by Jim C. Hines
“They’re deploying grav beams.” Monroe leaned closer, squinting at his console. “I think.”
Mops double-checked the shuttle’s range to the fighters and its distance from the Pufferfish. “Kumar, on my mark, send that shuttle on an A-ring jump. You won’t have much time. Power up the ring and trigger the jump as fast as you can, got it?”
“The safety prechecks . . .”
Mops simply folded her arms.
“Right. Sorry.” Kumar swallowed and spread his fingers over the console.
“You can do this.” Mops put a hand on his shoulder, glanced at the display, and said, “And go.”
Kumar jabbed the console with his index fingers. The tip of his tongue poked from his mouth as he concentrated. “Engaging microtractors.”
An image of the shuttle appeared on the top of the console screen, the A-ring highlighted in blue as it expanded like a belt loosening from the shuttle’s waist. The ring began to slide forward. Within three seconds, the ring stopped moving and turned a vivid green.
“Misalignment,” Kumar muttered. “I know there’s a realignment process . . .” He tapped another button, and the ring began to flash brighter green. “That wasn’t it.”
“Sir, I think the Prodryans are powering up energy weapons,” said Monroe. “They’ve disengaged their grav beams.”
“Kumar,” Mops said gently. “Activate the ring.”
He moved a pair of sliders forward, then pecked in another command. “It’s powering up now. Um . . .” He tapped the screen, where all four of the shuttle’s A-rings had turned green. “I may have accidentally activated them all.”
He’d barely gotten the words out when the console display went blank. The main screen flickered, attempting to display the expanding torus of energy and debris. Energy that tore through the Prodryan fighters like a bleach pressure-wash through mold.
The message Shuttle three destroyed appeared on the console.
Wolf let out a low whistle.
“Good work, Kumar. You can return to your station.” When he didn’t move, Mops gave him a gentle push.
He stared at the screen as he walked, the destruction reflecting in his eyes. By the time the viewscreen cleared and stabilized, nothing remained of the shuttle or four of the Prodryan fighters. Of the remaining two, one tumbled end-over-end away from the Pufferfish, venting air from a long gash in the hull. The other appeared to have partial engine function. A single thruster fired, trying to stabilize its flight. The fighter spat a pair of missiles toward the Pufferfish.
“Countermeasures, Monroe,” Mops snapped.
“On it, sir.”
Mops studied the screen. “Kumar, use the RCS thrusters to bring our nose up two degrees.”
A faint sense of heaviness told her Kumar had fired the small reaction control system thrusters at the front of the ship. She pulled up the weapons control, adjusted the plasma beam duration, and jabbed the firing button.
The screen showed a white beam passing just beneath the fighter. The fighter’s engines sputtered again. It crawled away, while the Pufferfish’s momentum brought them in a slow circle. They were like two drunken dancers trying desperately to keep from falling.
“They’re firing A-guns,” said Monroe. “Moderate damage to weapons pod number two.”
Mops double-checked her console, glanced at the screen, and tapped the firing button again. This time, the Pufferfish’s plasma beam boiled a meter-wide hole through the fighter’s metal hull.
Mops gave a satisfied nod. “If you can’t aim the guns, aim the ship.”
Humans’ eating habits are, from an objective scientific perspective, disgusting.
Feral humans are scavengers. They prefer the meat of still-living or freshly killed warm-blooded creatures, but will eat almost anything. Krakau scientists have observed feral humans eating: reptiles, dead fish, bird eggs, various plants, dirt, rotting wood, insects, and each other.
We assumed pre-plague humans would have had a more civilized palate. We were wrong.
Historically, humanity’s diet was even more varied and disturbing. Some of the preferred meals we’ve reconstructed from their cookbooks and other literature include:
The organs of an animal called a sheep, prepared and cooked within the stomach of the same creature.
Tuna eyeballs.
Raw fish. (One of the few sensible items in the human diet.)
100-year-old eggs. It’s a wonder this species didn’t go extinct sooner.
