Date Point: 14y2d AV
Camp Farthrow, Lavmuy City, Planet Gao
Mother-Supreme Yulna
“I do have a question.”
The briefing was over. Plans had been made, the process of war had been decided upon. Yulna’s role in it was, of course, going to be a relatively minor one. At this point, as they had been far too many times in Gao’s history, the females of the species were a prize and an objective, rather than allies.
Now there were just…questions. She didn’t want to ask them of Daar specifically but he was the only one to answer them.
She made sure to ask them in private, however. Or at least, in as much privacy as the human camp afforded. Private space was a practically nonexistent luxury, for the time being.
Paradoxically, Daar’s foul mood was what allowed her to talk with him at all. In a less guarded moment, without his iron self-control in place, he might have brushed her off. As it was, he was working so hard to contain himself that he might actually be at his most approachable. All of which explained why his expression, when he turned to hear her question, was standoffish and hostile but nevertheless alert.
“…Ask,” he growled.
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
Daar all but snarled at her. He was doing an admirable job of restraining himself considering how much he clearly wanted to claw the guts out of everything in reach, but a mood like that didn’t exactly make for clear thinking. “You know why, don’t play the fool.”
“That wasn’t an accusation, Daar. I’m not talking about telling all the Females. I’m not necessarily even talking about me, if you couldn’t trust me.”
She stepped closer and spread her paws. “But you told Myun,” she pointed out. “Did you tell anybody else?”
“We told every Female we could trust.” He wielded that word like a weapon. “That is a very short list. Niral. Mothers at some of the more defensible communes.”
Yulna duck-nodded slowly. “…Thank you.”
She turned to go.
This, apparently, was more than Daar’s patience could hold up, because rather than letting her go he surged round in front of her on four paws before rearing up onto two to glower down at her.
“Do…do you truly not grasp the scale of what you have done, Yulna?” he accused.
Before, Yulna might have flinched or cowered. Now, with the whole of Gaoian civilization collapsing around them, she found she had something tougher than courage to hold her up even if it was built from little more than grief. She stared evenly up at him, sniffled a little to settle her whiskers and gathered her robes.
“Enlighten me,” she said. It was a subject that had been weighing on her mind for the last two days, but she wanted to hear Daar’s perspective.
“…Very well.” He dropped to all fours with the distinct air of disappointment. Somehow, that stung worse than his careful, formal speech. He paused for a moment, growled to himself, then pressed on.
“Where…I’m honestly not sure where to start. You chose at the worst possible moment to make the most flagrant display of personal rebuke you could possibly show before the whole of the Gao. You ordered a flotilla to Cimbrean—with no notice to even our allies—expressly to demand an audience from me. Everyone knows that, Hierarchy and otherwise. Any hope I had of bringing the Females in on the plan was shattered that day. There was no longer any possibility of briefing you or any Female of consequence on DEEP RELIC, and that meant we had to rethink our entire strategy, on the fly, and make do with what we could.”
Daar prowled about. He’d been doing a lot of that today. “The direct consequence of that shattering meant we could not hope to properly defend the Communes. We had to assume virtually all of them would be slaughtered. We were proven right. We couldn’t pre-position large Claws because the Females would notice, we had to plan around detection, on and on…do you begin to see how that tiny slip of trust paid such compound interest?”
Yulna didn’t argue. She’d seen all of that compound interest for herself as she’d read DEEP RELIC and thought about its consequences. It had opened a wound in her belly, knowing that her own decision had been a victory for an enemy that, at the time, she’d had no inkling even existed. The fact that she’d made that decision on the advice of Sisters whom she now knew had been that unknown enemy did absolutely nothing to balm her conscience.
She didn’t really have a reply for him, just the words of a woman far wiser than herself.
“…Daar, my predecessor passed on a number of writings, journals, video diaries and collected thoughts to me. One of them was on the nature of trust.”
Daar paused and regarded her with a tilt of his head. “Did she, now?”
“Trust…is like bravery, she said,” Yulna revealed. “You can only be brave when you are afraid, yes? Bravery is not the absence of fear, it is how you overcome fear.”
Daar duck-nodded grudgingly, so Yulna forged ahead. “Giymuy felt something similar must be true about trust. She felt that if you never have any doubts about the people you trust, then it isn’t actually trust. Trust inherently implies the possibility of betrayal.”
