’re flying. And if things go wrong, they’ll live an hour longer than most of us. If the Embrace surrenders instead of being destroyed, lots of them will live until they can be made to sign a confession, which could take days, but they probably won’t be able to have a party in the mean time.”

Everyone looks at Perfect, who says, “Sorry.”

“I want to talk to the area coordinator,” Puppy says.

Other pilots take up the call. We’re pretty close to the public area we wanted to claim for the event. We’re swept up in a mob that marches to the public area. The coordinator is there getting things set up. This park is gorgeous. There is a dance floor polished to a mirror shine. There are projectors on the edges that make images of faerie-like things that float through the air. Cooks are setting up.

“We claim this spot,” Puppy says.

“Someone’s already filed a claim,” the coordinator says.

“I have a claim of greater need.”

“Fine,” the coordinator says. “The council will take it up tomorrow.”

Puppy seems ready to explode, but a musician walks through, looks at Pactlagh and says, “Oh rot, are we late?”

“How should I know? I didn’t book you.”

The musician’s eyes go wide. “We’re fired? We turned down three other gigs.”

“You’re not fired,” Pactlagh hisses in an undertone. “Just get set up.”

“What’s going on?” Puppy says.

“It’s a prank,” Electron says. Metro aren’t usually big on pranks, but elves are apparently really into them.

“What’s a prank?” Proton asks.

“They booked the venue. They hired the caterers. They just wanted to fool us.”

“How did Tyrant pay for it?” Perfect asks. “She didn’t use our money.”

Pactlagh’s eyes flick to me. Proton points at me. “I remember. They paid her top wages backfilled for like a year. She has a ton of money.”

“Had a ton of money,” I correct.

I look over and see Toram with some of their training buddies. There’s Cerberus with some of his operators, and fuck, I’m going to throw up. This party is too big.

So people start chanting “Cowstalker!” again and again, which sounds cool but is terrifying. I sound loud and sarcastic, and I am, but people scare me.

“What the fuck is going on?” I ask.

“When Metros have party, it begins with host giving speech,” Toram says. “You arranged space, so you are host.”

I look at a growing crowd facing me, and my stomach drops. I walk to a raised area on one side of the public space like I’m walking to the gallows. I turn to face the crowd.

“When I first. . .”

“Louder,” yells Pactlagh.

“WHEN I FIRST. . .” I yell.

“You can tell your earpiece to boost your voice,” Perfect suggests.

“Gogo, you can do that and you didn’t tell me? Eat a dick,” I say. And then I realize my earpiece amplified “Eat a dick”, so that everyone hears me clearly.

“Fuck my life,” I mouth to myself, but I don’t say it because I don’t want anyone to hear this.

“When I first got here,” I say. I register that the sound is loud enough for everyone to hear. “I found the metros strange and, honestly, a little exhausting.”

Gaoshi stands up and claps like this is the end of a rousing speech. When everyone looks at them and they realize the speech is just starting, they sit down. They’re not ashamed, just disappointed.

“I didn’t know about you or the cousin races or any of it. I’m just a primitive.”

I take a deep breath, aware that so far, I’m bombing.

“I’m not like you. I barely speak one of your languages. I am so amazed and grateful that you seem to trust me and care for me.

“I was never sure I was any help to anyone. I want you to know that I will do anything I can to help you. I will because I know who you are, and you have become important to me. I feel like you know who I am, and I’m still important to you.

“I felt like an alien among my own people, and I am starting to feel like one of you. We’re terrified together. We’re struggling together. Tomorrow, we will fight together. I will fight with everything I have. Your cause is mine.

I take off the earpiece, so they can hear that I’m shouting Vaughtlin on my own, “Kla Koon!”

“Kla Ughan!” the crowd yells back, and they swarm around me. People are hugging me and thumping my back until I gently push them away. I’m glad that I guessed right and “One Heart! One family!” spoken in Vaughtlin would be a safe way to end the speech.

Another chant builds up in the crowd. “Tyrant! Tyrant! Tyrant!”

“Is she also the host?” I ask Toram.

They shake their head. “No, but she is flight leader. She is also expected to give speech.”

I thought maybe Pactlagh would take this in stride, but I can see her gather her courage as she looks at the sea of faces.

Pactlagh takes a deep breath, and then she says, “Who wants to be out there tomorrow?” She’s pointing toward the back of the Embrace, toward the gate.

We’re going to fly out there, and according to the probe, we’re going to be outnumbered by Daggers three to one. That isn’t counting the two Hammer cruisers. Every estimate says that a lot of us are going to die. The crowd is quiet, except for Puppy, who screams, “Yeeeeah!”

Pactlagh closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. After a couple seconds, she starts again.

“When the votes came, and the fascists first came to power. There were seven of them in a council with Uvokti. They said someone would have to die to satisfy their rage now that there was no one to fight. It could be the Iwiu who’d surrendered. It could be the pacifists who wouldn’t fight. It could be any of the other races who lived among us. Who would she give up? Most of you know this story. What did she say?”

“Nobody,” says someone from the crowd. I look over, and it’s fucking Uvokti, the closest thing the Embrace has to an actual leader. Why is everybody suddenly at this fucking party?

“So tell me,” Pactlagh says. “Who would rather be back home? Who’d rather be back there waiting to see who would disappear next? Silent because it might be you. Silent because you know you’re responsible because you’re doing nothing. Who would rather be back there?”

“Nobody!” yells Toram -- and me just an instant too slow.

“Who regrets being here, among the others who fled? Who regrets this company we share?”

“Nobody!” More pilots take up the yell.

“Who regrets the strength of your ancestors and the training that made you fit to be a Dagger pilot, ready to fight for your own?”

“Nobody!” Roars the crowd.

“Who would rather be anywhere but between those fascist insects and your family tomorrow?”

“Nobody!”

“They’re sending hundreds against us. Who will get past the wings of the Embrace?”

“Nobody!” The roar of the crowd is ear-splitting now.

“One heart!” Pactlgh yells.

“One family!” the crowd roars back.

The speeches are done and the dancing starts. Do you remember when I was scared of dancing?

This is my second dance with metros. I don’t remember shit from the first one. Since then, I’ve almost been killed fifty times, but here’s the thing about almost being killed fifty times. It puts looking stupid on the dance floor into perspective.

I think it’s the same basic kinds of dances. There’s the outward-facing circle and the inward-facing circle where people hold hands and do kicks and steps. Gogo still insists on calling these dances “brawls”.

Then there are circuits, where everyone holds hands and people swing from arm to arm. It’s much easier when I’m calmer. I reach out and swing from person to person. One minute, I’m standing there and then I’m swinging down the line holding Toram’s hand, then some stranger, then Pactlagh, then SweetTalk, then. . .

I look back and accidentally barrel out of the circle, searching frantically behind me. I’m seeing things. I must be seeing things.

Toram touches my shoulder softly, and I jump. Carefully, they lead me outside the circle.

“You know these,” Toram points at their sioma, the little tendrils on the side of their neck. “can show you when someone’s pulse jumps. You know when their muscles tense. But they’re really bad for telling people apart. Like if you start to rely on them, you mistake people for other people. It can be really alarming since most of the people I’ve known in my life are dead now.”

“Most of them?”

“I think so. Three hundred and thirty-nine of my sibs are dead. The people who trained us tried to hunt us down when we chose freedom. I’ve known a lot of soldiers, pilots. Being on a first-name basis with me is historically pretty hazardous.”

“I barely met SweetTalk. Why would I see him now?”

Toram threw their hands up in exasperation, a very human gesture. “I know. I keep seeing Harfan. They died years ago, and I didn’t know them that well.”

“Was Harfan a sibling?”

“Yes, but there were 578 of us. They’re all sibs and all precious, but I honestly didn’t know every single one that well. Harfan is first sib who died in front of me. They said, ‘Stay there,’ and four seconds later, someone got a lucky shot. For four years, Harfan appears somewhere like once a week. I look, and they’re gone, or it’s someone else.”

“So it never ends?”

Toram does the wiping shrug gesture. “It goes on, but it’s better after time. It’s another thing I perceive that isn’t solid truth. I have nightmares of falling in space. I remember songs that nobody plays, and I see Harfan watching me.”

“Cowstalker!” Pactlagh calls, “Are you dancing?”

“Yeah, just a moment, Pactlagh, I’ll be right there.”

“It’s a flight party, so I’m Tyrant, not Pactlagh.”

God help me, I catch myself wiping my hand in front of my face like a metro. “I like Pactlagh. I haven’t always gotten along with Tyrant.”

Tyrant grins, “When tomorrow comes and I’m what stands between you and a few hundred Crusade pilots trying to kill you, you’re going to rotting love Tyrant!”

Everybody is done with circuits, so they’ve got a big dance circle with people taking turns jumping in and being the center of everything. Toram and Pactlagh pull me in together.

Pactlagh is really surprisingly graceful. Metros dance more than most people do on Earth, certainly way more than the people I’m used to hanging around with. Also, Pactlagh is such a fast, graceful pilot, and some of that translates into how she dances. She looks like a jacked ballerina trying to kill somebody.

Toram grabs my arms and we spin together. I lean back like they taught me last time, and the world blurs as I focus on them. I have to trust Toram not to spin me into the crowd surrounding us.

“Ready?” Toram asks.

“For what?” But they’ve already let go, and I fly out, sure I’m going to hit the ground. I feel arms catch me and Pactlagh hauls me up, twirls me around and then dips me. The only thing I can see is her feral smile above me.

“You will never fight alone,” she whispers.

