Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  The Locker had been mighty quiet lately. His friends there knew something was going on but didn't know what it was. MacAdams was more than curious enough to tether together and step over to her ship.

  "Welcome aboard." Kansas spread her arms to the bridge, which had been redone with baroque wooden chairs and silver candelabras that flickered so much like real candles that MacAdams wouldn't have known they were fake if he hadn't smelled beeswax versions at Wailan. Kansas wore a velvet coat like the captain of a tall-masted ship, black fabric with gold buttons and trim.

  "You look like you're gunning for empress."

  "Don't tempt me. Grab a chair."

  MacAdams seated himself in something that could have passed for a throne. He had the sudden and unshakable suspicion it had been a throne and Kansas had "liberated" it from an Earthside museum or palace.

  "What's up?" he said. "Just in the neighborhood and thought you'd say hello?"

  "I've been doing some thinking. About the recent past and our future from here. Though it was fun, in its way, we weren't prepared for the war at all. Not in the slightest."

  "I have the feeling that's usually how it goes with alien invasions."

  "No, that's how it goes for people who've gotten complacent and weak-willed. I don't want to let that happen again. I want to create a standing defensive force."

  "Congratulations. You just invented the navy."

  Kansas rolled her eyes and snapped her fingers at a servant, who bustled off. "You ever hear of the Spartans?"

  "Greeks. Soldiers. Among the best there ever were."

  "Yeah, I figured you'd know them. I've been doing some reading—try not to choke—and it turned out the Spartans were the baddest guys in Greece because fighting's pretty much all they did. When you were born, they took a hard look at you. If they thought you were weak, they threw you out to the wolves. Literally, like they put you out on a hill to get eaten. But if they thought you were strong, they started training you to be a soldier. From birth.

  "All these years of progress later, how do we train our soldiers? Most nations and companies won't let you into their armed forces until you're twenty. We start sooner at the Locker—which is no coincidence that we kicked their asses—but we still don't start until the teens. That's way too late. We don't have a true professional fighting class.

  "I aim to rectify that. I'm going to build a new fleet and I'm going to crew it with the best pilots, sailors, and marines we've ever seen. A fleet that can protect those of us on the fringes from planets and corporations—and from aliens, too."

  "That ain't a bad idea," MacAdams allowed. "Just as long as you make sure that you don't become the very thing you're trying to protect the Locker from."

  Kansas smirked. "I'll never let that happen. And you won't, either. Because you're going to be the first headmaster of my new academy."

  MacAdams swung up his head. "I can't do that."

  "Like hell you can't. You're one of about four people total who fought in the fleet actions and down on Earth. Not to mention all you did against FinnTech and Valiant. You've got more combat experience than anyone alive and you're the greatest hero the Locker has ever had. You're the perfect choice to train our soldiers."

  "And I'm telling you I can't do it."

  "What, now that you've got all that money from Benez, you're set for life? This is way more important than money!"

  He flexed his left hand. "If you know about the Spartans, you must know about the Romans."

  "Not really. What'd they do?"

  "They conquered an empire a hundred times bigger than the Spartans ever held. One that lasted for nearly a thousand years. And when the best of its generals and rulers finished all they'd set out to do, you know what they did?"

  "Crushed their enemies so hard they had to clean little bits of enemy-juice out from under their toenails?"

  "They stepped down and they went home. They went back to their farms. To live out the rest of their lives in peace and quiet." He clenched and unclenched his hand, watching the tendons pull, the nub where Enspach had taken his left index finger. "I'm done soldiering, Kansas."

  "This is such a waste." Her cold blue eyes stared at him and he would have sworn to Ares and Athena themselves that she was about to kidnap him and enslave him into tutoring her soldier-babies. "Yeah, well, you know what else all those old bastards did?"

  "What?"

  "They got so bored staring out at their wheat fields they wrote book after book about what their lives used to be like back when they were having fun. If you don't want to be a part of things anymore, I won't put a gun to your head. Even though I could. But what you don't get to do is get old and die and let all your knowledge die with you. There are hostile species out there, MacAdams. And there always will be. The people who fight them need to know what you learned."

  "Don't know," he said. He'd been ready to refuse her, but her appeal to later generations had hit something in him. Their ancestors who'd fought the Swimmers had made sure to preserve and collect as much about the era as they could. That was Dark Solutions' entire job, in fact.

  And without DS, they all would have died in the invasion. The only humans left alive would have been those the Lurkers selected to hunt for sport.

  He folded his arms. "I'm going to be pretty busy with my new property."

  "Don't you worry about that. It's going to be five years until my first batch of soldiers can even read."

  He grunted, then began to laugh. "Guess I'll need something to do at night. You'll get your book. But these trainees of yours won't believe half the things I put in it."

  ~

  "Countdown to the crossing," Ced said. "In ten. Nine."

  The irony of the countdown was that the transmission, historical as it was, had actually been made more than a day ago. But as Rada watched the ship creep across the massive screens of the Hive, the scale of the lag—a full light-day—helped her to begin to understand just how immensely far away Ced had traveled.

  "Six. Five. Four."