She spread her paws again. “The Females have always been afraid, Daar. We have never been entirely certain that the day wouldn’t come when we’d be forced back into the harems and become property again. We have trusted Stoneback all these long centuries…but that gave you power over us. I am truly sorry that I was not braver, I am truly sorry that I flinched…but even if none of us lived in those cages, we still remember them. We’ve always been scared of what you could do to us. You, to whom we exposed our throats and bellies.”
She sighed, and shook her head. “I don’t expect you to forgive me. You’re right, I blundered terribly and I know now that I’m partly to blame for the deaths of millions of my Sisters. All I ask is that…” She paused, then shook her head and stopped, letting the request trail away into a despairing silence.
“How could I have foreseen this?” she asked instead, and waved a paw at the whole world. “A mere falling-out between the Mother-Supreme and the Champion of Stoneback would be unfortunate, but repairable…Great Mother, it’s not even unprecedented.”
“No,” Daar agreed. “No it isn’t. That’s why we have very simple principles. It’s easy to understand what to do when the rules are clear. We protect and we provide. We do nothing else.”
Yulna nodded, sadly. The rules were indeed simple…But as the Humans so eloquently had it, the devil was in the details. And when simple principles collided with complex reality…
“…Thank you,” she said again rather than voicing her thoughts, and turned away for the second time. This time, Daar stood motionless and watched her leave.
Date Point: 14y2d AV
Three Valleys, Amanyuy Territory, Planet Gao.
Second Lieutenant (brevet) Martina Kovač
The farm turned out to be abandoned. Recently so—the heated underfloor was still warm, the refrigerator was full of food, and there were dirty eating utensils scattered here and there which suggested the place was a bit of a bachelor paradise anyway, but none of them was sporting any kind of fuzzy life. Assuming Gao had that kind of aggressive food-ruining mold.
It probably did. Kovač wasn’t an expert, but presumably any living planet needed some kind of fungal action or else dead material would pile up everywhere. So, probably it was present, but slower than the Earth equivalent.
Wherever the occupants had got to, the Marines didn’t find more than some shed fur of them. There was a greasy patch in the barn which suggested a vehicle was usually stored in there, but the vehicle itself was absent.
Otherwise, it was… a farm. No stupid spacefuture stuff here, this was a place where dirt got turned into food.
There were some differences. Gaoians liked to sleep communally all snuggled up in their nest-beds, and the workhouse at the center of the farmyard wasn’t so much a country residence as a hard-working dormitory with basically nothing in the way of private space. But it was sturdily built out of poured concrete with a rustic decorative cladding, small double-glazed windows and a commanding view of the fields in every direction.
The things missing that Marty’s non-agricultural imagination suggested a farm should have were the lack of a water tower or windmill. Instead there was a well, powered by a no-nonsense electric pump which in turn was fed by solar panels on the barn roof, a technology that was about as out-of-date in Gaoian terms as finding a steam-powered tractor on Earth.
To Kovač’s eye it seemed dark and claustrophobic, but the marines took an immediate liking to it.
“Sturdy stuff,”Hodder said approvingly. “Should stand up to small arms quite well, assuming the walls aren’t hollow.”
“Any improvements to make?” Kovač asked.
Rees ran a practiced eye over it. “Sandbags or something like that if we can find ‘em, dig some holes if we can’t, and fill the windows. Of course, if we had air superiority we wouldn’t even be here, we’d just be waiting on a ride out of here, so…”
“Unless there’s something we can do to help ourselves there, I don’t need to know,” Marty told him. An airstrike would wipe them out in a heartbeat, but that had been true from the moment their lifeboat hit soil. There was no sense in stressing about the things she couldn’t control.
“Actually, there might be,” Hodder said. “We’ve got those field emitters from the lifeboat. They aren’t powerful enough to stop a hit, but they might make an incoming weapon explode high up, rather than down here.”
“That’s something for Patel to do, then,” Marty nodded. “You two focus on the dig-in.”
“Yes ma’am.”
