Date Point: 15y5m3d AV High Mountain Fortress, Planet Gao
President Arthur Sartori
Presidential meetings always involved being briefed, which in turn always fell short of reality, especially for visits that had been rushed through ASAP like this one…but no briefing had ever fallen quite so short as the briefing on Daar, and what was worse was that Sartori had been absolutely certain that some of it must be exaggeration.
It wasn’t.
For one, Sartori had never known an official visit to be arranged within only a handful of hours, but apparently the Great Father believed in striking while the iron was not only hot, but practically molten. The kind of exchange that normally took weeks or months to arrange had been agreed to, arranged and enacted on an emergency basis, with apologies to his prior engagements.
In truth, that suited Sartori just fine… but the second way in which Daar overrode his expectations was that Sartori had never been bodily picked up and bearhugged by a head of state before.
“My people are alive because o’ ‘yers! Thank you!”
Sartori’s Secret Service attachment was understandably taken aback, but he managed to wiggle a hand free from Daar’s crush and wave them down. Daar’s bodyguards for their part seemed mildly amused and entirely unsurprised.
Sartori managed to retain a modicum of dignity and grunted out a reply with what little air he could muster. “We stick with our allies,” he managed.
Mercifully, he was returned to solid ground with his ribs at least still intact. His dignity was a slightly different matter, but he resisted the urge to brush fur off his suit.
“And ‘yer true friends t’have, Mister President. It’s a real pleasure to meet’cha at last.” The Great Father sank to all fours and flowed towards a huge set of doors and opened them, beckoning the President and his entourage to enter. “We’ve got a feast goin’ for everyone! Double rations ‘fer ‘yer guards…”
There was a waggle in his ears Sartori could read even across species. The Great Father was a booming force of nature who liked to play up his natural goofball boisterousness, but Sartori was no idiot—he could see what Daar was up to, and even approved.
Two could play at that game. Indeed, he’d been planning to from the moment he’d first read up on Daar’s dossier.
“My thanks!” He boomed and clapped Daar firmly on the shoulder… or at least, as high up and close to the shoulder as he could reach. In addition to being America’s first Italian president, he was also its shortest. “Before we eat though, I would like to give you something. A small token of our esteem.”
Daar’s right ear swivelled in an intriguing way. “Oh?”
“Two things, actually. The latter is a gift from the People of the United States of America. This one, however, is from me to you.”
“Ooh!” Daar flowed back over and poked his muzzle towards the package Sartori’s aide was pulling out of leather portfolio. “I love presents! What is it?”
“It’s a Karaoke microphone. You can download the app to any compatible phone, tablet… I’m sure your people can provide.” He met Daar’s eye and added, “I’ve heard your singing voice is legendary…”
They understood each other perfectly, and he noted with some satisfaction that Daar’s guards had actually flattened their ears for a moment in dismay and genuine fear.
Daar could not have been more delighted, and if there was a malicious edge to his deep, happy chitter then Sartori decided not to notice. Somebody somewhere was going to be cursing both their names in due course.
With their mischief managed and the waters well-tested, the two of them reached an unspoken agreement to move back onto a more normal trajectory for a state visit and let the analysts puzzle over this peculiar deviation from the norm. There was the food, of course, the exchanging of gifts from People to People, a few statements for the cameras… all necessary.
The real work began a few hours later in Daar’s private studies, away from prying eyes.
“The obstacle I’m working on is that our people really have got behind this whole ‘Never Again’ call,” Sartori explained. He still had his thinking baseball, and was rolling it over and over in his fingers as he digested the rich food with his jacket unbuttoned and his tie removed.
“I can unnerstand that, Mister President.” Daar went over to his incongruous record player and loaded a Muddy Waters LP of all things onto it. “Balls, it’s something I admire ‘bout ‘yer people.”
“Thanks, but it’s not exactly out of a good place. You know our history.”
“Yeah, an’ the last Great Father used to skin rebels alive an’ burned cities to the ground.”
“You’ve arguably done worse, Great Father.” That could be taken very badly, Sartori knew, but he suspected Daar would understand his meaning.
“I’ve done much worse. So if I say it’s admirable that you folks don’t wanna go there again… well, I mean it. Me, I got a diff’rent problem.”