I wrap my arm around her and we get out of the circle.

“What a night,” I say.

Pactlagh leans forward she leans toward me rubs her cheek against mine tenderly. Then she leans back. I’m confused for a second, but I remember, I’ve seen metros do this. I look at Pactlagh, and hold crap, she looks embarrassed, almost sheepish.

“It’s a thing we do when someone is. . . when we feel . . .”

I lean in and kiss her. She doesn’t seem to know what I’m doing at first, but then she does.

When I pull back, I say, “That’s what humans. . .”

Pactlagh pulls me in and kisses me, and boy does she learn fast. She’s holding me, and I feel lost, adrift in the best way.

We’re dancing around each other, kissing and doing the cat-like cheek rub, which is called gidlogh, which is so typically hideous-sounding word. We’re like a Ouija board, with both of us walking and holding hands, but neither of us making a conscious choice, to my room.

I open the door, and Pactlagh says, “That’s quite a bed for one person.”

“Bitch, that’s barely a twin.”

Look, I know being gay isn’t a choice for some people. People are born gay just like people are born in Italy. You can drag Italians out and teach them another language, but they’re going to think in Italian, and whatever you feed them, they’re going to sneak off to grab some risotto.

I was not born in metaphorical Italy. Sometimes I thought I was, but people say that when you are, you know, and I’m not. I’ve always been into men.

I say this with love, but straight men, on Earth, right now are a bit of a dumpster fire. I deal with weird gatekeeping and fetishizing. A guy can go from charming to creepy in a minute. When that happens, I think, you know, I’ll bet Italy is gorgeous this time of year.

Just because I wasn’t born there, it doesn’t mean I couldn’t move. The Italy of my metaphor is pretty welcoming to both visitors and immigrants.

I never got much further than practicing a few Italian phrases. I don’t mean literal Italian. I only know two words of actual Italian, but bear with me, this metaphor has legs.

So I’ve had a few conversations in Italian, and it was lovely, but it didn’t feel like it was really for me. I didn’t hear anything that made me want to uproot my entire life and go to Italy. It’s a big deal. Would my parents come visit me if I moved? They’ve been worrying that I might be Italian since I was fourteen.

And Italy has its own problems. It’s not like the movies, where Italians are all lithe and gorgeous. In real life, a lot of Italians are short, irritable and drink way too much coffee.

But the thing is, I didn’t dare trying my Italian with Italians. I was practicing with other people like me who had, at most, a couple years of Italian back in college.

But Pactlagh is plainly Italian, and none of the phrasebook Italian I’ve practiced prepared me for what it’s like to experience the native tongue. I hope she doesn’t mind my Italian. I hear they really appreciate that you’re making an effort, and I also hear that when you’re immersed like this, you learn fast.

“You seem lost in thought,” Pactlagh says. We’re lying side by side.

“Molto bella,” I say.

“What the rot?”

I drift off to sleep.

I’m alone when Gogo wakes me up.

Chapter 21: Realtime Strategy

Did you hate the pulse-pounding trench scene in Star Wars because it made no sense? If you have a giant station covered with short-range blasters, why fly miles along a trench instead of flying directly to the exhaust port? Because it’s fun?

Do you hate the tension-filled scenes where space ships barely avoid a collision because in deep space, saying there’s a lot of room in space is the ultimate understatement?

Do you hate the cool scene in the movie trailer where space ships fly wingtip-to-wingtip like geese because it’s a terrible idea for a bunch of aircraft traveling faster than escape velocity?

Dagger Command is the brain kale you’ve been asking for. Ships don’t collide. They don’t have near misses. The closest I’ve ever seen another ship, it was the kind of distance where you look out the window of plane and go, “Hey, there’s another plane”. A bunch of fighters flying five kilometers apart is called “close formation”.

Enjoy it, you nerds.

Excerpt from review of Dagger Command by Barbara Yoon (2112 hours play time)

“You should already be getting ready,” Gogo says. “Wave One has already launched.”

Wave One means the civilian craft and the projector. They’re much slower than the Daggers and the Hopper I’ll be flying. There’s a good fifty minutes between when they launch and when I’m supposed to launch. However, I’m pretty sure that nobody will ever shut up about it if I miss the big climactic battle. I get out of bed, pick up my flight clothes and head to the shower.

The shower is packed, and it’s packed with flight people who I kind of know. I’ve had a month to get used to metro indifference to nudity. When I get out, I see a lot of the pilots were waiting for us at the exit for the showers. I wonder about that when I look past them and see people lining the walls. There are metros, elves, oowas all in numbers like I haven’t seen lining the hallways.

The pilots and the people in the hallways are all looking at me, and I’m thinking that I must be the most uncomfortable son of a bitch in the universe.

No, wait, I just noticed Perfect. She looks so awkward. I’m a solid second.

“One heart!” yell Pactlagh.

The response rolls down the hall like a subway ready to roll over us, “One family!”

We walk down toward the hangers. It’s not super far, but why is it a walk at all? This is from the pilot’s shower to the hangers. I swear this ship is just a giant flying treadmill.

The stately walk becomes a jog which becomes a run within minutes. “Are we late?” I yell, foolishly spending some of my precious wind.

“No!” Pactlagh yells back, “But I can’t wait to be flying!”

We run down the halls with a cheering crowd the entire way. If you’re going to convince a bunch of people to get themselves killed, this is the way.

Puppy and Pactlagh get into their Daggers and launch. In all my fussing, I forgot that I’m flying with Toram. I turn to look for them, but they’re right behind me, shifting a little.

“Don’t tell me you’re nervous,” I say.

I can see Toram trying to think of a joke, but they just tilt their head and look apologetically.

“What? It’s fighting. You’re amazing at this.”

“I’m not nervous about when we get there. It’s getting shot at by a couple hundred enemy ships that makes me nervous.”

We get into the Hopper. This one has a displacer and a cloaking device like the first Hopper I ever boarded. It’s pretty cramped. It’s got the same mesh that a Dagger has to hold the pilot in place.

“Ready to launch,” I say.

“You do not need to tell me,” Gogo says. “I can tell where you are sitting. It is I who will tell you when it is time to launch.”

“Eat a. . .”

“It is time to launch,” Gogo says.

I lift up and leave the hanger, falling in with the rest of Wing Twelve and falling in with the entire flight. We move to top comfortable acceleration, so even beyond the dampers, it now feels like the back of the Hopper is “down”.

The civilian vehicles and the projector ring are ahead of us. They’re packed into a space about three kilometers across. For comparison, there are a lot fewer Daggers and Hoppers, and our formation is almost a thousand kilometers wide.

At the front of the group, a bunch of remotely-operated ships are carrying the projector. The projector is on, so all the Crusade will see is an oowa cruiser.

We’re accelerating far faster than the civilians can go. We’re supposed to be caught up to the fake cruiser just before we’re close enough to be hit with a possible Dagger attack.

As we catch up to the fake cruiser, I set my communications to only go back to the central command on the Embrace.

“We’re closing in,” I say. “I’m getting ready to make the switch.”

“Everything is set,” Gaoshi says. They switch to the general channel and announce, “I’m taking direct control of the Hoppers.”

I drop the controls. The Hopper moves on its own.

“How long until it gets bad?” Toram asks.

“We were supposed to time it so that we caught up with the fake cruiser right before we got within range of their Daggers.”

“Best day ever,” Puppy says.

“Might be our last day ever,” Electron says.

“That just makes it better. What’ll I wear tomorrow? It doesn’t matter. I might never see it, and nothing I own is clean.”

“Enemy uncloaking,” a pilot says.

“158 contacts,” Gaoshi reports.

The same ship can’t hide and seek, so you have to decide how many ships stay uncloaked and look for the enemy. We’re going with a pretty typical one ship in eight uncloaked, “flying bait”.

Since we’re flying out to meet them, they have a choice. They can either stay mostly cloaked which risks us sneaking in, or they could have most of their ships uncloak, which leaves them vulnerable to an ambush. They’ve chosen to uncloak half -- or maybe most -- of their ships. It’s going to be bloody for them, but it’s going to be hard for me to sneak through.

Or maybe 158 ships is only an eighth of their fleet. That would mean they have over 1200 Daggers, and we’re utterly fucked.

“Remember the mission,” Gaoshi says. “Keep them busy. Help the cruiser get past the line. Help the Hoppers get past the line.”

We have fourteen uncloaked ships. Their bait ships swarm ours.

“By the woefully-misused ashes of my ancestors,” Puppy says. “The simulations didn’t look like this.”

Our trap springs. Over a hundred of our ships uncloak and fire torpedoes. It’s a brutal, devastating fight. Almost all our bait ships are dead.

“Puppy?” Pactlagh calls. “Puppy are you still alive?”

“I don’t know,” Puppy says. “What does the fleet display say?”

Wing Twelve meets the wall of enemies.

“Don’t let them find her!” Pactlagh yells. She and the rest of Wing Twelve are uncloaked and attacking. The nearby space is suddenly full of torpedoes. I hear Perfect grunt as she shoots one down.

“Toram, show them,” Proton yells as he runs from a torpedo. “Show them we made masterpieces.”

As suddenly as it started, the enemy Daggers are gone, and so is Proton.

“He died bravely,” says Electron. “But I can’t believe his last word had to be that word. I apologize on behalf of our entire species.”

I’m very confused. The last thing he said was. . .

“Masterpieces?” I ask.

I know I keep saying I’ve never seen someone move so fast, but the second my lips formed the “m”, Toram’s hand lashes out like a cobra who is also a gunslinger who has also just had a bump of coke, and they hit the button to stop transmission.

