The Long Shot Pt. 03

He walked past ruined buildings and heaped scrap and came, after a few minutes, to the site of the dropped object.

It was a cannon-ball.

Scrawled on it in glowing, luminescent paint, were words.

"...I have no idea what this says," he said.

But there was a very limited constellation of what it could be. Threats. Demands. Ransoms. He frowned, looking upwards.

How the fuck to get up there?

He felt the water around him shimmer. Bubble. Froth. He looked around himself, opening his mouth in confusion -- the frothing wasn't boiling. Instead, it was something far stranger. The bubbles appeared right against his hull...his skin...and then shot upwards, a few inches, before collapsing back into nothingness. The froth was so intense and only got more intense as he felt an energy growing within himself. It was as if his desire to go up had triggered something, but he had no idea what. There was a horrible sense of dislocation and loneliness and..

.

Sorrow?

He was supposed to have someone with him, doing this. Helping.

Then the froth vanished. The city around him vanished. The water roared past his ears, rippling and tearing as he shot upwards a thousand times faster than he had descended. He expected his ears to pop, his blood to boil with nitrogen narcosis (the fuck is nitrogen narcosis? An errant part of his mind wondered), but instead, he felt nothing but the exhilaration of...

He exploded from the water with a geyser spray of white and steam. His body shot up, hit the apex of his jump...and hung in the air, trembling. Water beaded along his feet and his shoulders, dripping from his fingers, only to be caught in an invisible shell that hung around his body like a second skin. The water there whipped upwards, past him, dripping into the air and then falling back down again, carried a few meters off by the prevailing wind that caused the sails to ripple and the flag of the Imperial ship to flutter.

Gyre felt a giddy thrill as he realized that, with a thought, he could skim forward, backwards, side to side in the air.

That thrill curdle as he saw the deck of the ship had several still dripping Imperial marines, holding a knife to the throat of Tulon, who had a ragged cut along her left arm and a blackened eye. Next to her, Xan was still in his life-sack, but someone had sliced a hole in the leather and another marine stood there with what was unmistakably a crude flamethrower -- the kind of weapon that you'd have to be absolutely insane to use on a ship, made as it was of a brass cylinder and a bellows and a second marine holding a lit torch with a very, very, very nervous expression.

One of the marines stepped away from the bunch and smirked at Gyre. She was in many ways Tulon's opposite. Where Tulon was tall and muscular, this woman was short and curvy. Where Tulon had the gray and white color of a shark, this woman was something more...tigerish, brown with black stripes. Her eyes were almond colored and her hair was tied back into a thick pony tail, which she was wringing free of water.

"So," she said, sounding remarkably casual considering his hovering in the air before her. "She wasn't lying. You re a Goddess."

Gyre frowned.

"My name is Captain Yetna," the curvy shark-woman said. "We have captured the Queen's woman, rescue is thirty minutes away." A flick of his eyes showed that the Queen's ships were piling on more sail, clearly trying to get closer, but the broadside of the Imperial ship aimed their way, and they were forced to slow and bank, trying to come at the ship from the flanks. The Imperials were already working at the windless to draw up their anchor.

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

***

Hornet Abernathy's face was still beat red by the time she and her fellow prospective arrived at the small glade where the other prospectives were waiting.

"I'm so sorry," she said, for the tenth time.

The huge wolf-like alien laughed. He really was remarkably similar to a wolf from Terra's antediluvian past, save for the fact he was the size of a small horse. Or, for all Hornet knew, a big horse. She had never seen a horse in anything but a recreation vid or a VR simstim. She knew that her head came just barely to the shoulder of his haunch, and that his head was almost the size of her entire torso. That made him, to her, a very, very, very big wolf.

His fur was midnight back. His eyes were golden.

And his name was Hugh.

"Nettie, honestly, I was fucking with you," he said, cheerfully as they stepped through the narrow ring of trees that separated glade from forest. "I had no clothes, no collar, no drones, and I poked your neck like a big dog. The only way I could have triggered your 'must pet' instinct more would be if I had a big bone in my mouth or was something utterly undomesticated, like a hyena."

Hornet's blush got harder -- and she clapped her hands, trying to sound like she knew how to talk to people. "Hello everyone!"