The two men nodded and hustled to work on it, leaving Marty to deal with the shortwave radio. She’d elected to carry it herself—the radio itself wasn’t a big deal, being a sturdy chunk of hard-wearing equipment about the size of a shoebox, but it was attached to a hundred meter antenna on a reel, all stored as a hard-wearing olive drab backpack. With that thing deployed and strung between two posts or buildings, the radio’s effective range was more or less anywhere on the planet.
Right now though, she had it plugged into its other antenna, the shorter one that flopped and helicoptered crazily around above her head. It was all she could do to keep it from slapping her in the back of the head every time she bent down or entertained an impure thought of glancing any way but straight. Deacon, who had the filthiest sense of humor of anybody Marty had ever known, had gone suspiciously straight-faced.
Marty was not a radio operator. None of them were. But it was a survival radio, intended to be used by whoever happened to bail out of the lifeboat and retrieve it, so the basic instructions were stuck to the top in big, idiot-proof print. That plus a sharp mind for technology translated to quickly getting a feel for how it worked, and Marty wasted no time in kneeling down to unsling the pack and uncoil the antenna reel.
In minutes, she had it strung between the barn and the farmhouse, had run the cable through the wall of “sandbags”—repurposed fertilizer bags full of wet dirt—that the others were setting up, and soon enough she had a functional little command post set up, complete with a table. Not bad.
Now to get back in touch with the other ‘boats.
“Allied units, this is JOCKEY at Lifeboat Two-alfa-tango-niner, we have established an operating base and are ready to assist and receive you. Report your status, over.”
She watched as the ALE circuitry continuously strobed through the frequencies and repeated her message, always on the lookout for some other radio’s pilot tone. Probably. It had…been a while since her crash course in radio operations. It didn’t need her attention anyway, so she got out her tablet with the map app. Satcom was still down, which meant its connection to the Fleet Intelligence Center was a low-bandwidth, sporadic link through the shortwave, but she had a decent map of the region, with bookmarks already saved for the ‘boat’s crash site, their current position, and the town Wilde was checking out with Alpha team.
The nearest lifeboat she knew of was three-alfa-tango-four, about twenty klicks to the east. That one had reported in first, and was so far the grimmest for injuries.
They were also the first to check in. The ALE dinged a happy tone, worked furiously to lock a clear frequency, then turned green and opened the call.
“JOCKEY, Lifeboat Tree-alfa-tango-four. We’re prepared to move as best we can, but it’ll be difficult without transportation as we have more wounded than able-bodied. Our coordinates are as follows…”
An annotation arrived on the SMS sideband and automatically updated her tablet. Marty marked it on the map and studied what she could see. They’d landed on a hilltop, in the middle of more fields but as with all farms there was a road with access to the field. All things considered, they could be in worse positions. “…Copy, Tree-alfa-tango-four,” she replied, carefully pronouncing it ‘tree’ for clarity, as she’d been trained. “We are attempting to secure transportation for you. Dig in and hold.”
“Orders received and understood. Tree-alfa-tango-four out.”
As soon as her counterpart signed off, another spoke up. All the other stations had heard their linktones and were piling up on the control channel; the ALE screen blinked every time a new station joined the frequency.
“JOCKEY, Lifeboat Two-alfa-tango-tree.” That was a new one, previously out of contact. The longer antenna was definitely working. She listened as they reeled off their coordinates and connected their tablets for map sync, and ticked air through her teeth in frustration. They were far out to the East, nearly two hundred kilometers away. “We have acquired vehicles, just need a destination. Must report that I have CALEDONIA-FIVE-ACTUAL here among our wounded. She is unresponsive and needs urgent medical treatment, over.”
Marty’s heart lifted in one sentence then sank in the next. FIVE-ACTUAL was code for *Caledonia*’s executive officer, Commander McDaniel. As an experience career off icer who’d run Caledonia efficiently for years, she would have been perfect for handing off her brevet authority to.
Hearing how bad she was made for a punishing blow.
“…Understood, Two-alfa-tango-tree,” she called back. “You are…one-niner klicks from the nearest major settlement. Do you have marines, over?”
“…JOCKEY, we have three marines in able-bodied condition, over.”
Marty nodded. Right now, the lifeboats were just going to have to trust that their own training would be enough to defend themselves. The marines needed to be out there doing stuff, not sitting on their asses in a field waiting for an attack that might never come, or might come in the form of an airstrike or rod-from-god. Especially not when they had actual working vehicles, that was an asset too valuable to leave sitting still.