  There was, of course, no physical line or barrier for the ship to cross over. Or anything to visually distinguish that point in space from the millions of miles that lay behind it. Yet it marked the invisible line where the solar wind gave out and was replaced with the gases that lay between the stars.

  "Two," Ced said. "One. Zero. Hive Command, I have left the Solar System."

  Rada was already on her feet and so she jumped clear of the ground, lifting her fist in the air. "We did it. We did it! We left the System!"

  Next to her, Winters grinned. "Congratulations. Not to rain on your parade, though, but I think someone from the First Space Age probably beat you to this about a thousand years ago."

  "Yeah, but they didn't have to worry about murderous aliens. I mean, until they did. Anyway, they never got a manned flight anywhere near it. They hadn't even set foot on Mars."

  "Turning back around, Hive Command," Ced said. "See you by Christmas."

  He began the laborious process of turning his ship sunward: he was currently going faster than any human had ever traveled, and the turn would take a while. It was almost a shame to bring him back when he had that much momentum banked, but his ship was only outfitted for a few months of travel. The first step was to prove that it was safe to leave and that nothing was going to shoot you if you tried. Crafting ships that could get somewhere was still a long ways away.

  "Thank you for inviting me to witness this milestone." Winters shifted his feet. "So. What's next for the Hive?"

  Rada motioned to the immensity of the System. "We stick probe after probe out there until a space butterfly can't flap its wings without us knowing about it. No more sneak attacks. No more aliens skulking around in the darkness. It's time to claim our space as our own." She glanced at him. "What about you?"

  "Colonies. We'd like to have the first one on its way by the end of the year."

  "But that's only a few weeks from now. We literally just left the System for the first time
. You can't possibly have colonies ready."

  "We're sure there will be setbacks. But if there's anything the Second Invasion has taught us, it's that we can't afford to wait until we're ready. We have to push onwards, always, and make ourselves ready."

  "When you say 'setbacks,' you mean when something goes wrong, thousands of colonists will die."

  Winters swiveled his head away from the screen and gave her a long look. "After everything we have been through, do you truly think we can afford to hold back our species out of the fear of losing a few thousand lives?"

  "No."

  "Good. Because the alternative is to risk extinction if and when someone comes for us for a third time."

  "Do you really think they'll work? Your colony ships?"

  "We will learn to make them work." Winters snorted. "You almost sound as though you'd volunteer to join them."

  "With the amount of responsibility I have here, not a chance." Rada crossed her arms. "Space colonies would be great and all, but you guys do realize that Dark Solutions has already saved humanity, right? Why don't you seem to want any credit for that?"

  "You know that's not why we do what we do."

  "But if people knew what you'd done, they'd help you with the colonies. You could start spreading them much faster."

  "Our work isn't just about the colonies. We also have to be ready to protect Earth—and every other planet and station where people have made their homes. That work is best done in secret." He smiled at her. "People shouldn't know what we do. When the time comes again for them to fight for their survival, we don't want them to think they can rely on us to save them."

  Rada watched Ced's flight a little longer, then prepped the Tine. She launched for Earth. The ship had been restored and upgraded with new designs based on what they'd learned studying the wrecks of Lurker ships and her acceleration was so effortless she was already annoyed at the prospect of having to land.

  She was halfway between the Belt and the orbit of Mars when an orange dot appeared on screen.

  "Contact," her computer said loudly.

  Rada activated her missiles, readying her drones for launch. The ship had appeared out of nowhere in a way human ships couldn't. While the Tine had been fitted with DS' new mirror armor, the reflection defenses were far from perfect and they still hadn't worked out how to build lasers for themselves. All she had was missiles and bullets.

  But the ship on the screen wasn't the spikes and dishes of a Lurker. It was the segmented cylinder of a Swimmer.

  "Hello," a voice came through, pitched too loudly, like a local trying to get through to a foreigner. "This is the person who is named by Rada Pence?"

  "That's me," she said. "Who are you?"

  "You will come to our ship."

  There had been no contact between humans and Swimmers in the year since the war. In all that time, no one credible had even seen a Swimmer. Rada made sure all her recording devices were running—and ready to broadcast if anything funny happened—and drew close to the columnar vessel. The ships' computers spoke back and forth, coordinating maneuvers. The Tine attached to the larger ship like a remora hitching a ride on a shark.

  She crossed over. The airlock was lit with alien symbols and the controls looked to be motion-based. The lock cycled and the door irised open.

  Despite knowing better, she had expected to walk into a nightmarish bio-ship, but the room on the other side was off-white, clean, and empty. In fact, it didn't look that much different from the crashed and preserved Swimmer vessel they had explored on Nereid all those years ago. Her suit indicated that there was a little more nitrogen and a little less oxygen than she was used to, but that it was safe to breathe. She unsealed her helmet and tipped it back, getting a waft of ocean.

  Claws scraped faintly. The Swimmer was right there, looming over her like the big scare from every horror movie ever made about them. Its eyes bulged and small pincers and tentacles moved along its body. Rada's heart felt ready to burst, but she kept her face blank.

  "I'm Rada," she said. "Thank you for inviting me aboard."