The three other prospectives in the glade all slowly looked over at the two of them. One of them was a Terran -- a male, but from a strand of Terrans that was so alien from Hornet that she barely recognized him. His hair was the color of a hydrogen rich gas giant's atmosphere, his eyes were the same color as a cloudy sky, and his skin had so little melanin that he was clouded by a wave of butterflies so thick that their wings interlocked and the outer edges of the mass were all that kept the entire aloft by flapping in perfect synchronicity. He was lounging on the mossy grass, his head propped up against a moss covered rock.

Next to him was a Trisk woman. She looked like her ethnicity could be traced right back to the Triskar homeworld: Bright red skin, dark red hair, blood red eyes, red-black horns, red tail, red tail barb, red claws, red lips, red tongue. She had gone a step farther, dressing herself in a red jerkin that was only slightly darker than her skin, with dark red-black buttons and black-black belt. Her legs were crossed under her and she was bent forward over her knees to let her tail sway in the air.

Next to her was a broad disk of glass that contained what looked like several full shovels of moss and fungal growths that had been dumped onto the glass container. There were broad mushroom heads, dead-man fingers that thrust from underneath curved, moldering caps, flutes of almost wing-like material that spread between narrow tubers. Under it all, though, just barely visible to a close examination, Hornet could see something that looked unsettling like a humanform figure.

The disk had a translator on it, which flickered as the mound of fungal growths said: "Hesitant Greeting: Hello fellow Starship prospect." After a short beat. "Calmly: My name is Rotting Carcass. Guarded Curiosity: What is your species?"

"She's Terran, like me," the strange looking Terran said, standing up.

"Glad to see his translator has the emotional setting set to frank," Hugh muttered in her ear, his breath warm and playful. Hornet shook her head, then offered her hand to the other Terran, trying to ignoring the creeping feeling that Rotting Carcass was giving her. She didn't know how, but the fungal moss was just radiating a mixture of contempt and disdain for her. It was all in the slow, steady movements of the mushroom caps that studded its body.

"The name's Heinlein Clarksworld," the man said, smiling wryly at her. "Orion Arm. You?"

"Hornet Abernathy," she said. "Also Orion Arm -- I came from SKJ."

"Carenwine," he said, grinning at her. She felt a little flutter of excitement.

The Trisk was still lashing her tail. Hornet regarded her nervously -- some Trisks took the old Terran/Trisk war way too seriously for something that was older than the Ancient American Empire. And hadn't even lasted as long! She held her hand out to her and the Trisk girl grinned slowly, showing off her fangs. Her tail lashed out and Hornet yelped, but didn't jerk her hand back in time. The needle tip of the Trisk's barbed tail slipped between her pointer and her middle finger, then withdrew, leaving her feeling the sense of passing danger as the Trisk stood.

"Amazing reflexes there," she crooned. "Or was that exceptional control..."

"What the frick!?" Hornet squeaked.

"I'd have thought a girl named Hornet would be more used to stingers," the Trisk said, her fangs glittering as her grin grew wider.

"K'iren, please, stop being a bitch for, like, five seconds?" Heinlein asked.

"No," K'iren said, then laughed. "Don't worry -- I wouldn't have done anything too bad to you if you got paralyzed." She licked her lips. "Unless you're into that..."

"Forgive K'iren," Heinlein said, quietly. "She did this to all of us."

"Ahem?" Hugh stepped forward, letting his bulk become apparent to the three others.

"Respectfully: You are quite an impressive canidform," Rotting Carcass said. "Curiously: What is your name?"

"Hugh," Hugh said. "Also Terran."

"Wait, you're Terran?" Hornet asked.

"My name is Hugh, Nettie," Hugh said.

"That's a Terran name?" Hornet asked, glancing at Heinlein.

"Your guess is as good as mine," Heinlein said, laughing. "Though, we have three Hs now. Think that might get confusing?"

"Nettie, Hugh, and Line!" Hugh said.

"You can't call me Line," Heinlein said, frowning.

"Sure, Line," K'iren said, then sat back down, crossing her legs again as she settled. "So, you guys think you're the last? We've been wiling our time away on paradise, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and so far, nothings happened. It's been k'fekt." She shook her head, and Hornet slowly settled herself down. The moss and grass actually grew beneath her rump, plushing up against her to give her a bit more back support as she let herself relax against the ground. Her palms slid along the grass and she felt her hands sink partially in. It was so comfortable it was almost alarming.

"Did you all meet Sting?" she asked.

