Third Don: Ardulum, #3

by J. S. Fields

  “That’s the weirdly designed ship we couldn’t hit before it took out the Ardulan fleet. How did you manage to capture such a detailed image?”

  “The pods are moving lower. This one dipped into the upper atmosphere early this morning, near a settee. The pilot managed to get a scan. They are Mmnnuggl by design, similar in construction to their pods, but contain no cellulose, andal or otherwise.”

  “Titha shit,” Miketh breathed. “No wonder our ships were useless.”

  Ekimet didn’t take the biofilm. The priest continued to hold it out as zie stared at the drawing. A spacefaring ship without cellulose. It was possible, of course. Plenty of early spaceship models used hemicellulose to reach lightspeed travel, but cellulose was the superior polymer for many reasons. Andal cellulose in particular retained some of the tree’s unique properties, allowing for complete telepathic interfacing—moreover, it made the ships faster and sturdier than those with just hemicellulose. Cellulose was the major component in tesseract travel, as well.

  Ships without cellulose, without andal cellulose, should barely be able to fly. They certainly shouldn’t have weapons capable of damaging contemporary biometals. The Mmnnuggls were playing at something much deadlier than Ekimet had thought. Without cellulose, Ardulans were useless in space. The Mmnnuggls didn’t just want to punish Ardulum. They wanted to completely destroy it.

  It finally made sense why they had been so insistent on trading Ekimet and Miketh to the Eld in return for a flare back on Ggllot. Any flare. They wanted to understand the limits of the most powerful Ardulans. The Mmnnuggls eventually had to test their new technology. If a flare couldn’t take out their new ships, then nothing on Ardulum could.

  Had Savath known this would happen? Was that why this assignment was so important? Andal help zir, zie needed guidance! Ardulum had to be warned! It couldn’t come to Neek, but it had to be warned, somehow! Ekimet might be able to send a message through the andal, but the trees would need motivation to communicate across such a distance. They’d refused thus far. They needed a better reason than two stranded Ardulans. What did an eld do, to motivate trees? What did motivate trees? Water? Sunlight? Nutrients in the soil? A fear of…

  “Ground the Guard,” Ekimet said in a low breath. The answer was so easy—and so incredibly painful.

  “My lord?” the high priest asked.

  “El— Ekimet?” Miketh sputtered in protest. “The forests…the Neek… The Charted Systems will never recover!”

  Ekimet closed zir eyes and offered a silent apology to the whispering andal and then to Savath. Zir friend would have found a way around this. Savath would have known how to contact Ardulum without this kind of sacrifice. Ekimet was too new an eld. Ekimet didn’t have a choice.

  Silver flashed in the sky. Everyone turned their heads skyward as pods and oval ships burned through the atmosphere. Red streaks whistled from the ships and fell into the forests surrounding the capital of N’lln. Curls of smoke began to funnel slowly across the horizon.

  “Ground the Heaven Guard. Empty their holds. Tell the Neek people to stay away.”

  The high priest coughed, and Ekimet’s own eyes began to burn. “My lord, our forests—”

  “Have to be destroyed,” Ekimet responded. The whistling cut through zir mind, accompanied by the voices of the andal. First came shock and then the feeling of warmth against bark. Only a few moments later, the shock turned to panic as saplings—younger, thinner, and without the old growth’s natural defenses—began to burn.

  “We have to sacrifice,” Ekimet said, trying to put the destruction in words the high priest could understand—words he could communicate to his people. “We have to sacrifice if we are going to save Neek and Ardulum.”

  Chapter 6: Ttynn

  Maybe you got the drop on this one, since you’re dead, but just in case you missed the memo… Ardulum is real. The planet, anyway. Probably not the god stuff. I, uh, I knocked a few of them around. Ardulans, that is. They were getting all crazy on Salice and she’s not the most aggressive of beings and do you know how long it has been since I was in a bar fight? If you were here I’d suggest we go find that damned planet. Might just anyway. Seems like the Mmnnuggls have a hard-on for Ardulum, too. Funny, if I was going to play pin the tail on the asshole here, I’d pin it on the Ardulans right now, not the Mmnnuggls. Long story.