Sartori listened politely. Daar flicked an ear, dropped to all fours and began a slow orbit of the room. It was a nervous habit they shared.
“Gao’s hurtin’,” he said, pausing to inspect what looked like a half-finished flower arrangement. “We were damn near destroyed. My people were bein’ groomed as motherfuckin’ Janissaries for a race o’ living malware. It’s an open question if the Gao will survive the die-off we’ve got comin’ in twenny years, an’ what’s left of us are cryin’ out fer justice.”
Sartori nodded. Hearing his opposite number curse like a trooper was another first, but in a way it made him respect Daar more. “That’s a heck of a tiger to have by the tail.”
“Fuck yeah it is. An’ as bad as it is ‘fer the males it’s worse for the Females, ‘cuz everythin’ we fought for over the last thousand years just got reset. They’re free from the Males, sure. But they ain’t free from duty.”
“And that duty is to breed the species back from extinction.”
“Yup.”
Sartori nodded and played with his baseball some more. “I’m worried that ‘Never Again’ might clash with what your Males need. I take it you were briefed on what happened to one of our citizens on Origin?”
“I was made aware of your reporting.” That was a careful choice of words right there—a very precise statement of truth. Exactly why Daar chose to suggest he had prominent intelligence sources close to Sartori…something else for the analysts to ponder.
Of course, Sartori had prominent intelligence sources close to Daar too: Friends spied on friends. It just wasn’t conventionally the done thing to acknowledge it.
“The Hierarchy want to provoke dissent in the ranks. They know that once the idea gains any real traction on social media that we shouldn’t exterminate any species, no matter what they are or what they do… We already have enough trouble with groups like the Alien Protection Army, or anti-establishment and anarchist movements that would love to paint the US Government as bent on genocide.”
Daar’s pacing round the room brought him back to the flower arrangement. This time he stood up, stepped behind the table and pulled the vase toward him. “You think it’ll work?”
“The abductee at the heart of it didn’t need any persuading to stay quiet about what happened to her.” Sartori chuckled as a thought occurred to him. “I tell you, I wouldn’t want to get on her bad side.”
Daar chittered and carefully selected a stem to insert into his work-in-progress, but refrained from comment so Sartori continued his thinking aloud.
“…Honestly, I don’t know. We’ve seen huge numbers of good people run with some weird ideas against all the evidence in the past, just because somebody spun a persuasive narrative.”
“Mhmm,” Daar grumbled. “Thing I’ve noticed, you Humans are awfully passionate ‘bout things when y’ain’t sure if it’s right or wrong.”
“That’s what I’m worried about…”
“Why? You gotta do what ‘ya need ‘fer your people. I gotta do the same. And I think killin’ every last one o’ these Hunter fucks is a good place to start.”
“I agree. How long is it going to take?”
“Years. I think about as long as the Grand Army will last, anyway.”
“Meanwhile, I might not be President after next year. And if I am, I definitely won’t be four years after that.”
“Lucky you.”
Sartori put his baseball down on the table in front of him and straightened up. “That’s democracy.”
“I meant it, Mister President. You are lucky. I ain’t so blessed as bein’ term-limited.”
Sartori conceded the point with a half-nod. “It does, however, mean that I have to shepherd our will to fight and pass it on to the next guy, assuming he has the backbone for the fight himself. You have a surplus of fighting spirit. I have to carefully husband ours after… God, decades of wartime mismanagement by my predecessors. Going in where they should have stayed out, withdrawing too early and squandering years of hard sacrifice, staying out where we should have gone in… My countrymen don’t like to see their sons and brothers wasted. So I need to be sure, when I commit to a fight, that we’ll have the spirit to see it through to the end.”
Daar paused in his flower arranging. “How…? Arthur, they’re Hunters. What more do you need?”
“That’s enough to start the fight,” Sartori agreed.
“And? They’re Keeda-damned monsters. I ain’t got any problem whatsoever killin’ off what’re pretty much literal nightmares made real. If it means securin’ the Gao an’ endin’ a fuckin’ livestock trade in fellow sapients, then ‘fer the life o’me can’t find anything wrong.”
“And what about the Igraens?”
