This Starry Deep

by Adam P. Knave

  “It-it isn’t what you think,” Hodges insisted. Sweat beaded on his forehead. I tried to tell myself I didn’t enjoy the sight of it. I did.

  “Then what was it?” I asked.

  “The invasion was coming. Planets had gone dark. We knew they were out there—”

  “And so you called me up,” Jonah said.

  “But you said no!” Hodges tried to draw in on himself out of fear. “If you had just said yes—”

  Jonah laughed again and slapped Hodges in the face, hard. “So you kidnapping Shae is my fault?”

  “You should’ve said yes!” Hodges yelled. His fear turned to anger, “But you were stubborn and left me no choice! Don’t you see that? The Council is weak, they didn’t want to believe there was any real threat! I had to get you involved, but you said no. So I thought, and realized that you would chase your wife.”

  “And then what, huh?” Jonah raged, grabbing Hodges by the shoulders. “What then?”

  “We were going to let her go, eventually—”

  “Dead,” I cut in, “I assume. Made to look like the Tsyfarians had me the whole time?”

  “What choice did I have? We needed to fight back!”

  “Wait,” Jonah said, letting go of Hodges, “when I did show up, you still didn’t commit enough forces to possibly ever win.”

  “If we lost, with you involved, the Council would have no choice but to commit to the fight.”

  “You tried to make sure we’d lose?”

  “We would have! Admit it, you all know it! If you hadn’t worked it out, if your…your son hadn’t…it would’ve worked!”

  “So,” Jonah said slowly, “your plan was to toss a small battle fleet down the drain, just cast them into the fire, and me and Shae with them, because you wanted to score points with the Council and make sure I was out of the way. This was seriously your plan?”

  “After I took your wife—”

  “My name is Shae. I’m right here, your little Plan B,” I said, drawing closer.

  “Yes, yes, after that, what choice did I have?”

  “So all the men and women who died out there, you’re trying to say this is my fault?” Jonah swallowed hard.

  “If you’d just have said yes in the first place,” Hodges said, growing a bit of bravery, “this all could’ve been avoided.”

  “Did you try talking to them?!” Jonah suddenly raged.

  “We tried the normal channels and there wasn’t time for anything else!”

  “And I was able to get on their ship and talk to them and find out what’s really going on. Where in your plan was that attempt even discussed? What made you think hinging your plan on throwing your own men to the wolves was ever going to be a good idea? What in the known universe made you think you’d get away with this?”

  I hadn’t seen anger like this bubble to the surface in Jonah in decades. Not since the Artesian Battles. I still wanted Hodges’ head on a pike, but I needed Jonah to be calm as well. “The important thing is,” I said slowly, “Hodges thought he meant well.”

  “We should let him live for that? Thousands have died, baby. On both sides. Both. And it could have been prevented if they’d just talked. Or if, I don’t know, someone other than a complete psychotic imbecile was in charge.”

  “They’re incredibly stupid and sure, Hodges meant to kill me and make it look like the Tsyfarians. And soldier, we’ll dismember them soon enough. But right now we have to stop the war for good, no?”

  Jonah turned to me, eyes full of incredulity. “Wait, now you want me to listen to this idiot and let him keep sucking air? It isn’t even like I ever gave him a reason to want us dead!”

  “It’s just for a while,” I admitted, “long enough to do our jobs. We’ll need his access codes, I bet.”

  “Oh, I could get those,” he said, and he flashed a grin. It wasn’t a nice or pretty expression.

  “If I could just—”

  “Shut up, Hodges,” we both said at once.

  “Mom? Dad? Can we at least make sure this room isn’t flooded by security first?” Good, smart Mud, thinking ahead.

  “Right,” I said, before Jonah could speak. “Hodges, call off security.”

  Hodges nodded and did so, picking up the headset he’d dropped earlier. “We’re gonna need a few biologists, some med techs, and a whole lot of cooperation,” Jonah said. Hodges nodded again and kept muttering into his headset.