"Yeah," Heinlein said. He whistled. "What a dame."

"I'll say," Hugh said, sitting his rump down next to Hornet. "Did you see those kill counts? She had, like, ten."

"Well, she was deployed against Voidbringers," K'iren said.

"Proud Assertion: Voidbringer combat is nothing to be impressed over," Rotting Carcass said. "My people have been attacked by Voidbringer shards no less than six times over the past one hundred years and we have dealt with them using only rocket forces and levies." Rotting Carcass' wing-like protrusions of fungal growth swept out, then snapped back again, enfolding his body. "Patriotic Fervor: My people's rocket forces are on par with Concord subline ships."

"Fighting a Voidbringer shard isn't the same as engaging actual Voidbringers, though," Heinlein said, shaking his head. "They're practically defunct by the time they hit this deep into the habitable zone. They're singularity intelligences, so they're real scary between galaxies, and harmless inside them."

"That's...not quite true," Hornet said, then blushed as everyone looked at her. She felt Hugh's tail bumping against her back, gently. She gulped, then barreled onward. "S-So, uh, okay, the Voidbringers have been attacking the galaxy for two centuries. They're extra-galactic -- most likely, they're from the Andromeda galaxy, or possibly the Magellanic clouds, based off their entrance into our space. You'd think that they'd be singularity intelligences, like the members of the Pantheon that have spun-up into real, actual super-beings. The question is: Why are they bothering to attack us? It'd be like...it'd be like me getting mad at some bacterium in a sewer five miles from our house. And not just like, bacterium in general, but specific bacterium. Like, I have a bone to pick with you, streptococcus cell nine billion and sixty three!" She shook her fist at the ground, as if she was this hypothetical person.

Realizing just how stupid she looked, she jerked her hand down -- but saw the rest of the prospectives were watching her. Rotting Carcass still looked like he didn't like her, but K'iren was actually regarding her with some interest now.

"A-Anyway, uh, if they're not singularitarians, then, um, they're capable of functioning in the habitable zone," Hornet said. "So, that makes me think that...um..."

"Yeah?" Heinlein asked.

"Um, have any of you read Nu-Fir's Abomination Unto God?" Hornet asked.

They all shook their heads, except for Rotting Carcass, who sprayed a fine patina of mold into the air. Which might have meant the same thing.

"Well. In that book, uh, Nu-Fir outlined the possibility of various perverse ways something could go from being just regular smart to being exponentially smart. There are the various kinds of simulation computations like Basilisks and Hellcrafters and Painspheres, but the worst possibility, the one in the last chapter, were Black Swans."

"I've heard that term before, but..." Heinlein shook his head. "Don't know what it means."

"A Black Swan is an event so far beyond our understanding that it cannot be predicted or planned for," Hornet said, nodding slowly. "There exists the possibility that anything we run into out there might be totally and completely alien. We can't understand it. We'll never understand it. If the Voidbringers are Black Swans, then they can be smart enough to make core-hardened technology, but still want to kill us all."

Silence filled the glade.

"...that was it?" K'iren asked, her tail stilling. "You had that whole build up to tell us that one of the answers was 'we have no fucking idea'?" She shook her head, then stood. "Thanks for the no prize, Nettie."

Hornet's entire face flushed. "W-Well, I..." she gulped, then looked down at her hands, her shoulders hunching. Heinlein scowled, but before he could speak, Rotting Carcass started to hover away, silently leaving the conversation.

"Sorry about them," Heinlein said, shaking his head as he stood as well, pushing himself up as his butterfly umbrella flowed around and then kept overhead. "Their worlds both require competition to even get to submit their applications to the Corps. They haven't ditched the attitude."

Hornet felt...absurdly like crying. Stars. She was...just...

"You okay?"

Hugh had asked it, his paw on her back.

"Yeah! Fine!" She stood up, hurriedly, brushing her hands along her rump -- but despite sitting on grass and moss, she didn't need to do anything to make herself clean. The grass had actually withdrawn itself the instant she stood. "I'm gonna find a place to, uh...set up camp, I guess?"

Hugh stood -- but Hornet fled, as quick as she could.

***

Simply needing a camp did not, in most worlds, cause one to be formed.