“They’re digital parasites who’ve engineered the enslavement an’ extinction of literally quadrillions o’ sophonts o’er the last millions o’ years. I ain’t ever read any horror story that comes close to that bad, not even a Human sci-fi.”
“I promise, you’re preaching to the choir,” Sartori assured him. “But I won’t be around longer than five years at most. I’m warning you now so that we can have a plan in place to keep the momentum going no matter who replaces me, no matter how the narrative goes on Earth. Because if ever there was a fight we absolutely can’t afford to get sick of and back out from, it’s this one.”
“I’m gonna be sendin’ males to their doom by the millions, Mister President.” Daar gave him a very intense look. “I meant it when I thanked you. We’re alive ‘cuz of ‘yer people. But being honest, ‘yer givin’ me some concern.”
“Good.” Sartori nodded sharply. “Now… I have faith. I think we’re in it for the long haul, but I also know human nature and I know we’re up against an enemy who aren’t afraid to fight dirty and who’ve been fighting dirty for a long time. I want to rely on more than faith.”
“So…what do you plan to do?”
Sartori took a deep breath, and remembered years of skiing advice—committing to the turn might be scary, but it would be less painful than crashing into a tree. “I’m going to commit. I’m going to make it politically impossible to back out of this war. I’m going to prove to the American people that the Hunters are exactly the monsters we both know they are. And that, I’m afraid, begins with you. Personally.”
Daar regarded him carefully and might have sniffed the air almost too subtly to detect. He had an unnerving ability to stare right into people, Sartori was discovering.
“…Okay. What you want me t’do?”
With an internal sigh of relief that he was very, very careful not to allow onto the surface, Sartori pocketed his baseball and explained The Plan.
Date Point: 15y5m4d AV Folctha, Cimbrean, The Far Reaches
Allison Buehler
Being home alone was a genuinely novel experience. It had been years since Allison had last had a house all to herself, for a unique definition of “house” that included a spaceship.
The unexpected part was that it actually came as something of a relief. There was a sense of a forgotten pressure becoming conspicuous by its absence, as though she could feel Xiù and Julian nearby and was suddenly acutely aware that the nearer of them was a couple hundred miles away.
Julian was supervising Vemik as they got down to the business of introducing the Ten’gewek to how Humans did wilderness survival. It was an SOR operation, orchestrated by the JETS program as part of the plan to give the People something useful to contribute to humanity and the Gao, and it was probably going to be a heck of a wake-up call. Yan and Vemik were used to eating huge, protein-rich meals hunted from among the many large and sturdy animals of Akyawentuo. Native Cimbrean life and the invading Earthlings were much smaller and, in the Terran species’ cases, much cannier about not getting themselves eaten.
Xiù was on Tiritya Island again, doing her social acrobat thing. Allison had no idea how she did it, but no sooner had Xiu quit space exploration than she was in demand as a confidant to the Mother-Supreme, an advisor to the diplomatic corps, an insight into the Ten’gewek and more besides. She took to celebrity like she was born to it.
Both of them made Allison feel a little inadequate, at times.
But then again…
She stretched her back to clear out some of the ache and surveyed her handiwork. It had taken a little negotiation, but she’d finally persuaded Julian to take the basement for his man-cave and let her have the garage. She’d spent the morning fixing tool racks to the walls, securing her workbenches to the floor, securing other stuff to the workbenches… The shop air was working, the lighting was how she wanted it, and she’d just finished wiring up the sound system.
She opened the SMART//HAUS app on her phone and browsed the local digital radio stations. SKID Radio’s name made her laugh so she tuned to it and set about unpacking all the small tools onto their racks and into their drawers.
“-ject to availability, terms and conditions apply.”
Of course she’d caught it during a commercial break.
She waited out an advert for the new Vauxhall whatever at she-wasn’t-paying-attention percent API finance and who-cared warranty, ignored some kind of insurance comparison service, nodded and made a mental note to check out a season pass for the Lakebeds national park as a maybe-gift for Julian, and half-paid attention to the news.