“Two-alfa-tango-tree, how many vehicles and of what type, over?”
“JOCKEY, that would be, uh… two vans and a tractor plus flat-bed trailer, over.”
The tractor wasn’t great. It would be slow, obvious and vulnerable even if that trailer could carry all the wounded without trouble. The vans were more anonymous, and probably faster. Most importantly, they needed to be out of the open.
“Okay, Two-alfa-tango-tree, orders are as follows: There is a settlement one-niner clicks to your west. Send your marines to scout it, then relocate in that direction. Try and secure allies, supplies and more vehicles if you can, if not report back to for further instruction…”
That process became a rhythm that she fell into almost without noticing. Make contact with a lifeboat, assess their situation, figure out where they were, what they needed, how they could get it. At some point through it all, Rees delivered a comfortable chair for her. Later on, somebody—she didn’t even notice who—delivered a ration pack. It was one of the British ones, and she hardly noticed what the menu was except that it was nice and spicy and the fruit energy bar was far too welcome.
Later on, there was a coffee, which arrived just before Wilde and Alpha Team reported that their initial reconnoitre of the town suggested a minor Big Hotel presence at most, if any. She authorized the corporal to push into town and bring back what he could grab.
After that…nothing. Just an unexpected lack of anything to do as she realized that everybody was carrying out their orders. She stood up, stretched out her back and sore legs, and decided to perform a quick inspection of the farm now that she had a moment.
It was dramatically changed. The Techs were performing like the well-oiled machine they were. They’d all drilled together like a ballet, and knew how to account for an absence among their number as they worked, with the result that under Hodder’s and Rees’ expert eyes the farm had already been transformed into…well, if it wasn’t a fortress it was sure as hell a lot tougher than it had been.
There were earthworks taking shape out there. Not big ones, but enough to put some dirt between a prone man and any bullets that might come his way. Patel was safely ensconced in a foxhole surrounded by sandbags, surrounded by salvaged forcefield tech which she was poring over on a tablet and fine-tuning. Hargreaves and Doyle—Adam’s suit techs, and therefore themselves the biggest and strongest men on the tech team, because that happened to anybody who spent much time around Adam—had cleared a landing area and laid down some guidance markers.
Things were coming together pretty good, in fact. Which meant, for Marty, just a small moment of relaxation and calm in the middle of a storm where she was able to look around and see that there was nothing for her to do at that exact moment.
Wilde interrupted it.
“Jockey, Archer-Alpha-One. Arrived at the town, no sign of hostiles yet. Got eyes on something like a pickup, and signs of life in what could be a pharmacy or clinic.”
Back to work. Marty sighed and returned to her duties.
“Copy, Archer-Alpha-One. Update regarding vehicles, we have…”
She settled back into her rhythm. They had a long road ahead of them.
Date Point: 14y2d AV
Yi-Jan Township, Three Valleys, Amanyuy Territory, Planet Gao.
Tarraak, Clanless
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.” Tarraak confirmed. “It’s not sabotage or a malfunction, there’s just no power coming in off the regional grid.”
He threw his toolbag into a corner and glared suspiciously at the bound and straining form of their erstwhile workhouse-leader, Shurren. “He’s still being trouble?”
“He keeps it up I’mma claw his throat out,” growled Pinky. His name was Shun, but he was a rare albino, so to everybody in town he was Pinky. One of many reasons he hadn’t been accepted into a Clan.
Not that that was a mark of shame in this community. Everybody was a dropout in Yi-Jan…but it didn’t help they’d recently discovered Human cartoons; Pinky was strong but he wasn’t very smart.
Tarraak had avoided the nickname “Brain” by way of some carefully applied fights and a few scars. Being the town mechanic, handyman and general smart guy was something to be proud of, he wasn’t about to let the others burden him with a silly nickname.
“How does that happen?” Dinso asked. He was the closest thing Yi-Jan had to a doctor, an Openpaw dropout who’d drifted to an agricultural district to work as a veterinarian and found that broken bones and diseases worked pretty much the same in any species.
“It’s war out there,” Tarraak opined. “If that wasn’t an escape pod that came down out by the farm, I’ll eat my own balls. You all remember the flashes in the sky. That had to be fusion warheads.”