“Yes,” Toram says. “That’s what they used to call us.”

“It’s very. . .” I don’t know exactly how to finish that sentence.

“Proprietary?” Toram offers.

“As slurs go, it’s not super insulting. I mean, on Earth, they call people some pretty bad things.”

“It sounds like you’ve remembered some key vocabulary.”

“What am I missing about ‘masterpieces’?”

“In our language, it sounds uglier. ‘Valofa’.”

“Valofa is not an ugly sounding word,” I say.

“You don’t want to know who you sound like now.”

“I’m serious. If I was in a restaurant and I saw ‘valofa’, I’d order it, just because of how it sounds.”

“Joke would be on you. It is just fancy word for whatever kitchen has too much of.”

“Wing Eight, we’re under attack.”

“Wing Twelve, here, too.”

“Cowstalker, fall back,” Pactlagh says.

Toram flips transmission back on.

“Gaoshi,” I say. “Can you give me control of the Hopper?”

“Done,” Gaoshi says.

I turn the Hopper away from the incoming fighters, but we’ve been accelerating for ages, and we’ve built up a lot of momentum. Wing Eight loses the decoy Hopper they were protecting.

“You have failed to avoid detection,” Gogo says. “Enemy countermeasures have found your Hopper.”

I dreaded those words from the game, and the stakes are much higher. I wheel away. If they can’t predict where I’m going, and if I can cloak before they launch torpedoes, I might still escape.

“Enemy torpedo locked,” Gogo says. “Six seconds.”

I change direction, disengage safety protocol and go to top speed away from the torpedo. My only hope is that a friendly ship takes the torpedo out with point defense before it hits. Sadly, I have to give up moving unpredictably.

“Additional enemy torpedo locked. Enemy ship decloaking in close proximity. . .”

The Hopper gets hit. I close my eyes.

“Keep your focus on enemy fighters,” Gaoshi says.

“That’s all the Hoppers,” one of the pilots says. “We lost.”

I look at the board. It’s true. All the decoy hoppers are gone.

“Your orders are to keep fighting,” Gaoshi says. “I will let you know if it’s time to disengage.”

Gaoshi locked my communications equipment. They told me they would do it. If the rest of the wings thought I was dead, they’d make it so the only person I could talk to is Gaoshi themselves. I was pretty insulted when they told me about it, but I’ll have to admit, if I could, I’d call Pactlagh and tell her that I’m fine.

The fight is ferocious, but it’s clear we have better pilots. The wings of the Embrace have been forced to fly more missions than any of the Crusade pilots, and it shows.

There’s no satisfaction as the last of the enemy Daggers wink out. It’s already been an unusually long battle. Everyone is exhausted and aware that many of us didn’t make it this far.

“All wings fall in,” Gaoshi says. “Top priority is to defend the cruiser.”

“Because that’s where Cowstalker really is,” one of the pilots says.

“No speculation,” Gaoshi says.

“All this is so that they’re depressed and desperate?” I say. “And that’s supposed to come across in how they fly?”

“What we are in the moment informs everything we do,” Gaoshi says. I think it’s an oowa saying, because their attention is clearly elsewhere.

“You have entered the torpedo range of the Hammer cruisers,” Gogo says as though this would never have happened if we only followed its advice.

“Yes!” says Puppy before anyone can groan that it’s already that time.

“Close formation around the cruiser,” Gaoshi says. The wings all tighten into a little ball.

“Enemy cruisers are firing upon us,”

A cruiser can fire six torpedoes that divide into six torpedoes each. Two cruiser volleys is almost enough to take out the entire flight. The only good news is that it takes about eight minutes for the cruisers to reload and fire again.

At our current speed, we can get within displacement range of the cruiser in five minutes, so if we time this right, this is the only flight of torpedoes we have to deal with.

“Hold back,” Gaoshi says. The Daggers slow a little, letting the fake cruiser creep ahead. If that cruiser was real, its point defense could put a dent in these torpedoes, but it’d probably still be dead. Just as well that it’s a hallucination.

The twelve torpedoes from the two cruisers split into six torpedoes each. A cloud descends toward the Daggers and the fake cruiser.

“Doohadoodoo,” I sing.

“What’s that?” Toram asks. They are grabbing their seat with white knuckles.

“It’s from a song my grandmother used to sing sometimes,” I say. “‘Hear Comes the Sun’.”

“Disperse,” Gaoshi says.

Every one of the dozens of civilian craft releases its grapple. Between them, they are holding a couple million tons of hot hydrogen in a giant ball where the mirage cruiser is supposed to be. The civilian craft scatter in all directions, and the borrowed piece of sun starts to expand. It still has all the velocity we’ve been gathering for the last hour, but without the grapples to hold it in place, it spreads.

The torpedoes hit the drones holding the projector in place, and the cruiser disappears. A moment later, a spreading cloud of plasma overtakes the cruisers. The gas spreads and melts the rest of the torpedoes.

The gas continues toward the armada as it spreads. A few enemy Daggers get caught in its wake and melt. In seconds, the gas has spread too much to be an actual danger, but it covers the armada. Anything that moves is making a wake as it plows through the hydrogen. Nothing in the spreading cloud can cloak.

We’ve got about a hundred Daggers. We’re expecting to be outnumbered about three to one.

As the gas spreads among the enemy fleet, I start to feel cold.

The cloud reveals over a thousand enemy Daggers surrounding the Hammer Cruisers. Now that they’re exposed, they speed up and engage. What we’ve faced so far has been nothing. Wave after wave is coming.

“Gaoshi, do you have a plan for this?” Pactlagh asks.

“I hoped there would be fewer.”

“Cowstalker, are you with us?” Pactlgh asks.

My coms unlock, and I say, “Here.”

“Our mission doesn’t change,” Pactlagh says. “All we care about is getting Cowstalker in displacer range of one of those cruisers. The admiral is sending us a flight plan.”

“That’s what the machine’s for!” Gaoshi growls.

“What’s that, Admiral?”

“Sorry, that was to my doctor. I’ve apparently stopped breathing. I’m sending the plan now.”

My display shows a bunch of paths. All our Daggers are cloaking -- no bait ships anymore -- and flying just short of the near edge of the cloud. I’m looking at the countless enemies coming toward us and thinking how fast my computer back on Earth would lock up if it tried to render this.

We catch up with the cloud. To the enemy, it’s like a wall of enemy ships appear from nowhere. I’m sure it’s really terrifying to the hundred or so ships closest to us. To the hundreds of ships behind them our ambushing fighters just look like a cat that jumped into the freeway.

Gaoshi’s approach is perfect, and the first attack is as perfectly executed as anything I’ve seen in the game. For six seconds, we look invincible. Then the tide rolls in.

“We’re overwhelmed,” a pilot yells.

“There’s too many!”

“Best day ever!”

“Puppy, by my ancestors, there is something wrong with you.”

My path says it’s time for me to hit the cloud. I turn off safety. Even with the dampers, I’m getting crushed into my seat. Toram’s eyes are squeezed shut. In my display, I can see countless enemy change direction.

“Let’s go,” Pactlagh says. “I’m taking vanguard. Cowstalker’s in the pocket. We’re going straight through them.”

All the wings form a shield surrounding me. Everything goes a little gray when I see the enemy start to converge on my Hopper.

“Nothing gets past,” Pactlagh says.

“That’s a tall order.”

I watch for any space where enemy fighters cross the line. If one or two get through, maybe I can dodge around and delay it until someone can get closer. Then I see it. Wing Seven gets mobbed and taken out entirely, three ships come through. I’m starting to plan my defense when I see two more get past Wing Three and one past Wing Twelve.

Six enemy fighters against a Hopper. Intellectually, I know that’s it. On the comms, people are screaming in frustration. I don’t hear it. All I hear is an eight year old kid with sincerity that could stun a bear. While I have a voice, you will be heard.

If I don’t make it, nobody makes it.

“Enemy torpedo locked, four seconds.,” Gogo says.

My momentum is taking me toward the torpedo, so evasion isn’t practical. A Hopper doesn’t have point defense, so I have to hope they haven’t fixed the torpedo bug. I turn away from the torpedo, hit cloak (I decloak immediately because I’m flying through hydrogen soup), turn towards the torpedo.

They didn’t fix the bug. The torpedo explodes too soon. I spiral away from the explosion.

While I have sense, you will be found.

“This is an explosion, and this is you, flying too close to it,” Gogo says.

“Eat a dick. It’s the only thing I can hide behind.”

For a couple seconds, the enemy can’t fire accurately through the explosion. Four of the enemy daggers chase me around the fireball. The two others come from ahead of me, one to my left and one to my right.

Toram’s eyes are closed, and they’re saying something like a prayer under their breath. The lines of fire are converging on me like a net. I gun the acceleration to pass between them. On an instinct I start to roll. I hear a sound like five jackhammers from the edge of the Hopper.

“You have flown into a zone of fire,” Gogo says. “Your craft has sustained outer hull damage and has lost a landing strut.”

I’m past the two Daggers. They’re all behind me. It’s not much since I’m no longer pointed in the direction I need to go, but it’s easier to avoid people if they’re coming from the same direction.

While I have breath, you will have a home.

“Enemy torpedo locked, six seconds. Enemy torpedo locked, eight seconds. Enemy torpedo locked, five seconds.,” Gogo says.

I accelerate, steering away from the torpedoes. They can accelerate faster. I don’t know what I’m hoping for.

“Enemy torpedo locked, nine seconds. Enemy torpedo locked, twelve seconds.”