“—From ESNN’s newsroom for SKID radio this lunchtime, I’m Dale Parker. Today’s headlines: New Whig Party leader Colin Chapman says that nonhumans serving on the Independent Electoral Oversight Committee should be given special concessions to help them cope with the stress but some former Committee members object, calling the proposal “unfair and unconstitutional”; Hephaestus announce plans to expand Armstrong Station and begin asteroid mining in the Cimbrean system; On Earth, five people are killed and dozens are hospitalized as Storm Alfred batters northern Europe; and in interstellar news US President Arthur Sartori begins the second day of his state visit to Gao by laying a wreath at the ruins of the Wi Kao commune.”
The political bullshit was… well, it was political bullshit. Allison had heard a thousand news reports like it, the usual corkscrew thinking where folks tried to argue that the rules shouldn’t apply the same to everyone and make it sound good. She tuned it out and spent a minute or two with pencil and paper figuring out the best way to store all her welding gear—glasses, bandana, jacket, apron, gloves and helmet—in one neat package.
She settled on something out of the Misfit design book, a little swing locker she could fix to the ceiling beams, and listened with rather more interest to the bit about asteroid mining as she gathered the bits and pieces she’d need.
“—absolutely excellent safety record. Mining has always been a dangerous profession, and when you throw in vacuum, zero-gravity and radiation it only gets more difficult. The fact that we’ve had zero fatalities and only one major incident in all these years is a testament to the hard work and caution of some very dedicated people.”
Allison had to admit, that put Hephaestus a hell of a step ahead of MBG. Most of the missing Exploration Vehicles were still unaccounted-for and probably would remain that way. She didn’t know whether to feel worse about the ones who’d met an unknown fate, or the poor bastards of EV-03 who’d blundered into Hunter space never to be heard from again.
Her phone rang, automatically shutting off the news report.
She glanced at the name on the screen, laughed quietly, and answered.
“Speak of the Devil. Hey Clara!”
“Hey!” Clara Brown always sounded sunny on the phone. “Talking about me behind my back?”
“Nah, come on, you know me better than that…” Allison leaned against a bench and smiled. “What’s up?”
“Oh, y’know, nothing super important. Just that all the HR stuff is dealt with and I’m pleased to officially invite you to join my crack outfit of starship designers!”
Allison laughed. “Well, it took them long enough! When do I start?”
“We’re jumping EV-13 over from Omaha on Monday. I’ve put you on the interior crew spaces team. Y’know, seeing as you actually know what living on one of our ships is like.”
“That makes sense. What’s Thirteen like?”
“She’s a Misfit-class, mark two. Hope that’s not weird for you?”
“It’d be weirder if I was refitting Misfit herself. I mean, I’m okay with her going on and having more adventures but…” Allison shrugged.
Fortunately, Clara seemed to be able to sense shrugs over the phone. “It’d be like decorating your old house for the new owners. I hear ya. Anyway you’ll like your team, though, uh, don’t be surprised if they kinda fangasm all over you.”
Allison pulled a face. “Really?”
“Hun, they get to work with the Allison Buehler. Of course they’re geeking out. Get used to it.”
“You don’t geek out over us…” Allison pointed out.
“That’s because I know you.” Allison could hear Clara’s troll-grin. “But seriously, it’s fine, they’re professionals! Worst-case scenario, they’ll want a selfie. You’re a big girl, you can handle that.”
“Yeah, yeah…”
“So…speak of the Devil, huh?”
“Huh? Oh.” Allison mentally rewound. “Uh, there was this thing on the news about Hephaestus asteroid mining and it got me thinking about our own safety record with the missing ships… Uh, but that’s… I know the problem wasn’t with the ships,” she added.
Clara sighed. “Thanks, I guess? But believe me, I’ve lost a lot of sleep wondering if it was, over the years.”
“We made it. If it was an engineering problem, I’d know. You make good ships, Clara.”
Clara’s second sigh was a little less tense. “…Thanks,” she said, and sounded like she meant it this time. “So, uh, how are your two settling in?”
“Barely. They’re both away on business right now. I’m alone in the house for like the first time in… I dunno. Years.”
“That’s gotta be weird.”
“I’m actually kinda enjoying it!” Deciding that she may as well take a break and grab a lunch, Allison stood up and headed for the kitchen. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love them both like crazy but…”
“But it’s nice to get some space for a change,” Clara finished.
“Yeah. Think I’ll send out for pizza, though. There’s a reason they do the cooking.”
