The Long Shot Pt. 04

Then...

The penultimate frame.

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

The final frame.

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

Nothing.

Not even mist.

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

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

Hugh shook his head. "This might lead to a war."

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

"The Pantheon-" Heinlein started.

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

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

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

"Medtech's getting-" Hugh started.

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

All of her fellow prospectives chewed on that.

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

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

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

"Maybe it's a test?" Hornet suggested.

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

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

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

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

"Nothing," Hugh said.

"I found a real nice porn story about Starships, but no, nothing," K'iren said, dryly.

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

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

"Did you?" Heinlein asked.

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

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

WELCOME...

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

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

***

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

But she had never seen anything like this.

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

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

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

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

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

The Goddess smirked.

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

She pointed at the deck before Yetna.

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

Her ship.

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

She coughed, then choked out a wheezing: "What the fuck just happened?"

A hand grabbed hold of her, sweeping her from the ocean. Water dripped from her and a stunned, horrified voice spoke in her ear. "Oh my...Jesus Christ, I am so sorry, I didn't..." the Goddess was sounding just as shaken as she was, even as the Goddess flew and then darted down. She moved so fast, and yet, Yetna didn't feel a hint of wind on herself as she was deposited on the prow of a mongrel ship. The sailors of the Queen's realm gaped at her and the Goddess in equal measures. But the Goddess didn't stick around -- she zipped off and Yetna turned to watch as she dove into the water again and again.

"Well, don't just gawk, ladies!" an officer on the Queen's ship shouted. "We're rescuing them -- Imperial dogs or not!"

Slowly, shock turned to befuddlement, then disbelief, then...slow understanding. Over an hour, the Queen ships collected the surviving crew and the Goddess was waved down to the squadron's commander, and Yetna was transferred over. During that time, she managed to recall the seconds after the Goddess had pointed at the deck. There had been...a flash, then a roar, then she had been knocked silly by a gunpowder blast. But by watching her ship sink, she knew that the magazine had to have gone off.

How? She had no idea.

But the only grim piece of comfort she was able to fish from it all?

At least-

"Oh you have to be fucking kidding me!?" She exclaimed as she stepped from the boat that had been her unwilling home for the past hour to the squadron leader. Because there, in the center of the deck, surround by furious looking Queen's sailors and marines, lit by the sun and the light of a dozen males, was Stasi Lidara, her left arm splinted and her face bearing scorch marks from powder burns.

"I will be remembering that!" Lidara snapped.

Next to her was the Goddess, and next to the Goddess was the Queen's Chevalier, who was looking as if it had been her ship that had been blown to smithereens, not Yetna's. She was cradling her hands against her chest, her eyes wide and staring. The Goddess looked more guilty than any woman that Yetna had ever seen in her life. The squadron's commander floated away from his wife and shimmered into as much coherence as a man could make without this being lovemaking.

"Captain Yetna, your sword," the man said, his voice firm.

His wife, dressed in the Queen's uniform and bearing the rank-markings of an expert diver, stepped forward and held out Yetna's ceremonial cutlass. Yetna took it, giving the smallest of nods to the man, despite the fact that Imperial doctrine was that male captains were to be killed on sight.

"Well...today hasn't gone how any of us expected," the male captain said, quietly. "We've all lost more than we wanted, and we're all facing more than we expected, all thanks to disaster-"

"It wasn't a disaster..." the Goddess said, looking down at her feet. "I...I'm so sorry, Tul-"

The Chevalier stood and dove over the side of the ship. She swam deep and fast, vanishing into the waves. A few moments later, she emerged from the water and scrambled up onto the most distant Queen's ship. Yetna frowned at that, while the Goddess clenched her hand, then held it to her oddly flat chest. "I..." she continued. "I just wanted to scare you, Captain Yetna. Just to show you my power. I...chose a weapon, an x-beam and fired it at your feet. I...didn't realize it was so powerful and...that..."

Yetna closed her eyes. She clenched her jaw, then breathed out. "Canister shot," she said.

The strange word provoked confusion among the crew, and she explained -- despite the furious hissing and glaring from the Stasi: "They're new shot for our guns. They're made hollow, with explosives inside, that are made to explode when they get near an enemy ship. I had them prepared and ready to be loaded on my guns. They were under my feet."

The Goddess put her hand over her face.

"Well," the male said, quietly. "I am Captain Gon, and we are to make sail for the Queen's Crown."

"You will all die," the Stasi growled.

Later, Yetna would blame her concussion.

"Could someone please knock that bitch on the head and throw her overboard!?" She asked.

"No," Captain Gon said, his voice grim. "Unlike Imperials, we don't mistreat our prisoners."

Yetna groaned as Lidara glared daggers at her.

The sails caught the wind.

The Queen's flotilla sailed away from the bobbing driftwood and the smear of smoke that was all that was left of her ship.