The others duck-nodded.
“They’ll be reconnoitring the area.” That was Kiro, who fancied himself a tactical “expert” and spent far too long studying Stoneback and Human tactics on the infosphere. And even longer playing online strategy games. He was an obese idiot most of the time, but Tarraak was inclined to listen to him for now. He was the only one who might know anything relevant, after all.
“Yeah, but who’s they?” Pinky asked.
“That pod hit hard,” Tarraak noted. “So they’re probably Clan with access to really good inertial…thingies. Whatever they’re called.”
“Aren’t you the mechanic?” Dinso asked.
“I fix tractors and water pumps. I don’t know spaceships,” Tarraak growled at him. The skinny “doctor” flattened his ears submissively and didn’t press further.
“They could be humans. Humans could survive a hard landing…” Kiro said.
“Just because you want to meet a deathworlder, Kiro, doesn’t mean they’re about to fall out of the sky,” Tarraak told him. He glanced out of the window. “It’s getting dark, and we aren’t getting the power back in,” he said. “We should use the last of the light to light a fire.”
“What good will a fire do?” Pinky asked.
Tarraak was about to launch into a lecture on cooking the perishable food, boiling some clean drinking water or just plain keeping the four of them warm. He didn’t get the chance—the door exploded inwards, disintegrating around the lock in a blizzard of cheap wood fragments that scattered themselves across the workhouse floor.
Something dark, fast and violent followed them, followed by two more. Before he’d even finished reeling from the shock and suddenness of it all, he was being shouted at, by a voice that would plainly brook zero resistance.
Pinky, whose eyesight was kinda bad at the best of times, was desperately sniffing the air. His ears flattened, and he hastily bundled himself to the ground. Kiro was a second behind him, followed by Dinso.
Tarraak promptly found himself with three weapons aimed by his chest, held tight and aggressively by three of the very creatures he’d just claimed weren’t falling from the sky.
He raised his paws slowly to let the humans know he was no trouble, and imitated his colleagues.
The instructions were simple. Keep his paws visible, stay still, stay down…he obeyed. Something was pressed against his head and beeped. Then against Pinky’s, Dinso’s, Kiro’s and Shurren’s.
The beep was different, in Shurren’s case. A second later, Shurren was dead—the human who’d pressed the whatever-it-was to his skull simply drew a pistol and fired a single dispassionate round into his skull.
Tarraak flinched at the sound of the shot. There was a horrible silence punctuated by the slithering thump of Shurren’s corpse toppling over, and the ringing in Tarraak’s ears.
“…Alright lads, you can stand up now. Slowly.”
Tarraak glanced at his friends, who glanced back at him. They had a silent conversation by various ear-angles and expressions before he finally took the plunge and stood up first. Slowly, as ordered.
He’d never seen a human up close. These ones probably weren’t actually quite as big as they looked—that armor looked bulky—and they’d smeared their faces with a dark substance so that their eyes almost shone in the encroaching night. But the smell was something else. Pure dangerous alpha-male aggression, with hints of oil, grease, soot and hot metal. And something else. Blood? But not theirs, nor Gaoian.
“I was beginnin’ to think this place was deserted,” the one who’d so far done all the talking said. “Town like this oughta have a couple hundred people livin’ in it. Where is everyone?”
Tarraak glanced at the others again, and discovered that they were designating him as their spokesman. At least, that was probably what Dinso’s urgent gesture meant.
“They…left,” he said after a moment. “When we heard the news reports and the civic alerts, they loaded up their vehicles. Most of them went over toward Yeego’s compound, others thought they’d be safer in the cities.”
“Sucks to be them,” one of the other humans muttered.
“Who’s this Yeego?”
“He owns most of the land in the Three Glaciers Valleys. Very rich, has contacts in the Clans.”
“Right…So why didn’t you leave?” the leader asked. “How much do you know about what’s going on?”
“Enough to know that bombs and stuff were going off in the cities,” Tarraak replied. “Kiro convinced us to stay.”
“How many of the ones who left had neural augmentation?”
“Uh…?” Tarraak looked to Dinso for the answer to that one, who mulled it over.
“…Ten or so?” he ventured after a some thought.
[“Fuckin’ ‘Ell.”] That sounded like a curse to Tarraak’s ears, and the human sagged a little.