  —Archived biofilm letter from Captain Yorden Kuebrich to Neek (Eld Atalant of Ardulum), third month of Arath 26_15

  DECEMBER 14TH, 2060 CE

  “Could we stop discussing missiles for a minute?” Yorden rubbed his temples and shifted in his seat. In a low-ceilinged meeting room onboard the Mmnnuggl pod frigate Ttynn, the purple-black spheres hovered around him in a circle. It was like being an antelope surrounded by hyenas—except in this case, the antelope had become some sort of god-advisor-thing and the hyenas were frothing for direction they really didn’t need.

  This was the third hour, now, of this particular meeting. The Ttynn was idling somewhere between Alliance and Charted Systems space, waiting for smaller transport pods to join them with delegates from Ggllot’s ruling council. They were already surrounded by forty or so other Mmnnuggl pods, as well as a handful of Alliance craft Yorden didn’t recognize. The Mmnnuggl president herself was supposedly en route, or was going to be en route. Yorden still wasn’t certain what the time frame was for her arrival. Mmnnuggls didn’t seem to work on the same linear timescale as he did. They also didn’t seem to work according to the same motivations that he did, since Yorden couldn’t for the life of him figure out what the Mmnnuggls actually wanted. They kept contacting the Risalians and trying to have meetings, and then the meetings broke down into laser fights and name calling, and inevitably the Mmnnuggls got pissed off, took their ball-shaped ships, and limped back to Alliance space. And they’d been putting on this same circus for, what? Two weeks? One? It was so hard to tell with faster-than-light-speed travel.

  Yorden’s own pod, the one with the cracked viewscreen he’d purchased at Xinar Station, was in a berth in a hangar bay on the fifteenth deck. It was there by choice, sort of. He’d tried to leave the Mmnnuggls and the whole mess at Xinar behind. After quickly exiting the bar where he’d incapacitated the Ardulans and seeing a standard, non-Ardulan healer about Salice’s nose, Yorden had grabbed the woman and launched the little pod into Alliance space. The blob-thing had jury-rigged the ship enough that Salice could fly it, or at least could enter coordinates into the wormhole generator. They’d set a course for Earth. For about ten minutes, it had seemed like his life might be finally getting back on track.

  Then, the Mmnnuggls had come. Again. Large and small pods had trailed them across Alliance space. They didn’t attempt contact. They didn’t engage combat. They merely watched, followed, and served to completely unnerve the captain. Yorden had asked Salice to change course back to Xinar. The Mmnnuggls followed. They’d jumped to the outskirts of the Risalian System. The Mmnnuggls followed.

  Yorden would not lead them to his homeworld, even if the Mmnnuggls were acting more like lost puppies than the beings that had instigated the Crippling War. Frustrated, Yorden had finally been the one to contact them, demanding to know what they wanted.

  A meeting was all the Mmnnuggl captain had asked for—a meeting with Yorden and Salice and some type of military ruling council from the Mmnnuggl homeworld of Ggllot. Apparently the Risalians were all about meetings now too. Yorden had found an open invitation to a meeting near Risal—sent by the Markin Council and meant for the Alliance—in the pod’s memory, from only a few days ago. Risalians courting their enemies made no sense, except that the Risalians seemed to be pointedly ignoring the Mmnnuggls. Still, Risalians consorting with the Alliance made no sense. Mmnnuggls desperate for contact with the Risalians made no sense. The whole thing stank like a dried-out titha husk.

  Yorden had acquiesced to the Mmnnuggl invitation on the promise that, afterwards, the Mmnnuggls would disperse. A contract had been signed. Yorden had let Salice geld
one of their smaller pods as a warning. Salice had enjoyed that. That had brought a lot of high-pitched twittering and some brighter purple tones to the round bodies, but thus far, the Mmnnuggls had kept to the agreement. Yorden’s ship was safely berthed, and he was the only one with the access codes to the entry door. Unlike before, he and Salice were free to come and go as they wished, and Salice had blossomed rapidly under her newfound independence. Biped commodities were brought aboard as he requested them: slabs of meat, textiles, writing implements, and woody vegetables for Salice. Yorden thought he could tolerate maybe a week more of it before he asked Salice to blow up the whole frigate so he could get back to his original retirement plans.

  “Using gravity wells would allow us to stay out of range while still allowing significant impact.” The captain of the Ttynn, Hhffvnoll, twirled in a tight circle. “Do you have an alternative method to propose?”