Pufferfish. The toxins of this fish were highly deadly to humans. I originally assumed this meal was used as a means of suicide or execution, but in fact, humans ate this for pleasure. The risk of death was part of the appeal. It’s one more example of the human obsession with things that can kill them.
Something called a Fried Twinkie. A slower method for humans to kill themselves.
I strongly recommend not attempting to reproduce traditional human meals. In addition to the fear that the mechanics of eating could trigger a resurgence of feral impulses, my conclusion after ten months of research is that human cuisine was primitive, dangerous, and inescapably gross.
—From Observations on Human Cuisine, by Under the Orange Tree
(Interspecies Culinary Specialist)
MOPS STEPPED CAUTIOUSLY INTO the mess hall, her utility pole clutched in both hands. They’d scanned and sterilized this area, but she wasn’t taking chances. She searched every corner of the blocky, loungelike room before calling back, “It’s clear.”
“Told you so,” grumbled Doc.
The rest of the team followed her inside. Mops headed for the closest of the six identical dispenser slots built into the walls and punched the button for her daily nutrition allowance. Behind the panel, a vertical conveyor lowered a thick gray tube with a conical cap on one end. Mops reached into the slot, popped the tube free, and retired to one of the chairs in the corner where she could keep an eye on the entire mess hall.
Monroe took the chair to her right. “What better way to celebrate surviving a battle than with a nutritious paste of slow-release fats, proteins, and carbohydrates?”
He’d unsealed the seam in the front of his suit, revealing the dark scar tissue where pale flesh and white plastic came together. Without a hint of self-consciousness, he tugged part of his uniform to one side to expose the plastic nub of his feeding port. Monroe’s port had been relocated to the left side of his torso to better reach what remained of his guts.
Mops opened ten centimeters of her own suit. Her hands moved automatically through the process of popping the cap from her nutrient tube and sliding the thick needle into her own feeding port. She twisted the tube to lock it in place, fastened the loop on the other end to a small hook on her harness to keep it from pulling free, and pressed a button to begin dispensing twenty-four hours’ worth of food.
Mops’ stomach gurgled. She and the team should have eaten three hours ago, but that would have cost them their chance at collecting what was left of the Prodryan fighters.
Trained technicians could sweep up post-battle flotsam in twenty minutes using the ship’s grav beams to tow the pieces into a vacant cargo bay. According to Doc, the Pufferfish’s three grav beam techs were currently locked in the aft observation lounge, the maintenance garage, and a bathroom on deck B.
Wolf had insisted she could handle the grav beams. She’d seemed genuinely eager to learn and contribute. Wolf wouldn’t have been Mops’ first choice, but she was reluctant to quash this new attitude.
After half an hour poring over the tutorial, Wolf had gotten a lock on the first of the two salvageable fighters . . . which promptly crumpled and exploded, destroyed by a missed decimal point in Wolf’s calibration settings.
On her second attempt, Wolf had successfully hauled the remaining wreck toward the Pufferfish. She was less successful at slowing said wreck down as it
rushed closer. The resulting collision had punctured the doors to cargo bay three, rendering the whole bay unusable.
At that point, Monroe had finally suited up and gone out with a magnetic grapple to physically maneuver the ship into bay two. The instant both Monroe and the fighter were on board, Mops had ordered everyone to the mess hall.
Despite what much of the galaxy believed, humans weren’t indestructible. Her team was raw and exhausted from the tension of combat, not to mention hungry. Even Monroe appeared pale, and the lopsided slump of his body meant he was ready to drop.
They needed to figure out how to contact Command to update them about the Prodryans, but Mops feared if she pushed the team any harder, they’d end up breaking whatever they touched.
Wolf mumbled to herself as she grabbed her food tube from the dispenser.
“What’s she doing?” asked Mops.
“Reviewing grav beam basics on her monocle.”
Wolf plopped down on a couch and stabbed her meal into her feeding port. She kept her head down, continuing to mutter as she read.