“Is…that why you shot Shurren?” Kiro asked.
“That wasn’t… Shurren, was it? Sorry mate, Shurren died a couple days ago. We just put down the thing wearin’ his corpse like a suit.” The human leader lowered his weapon. “Corporal Wilde. This won’t mean owt to you, but we’re Royal Marines. Our escape pod landed a ways out of town.”
“With just you in it?” Tarraak asked. It had looked much bigger than that.
“No comment, mate. Point is, it’s gone to shite out there and if we’re gonna get back in the fight and make anything good come of it all then we need supplies and vehicles.”
“…We need those supplies, too.”
“I’ve heard of the Royal Marines,” Kiro spoke up. “Semper Fi, right?”
The human snorted. “Wrong. That’s the Yanks. Decent try, though…” He looked around, then grabbed a chair, while the other two Humans busied themselves with…whatever it was they were doing. “Look, we’d better explain…you better brace yourselves, this one’s a bit of a bloody [revelation], believe me.”
Tarraak had no idea what ‘Revelation’ meant, but he quickly discovered how it felt. It felt like the world turning upside-down and dumping a whole Naxas-pen full of shit on his head. It felt like knowing the Swarm-of-Swarms was coming, and that probably most of Gao’s military had been compromised by an enemy that would have just stood aside and let them come.
It felt like a Keeda tale come to life.
“…That’s…” he ventured, when Wilde had finished. “…asking us to believe all this, that’s…it’s big.”
“I fuckin’ know it, mate. But… he had implants, right?” Wilde jerked his thumb out the door, where the other two had removed Shurren’s body.
“I don’t know. Dinso?”
“…Yes. He did.”
“And you don’t,” Wilde said. “We coulda just shot the lot of you, mind. Would have been easier and safer for us…So why didn’t we?”
Tarraak couldn’t think of an answer. This was bigger than he was used to—He was a handyman, a hammer-and-nails kind of guy. If it couldn’t be swapped out for a spare part, patched with tape, glued, screwed, nailed, filed, sawed, hammered back into shape or lubricated then he was about at his limit. The end of the world was too big for him.
“I guess…” he began, then faltered.
“He smells like he’s telling the truth, Brain,” Pinky spoke up, suddenly. He’d been silent so far, letting others do the talking. But he had the best nose Tarraak had ever personally met, possibly as a compensation for his poor eyesight. If Pinky said that a person smelled truthful, they were truthful.
“…Brain?” Wilde asked, and a smirk pulled at the corners of his mouth. “And… his name’s Pinky?”
“Yes, yes. It’s a reference,” Tarraak admitted. “And I told you not to call me that,” he added.
Wilde simply chuckled, then stood up. “Jockey’s gonna fuckin’ love you two,” he said, cryptically. “Arright, look. You know the area, you’re smart blokes, you’re clean in the head. If you want to curl up in the basement and wait for the end or for rescue that’s up to you. Me, if I were in your position, I’d want to fight back somehow. And right now the way to do that is to help us…And I bet the safest place on this planet right now is wherever we happen to be.”
Tarraak had to admit, there was some logic there.
“So…” he said, and realized he’d made his mind up. “About those supplies…”
Date Point: 14y2d AV
Lavmuy City, Planet Gao
Champion Genshi of Whitecrest
Hunters had better cloaking technology than anybody, a consequence of Fyu-alone-knew how long they’d spent raiding and reaping their harvest of the galaxy’s sophonts. Their obsessive focus on a few specific things had made them the undisputed galactic leaders in their narrow, perverse fields.
Whitecrest, however, had managed to acquire one of their ships some years ago. The same one that had violated the Rich Plains, in fact, only for Sister Shoo to do what Humans did and put the Hunters in their place.
The Dominion authorities had simply cast it off from the damaged diplomatic vessel and left it to drift, the fools. Genshi had recovered it personally.
They hadn’t done anything so crass as commandeer it, though. There had been Gaoian carcasses hung up in a meat locker aboard that thing—a memory that still made Genshi shiver—but they had taken it to pieces and squeezed every last secret they could out of it.
Most of those secrets had been shared with the other Clans. Little diplomatic favors, gifts, peace offerings, bargaining chips…over the years, every scientific mystery that ship yielded had been bartered away…except for the cloaking tech.