  “No, because I don’t understand your needs,” Yorden argued. “If a little scare is what you want, just send a few pods to the lower atmosphere and drop some basic bombs. If you’re trying to wipe out a planet, you have wormhole generators, so why not generate a bunch near Ardulum’s surface and deliver something that way? Realistically though, there are a lot of ways to stop a threat that are far less destructive. You could cut off trade routes, for instance.” Yorden tugged at his beard. “Really, targeting the economy always deals more hurt than weapons could, unless you’re trying to outright destroy the planet. You don’t have to blow everything up, you know.” Yorden could almost hear Neek’s ghost laughing at him. “You keep talking about tactics, but you won’t tell me anything about why you’re after these Ardulans. If you’re so damned concerned about them attacking you, why attack them at all? Why not just leave them the fuck alone?” Yorden rubbed his forehead. “Someone, somewhere, is laughing at me for saying this, but as much as I hate peace, war doesn’t do a damn lot of good, either, except get people killed.”

  Hhffvnoll opened his long, lateral mouth slit and let out what Yorden thought might have been a sigh. “Conqueror Yorden Kuebrich—”

  “Yorden,” he interrupted. “We’ve been through this.”

  “Conqueror Yorden,” Hhffvnoll continued, his tone weary. “The Ardulans represent a significant threat to our population. Those not under your direct control must be exterminated.”

  “Yeah, sure, but why?” Yorden smacked his hands across his thighs, pleased with the muscle that was returning there. “So they stopped picking fruit or some such thing. Pick your own damn fruit! How hard can it be? You have spaceships, but you can’t invent fruit pickers? You’re holding a grudge over fruit.”

  Hhffvnoll tilted several degrees, but Yorden cut him off before he could respond. “I get that you feel betrayed. You thought the Ardulans were gods, and turns out, they’re just bipeds with some crazy telekinetic powers. I get that. I got a friend…had a friend. She was in the same boat, sort of. Just going out and killing them all isn’t a rational response.”

  Another Mmnnuggl—smaller, with red-tipped ears—rose a meter from the ground and addressed Yorden. “The Ardulans parade through space, taking over land, taking over beings, taking over entire civilizations! In a galaxy filled with cellulose, how do you propose we protect ourselves? You, Terran Yorden the Conqueror, can control the Ardulans. We cannot. We require your guidance. You have an understanding of them we do not possess. We need you.”

  Yorden held up his hands, palms out. “I never agreed to help you take down Ardulum. You want to study tactics for theoretical warfare, fine. I’m as interested in that as the next guy. I get that the Ardulans are scary. Strange powers that defy science can get under your skin, so to speak. If we were talking personal protective equipment, maybe. Specialized laser guns, sure—but I draw the line at genocide. Why don’t you just find yourselves some new gods?” The spheres began to purple, and Yorden mentally berated himself. “Those gods don’t have to be me, mind. Unless doing so would get you to leave me alone.”

  The purple color remained as a chittering rose up amongst the Mmnnuggls. Yorden caught a flash of brown clothes near the wall and looked over to see Salice standing near the doorway to the conference room. She offered Yorden a nod, but did not approach. About ten meters away, a large Mmnnuggl spun slowly on the ground.

  An idea popped into Yorden’s mind. He had witnessed the Ardulan child, Emn, accomplish some amazing feats of microkinesis. Neek had tried to explain the mechanism of what she was doing. At the time, it had seemed very abstract. Highly unlikely. Given the Mmnnuggls’ treatment of Neek myth as scientific fact, it was possible that the answer to their problem was very straightforward and might spare Ardulum a beach ball invasion.

  “Is it domestic security you’re after?” he asked the ring of Mmnnuggls. “You want to keep the Ardulans from…” Yorden tried to think of why the Ardulans would come after the Mmnnuggls. Some failure during the Crippling War? Breach of contract? Something as base as genetic superiority? He reached. “From colonizing? Retaliating? Conscripting?”

  Hhffvnoll stopped circling and bobbed up and down twice. “All of these are concerns, to some extent. This would be an adequate step for the time being. Do you have suggestions for us, Conqueror?”

  “Yeah.” Yorden shoved his hands into the roomy pockets of his muumuu. “Why don’t you just stop using cellulose?”