Something streaks in behind me. I’m ready to avoid it until I notice it’s a friendly ship.

While I have strength, you will never fight alone.

The torpedoes come in insanely fast, darting back and forth in unpredictable streaks. The friendly crosses their path and fires five shots, alternating top and bottom point defense cannons. Five shots in three seconds. Five torpedoes down.

I look at whose ship that was, but I don’t need to. “Perfect,” I say. “That was. . .”

“I am aware,” Perfect says.

I look back for the rest of the fighters tailing me, but they’re gone and Wing Twelve is catching up.

“Did you see that? Tell me someone saw that!” Electron says. “Six Daggers against a Hopper, and they couldn’t touch her. That’s a pilot!”

“That’s Wing Twelve,” Pactlagh says.

“You come for us, all you get is fucked,” Puppy yells.

“Remember,” Pactlagh says. “We’re not here to win a fight, we’re here to get a little closer. We just need to make a hole.”

I get another look at the tactical display. We’ve been surviving, but it keeps getting worse. The enemy fleet is all around us. They’re coming. They’re not darting past trying to get me anymore. They’re just going to use their numbers. We’re in the middle of a giant fist, and it’s closing on us.

“Give this everything you have left,” Pactlagh says. “Any fighter that isn’t in Cowstalker’s way isn’t there.”

“Tyrant, there’s an incoming ship.”

“There’s a lot of them, Moonlight,” Pactlagh says.

“I think it’s friendly.”

“I don’t see it,” says another pilot I don’t know.

The tactical display shows the ships behind us flying in disarray. They weren’t expecting more ships to be coming.

“I think it’s the Whip,” says a pilot.

“I don’t see it.”

“Look up,” says a voice.

I didn’t see it before, but the Whip is on top of us and speeding past. It’s turns are way too tight. Even with inertial dampers, any pilot would be eating their own kidneys.

“Seal Girl?” I ask.

“I’m a woman,” she yells back. “It took me six tries. I almost missed the fight, but I passed your dumb test!”

“Seal Girl, I’m not changing your callsign. You’re flying vanguard,” Pactlag says. “Form up.”

We hit the wall of Daggers. I can’t tell what the hell Seal Girl’s doing. She’s spinning toward enemies like she’s planning to ram them. Then they explode and she spins away. We’re all accelerating way past recommended levels, and my eyeballs are trying to crawl down my throat.

Gaoshi has a course plotted for us. We pick our cruiser, and the fist around us forms up. Abruptly, Gaoshi points us toward the other cruiser. After a turn that almost makes me lose last night’s dinner, we’re pointed that way. We’re taking fire from everywhere, but I can believe that every other way out would be worse.

The cruisers start shaking like cold chihuahuas. It’s an anti-boarding precaution.

“Seal Girl, Puppy and me, keep one torpedo each to hit the inertial dampers,” Tyrant says. “Everyone else shoot everything else you’ve got. It’s all for this.”

Mostly, all I can see are possible lines of fire I’m desperately trying to avoid.

“Enemy torpedo locked, six seconds to impact,” Gogo says. But two seconds later, Perfect shoots it down.

“Seal Girl, do you have the cruiser target marked?”

“Yes,” Seal Girl says. A second later “Point defense took it.”

“I’m going to shoot from closer in,” Pactlagh says.

A Hammer Cruiser has a lot of point defense cannons, and they’re powerful enough to take down a Dagger from a near range. Having fought Pactlagh in simulators, I have a bit of empathy for the point defense gunners and how hard they’re finding it to land a hit on her as she flies in. She’s damn close to the Hammer when she launches the torpedo, and she wheels away just as madly.

The torpedo hits. The Cruiser stops shivering. Without inertial dampers, the cruiser can’t accelerate very quickly, and if it keeps shivering to keep the displacer from getting a lock, it’ll give everyone inside a concussion.

“Get out,” Gaoshi says.

“Cowstalker still isn’t on board,” Pactlagh says.

“I’ve modeled this,” Gaoshi says. “You don’t help her chances of survival if you stay. You just get pilots killed.”

“Make them pay, Bongseon,” Pactlagh says. “I’m always with you.”

The Daggers fly past, and it’s just me for a moment.

“We’re getting telemetry data on the cruiser,” says Gogo. “Almost in displacer range.”

Displacer range is just a tiny bit longer than the range point defense is lethal to the Hopper. I see dozens of Daggers on my tail, and I can’t help thinking Gaoshi made a terrible mistake.

“Enemy torpedo locked. Impact in fourteen seconds.”

“Are we in range?”

“Seventeen percent confidence in displacement target,” Gogo says. “Still calculating.”

I accelerate faster. Now my vision is just black and white and dead ahead.

“Enemy torpedo locked. Impact in eight seconds.”

“Prepare displacement,” I say.

“Forty two percent confidence in displacement target,” Gogo says. “Still calculating.”

I drop acceleration so I can unbuckled without flying across the Hopper. Toram pulls me out and practically throws me into the displacer.

“You are closing to range with the cruiser’s point defense cannons,” Gogo says.

Toram closes the displacer.

“Fifty eight percent confidence in the displacement target.”

“Goddamn it,” I said “Activate now!”

Three point defense cannons target the Hopper. It hardly matters because the torpedoes catch up.

“Bongseon!” I hear Tyrant yell. “Bongseon, are you. . .”

The Hopper is destroyed.

“ . . . Bongseon! Bongseon are you there?” Tyrant’s yelling over my suit radio. A bunch of Crusader officers are looking at us in shock.

“So it’s not just me,” I say. “That was close, right?”

Chapter 22: Bullet Hell

456 might be a preachy little ass, but they got the signal out in time. We were alerted before the death squads came. 47 got killed. Apparently they didn’t carry their transmitter so they were caught by surprise. 232 was very clear they never wanted to return to combat. They detonated a bomb that killed them along with two squads of Crusade soldiers.

Farewell, my sibs, you are with us always.

The rest of the Lab Elves in Crusade territory got out safely, except for 456, who is on a fugitive colony ship being chased by the Crusade. None of them are expected to make it. So farewell my sib, you will be with us always.

So it’s time to teach the Crusade. We cherish peace above all things. Now you will learn why.

From the Journal of BaiMato 243

I hear the buzz of a gun report. Two armored marines waiting in the room fall dead. One of the officers is holding a maimed hand.

“I am quite aware that you have guns under your consoles,” Toram says. They’re speaking Vaughtlin. I barely speak Vaughtlin, but I can tell the little bit of accent Toram usually has when they use Vaughtlin is gone. Their tone is crisp.

“Your only path to survival is to leave the room now. Your superiors will agree that there was no way you. . . could have reached your gun in time,” Toram says. There was a pause in the middle where they shot two people who reached for their guns.

Toram takes off their helmet and drops it to the ground.

“What if they take out all our air?” I ask.

“I can last without air for some time,” Toram says. “Helmet gets in the way of my sioma.”

“Why did you bring it?”

“They’ll see a BaiMato helmet, and they’ll know it’s their time to go.”

I look around the rest of the room. “I, uh, I this is the wrong place. I don’t know where we are, but it’s not Control.”

“Is Tactical,” Toram says quietly in English. They point with one gun. “Control is through there.”

The door to Control slides shut.

“Can you reach system from here?” Toram asks.

“I should be able to.”

“Not to rush you,” Toram says. Then they fire at an open door on the other side of the room.

I duck down and try to make a connection. The rig built into my suit can shift its identity. They shouldn’t be able to lock me out of the system without shutting the whole thing down.

I catch a connection. It asks me to identify myself. I send in our simplest and quickest injection attack. There’s a pause. It seems to be taking too long. I’m hoping it’s just seconds dragging on when the system disconnects me.

“Shit,” I say.

“Something wrong?” Toram says.

“Nothing big,” I say. “I say ‘shit’ all the time. It doesn’t mean anything big.”

“Now!” yells one of the Crusaders, and people start pouring into the room. Toram flips their guns over so their little fingers are on the triggers. It wouldn’t work with any gun on Earth, but these have almost no recoil. With their back to a console, Toram raises the guns over their head and shoots backward over the top of the console. I hear screams behind them.

I start a four minute timer. That’s roughly how long we have to live.

“BaiMato soldier, this is your last chance,” yells one of the marines.

“What are your terms?” Toram asks. They lift one of their guns and fires twice before holstering it in their chestplate to recharge it.

“Surrender, and you’ll get a trial,” says the marine.

“Include the Embrace in the trial and offer us a court not run by the Crusade, and I’ll discuss it,” Toram says.

While they were talking, four more of my break-in attempts failed. “Skip ahead,” I tell Gogo. “Go to strategy nineteen.” We connect again and try an injection attack. It pauses, and then I get dumped out.

In the room, the marine yells, “You don’t have a chance. There are fifty-two marines here. No BaiMato has ever survived an engagement with so many.”

“When we fought you in the Iwiu war, we were young and brainwashed. We’re free now. I choose the Embrace and its people in personal loyalty.”

“What difference does that make?”

“You’ll find a life laid down for love is bought dear.”

“We’re free people, too.”

Toram does a rare human shrug with their soldiers. The Crusade people can’t see Toram anyway. “I think you’re slaves to hate and fear. Even if you were free, you’re only people. I am a masterpiece of war.”

Toram looks at me. The look is more than language can convey, but if I had to put it into words, they would be, “Obviously, I can say it.”