Clara laughed. “Oh, I wish Dane would let me cook. But no, it’s all gotta be on the meal plan and measured out and portioned and— Sometimes I just… I dream of cheese, you know? I don’t care if it’ll make my acne worse, I might honestly sell a kidney for the chance to pig out on chips and dip…”
“Clara… Have you tried actually asking him for that?” Allison inquired. She opened the fridge and surveyed its innards, reflecting that Julian’s diet looked much the same as Clara had just described nowadays. The whole top shelf was color-coded tupperware.
“…You think he’d say yes?”
“Come on, if he was that anal would you have married him in the first place? Julian gets to cheat three meals a week, y’know…” Those were the days when Xiù cooked.
There was a prolonged, hungry silence from Clara’s end of the call during which time Allison picked out the makings of a bacon, egg and avocado sandwich and shut the fridge door with her butt.
“…Hey, uh. When are your two back?”
“Julian’s gone until… I dunno. He’s doing something with the SOR. Might be a few days. Xiù should be back tonight. You know she talked Yulna out of gifting her a shuttle?”
“She did?”
“Yeah. Told her off! She said it’d be an irresponsible waste of resources the Clan could use and would only upset the Males and if she really wanted a shuttle she could buy her own thank you very much…” Allison smirked at the memory. At first she’d been shocked at how forthrightly Xiù spoke to Yulna, but it had quickly become obvious that the Mother-Supreme truly appreciated being given a dose of tough truth now and then.
Clara giggled into her phone. “Wow. I wish I could talk like that to Levaughn or Kevin sometimes… anyway, you wanna come up to Chiune? Or maybe we come down to your place? I feel like an evening of junk food and movies would be about perfect right now.”
Allison grinned. “Sure. What’s your favorite Disney movie?”
“Uh… ‘Beauty and the Beast’ I guess…” Considering Clara’s status as a classic geeky brunette, that made an endless amount of sense. “But don’t you guys ever watch anything other than Disney?”
“Of course we do!”
“Like?”
“Star Wars, Marvel movies, Alien, Avatar… y’know, the scifi classics… Uh..” She paused and thought of some more contemporary titles. “…The Long Road Home, Commonwealth, Shadowrun…”
“Allison, those are all owned by Disney.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nuh-uh. The House of Mouse owns all.”
Allison cast a net through her memory for some of the other things they liked. “The Last Airbender? That’s Nickelodeon.”
“Disney bought out Viacom like seven or eight years ago.”
“…Okay, what about Wuxia movies? There’s no way Disney owns…” Allison paused, “…many of those…”
“…Wu what, now?”
“Kung fu. Xiù loves those even more than Disney.”
“We’ll watch one of those, then.”
“Hey, it’s your shameful pig-out-on-junk-food party. I got no problem watching whatever you want.” Speaking of which, Allison put her on speaker so she could finally start making her own lunch. “You’d better come over to our place though, we still don’t have a car yet.”
“Sounds great! Why don’t you have a car?”
“Haven’t bought one yet, Julian likes to run everywhere, roboTaxi is cheap and all the cars I’d wanna buy have to be imported from Earth. Do you have any idea how expensive that is?”
“…Yeah, I guess you’d take up a whole Array, huh?”
“Not to mention shipping the car to the Array, Earthside. So yeah. No car yet.”
“I guess that explains why the rental company does so well…” Clara trailed off and there was a muffled hint of conversation with somebody as though she was covering her phone with her hand. “Oh, okay. Hey, I’d better take care of some stuff. I’ll see you tonight.”
“See ya!”
Feeling slightly tickled by the irony of using her first day of solitude in years to arrange a movie night with friends, Allison finished making her sandwich and leaned against the kitchen counter to enjoy it. The place was beginning to feel like home now that they’d applied some personal touches. The cold white decor had been touched up with some artwork and accent walls, she’d got the customisable color lighting system in place and found some understated hues that warmed the ambience while softening the shadows…
The doorbell pulled her out of her thoughts. Frowning, she set the sandwich aside and dusted crumbs off her palms as she headed to the intercom. There’d been a whole security lecture from Mister Williams about how they were celebrities now, and how a domestic terrorist group had tried to bomb them, and even if the APA never took another shot at them there was always the spectre of kidnapping and ransom or… whatever. The point was, even if they were expecting somebody—which she wasn’t—they weren’t to open the door without checking the camera first.