  Mud unbolted and stepped away from the door, reluctantly, and lowered his weapon. I pulled my own weapon away from Hodges and stuck it in my belt. Jonah stood, fists still clenched.

  “There’s still the matter of a bit of kidnap, and, from the look of it, torture,” he said softly.

  “Oh, no, soldier,” I told him, “the wounds are self-inflicted. There are times you need to do a little damage to get out of a tight spot.”

  “Why is it,” he said, softening, “those times always seem to center on you?”

  “Luck. Planning. Style.”

  “Mom! Dad! Flirt later. Save the world now?” Mud said, shaking his head at us. Poor thing, we embarrassed him. But he was right, we needed to focus.

  “Regardless, the kidnapping,” Jonah said.

  “We’ll deal with him later,” I promised him, “but Mud is right.”

  “Fine. Hodges, you hear that? You have a bit longer to live. Now get those people here.”

  The room filled quickly, fear being a great motivator. Jonah cleared the wreckage of the broken chair and everyone sat around the planning space. Jonah proceeded to tell us what we were up against. The bird people who weren’t birds. The migration and the problem inherent in it.

  Everyone looked interested. This was a problem that, under normal conditions, would result in years of research. Careers would be made on the studies done and papers written. Under normal conditions. This was the calm of the storm, though. We sat right in the eye, and chances were it would pass quickly.

  I grit my teeth as everyone discussed what could be done, tossing time frames around that were so unfeasible I wanted to laugh. A med tech came by with fresh bandages and painkillers for me. I took half the dosage suggested; I thought keeping sharp sat further up the scale of necessity than feeling no pain. It still helped.

  Out of all of us, Mud looked the most pensive. He had something brewing in his mind, but I didn’t know what. Hopefully he’d come up on the right side of a solution. Someone had to, and this room of brains didn’t seem like it could in anything like the allotted time.

  “All right!” Jonah barked out, stopping the discussion. “We’re getting nowhere and we don’t have time for that, do we?” No one spoke. Jonah looked at me and I nodded. I knew where he was about to go.

  “So here’s what we’re gonna do. Hodges, get on the line with the Council. Explain to them exactly why they need to respond to this, and not with guns. Don’t mention our little personal problems, we’ll get to those as we go. For now, focus. This is your chance to do this right.” Hodges nodded and actually put his headset on, instead of just holding it to his head. He might be worth keeping alive after all.

  “Someone find me Mills. I’m going to need a liaison, ongoing. He’ll do the job well.”

  “Soldier—”

  “I won’t keep him, baby,” Jonah said, “but you know he’s right for this.”

  “Fine.”

  “And, baby, do me a favor and unlock their comms, huh?”

  I laughed.

  “Also, you med tech guys and science division folk, open a channel to the Tsyfarians and compare notes. We might not have anything ourselves, but they know their biology better than we do, Lord knows. Let’s see if something they know already sparks something worthwhile.”

  People started to move, taking his orders without any more questions. I’m never sure how much Jonah knows that he does that to people. How much was intentional and how much he just assumed as part of the natural order. I guess it doesn’t matter, in the long run. It’s still something to watch, ev
ery time.

  “Shae, I need you to work with Bushfield. Call sign Deep Water. She’s out in the thick of it, and the shooting’s stopped but she’ll want tactical reassurance and ideas. You’re our best bet.” I nodded. Truthfully, Jonah outstripped me on battlefield tactics, but he’d be busy.

  I checked myself and thought about it. No, on normal tactics: yes, he outclassed me. Desperation and pulling a rabbit out of an empty hat, though - he was right. The answers I came up with alongside this Bushfield might not be pretty, but I could promise they’d work.

  “What about me?” Mud asked his father. He was the only person there with no specific job.

  “You and me are going to go for a walk, and you’re going to tell me whatever it is that you’ve been chewing on this whole time. I don’t know what it is, but I know you, Newt—”

  “Dad!”