Whitecrest’s fleet was tiny anyway. In the end, only three ships to date had benefited from the reverse-engineered cloaks—the Lancing Shadow, the Flying Midnight, and Genshi’s personal favorite, the Moving Nothing.
Decorum—and an intense desire to not be shot by his allies—demanded decloaking as they approached Lavmuy’s airspace, however. The Humans had established impressively tight-fisted control over the sky around the capitol, and even if the fighting in Lavmuy itself was still brutal, the skies were wholly owned by the relief force.
And if Whitecrest’s intelligence on the fate of a cloaked ship on Earth some years back was anything to go by, the humans had a few ways of sneering at cloaking tech, too.
He activated the primitive digital radio the Humans had given him and hailed them, using codes and phrases that had been shared between Whitecrest and AEC some time ago. In a way, he was a little disappointed—most of his Brothers and other Gaoians working with the humans had exciting and dynamic codenames, wrapped in fascinating layers of meaning or containing twisty references and in-jokes that might take months to fully decipher.
His was dismayingly functional.
“Human aid force, this is WHITECREST-SIX-ACTUAL. CASPER on approach, request clearance to land, over.”
‘Casper’ was the code phrase for a friendly cloaked ship. He had no idea why.
As expected, the reply was punctual and forthright. “WHITECREST-SIX-ACTUAL, you are not cleared to approach. Decloak and set down at the following coordinates where you will submit to a security inspection…”
Genshi carefully followed the instructions to the letter, and parked the Moving Nothing exactly where he’d been ordered—on a makeshift landing pad in the middle of what had been a major intersection near the spaceport but which was now just so much open space where there was enough room to land an aircraft and the highway overpass provided a decent spot to build a forward base protected from indirect fire weapons.
Human soldiers with what were plainly some kind of anti-aircraft weapon system tracked him every inch of the way down to the ground, and he barely had time to order his brothers to brace themselves against the wall with their paws up before the boarding force stormed aboard.
Somebody was going to have to come up with a reliable, more comfortable and more dignified neural scanner soon, he hoped. The one the humans used was so uncomfortably robust that it almost felt spiky.
Still, it worked, and the inspection was mercifully brief. He was given the option of waiting with his ship until an inspection team had thoroughly checked it over, or being delivered to the Farthrow facility in an armored vehicle.
He took the armored vehicle. They were well past industrial secrets at this point.
He had to give credit to the humans. He’d had some inkling of their deployment abilities thanks to Whitecrest’s careful probing and secret-gathering—it always paid to know what one’s allies were capable of—but seeing them realized was something else. They’d converted the open concrete of the spaceport into a fortress, and their foothold was getting firmer with every passing minute.
His vehicle passed through checkpoints, jinked through chicanes and between offset barriers, tracked all the while by heavy weapons. By the time he alighted at the command facility, he’d had lethal firepower pointed at him for every second of a full twenty minutes.
The security was commendable.
Father Regaari was waiting for him. He didn’t duck his head to show respect, but the set of his ears was deferential. “Champion. You had us worried.”
“I had business to take care of…” Genshi gathered his younger colleague into an affectionate embrace. “I heard what happened at Wi Kao. I understand you were close with one of—”
“Please, Champion…I’d prefer not to discuss that, right now.” Regaari interrupted him, gently, but every line of him was a sketch of pain being held tightly in check and channeled towards a purpose. “Did you hear that Champion Daar is here?”
That brightened Genshi’s mood substantially. “I hadn’t! Where is he?”
“Organizing a massacre,” Regaari replied cryptically, gesturing toward the command building. “May I ask where you were?”
Genshi indicated the boxes his Brothers were unloading from the transport. “Collecting a few essentials. I had hoped for more warning, and so couldn’t retrieve them as smoothly as I would have liked.”
Regaari twitched his whiskers at the boxes curiously. “What are they?” he asked.
“The grand strategy is to knock out planet-wide communications, yes?” Genshi asked. He’d figured that one out some time ago—it was the only realistic way to ensure that they could deploy a system defense field without it promptly being shot down from within by Gao’s own defenses.
“…Yes,” Regaari agreed. Genshi panted happily, and allowed himself to look smug.
“I prepared a few things to make that task easier…” he said.