On Found, Hornet stopped walking after a half hour of sniffling, whimpering and wiping at her face and muttering under her breath about how stupid she was, and found herself standing before a small lean to made of artfully decorated, huge leaves that looked as if they had been harvested and put in place by a collection of sleek, foxlike critters that were still working. Just before she stepped right up, the last two were using their teeth to drag something dark brown against some leaves -- and then as they scampered off, flames burst to life inside of a collection of carefully placed stones.

Fire.

Hornet sat down with a whump before the lean too, blinking, and then saw that the interior of the lean to had a small honey-comb that was hanging from the roof of the lean to, with a collection of softly glowing insects nestled against it, each one very fluffy and soft looking. They cast a pale blue illumination, and there was a collection of blankets made of leaves and pillows of humped up moss. The whole thing looked beautiful and shockingly comfortable.

Hornet sniffled then closed her eyes. She bonked her head forward against her knees and tried to make herself feel less sad. But for some reason, screwing up her eyes and thinking the words 'stop being sad' didn't actually do anything. She kept thinking of her nervousness, K'iren's words, of how powerful and confident Sting was.

She had had that confidence.

That tiny spark of confidence.

It had been there, and then it had flickered out and died the instant she had set foot on Found.

And what had she used it?

She'd shagged her teacher.

To be fair, she didn't regret screwing Professor Leylin. Especially since, well, she'd dropped out of school immediately after, so it hadn't been a violation of ethics or anything. At least, she had hoped it wasn't a violation of ethics. She lifted her head.

"Shit," she said, quietly.

Crack.

The sound of a branch cracking under a heavy paw, the flickering firelight, the wind in the trees, the stars overhead, all of it screamed through Hornet's nerves. Ten thousand years seperated from the homeworld, and she was still, at the end of the day, a highly trained ape. She leaped to her feet and swung around, half reaching for a weapon she didn't have. The dark shape in the shadows loomed huge -- then padded forward to reveal the concerned face and golden brown eyes of Hugh. Hornet's shoulders relaxed and she breathed out a long sigh -- and felt even stupider.

"Hey," she said.

Hugh chuckled, nervously. "For just a second there, I was worried you had a ripper gun or something." He walked forward, his huge paws crunching the moss under foot. He bumped against her back, then nosed at her, using his bulk to actually sweep her off her feet. She squeaked, then slid down and landed with her rump on the grass and her back sprawled against his immenseness. His fluffy fur was so soft and silky that she felt her sinking into it like she was being swaddled in a comforter. She wriggled, resisting the comfort, but Hugh leaned his head over and lapped his massive tongue against her cheek. "No getting up until you feel better."

"Auuuugh!" Hornet squalled. His tongue had been broad and warm and soft -- and also very wet. Her cheek now was slippery with his slobber. She laughed, despite herself, and then shoved at his head. "Hugh!"

"Do you feel better?" he asked.

"I...I don't know..." she admitted. "I'm just scared that Starship Corps are going to reject me."

Hugh nodded. "Everyone's scared, Nettie. Heinlein is scared. K'iren is scared. Rotting Carcass is scared. I'm bloody terrified." His tail slapped against her side as he wagged it. She brushed her hand along his haunch. "Being a Starship is a huge deal. Like..." he paused. "A single Starship, in the right place, at the right time, can save whole sectors. Not just solar system, sectors."

Hornet nodded.

"It's a huge responsibility, but it's more than that..." Hugh sighed. "They...they say that Starships can bathe in the hydrogen oceans of gas giants. They say they walk through E-space, able to see the whole thing without needing filters or interpreters or protection glass to keep themselves from going insane. It's..." He chuckled. "Gods, it sounds shallow, but I want it so bad."

Hornet smiled. "That's what got me, you know?"

"Hm?"

"When I was...nine, I think," she said. "I was taken on my first E-liner. I wanted to see E-space without the protection glass, and my mom, she told me about how only Starships could do that. I went and I started reading everything I could. I read about them all..." She shook her head.

"Did you have a favorite?"

Hornet's cheeks heated. "Y-Yeah, I mean, who doesn't."

"Who?" Hugh asked.

Hornet's cheeks heated more. To have a favorite Starship was super common. It was also generally accepted to be a kind of childish thing. Like, you could have a favorite Starship into adulthood. Some adults had, like, whole walls of action-figures and holos of their favorite Starships. But, like. They were considered a bit eccentric. Maybe a little childish. Her shoulders lifted and her hands wrung in her lap. "Tell me yours first," she said.