Or checking her daily carry. Getting the special license for that had been a genuine bitch but at least CCS had finally agreed that she had a “legitimate need.” Goddamned Limey colonists.
All of that was common-sense advice even though WIlliams had been serious beyond his usual characteristic excess in giving it, so she tapped the screen by the door and… stared.
The three figures waiting nervously on the porch didn’t seem to realize they were being surveilled. That gave her a minute to think, decide what she was going to do.
She wrenched some false calm and the coldest expression she could muster into place, opened the door, leaned against the frame and folded her arms.
“…Hi, Mom.”
Date Point: 15y5m4d AV Clan One-Fang experimental starship Stalking Blizzard, Near Kwmwbwrw Great Houses
Shipfather Gilim
“Shipfather! It’s happening.”
Gilim set aside his log-taking and pulled down the tactical display around him. In older models of ship he’d have sprung forward into the middle of the combat deck, but One-Fang was always innovating, always improving, always learning. The doctrine on the new ships coming out of the Dark Eye yards was to take the data to the officer and minimize risks taken by the crew. The Great Father had been right—Gilim was safer in his command chair than leaping around the deck, so even though it was difficult to control the urge to do, the thing that mattered first and foremost was the Mission. So he remained strapped in and the information came to him.
Lightyears and lightyears of information. He was tracking FTL signatures and wormholes across incomprehensible distances, but the most important track came from the Humans.
They knew how to detect Hunter comms.
Apparently the technology was quite old. Cimbrean had been equipped with a basic version from its very earliest days, but no Gaoian would have sat still on just the basic version, and the Humans had the same sensible instinct. They’d refined it immensely, and handed it along to the Clans in due course.
“Three?” he checked.
“Three,” Brother Taga confirmed. “One Broodship, two Swarmships. Previously undocumented Brood.”
“Tag them for strategic analysis, watch closely.”
“Yes, Father.”
“Helm, low-profile pursuit. Comms…contact the Great Father.”
“Yes, Father.”
Daar had organized this operation personally, as a matter of urgency. Based on what, Gilim didn’t know and presumably didn’t need to know. He certainly wasn’t about to object—after years as a merchant captain, he’d had more than his share of close shaves with the Hunters, or heard of too many fellow freighters being hit. Any opportunity to give those ball-less shits a well-earned clawing was entirely alright by him.
They were experimenting with pulsed wormhole comms, too. The Farthrow facility had taught Clan Longear a lot about wormholes, and studying biodrones, Hierarchy infrastructure and interrogating a captured Agent had yielded some other clues. They were still a long way from achieving point wormholes with zero radius, zero volume and zero surface area, but real-time FTL comms over indefinite distance was now being rolled out. So long as the sender and the receiver were both carrying what the Longears called a “microhole” router, they were no longer shackled by the limited range of distorted-space wake comms.
The only downside really was that the microhole routers drank power like a large town, and there were still some issues with bandwidth so the Great Father’s image was low-resolution and the audio was low-fidelity, but it was more than good enough.
“Report.”
“Three ships, My Father. One Broodship, two Swarmships. Their current course takes them near the Kwmbwrw colony of Glwngwli. There’s a Great House response fleet moving to intercept, but there are unprotected mining facilities in the nearby systems. The Hunters will have plenty of time to raid one and escape.”
The Stalking Blizzard was too far away to help. Gilim would have liked his chances against the three Hunters if they were closer—with the element of surprise and the initiative on their side, his ship would tear through them like claws through wet paper—but they were hanging too far back so as to be absolutely sure of their invisibility.
That was an important part of the plan. They needed to remain undetected because the Stalking Blizzard had a very unusual cargo on-board, and they needed to be kept safe. After all, broadcast engineers weren’t known for their combat prowess.
Daar’s ship, however, was not so handicapped.
Its name was the Destroying Fury and it was a monster. Everything unique about Gaoian ship design had been sharpened, honed, tempered and packed into a flying wrecking ball that echoed the Great Father in size and charisma. Nobody quite understood the art on the nose—a stylized Gao on a gleeful rampage with a ‘turkey’ of all the Keeda-fucking things hanging from his jaws—but the Great Father had commissioned it specially and nobody was going to argue.