“What do we do next?” Kumar asked as he joined them. “The ship’s damaged, the crew—”
“Next, we eat,” Mops said firmly. “I know that all could have gone better. It could have gone a lot worse, too. An Alliance SHS team just took out six hostile Prodryan fighters.”
“Grom helped, too.” Wolf grimaced, as if the admission caused her physical pain. “Prodryans ought to know better than to mess with humans by now. Ninety-nine percent of the crew out of commission, and we still kicked alien ass.”
“Ninety-seven percent,” Doc corrected, speaking loudly enough through her comm for everyone to hear. “And Prodryans don’t have asses, per se. They simply regurgitate pellets of—”
Mops cut him off. “Unless I have to install or maintain the plumbing, I don’t want to know.”
“The Alliance should have ended the Prodryans years ago,” Wolf continued. “Send the EMC to the Prodryan home world.”
“And do what?” asked Monroe, his words deceptively mild. “How many would we have to kill to stop the killing?”
“You’d rather let them kill us? Turn us back into animals?” Wolf waved an arm. “Any one of us are worth ten Prodryans. I’m not saying we should wipe them all out, but if we burned their home world to slag—”
“Assume we could get through their system’s defenses,” Monroe interrupted. “Assume we razed their home planet. Blew up their shipyards, turned their cities to craters, and so on. What do you think would happen next?”
Wolf squared her shoulders. “Maybe they’d think twice about continuing their war against the Alliance.”
“They wouldn’t even think once,” said Monroe. “An attack of that scale, one that legitimately threatened their species in its entirety, would unify them against us.”
“They seem pretty unified to me,” Wolf muttered.
That earned a tired chuckle from Monroe. “If there’s one thing Prodryans aren’t, it’s unified. Loyalty is to self first, military unit second, family third, and finally to species. Last I heard, Alliance Intelligence estimates fewer than a quarter of all Prodryans are part of ongoing hostilities against us.”
“A quarter of their species has been holding its own against the entire Alliance?” Wolf scoffed. “You’re full of shit, Monroe.”
Mops listened in silence. Unofficially, you left rank behind when you entered the mess. Officially, she was fully prepared to smack them both upside the head with her utility pole if the argument got out of hand.
“Prodryans breed to fill the environment,” said Monroe. “A single mated pair on a new, unsettled planet can have a hundred offspring in a year. A colony of several thousand can turn into a billion in three short generations. The only reason they haven’t overwhelmed us by sheer force of numbers is that Prodryans are incapable of acting as a unified force. The Alliance hasn’t been fighting a war against the Prodryans. We’ve been fighting a thousand wars against a thousand militias and temporary coalitions.”
“Then how do we win?” asked Kumar.
Monroe shrugged and settled back in the couch. “If you figure that out, be sure to let the Alliance Military Council know, will you?”
“I still say humans can hold our own against the bugs,” said Wolf. “The whole galaxy’s scared of us. Even the Quetzalus! You heard the story about the Quetzalus bounty hunter who ate one of our infantry soldiers?”
“I know that one,” said Kumar. “The soldier shot his way out ten minutes later, right?”
“Damn right.” Wolf folded her arms. “Their first loyalty is to self? Then we hit them in their sense of self-preservation. Remind them what humans are capable of.”
“They know what humans are capable of,” Mops said wearily. “That’s why they’re afraid of us.”
“Are we really human anymore?” Kumar asked. “How old are you, Wolf?”
“Around twenty-six,” said Wolf.
“Not your birth age. Your rebirth age.”
“Eighteen months.”
“Eighteen months since you woke up in a Krakau medtank,” Kumar continued. “Maybe two years since you were plucked from the human packs roaming the ruins of Earth. Since you were pumped full of alien drugs, operated on, and reeducated with alien technology.”
Wolf’s brow crinkled. “You saying that makes me inhuman?”
“I’m saying it . . . confuses things.”