  “Mud. I know you. You have something close to an answer. We’re gonna need it. Let’s go. Everyone. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 34 - Mud

  DAD’S HAND CLOSED over my shoulder as we left the room together. There were guards posted outside the door and I started to reach for my gun. I stopped when they saluted my father and moved aside. Not even thirty minutes ago they were trying to take me and Mom down, and now we were back to saluting and supposed to be all right with that?

  Times like this I didn’t envy my parents. This was their world, not mine. I liked to operate small and solo. The military, with all of their rules and quick turns, just wasn’t for me. Holding a grudge wasn’t always a bad thing, and operating by myself was just all-around simpler.

  We wandered, Dad and I, for a few minutes in silence. He steered me clear of crowded spaces and waited until we seemed alone before he spoke. “So what do you have for us, Newt?”

  “Dad,” I said, holding in a sigh, “I’m not a kid anymore. You can use my name.”

  “You sound like me. And you’re right. Mud. What’ve you got?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know.”

  “Nothing, or you don’t know?” he asked. “Because you spent that whole time obviously chewing over a thought or two. This is the time to speak up.”

  I rolled over my thoughts slowly. He was right, if there was an idea I should be open about it, but I knew where it would lead and really didn’t want to have to go there. No other choice I could see, though. “The Hurkz,” I said.

  “What about them?” He raised an eyebrow at me, not seeing where I was pointing yet.

  I stopped and leaned against a wall. “They’re…we’re reptiles, too. Sort of. Almost.”

  “You think the Hurkz have something that could help?”

  “I’ve been trying to think. But, you know, it isn’t as if I spend a lot of time with them, or ever have. They sort of don’t enjoy my company, don’t forget.”

  “No, of course. But still, that might be a good way to point a search. The Hurkz are the best-known amphibian species. Is that close enough to what the Tsyfarian are? I don’t know.”

  He tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling. He did that a lot. In his head, I know he saw stars, not tiles. It was how he thought when he had a strange problem to sort out. Or when he had to count to ten to calm down after you’ve set fire to the couch.

  Dad keyed his comm unit and asked to be routed to the biologist meeting with the Tsyfarians. I guess he wanted to sit in on it. He nodded to no one and smiled at me. “Come on, Mud. Let’s get you involved in this.”

  We wandered back the way we came, hit an access shaft along the way, and went up a level. I could already see the guards standing in front of a door and, correctly, assumed that was our destination.

  Inside the room, eight scientists of various specialties sat around a table facing a large screen. On the screen, a life-sized vid feed of what had to be the Tsyfarians looked back. They’d assembled their own collection to join in. The whole room went quiet as we entered.

  “Hey, Tslakog! How’re you holding up?” Dad said, loudly, pulling out two chairs and dropping into one of them. I sat in the other, slowly, unsure of myself.

  “Jonah, it is good to see you,” Tslakog said, “you were correct, our two races may yet find a solution that will spare many lives.”

  “Good. Stopped the fleet easily enough, huh?” Dad smirked as he said it, knowing that the human fleet still stood on alert due to the increased proximity of the Tsyfarian fleet, which had been his fault in the first place.

  “Of course. We can stop as easily as we can speed in flight,” Tslakog said proudly, “but this is not our purpose here.”

  “Sorry,” Dad said, looking around the table. He caught the eye of a tech and nodded. “Catch me up quick as you can, will you? My kid here, Mud, needs to be in on this. He’s Hurkz and thinks that may help us. I’m inclined to agree.”

  They got us caught up fairly quickly. Nothing much had happened, really. The basic problem of how to allow the Tsyfarians to deviate from their known route didn’t feel like it could be worked. Too many planets in every direction with life, and those that weren’t wouldn’t sustain the Tsyfarians anyway.

  How to get them enough food to not need to raid planets was the current focus. The major issue there was whether anyone could provide that amount of food fast enough. Tslakog remained honest, and you could see some of his friends didn’t enjoy it. The gist of it was simple - if a source of food wasn’t found within a few days, the fleet would have no choice but to raid again, or perish.