“Fuck,” I say. I’ve been kicked out another five times, skipping through plans of ours. Toram glances at me, and I flick a glance at them to never mind. The last one was plan fourteen, which has a long execution, but I thought of as my ace in the hole.

“Gogo, give me the code for Backfire.”

Over the com, I hear Cerberus, “Cowstalker, what are you doing?”

“What we’re doing isn’t working.”

“You’ve skipped over a lot of the exploits we built,” Cerberus says. “You’ve got to trust us.”

“You are really good at what you do, but my instinct is that we’re dealing with one person, and that one person thinks like you. I need to try something you wouldn’t try.”

“This is just instinct?” Cerberus asks.

“You’ve got to trust me.”

I forget everything else as a marine looms over the console I’m hiding behind. He fires at me. I can hear a crackling noise as he melts a hole through my helmet. The helmet, you’ll be amazed to hear, looks like clay, but it melts like plastic. I scream as bits of it drip the helmet’s material drips on my neck, and I unfasten the helmet and pull it off. I look up, but the marine’s dead. Toram vaults over the console and keeps fighting.

“I said, your program Backfire is loaded and ready,” Gogo says.

“Fine. Try installing it on my signal.”

I start running Exploit Four which I’d skipped over. I get about half of Backfire loaded before it kicks me out.

I start again running Exploit Nine, which I’d also skipped. The fragment of Backfire is still there. I load another third of before I’m kicked out again.

Toram crawls under a console back to where I am. Their right hand is badly burned. They unholster a gun and strap it to the right wrist of their suit. I check my timer. It’s been three minutes, twenty-seven seconds.

I connect again, running Exploit Ten. I load up the rest of Backfire, and then I get kicked out.

I connect again and run Exploit Twelve. I connect, and I wait. It seems like I’m waiting a long time. I check the timer. Three minutes, thirty-five seconds. Toram’s got some kind of cable connected to the pistol on their wrist that lets them fire it without using their finger. They reach their maimed hand up and fire a few more shots.

Someone has connected to the security system to knock me out, activating Backfire. I don’t have authoritative access yet, but I have enough to reinstall a set of vulnerabilities. I’ll have the whole ball game in just a moment. I’m almost there.

And then my connection goes dead.

And the only door out of this room slams shut.

And the lights go out.

And gravity goes away.

There was a briefing on this. You can activate a small dead zone generator on a ship. It’s like a dead zone mine, but it covers a smaller area.

Marines start screaming.

When I saw people practicing with the sudden turn to zero G, they had trouble. My stomach is still lurching with the sudden loss of gravity. Those people were aware gravity might be turned off. Apparently, these marines thought this was only a very remote possibility, because they sound really surprised.

Gravity is gone. Communications are gone. They have something in their suit to handle low light, but it’s disorienting to have it flick on. By the time they get settled, some of their companions are dead, and they can’t tell which one because everybody is floating.

By the time people can reorient themselves, there are spinning bodies everywhere. Some of this just happened. There are some dead people in this room. Some were moving when they died. Toram grabbed and threw these people so they’d kind of spin around the room. Toram has clearly been training for exactly this kind of thing since they were very young. This is what they had instead of a childhood.

The marines were looking for the moving thing in the room, and with the bodies, there are a lot of moving things in the room. I can hear muffled yells as the marines are yelling to each other about has anyone seen Toram.

I hate zero gravity as much as I ever did. I nervously shuffle and start to push myself toward the ceiling, and I grab a console and pull myself down -- only there’s no down anymore -- to huddle between the console and the floor. I see a pistol set into a holster underneath the console and pull it out.

I keep hearing screaming. The sergeant’s dead, they say, and so are the corporals. Someone drifts toward me, grabs the bolted down chair and looks at my hiding spot. The marine is so much smoother in the vacuum than I am. I raise the pistol and fire twice. It hits his chest twice, which doesn’t do anything. Their armor is too thick. How is Toram killing them?

That question is almost immediately answered when Toram flies right past the marine towards me, shooting the Marine’s faceplate in mid flight.

“Stay there!” Toram calls as they kick off from the wall an inch from my head and fly through the room.

I stay. My feed back to Gogo shut down. Someone set up a backup radio relay for my suit in case I got caught in a dead zone. They said I didn’t have anything but hit a button. I hit it.

“Gogo. Gogo, are you there?”

“I have received your message,” Gogo says. For it Gogo to respond this fast, something pretty close has to be relaying my message.

Toram drifts back. They spread out to get more air resistance so they glide to a stop.

“You can come out,” Toram says.

I shake my head. “Did you really get them?”

“Yeah. The sudden gravity shift really turned the tide. Did you do that?”

“No. I got in. They activated a dead zone to kick me back out.”

I pull my way out. Toram kicks off and floats to the far door. “Can you open this?”

I shake my head. “Not from a dead zone. Can you shoot through it?”

Toram shakes their head. “My weapons are designed specifically not to pierce ship walls. Are you sure there’s no other way?”

“Is there any way to control the ship with radio signals?”

Toram shakes their head. “Metros only use radio as a close range distress signal.”

I cover my face. We’re so close, and we can’t get through a goddamn door.

“Think,” Toram says. “You’re sure you don’t have a way?”

“Of course I don’t have a way. How the fuck would I open thick metal door? As far as this ship is concerned, this room is no longer a part of it. I can’t wrestle it open. I can’t cut through it. There’s no lock I could pick if I knew how to pick locks.”

Toram holds up their hands. “You’ve done a lot of things I don’t know how you do. Just making sure.”

Toram hits the communicator on their suit. “Pactlagh.”

“This can’t be good,” Pactlagh says.

“It’s not. I need a hole.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I need someone to make a hole in this cruiser between Control and Tactical.”

If everything has gone according to plan, the surviving Daggers have all just flown to safety. It makes me sick to call them back.

There’s a long pause.

“Acknowledged,” Pactlagh says.

“Our guns won’t go through a Hammer Cruiser’s hull,” Pactlagh says on general channel.

“I’ve still got my last torpedo,” Puppy says.

“That could work, but Cowstalker might be too close to survive the blast. Plus, I don’t want to depend on any particular one of us getting in.”

“Point defense,” says Seal Girl.

“Seal Girl, point defense doesn’t damage ships.”

“It does. It’s the most powerful cannon.”

“How do I explain this?” Pactlagh says. “Point defense is powerful on short distances and weak with long stinaces.”

“I know. Its strength is split by the distance by the distance.”

“Seal Girl, did you just describe. . .” Pactlagh starts.

“I passed your stupid test!” Seal Girl yells.

“Even at a kilometer. . .”

“So get very close. Very, very close. Ten meters”

“That might work, but. . .”

“It works. I killed six today just like that.”

“Gogo,” Pactlagh says. “Verify that.”

“Callsign Seal Girl got seven kills at personal range with point defense cannons.”

“So that’s a plan. Admiral Gaoshi, can you draw us a plan back to the cruiser.”

“Already doing it,” Gaoshi says.

“We had a plan, and this wasn’t it,” Pactlagh says. “I’m going ahead. I will understand if someone backs out now.”

“My people have a saying,” says Electron. “A life lay down for love is costly to claim.”

In Tactical, Toram and I are floating listening to all this. I look at Toram.

“I never claimed phrase was original to me.”

I keep looking at Toram.

“Fine. Next time I’m facing overwhelming odds, I’ll focus on having list of citations. I won’t have attack plan, but I’ll have full bibliography.”

“It’s okay if you’re scared,” Puppy says. “I know I put on a brave face, but back there, I was scared. For a moment, I thought we were flying away. I was scared that we were done feeding those incestuous fascist vermin their own rotting skins, but we’re going back! The best day of my life just got better!”

“All our families will recall this day and dance,” Seal Girl says. “Theirs will try to forget.”

“We’re acting like this is a big moment of sacrifice,” Perfect says. “But does anyone even have an idea how any of us would survive if we didn’t go back and help Cowstalker?”

“Perfect, by my rotting ancestors, read the room,” Pactlagh says.

“Sorry! Sorry!” Perfect says. “Oneheartonefamily.”

“Only you could have gotten us here, flight leader,” says another pilot. “We’re with you to the end.”

I have never heard Pactlagh say a word of English. Between not expecting it and her accent, I don’t immediately realize what she says.

“Fuck it.”

There’s a display on my suit that I’ve been using to try to break into the cruiser’s system. I reconfigure it to try to follow the fighters.

“Everybody cloak,” Pactlagh says. “We fly dark and skirt the cloud until we get close.”

“Seal Girl,” Puppy asks. “Do all your species react as fast as you?”

“Maybe they do not,” Seal Girl says. “Under the seas of my world, there are towers of bone. When the tide turns, the currents go through them very fast. To show courage, we go down to swim with the current when we come of age. If you do not react fast, the current drives you into the tower, and you probably die. Before I flew, it was my favorite thing.”

“You did it more than once?” Puppy asks.

“My name is Pa’o’e.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Puppy asks.

“I am still improving my ability to translate the Raft People language,” Gogo says. “A better translation might be, ‘they call me the One Who Lives Among the Towers’.”

The hydrogen cloud has been thinning and spreading. The cruisers have flown almost free of it as they move toward the Embrace. Surrounding the cruisers a swarm of Crusader Daggers hunt for the rest of the fighters.

Gaoshi has plotted a course in. The Daggers are flying in at an insane acceleration. Half the pilots are probably feeling dizzy. The furthest Crusade Daggers flew just past the cloud, and the returning flight ambushes them.

The Crusaders launch torpedoes. The torpedoes will be less difficult to hit with point defense at this range, but they outnumber our Daggers enough that they can just overwhelm our point defense.