  "I can be called Arlo," the Swimmer's device said, translating the gesticulations of its tentacles. "I asked you here to speak of those you call the Lurkers, and to speak of your past and also your future."

  "I tried to talk to you after you helped us win the last battle. Why come to me now? A year later?"

  The alien tilted its long head. "This has its ties in what I am here to tell. For there are rules of contact between one species and another."

  "Rules? Made by who?"

  "Those who are greater than any of us. The rule that applies is that there cannot be contact between star sailors and a young species until the young species has sent one of its own beyond the borders of its home system. This is what you have just done, and so we may now speak."

  "Are these rules why the Lurkers were so intent to keep us confined to our system? So that you couldn't speak to us?"

  The Swimmer clenched its foreclaws together and spun them in a tight circle. "Yes and for similar reasons. Those you call the Lurkers are not far advanced from yourself, and thus knew they had a brief window to strike you and prevent you from expanding into what they saw as their own."

  "That's why their force wasn't completely overwhelming. They didn't have time to wait. But let's back up. If we haven't gone beyond our own system, it isn't legal to speak to us—but it's legal for the Lurkers to try to exterminate us?"

  Arlo wagged its head up and down. "It was that such actions were not legal and could not be done. But there has been a change. Now those who have not tested the ocean past their home island can be attacked and killed and conquered."

  "Are you saying the law was recently changed? By who?"

  "That is not yet known."

  "Will the Lurkers attack again?"

  "That is also not known."

  "Then what exactly can we do to protect ourselves?"

  "You have been attacked twice: first by us, then by them. Both times you have defended yourselves. If you choose to not protect yourselves when a third attack comes, ask yourself if what you have become still deserves to survive."

  "We're doing everything we can," Rada said. "But clearly there are other forces out there. Ones we don't know anything about. Will you help us? Will you ally with us?"

  "There are ways in which we already have."

  "Like the technology you slipped to us in secret. And when you bailed us out at the battle. Was any of that legal?"

  The Swimmer wagged its head side to side. "It was not and it must be kept secret. But that is not what I mean when I say that we already swim together as allies. Come."

  It pivoted on its limbs and scuttled into a hallway, moving smoothly forward. It stopped at a tall set of doors and wiggled a tentacle over a pad. The doors slid to the sides. They stood at the top of a large bridge. The room was arranged like the seating in an arena or stadium, with terraced workstations leading down to a central stage. Rada had a sense of deja vu, knowing she'd seen something like this before but not knowing where.

  Arlo descended to the stage and swiveled its orange-sized eyes toward Rada. "I have brought you a message. This message was recorded some time ago but it was not to be delivered until this time. What will be seen was to have been kept secret from you and your people, but the time for it to be secret is now over, and you may share the contents of this message as you please."

  "What exactly are you about to tell me? Was the Earth flat all along?"

  "Watch."

  The Swimmer dug into a pouch on its bandolier and removed a second device. It gestured over the screen.

  A six-foot-tall oval of blue-white light glowed from the middle of the stage, causing Rada to take half a step back. The hologram cohered into the outline of a person, and then into a man about thirty years old. He was skinny and his brown hair hung into his eyes. He was grinning a bit, shy but also like he knew something you didn't. He was standing on a slope of deep blue grass.


  "Hey everyone." He lifted his hand and waved. He seemed to be looking right at Rada. He was speaking English, but his accent was so strange Rada leaned her head closer. "This is kind of weird for me, because if you're seeing this, I've probably been dead for a real long time. My name is Ness Hook. I was born in America in the last generation before the Panhandler. Needless to say it's been an interesting life."

  "Stop." Rada felt like she might pitch forward. "Ness. Ness Hook. That's Weirdness!"

  The Swimmer paused the hologram. "I do not know who that is."

  "He's the one who befriended the Swimmer. Sebastian." Her eyes grew even wider. "People used to say that when the Swimmers left, Weirdness went with them. I never believed it. Nobody did. But he did, didn't he?"

  Arlo gazed down at her. Rather than speaking, the Swimmer resumed the hologram.

  "Funny," Ness said, smiling with half his mouth. "It just occurred to me that something awful might have happened back there and there's no one left to get this. That would mean I'm just here babbling to myself. I don't much like that idea, though, so I'm just gonna go on like everything's okay and you're still building yourselves back to what we once had.

  "There's three main things I need to tell you. The first is this: the Dovon—that'd be the Swimmers—they aren't your enemy. Given the way the war wrapped up, you probably already know that, but again, if you're hearing this, that means it's been a real long time since then. And time has a way of devouring things. So if you do think they're horrible monsters, well, the ones that attacked us kind of were, but they're not the ones running things anymore.

  "Here's the second thing. You might have figured this one out by now, too. But the Dovon, they're not the only ones out here. Not by a long shot. In fact, there's so many damn species you'd think somebody seeded the galaxy with them. Anyway, if you think the Dovon are bad, you should see some of the other guys. You need to be ready for them. Like right now, whenever now is. The Milky Way is big and it's scary, and if you want to survive in it, you got to be big and scary, too.