  Nothing could grow enough food at the speeds needed, much less harvest it and transport it. This was a purely useless train of discussion. I looked at Dad, but he had that far-away gaze he got when listening to something in his headset instead of in the room. He muttered something and refocused on the goings-on.

  We continued to discuss our options, getting into Tsyfarian biology. Their consumption rates were slightly higher than the human species’. That only made everything harder. I kept thinking over Hurkz biology - what I knew of it, past my own - to see if something stuck out, but so far nothing did.

  While we were hashing out a possible plan to land the Tsyfarians on a growth planet and ferry them along their route in smaller batches, a guy I’d never seen before came in and walked over to Dad. They talked quickly and then the guy went out again. Dad looked at me and nodded. “Mills,” he said, as if that meant anything. Oh, right, his assistant.

  “Well, people,” my father said, looking around, “that was a report from every other angle of this mess.”

  The room drew silent as everyone wound down to listen to the state of things.

  “The Council is fighting back, but Hodges is doing his best to bring them around,” he said. “Carefully,” he added, “so that they don’t know the extent of the problems we’ve had. We don’t want them deciding a war is the right answer. Shae and Deep Water are working out a plan to keep both fleets moving, as slowly as possible. We can’t do a full shut down. They’ve worked out a sluggish route that will allow the fleets to travel and keep the engines hot but not come near any planets.” He looked at the screen with Tslakog. “They’re also making sure the fleets don’t stray far enough from your route to cause any panic or problems.”

  Tslakog nodded his thanks. Everyone around the table just listened and made notes. Many of them looked relived. As if what Dad said he had invented himself. He controlled the room without trying.

  I shook my head, admiring the effect but not getting drawn into it. When you’ve seen the man sing songs from your cartoons as a kid it stops working as well, I guess. I thought, instead, about the problem at hand.

  There was something gnawing at the back of my brain. A fact, a memory, that felt connected to this. Something I’d learned the last time I was on the Hurkz home world. I’d overheard a mention of some plan of theirs. A long-range plan. What was it?

  I kept my brain working on it while I refocused on the conversation around me. One of the Tsyfarian scientists was going on about a plant he had heard stories of. “When I was but a c
hild,” he said, “there were tales of a root that would suspend all functions for days at a time.”

  Another Tsyfarian we couldn’t see scoffed audibly at the idea. One of our scientists offered up the concept of true hibernation, not the process the Tsyfarians used that still required full feeding tubes. Humans hadn’t worked out long-term suspended animation yet, but they’d come close. Closer than the Tsyfarians, at least, and maybe that would be enough.

  The heart sizes and glandular differences were too varied, though. Everyone seemed to realize it, but kept working it out just in case. Which is when it hit me.

  “Hey, wait a second!” I blurted out. Everyone stopped to look at me, confused. I just carried on, heedless of the looks. “The Hurkz have hibernation tech, I think.”

  “You think?” asked one of our techs. “How much of a guess is this?”

  “When I was on the Hurkz home world last, I heard two people mention it. They were being sent to explore a distant world and they were nervous about using the new hibernation technology. They, I remember now, they mentioned that the technology worked fine but it scared them because they hadn’t tried it, personally. It felt unnatural to them, ‘returning to a hibernation state,’ one of them said.”

  “So this is new tech,” a Tsyfarian said, “and not widely tested, on top of being for a different species?”

  “It was then,” I told him, “but that was at least ten years ago. So if they were starting to use it a full decade ago, by now there’s a good chance it works just fine.”

  The room burst full of conversation after that. Everyone talked over everyone else, trying to work out the implications. No one knew for sure if Hurkz biology would be compatible enough with Tsyfarian to allow the science to hold. Then there was the problem of how to get our hands on it.

  The Hurkz are an isolationist people, for the most part. They didn’t expand much, or interfere with other races. They hadn’t in centuries. The Hurkz Empire did its thing across their worlds and left everyone else alone. Outside of the occasional foray to human-controlled spaces to kill or retrieve those who’d left without permission, or who were aberrations.