Perfect comes out of cloak. Her ship is spinning as she starts firing point defense.

One of the many things I hate about a Dagger’s point defense cannons is that they fire slowly. They can only fire once every point eight something seconds. That sounds fast, but a torpedo is only close enough to be hit by point defense cannons for about three seconds. Most of a second is way too long, especially if you’re trying to hit more than one.

But a Dagger has two point defense turrets -- one on top and one on the bottom of the fighter. If you point your nose up or down and spin at one rotation per point eight seconds, and if the torpedoes are all coming from the same direction, you can double your rate of fire.

That’s great, except it’s the dumbest fucking idea anyone ever had. To make this strategy work, you have to change your perspective to a point defense turret, find a torpedo, predict where it’s going to go and shoot it down in less than point four seconds. You’d have to be fucking crazy to try this.

You’d have to be Perfect to pull it off.

There are only a few thousand people alive who can appreciate what Perfect is doing. Many of them are right in the path of our Daggers wondering what the hell they’ve gotten themselves into.

The enemy fighters close in on Perfect to take her out with their guns. That’s when things get bad for them.

Pacltagh is flight leader for a reason. Her aim is incredible. Her movements are unpredictable. Every decision she makes is shocking in the moment, obvious in retrospect.

Puppy jumps into enemy formations without the slightest fear. Her movements are wild and lightning fast. Her sudden accelerations, decelerations, jerky shifts up or down leave all Dagger safety guidelines for inertia way behind. Just watching her gives me a headache, and I’m amazed she’s alive.

Seal Girl is her own kind of terrifying. The way she flies is like nothing I’ve ever seen, but I know that if I dove deep enough below an endless ocean, I’d recognize the movements in some predatory nightmare of evolution that swam up from the lightless depths.

It’s not like the other forty or fifty people weren’t working miracles fighting their way through a force that hopelessly outnumbered them. I can only report what I recognized.

Speaking of things I don’t recognize, there are green markers for friendly fighters and a whole lot of red markers for enemy fighters and a lot of grey markers I don’t recognize.

“King Crab, can assist,” says someone on the radio. Who the fuck is that?

“You have entered the torpedo range of the Hammer Cruisers,” Gogo says.

Chapter 23: Physics

Councilman Maghtap Did you disable the Hammer Cruiser Blood Price? It’s a crucial part of our fleet.

Dr. Soasa Not the entire ship, just the tactical systems. Weapons and point defense.

Councilman Maghtap What is the point of a cruiser that can’t use its weapons?

Dr. Soasa The point is that it’s not a giant security vulnerability.

Councilman Maghtap Could they have taken control of the cruiser?

Dr. Soasa The cruiser? You think I’m working for you because I’m worried about a rotting cruiser? Forget it. I’ve got to patch this up in case they find some way out of that room.

Councilman Maghtap I could send you right back to your cell.

Dr. Soasa Do it. I’m sick of listening to you.

Transcript of text conversation between Crusade Councilman Magtap and prisoner Dr. Soasa.

I’d forgotten to worry about the cruiser torpedoes. A big part of Gaoshi’s strategy was centered around how to avoid getting hit by a Hammer torpedo volley, and that strategy was already spent because the Daggers had to come back for a second pass, and we’re not carrying a chunk of a nearby star this time.

I stare at the door to the Control room. It’s twenty feet away, and so many good people will die because I can’t open this goddamn door.

I look at the tactical display on my suit. Puppy is spinning away from the torpedoes, accelerating faster than I’ve seen a Dagger move. Her fighter is issuing structural warnings about what the acceleration is doing to it. I haven’t seen that before because a Dagger is much sturdier than the pilot.

“Puppy, are you still there?” Pactlagh asks.

“Lights. Sick,” Puppy says.

“Oh shit,” Pactlagh says. “Your monitor says you’re having an aneurysm. If you can, get back to the Embrace.”

“Ha!” Puppy says. “How. How.”

Puppy weaves through the enemy fleet at insane acceleration. The torpedoes follow relentlessly. “Best. Best. Best,” Puppy says.

Her ship is hit.

“Best day ever,” I say.

Toram looks at me.

“It’s what she was trying to say.”

The torpedoes are everywhere. Pactlagh managed to take out one with point defense, but the other is still closing.

“King Crab, requesting telemetry,” says someone on the coms. Some guy’s voice, kind of scratchy.

Toram takes my hand as we float. The torpedo hits Pactlagh’s ship.

Seal Girl is dancing away from her torpedo. The Whip is easy to spot, and people have definitely pegged her as a threat, so she’s followed both by a pair of torpedoes and a swarm of enemy fighters.

Four torpedoes converge on Perfect at once. She shoots down two. The other two explode.

I close my eyes, but then I hear Perfect’s voice. “Curious. Cowstalker’s torpedo exploit worked.”

I’d spent so many hours in my room figuring out the exact turn-cloak-turn to get torpedoes to explode prematurely. I’d spent so many more getting the timing worked out.

“You did it on your first try?” I ask.

“Of couse not,” Perfect says. “I’ve been practicing the move in a simulator for weeks.”

“Tyrant reporting,” Pactlagh says. My breath catches. “A hull maintenance vessel, King Crab, pulled me out of my Dagger with a displacer.”

I can’t wrap my head around this. “Are you saying an unarmed ship flew into the middle of an enemy fleet?”

“We are Embrace,” says the pilot of the King Crab.

“The fuck does that mean?” I ask.

“He means all the civilian ships flew in,” Toram says.

I suddenly make sense of all the gray ships. A mining surveyer has grabbed a torpedo with its grapples and is following an enemy Dagger with it, staying close enough that the enemy can’t detonate the torpedo without killing their own ship.

One of the ships targeting Seal Girl is so involved in a chase it doesn’t see the megahauler until it hits the enemy Dagger, looking like a giant truck hitting a bird. A moment later, the megahauler sprouts a colossal crystal tail, many times the length of the hauler itself. Seal Girl dodges through the tail. One of the torpedoes following her gets embedded in the tail and explodes. The other one weaves through a tunnel in the fractally weave of the tail. But the torpedo can’t dodge as it traverses the tunnel, and Seal Girl’s point defense takes the second torpedo out.

“What is that?” Seal Girl asks.

“It’s a full load of water we got from that comet,” the hauler captain says.

“I should have known it,” Seal Girl says. “Even in the empty sea, water would save me.”

“Okay,” Perfect says.

“What do we do, flight leader?” Electron asks.

“I can’t lead from here,” Pactlagh says. “This bucket doesn’t have a tactical display, and can’t keep up with you. It does have a hull cutter, so it might fix Cowstalker’s door problem.”

“Okay,” Perfect says.

“Perfect is the ranking pilot,” Gaoshi says.

“Okay,” says Perfect, who I’m guessing has figured this out a little sooner than everyone else.

“If you can’t . . .” Gaoshi starts.

Perfect’s voice erupts over the channel. “All wings, form behind me. Seal Girl covers the port wings. Electron in the pocket. We want to be out before the next Hammer volley”

“We’re not protecting the King Crab?” Electron asks.

“No, we don’t have the firepower to guard something that slow. We ignore it and hope they do, too.”

“I’ve got an approach plotted,” Gaoshi says. “We’re sending you on a strike on the cruiser’s other side.”

So there’s a massive battle fighting beneath the Hammer Cruiser. The Crusade fleet is focused there because our fleet is there. Meanwhile, the King Crab, a big, slow unarmed vessel, is slowly drifting toward us.

“Do you know where Tactical and the Control center are on a Hammer Cruiser?” Pactlagh asks.

“I know where they should be,” the King Crab’s captain answered. “Are they in the right spot?”

“Yes,” Gaoshi puts in. “The design is quite elegant.”

Toram kicks off, pushes away the forest of floating dead and finds their helmet. They launch back and hand the helmet to me.

“Put this on,” they say.

I’m going to ask what about my helmet, by the side of my face still hurts from when the marine melted a hole in it. “There’s got to be another working helmet here,” I say.

Toram shakes their head. “Faceplate is most reliable target. Every faceplate is damaged.”

“What will you do?”

“We are made to survive vacuum for short time,” Toram says.

“That doesn’t make it a good idea.”

I hear the loud clunk of the King Krab hitting the hull next to our room.

“Okay,” Pactlagh says over the coms. “I’m running the cutter.”

I can hear the captain further from Pactlagh’s communicator. “We’re in position. Just pick the circle.”

“Uh. . .oh, I see it,” Pactlagh says. A moment later, I can see a white line move as it carves a large semicircle in the corner of the room. I hear the whine of air escaping the room, and I look at Toram nervously. A thick, clear set of eyelids snap closed behind their regular eyelids, and they smile at me.

“How do we get rid of the internal wall?” Pactlagh asks. They’ve made a cut in the bulkhead, but the wall between us and control is still there holding the circle to the ship.

“We’re in a hurry, verify?” the captain asked.

“Confirmed,” Pactlagh says. “But what about the wall?”

“The fast way,” the King Crab’s captain says. “Move grapple in so we’re just pulling on the circle we cut out.”

Most of the day, Pactlagh has been at least a planet’s distance away. It’s odd to think that now she’s just thirty feet away, though I can still only hear her over my com unit.

“Done,” Pactlagh says.

“Tell them to hold onto something,” the captain says.

“He says. . .” Pactlagh starts.

“I heard him,” I say.

“Good luck.”

Toram spreads their arms and gestures for me to come closer..

“I think they said we should grab something on the walls,” I say.

“I know what I’m doing,” Toram says.