“It makes you a child.” Monroe pulled a cube of gum from one of his uniform pockets and popped it in his mouth. Chicken soup flavor, from the smell. “No offense intended, but a year and a half of real-world experience? You’re practically a baby. I’ve known too many newbies like you. Hell, I used to be one. Eager to fight, convinced we’re the toughest things in the galaxy.”
“Aren’t we?” asked Kumar, leaning forward like he was watching a sporting event.
“Physically, maybe. Intellectually?” He snorted and waved a hand. “You see what happens when we try to command our own ship.”
“We beat the Prodryans,” said Wolf.
“We got lucky. We barely survived an encounter with a handful of fighters the Pufferfish should have swatted like insects.”
“We’re SHS,” Wolf protested. “We’re not trained for any of this.”
“It wouldn’t matter if we were. That’s why we get a Krakau command crew. Post-plague humans aren’t bright enough—”
Wolf stood. “Are you calling me stupid?”
“I’m saying we’re all stupid, you idiot. At least compared to what humanity was before.”
“The same humanity that created a plague and turned itself into animals?” asked Wolf. “They don’t sound too bright to me.”
“We used to have dozens of languages and cultures,” said Kumar. “Now we all speak ‘Human.’ One language, designed by the Krakau.”
“More like thousands of languages and cultures,” Doc interjected. “Which might explain why Earth history is an unending list of arguments and violent misunderstandings over everything from land rights to the proper way of hanging toilet paper. Communication has never been your species’ strength.”
“They fixed us,” Kumar continued. “They give us jobs, purpose, even our culture. We call ourselves human, but are we? Or are we Krakau? Maybe we’re something in between. Krakuman?”
“I am not calling myself Krakuman,” snarled Wolf.
“Kumar has a point,” Mops said, before the “discussion” could escalate further. “Intellect, creativity, reasoning . . . we consistently score lower on every test than pre-plague humans. Whatever humanity was before the plague, we’ve changed. But we are human.”
“How do you figure?” asked Kumar.
“Because we have to be.” She studied her team. They were exhausted. Anxious. Scared, though she doubted any of them would admit i
t. The command crew was dead, and the rest of the crew would happily eat them. Her team was trained to eradicate mold and fix clogged water filters, not battle Prodryan fighters. “Because we’re what’s left. Ten thousand or so reborn humans, with maybe a half billion surviving ferals back on Earth.”
Kumar frowned. “I’m not sure I follow your logic.”
“It’s not about logic.” Mops removed her empty food tube and used her thumb to wipe a single drop of gray sludge from the edge of her port. Her stomach felt bloated and hard, but the pressure would ease within an hour. “We were born of Earth. ‘Human’ is our word. Our history. Our connection to each other. Nobody gets to tell me I’m not human.” Her eyes sought Kumar’s. “Nobody else gets to tell us what that word means.”
“What do you think it means?” he asked.
Mops turned, opening the question to the others.
“Survivors,” said Monroe.
Wolf raised a fist. “Fighters.”
“Hope.” Mops shoved the empty tube into a disposal unit next to the couch. “Hope for the worlds we protect. Hope for our own planet and species.”
She shook her head. “I don’t mind the rest of the galaxy giving us a wide berth. It makes our jobs easier if they think we’re monsters. But I refuse to become one. Destroying the Prodryan home world of Yan? Slaughtering billions of sentient beings, most of whom never raised a weapon against us? Hell, no. An act like that would define humanity forever. Who we are and who we become. I’ll be damned if I let that happen.”
Wolf looked around. “So instead, we’ll be defined as toilet scrubbers and wall washers?”
“Nothing wrong with scrubbing toilets.” Mops stood and stretched. “Finish up, then report to the bridge. This isn’t over yet.”
Mops stifled a yawn as she reread the instructions for calibrating the ship’s primary communications pod.
Sending out a distress call was simple enough . . . if you didn’t mind everyone within range hearing it. Somehow, Mops didn’t think it wise to announce to the galaxy that the Prodryans had a new weapon capable of incapacitating humans.