***

Gyre looked out the window of his palatial guest rooms and onto the sweep of Queen's Crown -- and as he looked out there, he felt two warring emotions in his gut. The first was simple, gentle awe. He had never seen a city like this before. Of course, he had no memories of seeing other cities, so for all he knew, this was a bronze aged shithole that he'd have turned his nose up at before he landed here. But the other emotion, the one that kept him from smiling, that kept his fingers clenching on the stone. He only stopped when he heard the faint creak and realized...

He was cracking the stone.

He sighed, then turned his gaze back to the horizon. Queen's Crown was named because it matched the curved crest of the Queen's actual crown: A half circle of a city, built into layers that swept out from the moon shaped harbor that the city dominated. The piers thrusting from the beaches were absolutely chock full of ships -- fishing ships, trade ships, military ships. The center of the harbor, though, was dominated by a star shaped fortress that had high, flat walls and were covered, absolutely covered, with cannons aimed out to the distant horizons.

The city buildings themselves were made of pure, gleaming white stone that shimmered in the sun. The streets were broad and the city had to be the most agriculturally compact place that he had ever seen. Gardens and paddies were constructed, flush with homes and upon their roofs. Fruiting vines wound along pillars, and rice paddies were stuffed with growing crops, and the entire place was bustling with people. Men and women alike worked at various jobs -- and he watched the interplay between man and woman with fascination. Men could actually carry parcels here and there, so long as they were not overly heavy, and so the air was full of moving clouds of men. Women were at work at tasks that required strength and cohesion -- but many of them were assisted by men. Their glow illuminated the way, their eyes provided assistance, their heat relaxed muscles strained by efforts.

There was even hot water, piped through bronze tubes, that was provided by men using their natural abilities to serve the people.

Rap rap rap.

Gyre turned and saw that a court servant had come to his door and was smiling in at him. She was, like most of the women of this planet, absolutely lovely. Her skin was pure teal, with stripes of dark blue lining her features, giving her almost cat whiskers, accentuated by the fact she was dressed in a very sleek, very thin gown that looked faintly like cotton. If she stood in the right place, with the light behind her, Gyre could see right through that gown...

"Master Gyre," she said, bowing to him, the gown falling forward to reveal the curve of her generous breasts. "I have been sent by the queen to...serve you. My name is Chinsara."

Gyre adjusted his leggings. They were hastily tailored to fit him after he had arrived and made his first knee to the Queen. The old woman had accepted the story of his arrival with shocking equanimity, though she hadn't kept him around for the council meetings that had followed...but they had no idea that their secret council chamber had been as easily observed by him as if he had been in the same room. He could hear further than he thought possible, and his translation program was becoming able to turn even lip reading into a functional approximation. What was more, if he focused, he could change his vision...blurry glowing markers that showed heat, shimmering gauzy silver that let him look through sufficiently thin walls...

The only reason why he hadn't experimented with that more was...well...

He remembered the horrifying second after he had pointed at the ship. The knife to Tulon's throat had allowed his ROE to trigger. He had fired...and then...

"Serve me?" Gyre asked, trying to turn his thoughts to the hear and now.

Chinsara giggled. "Well, what she said is fuck his brains out if he asks it, I don't care, just make sure he likes us." She grinned, then cocked her head at him, her eyes narrowing. "I've never slept with a woman, though...but I have heard-"

"Whoa, uh, heh!" Gyre said, holding up his hand. "You don't have to have sex with me."

Chinsara pouted and then walked into the room, sitting her rump down on the bed. He noticed that she, unlike Tulon, had a tail -- a long, muscular tail that arched and ended in a pair of sweeping flutes that she slapped against the bed. "Well, then, that makes my job annoyingly easy. Don't you know the maxims -- a task done well is its best reward? But a task that cannot be done cannot be done well, thus, leaving me bereft of my reward." She drooped, then flopped onto her side, sighing loudly.

"I...are..." Gyre laughed. "You have me there." He walked to the bed, then sat down next to her. Since she was still laying on her side, this meant she could look up at him with her brilliant topaz eyes. She grinned and showed off her very sharp teeth.

"You know, it is very strange to meet a man that I can ravage..." She said, her voice soft.

"Oh?"

"Well, with most men, they can turn intangible if they really don't want it. Not that I ever would, ah, force a man to do anything..." she said, her voice playful, her clawed fingertip sliding along his legging. "But you're always solid, so I can...do..." She trailed off, looking up at him through her electric blue hair.

"So, we've gone from serving me in any way, to ravaging me?" Gyre asked.

Chinsara giggled, then pushed her palms under her, shoving herself up to her hands and knees. Gyre had to either look away or simply oggle her breasts as they almost popped free of her gown. He chose to admire the fresco of a woman slaying a mythological, huge manta ray on the wall. As he flushed, Chinsara continued. "I've been trained to submit to royal men who are visiting, but it's so easy to fall back into my natural habits. I can't help it, women are the dominant sex. It's just how things are."