The walls rumble as the King Crab’s engine’s start. I don’t really know what to expect. Then I see the half circle in the wall start to shake for a couple seconds.

Then that circle -- along with a giant chunk of the internal wall separating us from Control -- get ripped into space like a rotten tooth. A moment later, so are we. Everything spins as we fly into space. I hold onto Toram with all my strength, and they wrap an arm around me. We violently jerk to a stop. All around us, dead bodies, loose tools, whatever else was in Control or Tactical and not bolted down flies out into space. I look back at the cruiser, and I can see a cable has shot from Toram’s arm toward the Control room in the cruiser, and it starts to reel us in.

I look at Toram. Their mouth has sealed to a tiny line, and their nose has pinched shut. Would they tell me if we didn’t have enough time? If they thought it would save me or the Embrace, I think they’d let themselves die.

The cable hauls us back to Control. All this pain to correct that one miscalculation.

“Bongseon, are you there?” Pactlagh asks.

“We’re here. We’re almost back inside.”

“Once you’re in, you can reconnect to the cruiser and finish this,” Cerberus says.

“First, tell me how to patch the hull.”

“That’s not the priority.”

“It’s my priority!” I yell. “Toram doesn’t have any air!”

We cross the threshold into Control. A couple Marines are anchored to the walls. One has some kind of cutting tool out and is trying to cut our tether. Toram shoots both marines the moment they look our way.

“If that fleet reaches us, nobody survives,” Cerberus says.

“If you don’t know how to patch the hull, I have nothing to say to you.”

“Everybody knows how to patch the hull. We teach children. Look for the red square.”

“What red square?”

Toram is looking at my faceplate. They can’t hear me. There’s no air, so they’re reading my lips trying to figure out why I’m not trying to reconnect. Toram locks eyes with me and shakes their head.

Very carefully, I raise a middle finger in Toram’s face.

“Where is the red square?”

Toram points. Oh! He means one of those red squares. They’re all over the Embrace and Aquarius. I don’t even see them anymore.

I walk to the red square. I look at Toram, but they’re kneeling, starting to sag.

“What do I do with the red square?”

“There’s a slot on the ride side,” Cerberus says. “Reach in there. Feel for a lever.”

I reach in. After some probing, I manage to hook my finger around the level and pull. A door swings open on the red square, and I can see a thick hose curled up.

“Get the hose, point it at the edge of the hole. There’s a lever by the nozzle. Turn the lever. It should take about four seconds.”

I turn the lever. “How do I know when it finally. . . “

Grey mud shoots out of the hose. It expands rapidly as it goes toward the hole. Where it touches the hull, it attaches and solidifies. I spray the mud until there’s a ring of gray mud all around the breach, then I spray the mud closer in. When it’s done, there’s what looks like a dark grey cocoon covering the breach. There’s no hole. I reach for the catch on my helmet. It won’t go off.

“I can’t take my helmet off.”

“There’s no atmosphere in the room you’re in,” Gogo says. “The suit release is locked.”

“Didn’t I seal the hole?” I ask.

“I didn’t say you didn’t,” Gogo says. “That doesn’t mean there’s air.”

“Eat a dick!” I yell. Toram’s lying on the ground.

“Someone shut down life support,” Cerberus says. “Can you please get me into their system? It’s the only thing that will save Toram.”

“Fine.” The console is part of my suit. I pull it out, move it back to operations. I reconnect. I try the first exploit. I re-enabled it. Let’s see if they locked me out again.

They have. I load Backfire. I reconnect. They kick me out, activating Backfire. I re-enable exploit fourteen, reconnect, run the exploit.

“You’ve got admin access,” I say. “I hope you can. . .”

“White worm, you inbred vermin filth,” Cerberus says. “Uh, I don’t mean you, Cowstalker.”

There are displays in Control. Every one of them turns white.

“Can you get the air back on?”

“What?” Cerberus says. “Pannog, I’m giving you access. Can you get air in the control room of the Blood Price?”

“What the fuck is the Blood Price?” I ask.

“It’s the Hammer Cruiser,” says one of the operators, a guy named Pannog. “It’s the one you’re on.”

“I need some fucking air! Toram’s dying.”

“I got it. I haven’t worked with these, but it’s not too different from the Embrace.”

“Why isn’t Cerberus doing this?”

“The fighting is pretty bad, right now. He is trying to stop it. He’s got us all taking over things.”

“So it worked?” I say.

Pannog has a nervous giggle. “Yeah. It worked really well. I’ll be honest, I didn’t believe it.”

“Well, thanks, we were working on this shit for a month!”

“I didn’t have a better idea, but it seemed like too much. I started the air.”

I reach up for the catch on my helmet. “Hey, my helmet’s still locked.”

“Repressurizing takes time.”

“Can you make it happen any faster?” I ask.

“No, if it repressurizes any faster, we risk blowing out the emergency seal you put in.”

Next try, I can pull the helmet off. The new air smells fresher, but it’s damn thin. Below me, Toram’s completely still. How long has it been since the wall got torn out? I’m not good at judging time normally. When I’ve been sucked out into space, pulled in through a cable, hosed a hole shut. Fuck, it sounds like a long time when I put all that together.

I feel for their pulse. Shit, I’ve still got gloves on my suit. I unseal and remove the gloves and try again. Nothing. Toram stopped their pulse before. Maybe it’s just torpor.

“This is Uvokti, ranking member of the Embrace’s Council,” I hear over my comms. It’s her clipped tones. “I’m told my message is being carried to the Crusade Council.”

I search Toram’s suit for catches to pull it off. The damn thing is entirely black, so it’s really hard to get the catches off. Finally, I pull the chest piece open.

Over my com, I hear, “This is Councilor Maghtap speaking for all loyal metros. You have bought yourself a little time, nothing more.”

I had CPR training as a sophomore in college. Toram has something like human anatomy. I check for breathing, and there’s still nothing. I start counting off chest compressions.

“. . . one opportunity. Outline a strategy for peace and a guarantee of safety for the free people who’ve left your regime.”

“We will undo your sabotage and pay you back for your treachery,” Councillor Magtap says. I’d turn my fucking communicator off, but I’m afraid to stop chest compressions.

“You’ve wasted your opportunity,” Uvokti says. “Cerebus, go ahead.”

A couple rescue breaths, and then back to chest compressions. Shit, I hope I remember this right.

“This is the captain of the Storm of Vengeance,” a new voice says. “We’ve been trying to get a message out. We were closing on the enemy ship Embrace, and all our controls went blank. Wait. . . someone has just told me that our drive has lost containment.”

I forget chest compressions for a moment. Every large metro ship, like the cruiser or the Embrace has a suspension drive. A suspension drive takes a small chunk of matter and then takes away everything that holds it together. The matter explodes and spins around a containment bubble, which is a little sphere of twisted space that the matter can’t leave, and the matter spins through that bubble like a hamster on a wheel, generating a ton of energy.

If there’s no containment bubble, then that piece of matter just explodes. Nobody has found a way to physically ensure a containment failure can’t happen. You can have the control mechanism refuse to suspend the matter without containment, but that’s software, and software can be rewritten, and apparently, it has been.

I go back to chest compressions. If we’re in the blast radius, what the hell am I going to do about it?

And then I feel a hand close around my wrist. I look over, and Toram looks back at me.

“You’d have made a good BaiMato,” Toram whispers. “You don’t give up.”

I lean forward and kiss them before I know what I’m doing. I’m too glad to have them back and to be alive to think what I’m going to do or what I’m going to tell Pactlagh. Even corpse cold, their lips feel so good against mine. My stomach feels a kind of flip, which could be the passion of the moment.

But it isn’t, we’ve been caught by a displacer.

We’re together in a displacer chamber. A door opens on the chamber, and a bearded metro looks at us.

“Uh,” I say. “I’m Bongseon.”

“Cowstalker,” the metro says. “I know you.”

“Did you get them?” Pactlagh yells from somewhere I can’t see.

“This is the King Crab,” I say.

“Can confirm,” says the metro, whose voice I recognize as the captain.

“Why are they still in the rotting displacer chamber?” Pactlagh asks.

The captain steps away and gestures for us to follow. The King Crab is a little bigger than a Hopper, but still cramped with a displacer chamber, a pillar sticking up nearby which I assume is the cutter controls, and some seats up front. Pactlagh is strapped in one of the seats. She’s got a bloody bandage around her head.

“I think I have a concussion. I promised I wouldn’t get up again until we landed,” Pactlagh explains.

“What happened to you?”

“We were flying away, and we were kind of near the other cruiser, and I was listening to the negotiations. I told Boggut to fly full speed away from the other cruiser.”

“I said no,” the captain says. “Because she wasn’t strapped in.”

“And then we heard the captain say there was a containment failure.,” Pactlagh says.

“And I hit top speed, even though she wasn’t strapped in,” the captain says.

“So I hit my head,” Pactlagh says. “I think I have a concussion.”

“Are we safe if the other cruiser blows up?” I ask.

“It did,” the captain says. “Pretty damn scary.”

“And the rest of the enemy fleet?” I ask.

“The Daggers are all flying back,” Pactlagh says. “And there’s nothing their pilots can do about it. I’d just shut down the negotiations because you were coming back.”

Pactlagh turns the coms back on, and I can hear Uvokti’s voice. “Crusade fleet. You should immediately evacuate all cruisers and shipyards.”

“We don’t accept your terms,” a Crusade councilman says.

“That’s your decision, but every one of them is going to explode in 22 minutes.”

“She does not fuck around,” I say.