“Get in position,” the Great Father ordered. “You know the plan.”
“Yes, My Father.”
Gilim watched as the Hunters swung away from the Kwmbwrw interceptors and vanished into an unimportant red dwarf system near the colony. It made him itch a little, but the ideal outcome for the plan actually depended on the Hunters completing their raid and getting away with their meat lockers full of live Kwmbwrw miners. Hunters preferred their meat “on the hoof” if they could get it, and that was just one more reason Gilim was in full agreement with the Great Father. Every Hunter everywhere needed to die.
The second step was the rescue. The Gaoians would play the role of a deep-space patrol that had noticed the raid in progress and, complying with their obligation to multilateral interspecies defense that the Dominion had so shamefully ignored during the attack on Gao and the colonies, would leap to the rescue.
They would save those Kwmbwrw, whether their fleet appreciated it or not. And they would teach the Hunters a painful lesson.
There was another Deathworlder species on the prowl, and they would have their revenge.
Waiting for the raid to conclude took a tense hour, during which time the Kwmbwrw fleet covered barely half the distance to catch their foe. Gilim strongly suspected that they were going slow. They knew that even at best speed they’d never get there in time, so they were taking their sweet time to be certain that the Hunters would be long gone when they finally arrived.
Pathetic. Gilim had no idea how they could show so little loyalty to the innocents of their own species. The Kwmbwrw were natural carnivores; had they lost all their instincts?
The moment when the Hunters shot out of their target system at a respectable two hundred kilolights came as a moment of feral relief. He bared his fangs. “Message the Great Father. Pounce.”
Two hundred kilolights was respectable. The Kwmbwrw certainly didn’t have anything that could keep up.
The slowest ship in the new Gaoian fleet could do significantly more than that. Stalking Blizzard was the fastest, and Daar’s flagship was only marginally slower. The Hunters pulled an extra fifty kilolights out when they realized they were being pounced on from two angles, but the Destroying Fury had some tricks on board that made a mere two hundred and fifty thousand times the speed of light look utterly trivial.
It fired a megalight drone. In seconds the remotely-operated vehicle flashed across parsecs, overhauled the Hunters and dropped a gravity spike that brought the fleeing trio to a brutal halt.
Seconds behind it, the two Gaoian ships effected a more dignified landing. Gilim stripped a whole ten percent off his own capacitor reserves to launch a hugely overpowered electronic warfare assault, but there would be no need to expend any more. Already the Hunters were drifting, tumbling, blind.
The Destroying Fury was not nearly so subtle. It crashed into their midst, caught the three ships in a knot of high-intensity forcefields and crushed them. Weapon racks crumpled like empty drink cans, sensor blisters flattened, hull plating buckled and split. The ships’ precious pressurized guts squirted out into vacuum in brilliant white plumes.
The two escorts, neither of which were large enough to be carrying any hostages, were compacted down into tiny, almost flawless spheres but the Broodship with its precious cargo was spared for the moment. With the prey thus crippled and held, Daar did something no sane being other than a Human had ever done to a Hunter ship—he boarded it.
Two minutes later, with a terse report of “Target secure,” it was over. Gilim noted to his satisfaction that the Kwmbwrw were now hauling ass as fast as their ships could go.
One of the Whitecrest officers on the bridge sent a message to the broadcasters. “Did you get what you need?”
“We need to record inside the broodship. The Great Father was very specific about that. Helmet-cam footage won’t be enough.”
The Whitecrest gave Gilim a questioning look.
“We have…two hours, before the Kwmbwrw arrive,” Gilim decided. “They might have questions if they find a film crew aboard that ship when they arrive, but I defer to the Great Father on the question of whether we care.”
The Whitecrest duck-nodded and set about arranging for a shuttle to take the broadcasters and their equipment over. Gilim let out a long breath and relaxed into his command chair. His body was fizzing with delight over what they’d just done, and the desire to rip, smash and claw at the Hunters some more.
His happy high fizzled out painfully a few minutes later when the first footage came back from the meat lockers.