  Silence fell in the conference room. The spheres stopped spinning. As a group, they lowered to the ground and tilted, considering.

  “We have had this same thought and believe it could be effective, but there is a major flaw. Without cellulose, we cannot access tesseracts,” Hhffvnoll said finally. “In addition, we have found that our shielding cannot hold against cellulose-infused laser fire. Extended contact breaks down the biometals and the ship disintegrates over time. Our prototype was both a success in this and a failure.”

  Yorden shook his head in agitation. “I didn’t say go without any organic polymers. Just ignore cellulose. Trees have plenty of hemicellulose in them, and we know that stuff works, just not as well and not in the same way. I’ve never heard of an Ardulan manipulating a xylan. Have you? What about a galactoglucomannan?” Yorden crossed his arms over his chest. “I don’t think they can do anything with them. Just retrofit some of your ships. You’ll go slower, sure, but you won’t get melted out of the sky, either. Boom. Problem solved.”

  The chittering started again. It was lower in tone this time, almost a whisper. The smaller sphere with the red-tipped ears rolled partially away from the circle of Mmnnuggls, towards Yorden. “We would need a supply of hemicellulose,” they said hesitantly. “Our native trees do not produce the branched polymer in any form, and the history of the Charted Systems indicates that xylan was the only hemicellulose capable of conferring reasonable speed and stability to spaceworthy metals, and even then, only andal xylan was appropriate. We would need a large, naturally occurring source.”

  Yorden didn’t think. The words were out of his mouth before he realized what he was saying. “I’m sure the Risalians have a ton. Cell-Tal, their main bio-fabrication company, likely just tosses it with other andal residuals after they harvest the cellulose. Come at the Risalians, especially Cell-Tal, with a business proposition instead of whatever you’ve been doing, and they’ll be much more likely to listen. Or send one of the other Alliance ships to do the negotiations. Just don’t do it yourself. Clearly the Risalians don’t want to listen to you, which, considering all the destruction you caused in the Systems, makes sense.”

  “Risal!” The word echoed in the room, said simultaneously by all the Mmnnuggls in attendance. They began to roll, floating off the floor as they did so until a spinning circle of Mmnnuggls was rotating around Yorden at chest height.

  Clenching his teeth at his own stupidity, Yorden ducked out of the ring. Why, in the name of all of Earth’s gods, was he encouraging, no, enabling the Mmnnuggls to head back into the Systems? How many more wars did he need to see in his lifetime? “You know, the Risalians
have blasted a lot of your ships apart recently. Maybe they’re not the best choice. There are plenty of other options too,” he added as the Mmnnuggls kept spinning. “Surely there are cellulose engineers in the Alliance. Who says you even have to use andal wood? Maybe another tree would work just as well? You should do research. Lots of research. Take your time with this.”

  No one responded. The spheres began to stack on top of each other. The circle closed in but became progressively taller. “Hey!” Yorden yelled at the spheres. “Just think about it, all right? Don’t do anything stupid.”

  No one responded, although their chittering was becoming increasingly louder. The conversation was clearly over. Once the Mmnnuggls started stacking, there was nothing he could do to get through to them. He made his way to Salice.

  “Come on,” he muttered as he took Salice by the hand and led her from the room. She was scowling at him, which he deserved, but they couldn’t talk about that here. “Nothing more to see here unless they start mating. I think we can consider this meeting a colossal train wreck.”

  IT WAS QUIETER on their walk to his pod, for which Yorden was grateful. He didn’t trust his new spaceship any farther than he could throw it. Stupid telepathic interface. The scans he had been able to run since docking with the Ttynn had brought up a whole host of mechanical issues the sales blob had not disclosed—no surprise there. How the pod had not disintegrated upon their first tesseract generation, Yorden didn’t know and didn’t want to think about. Regardless, they had about a month of repairs to do on the pod before they could go anywhere, and as long as the Mmnnuggls were being relatively hospitable, it made sense to stay where the engineers could lend him a hand.

  Yorden and Salice rounded into the interior causeway that connected their small pod to the Ttynn and proceeded inside after inputting the access code. Here, the ceilings were mercifully higher than in standard Mmnnuggl hallways, and Yorden cracked his back in delight. The last scan he’d run had identified a modified access panel in a small set of living quarters on the pod, which he had planned to check out before he retired for the evening.