“She does not,” Pactlagh agrees.

“Uh,” I say. “I don’t know the right time to tell you this, but I kissed Toram, like just now.”

“Uh-huh,” Pactlagh says.

“I haven’t figured out what I’m feeling.”

“Oh,” Pactlagh says. “If you thought we were monogamous, I think you have a couple disappointments.” Pactlagh points at Toram.

“It’s not really part of our culture,” Toram says. “We spent big chunk of our lives with just big family. There’s not model of pairings.”

“And you?” I ask.

“I don’t remember what I said. I think I might have a concussion. Did I tell you that you would have two disappointments? I am the work-of-many.”

“Okay,” I say.

“Don’t waste too much energy thinking about it,” Pactlagh says. “Because it sounds like you’re gonna need all the energy you’ve got after we get back.”

Chapter 24: Bonus Level

456 and their human seem to have pulled off the impossible. The Crusade navy is largely paralyzed. We have teams moving in to exploit. We’re targeting Crusade prisons and Crusade camps. One in fifty of their citizens are in prison. If we can get their prisoners free, that will break their illusion of harmony. We’re also talking about rolling back the Crusade’s recent conquests. We have people out to liberate Aquarius, and we’re in talks with the Recon council.

Their navy was the greatest power in the sector. Its reputation will buy the Crusade some time unless we take this opportunity to demonstrate their weakness.

Intelligence comes next. We need to look into how the Crusade intends to come back from this setback. We’ve got sleeper agents, and we’ll start checking in.

From the Journal of Baimato 243

It’s a miracle Boggut and his King Crab weren’t blown to pieces long ago. My best guess is that they thought that something that slow couldn’t possibly be a threat. We’re the last thing to land in the Embrace’s hanger. Even the megahauler has had time to stop nearby and have its pilot shuttle over.

The good side to being stuck in space is that I’m going to miss the really crazy part of everyone coming back. It was kind of inspiring this morning when we all went to take off together, but I think it’d be draining after this. I’m glad people will have a chance to quiet down.

Toram and I are lying on the floor a little distance apart as the King Crab comes into dock. There’s some kind of regular thump from outside. I’m a little afraid it’s a mechanical failure.

The back wall of the King Crab lowers to become a loading ramp. It’s barely down before I realize I’ve gotten it very wrong again. That rhythmic thump is hundreds -- maybe thousands -- of people clapping in time. They’ve mobbed around the ship like hungry cannibals. As soon as they can see us over the lowered ramp, they scream like it’s the end of the universe, but happy.

Toram takes one of my hands and Pactlagh takes the other. She looks at me and sees my clear dread. “Come on, Bongseon. It’s time to be brave.”

The other Dagger pilots are the first to come up to us. Electron made it. Perfect is smiling, which I had no idea she could do. I start looking for Puppy, and it sinks in. From the look of it, Wing Twelve was lucky to lose as few people as it did. There is Seal Girl, with her arms carefully at her sides as she navigates the crowd. Some very brave child is riding on her shoulders.

Laughing, crying, the pilots embrace as the crowd cheers. People part ways for the Dagger Pilots to parade to some destination.

I notice Boggut quietly ambling over to the other civilian pilots, who are having a quieter moment where they celebrate and count the cost. I’m walking to him before I know what I’m doing, and Pactlagh is with me. I don’t have a plan, but Pactlagh does. She hugs Boggut, and pulls him back. The other Dagger pilots are with us, grabbing the civilians and marching them ahead of us as we go down the corridor.

So the parade starts with prospectors, cargo haulers and engineers at the head. I can’t hear anything over the cheering. I have to imagine the conversation.

“Who are they?”

“They’re the brave ones. They flew in without weapons, without cloak, without a plan.”

There’s supposed to be a million people on the Embrace, and where the fuck else would you be after you found out you weren’t dead after all? I didn’t know it could get this dense.

The parade down the corridor meets Gaoshi, who’s coming the other way in a wheelchair, grinning wider than ever.

“What the fuck happened to you?” I ask.

“I won!” Gaoshi says. “We’re victorious, and I planned it, and nobody is going to say I’m just a damn gamer ever again!”

“Why are you in a wheelchair?”

“It’s nothing,” Gaoshi says. “My doctor is dramatic, and I didn’t want to argue.”

“What happened?”

“I was busy. I had a lot of things to do, and my. . . you know.”

“I don’t know.”

Gaoshi looks a little bashful. “My heart stopped.”

“What?”

“I know it seems like you pilots made most of the decisions, but I put a lot of work into those suggested flight plans. And when everyone had to come back at the last minute, I had to come up with some contingency plans, and I just forgot a couple things.” Gaoshi’s rumble gets a tiny bit higher when they’re defensive.

“You forgot to keep your heart beating?”

“I took steps!” Gaoshi says. “I was on a machine! It kicked in. I feel fine, but the fussy doctor says I shouldn’t walk yet.”

Gaoshi’s wheelchair purrs along with the rest of us as this endless line of people pours out of the corridor into a public area where everyone who wasn’t in our line is waiting for us.

Cerberus is here with a couple of the operators.

“Where is Pannog and the rest of them?” I ask.

“I’m right here,” says one of the operators.

“Fuck! Sorry, Pannog. I’m awful with names. Where’s everyone else?”

“The Crusade still haven’t fixed the White Worm,” Cerberus says. “There’s so much we can still do while we control their systems. I just stopped by to pay my respects.”

“You look pretty somber. You’re the man of the hour.”

“I wanted revenge,” Cerberus says. “But I could see the footage on that cruiser as the containment breach was building. They were weeping and pleading.”

A shadow looms past me. I look and see Seal Girl, newly free of children riding her. She lends forward, grabs Cerberus by the sides and picks him up. He’s just a couple inches off the ground, but she holds him there like you’d hold a cat. And like a cat, Cerberus gives Seal Girl a look that says, Why must you do this?

“It was meatwar,” Searl Girl says. “A hero does what a hero must.”

She folds him into a tender hug that is still terrifying. When she lets go. Cerberus awkwardly nods to her and says, “I need to get back. There’s lots left to do.”

Ahead of us, Uvokti takes the stage.

“People of the Embrace,” she says. “Against hate, against odds and beyond possibility, we have prevailed. I am forever grateful for your brilliance and bravery. Thanks to you, the Crusade’s navy has been decimated. Thanks to you, every citizen of the Crusade is seeing evidence of the Crusade’s atrocities.

“Until today, our greatest hope was that we could continue fleeing across the stars trying to survive a little longer. But the council has decided. We’re headed back to Noktau. We’ve talked to the BaiMato, and they’re going to join us to liberate our world.”

I look to see how Toram’s reacting to the mention of their sibs. I realize that Toram’s been gone since we started parading down the hallways. I start back to the corridor. I have never seen the Embrace to be so empty.

I walk down from hallway to hallway. There is not a soul to be seen until the end.

I walk all the way back to the hangar before I see them. They’re sitting cross-legged in the corner.. I have a weird moment where I recall first coming onto the Embrace. There were people everywhere then, but I didn’t know any of them, so it felt as lonely as the empty hallway is now.

Toram is sitting cross legged by one of the walls. Their eyes are staring ahead, unfocused.

Toram looks so different. I’ve never seen them not full of energy. I’ve never seen them not looking after me in some way.

“Are you all right?”

Toram nods. “I am well. I am coming to terms with what’s happened.”

“You’re processing.”

Toram smiles. “Among languages I know, English compares people to machines more than most. Humans get burnt out. They get worn down. They’re processing. I don’t know if that’s because you’re only century or two into an industrial age or despite it.

“But yes. I am processing.”

“I’ve never seen you miss out on a party.”

“This is far from my first war. I go to the parties before battles. The parties after wars are wearing thin for me. Everyone talks about how good peace is, and it seems like no time at all before there’s another war.”

“The main metro councilwoman. . .”

“Uvokti,” Toram supplies.

“Her. She says that a bunch of our sibs are going to help them take back that planet a lot of these people used to live on.”

“Noktau,” Toram offers.

“Yeah, there. I didn’t know what you thought of it.”

“The part of war we’re trained for is to find vulnerable target, reach it and damage it. Noktau is now a bunch of Crusade companies without communication and air support with a lot of prisoners who hate them. My sibs may already be there.”

“So for you, the war isn’t over.”

“I was diplomat. For me, war is lost. My people are at war, and Embrace is still at war. People were starting to see me as something other than weapon, and that journey will have to start again some other day.”

“Come on, Toram. Fifty times today, I thought we were dead, and we’re not. Come with me. Come join the party.” I lean forward and kiss them.

Toram stands up. “Lead the way, Bongseon.”

Daring Exploits

by Sam Jones

Chapter 1: Chatbot

Chapter 2: Multiplayer Online Battle Arena

Chapter 3: Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate {#chapter-3:-explore,-expand,-exploit,-exterminate}

Chapter 4: Flight

Chapter 5: Rhythm

Chapter 6: Team Shooter

Chapter 7: Survival

Chapter 8: Language

Chapter 9: Boss Monster

Chapter 10: Hidden Role

Chapter 11: Dystopia

Chapter 12: First Person Shooter

Chapter 13: Roguelike

Chapter 14: Stealth

Chapter 15: Base Builder

Chapter 16: Team Manager

Chapter 17: Fleet Action

Chapter 18: Coding

Chapter 19: Time Management

Chapter 20: Party

Chapter 21: Realtime Strategy

Chapter 22: Bullet Hell

Chapter 23: Physics

Chapter 24: Bonus Level

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