Leaving the command group behind, the Shining Mother approached Sings. She was young for a Great Mother, Sings realized, with the soft green skin of a female barely past her first spawning.
She was also the only leader left on Vista who would talk to Sings.
“I apologize for our setting,” the Shining Mother told her as she left the command group behind. “I am rarely able to leave the command bunker.” A firm chirp underran her silence as she paused to consider her next words.
“We will meet your new Strangers in the grand hall, but I wanted to speak with you first. Come, follow.”
Sings followed. Some of the Mothers who ran the orbital industries had urged her to try to take control of the planet herself, but she knew her skills. Trying to lead a planet in the midst of a terrifying evacuation would far exceed them.
The Shining Mother led her into a side office, closing the door and tapping a command. To Sings’s surprise, the entire room shifted down a quarter-length and began to fill with warm water.
“I am Sleeps-In-Sunlight,” the Shining Mother introduced herself, gesturing Sings to a chair.
The warm water running around her legs was calming, but calm was far from the First-Among-Singers’s emotions. Great Mothers not only didn’t go by their names; they didn’t give their names.
But…she knew nothing about Sleeps-In-Sunlight. Shining Rivers was the opposite side of the world from her own Clan and had never been a problem for the Star-Choirs.
“I am Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters,” Sings finally replied. “I wish we had met in better times, but we have no time. I must know where you swim.”
Sleeps-In-Sunlight chirped pleased determination.
“We are of a mind, then,” she said. “I intend to use whatever force is necessary here on the surface of Vista to restore order and keep people safe and fed.
“That can only buy time. I am not a scientist. My training is politics and history, not science or war, Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters, but even I can understand what my scientists are telling me.”
The Great Mother’s chirps were slower now, subdued with sadness…but still determined.
“We have half an orbit in which the storms will grow worse and the skies will darken, but our people can likely survive,” Sings said calmly. “Then…another half-orbit, maybe a full orbit, in which technology will be able to sustain enclaves on the surface.”
“That is much what my advisors say,” Sleeps told her. “They also fear super-storms during that first half-orbit that will devastate the coastal cities and sea steadings. Those will grow more likely as time passes.
“They estimate that we can protect enclaves of perhaps a million apiece,” she continued. “If we start building them now, we might have as many as sixty in half an orbit. That is less than half of the people of my Shining Rivers—and building those enclaves will consume resources that might be better used elsewhere.
“But we were never a void-faring nation. We know what the Star-Choirs have told us of their resources, but we do know these waters in our bones.” Sleeps-In-Sunlight shrugged, a massive gesture, given the size of a Vistan’s legs and their dual shoulder.
“I cannot save our race if we remain here,” she concluded. “I hope you have an answer for me that brings more hope.”
“Some,” Sings told her. “There are a hundred million of our people in the void. We believe we can triple our capacity to support people in the void over the half-orbit remaining to us, but we cannot sustain those settlements forever.”
“Between us, we might save three hundred million,” Sleeps said. “But there are three times that remaining. What can we do?”
“These humans are now our only hope,” the leader of the Star-Choirs said calmly. “They tell me that they will have a flotilla of a dozen transports here in a few turnings, capable of transporting two hundred thousand of our people out of the Hearthfire System.”
“To where?” Sleeps’s unconscious chirps betrayed her awe at the very concept of moving people out of the star system.
“Another system, close by,” Sings told her. “A tenth-orbit there and back.” The numbers her analysts had given her weren’t the best.
“That saves…very few,” the Shining Mother said, her chirps slow again. “A million before our world becomes uninhabitable.”
“So, we must stage our evacuation,” Sings replied. “Into the void first, and then to this Refuge we have been promised. We must learn their technologies and build ships like theirs, to increase the speed of the evacuation.
“To flee our system will be a process of many orbits. We must move as many of our people as we can into the void-sea to make sure they will be present to flee.”
“And to do that, we must keep them calm,” Sleeps-In-Sunlight agreed. “It is good to know our limits—so we may push past them. There are still a billion people on the surface of Vista, Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters.
“We now know how to save a third of them. From there, we must work out how to save the rest!”
It was strange, Sings reflected. She’d thought the same thing and given up hope. When Sleeps-In-Sunlight said it, though, she could only feel determined. She’d come to meet the Shining Mother knowing that she was the only leader left, praying that the female would be able to keep at least a few people sane and together long enough to get them out.
She’d set her hopes too low…but even in their darkest hours, who truly expected to find that fate had given them the type of Mother who became a legend?
13
Even through the darkest of hours, Octavio Catalan couldn’t stop himself from marveling at the city of Shining Sunset. The people aboard his shuttle now had the unquestioned honor of being the first humans to ever look at an alien city.
Octavio had figured that the city couldn’t be too different. Physics and engineering were physics and engineering, after all, which left only so many ways a building could be assembled.
He’d been right…and he’d been wrong. He didn’t know what the purpose of the line of stone domes that divided the land city from the sea city was, but their position was too distinct for it to be unintentional. The decorations on those domes were barely visible from the air, because they were carved into the domes, not painted on.
There was little in terms of color in the city at all. Several different colors of stone and concrete had been used to build the city, but color hadn’t been an esthetic factor. Domes and sweeping bulwarks and communal pools, those had been esthetic factors. The city had been designed to be made of pleasing shapes above all else.
Water flowed through most of the streets, and what vehicles he could see were clearly amphibious. The Vistan shuttle they’d followed down had landed in the water, using the ocean to absorb the heat of its descent.
Scorpion’s shuttle wasn’t designed to do that. The delta-winged personnel transport had taken longer to land for the simple reason that they’d needed to slow down more. Now they were coasting in to a landing, and Octavio saw some of the less-beautiful aspects of Shining Sunset.
Vast highways led deeper inland, and it was clear that those highways were mostly industrial transport. Even now, massive automated vehicles traveled those roads. Tucked away among them, though, were personal vehicles.
Many of those vehicles were what he’d have called camper-vans, designed to act as temporary homes-away-from-home…and based on the sprawling tent city now surrounding the city, they were planning on staying.
“Are they even going to be able to feed these people?” Das asked. “They’ve got to have added thirty percent to the city’s population.”
“More,” Octavio replied. “Did you see the boats as we came in? Most of their population is coastal, so people are sweeping in from the land and the sea to huddle together for security.”
A set of clearly armored vehicles were rolling out along the highway toward them, and they distracted him for a moment. They were probably friendly—they needed a guide and escort, if nothing else—but h
e couldn’t be sure.
“As for food, Sings told us that the leader here had seized everything and imposed rationing. That’s going to buy them time.”
“Is it going to buy enough time?” his tactical officer asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t think anyone knows. We can evacuate a million people every thirty days once the transports are here. Everything beyond that is waiting on the two-fifty-six ships that Admiral Lestroud is bringing and whatever we can get the locals to build.”
“They don’t even have artificial gravity on their ships,” Das pointed out. “Where are they going to find enough exotic matter to build warp drives?”
“In the long run, they’ll build particle accelerators to make it happen,” Octavio said. That was a vain hope in the short term, though. He could see ways that he and his engineers could use the existing industry to build the crude exotic-matter production systems that were all the Vistans would be able to construct.
It would take time, though. And the one thing the Vistans did not have was time.
“In the short term, the focus has to be on getting people off the planet.” He shook his head. “And making sure everyone is safe if the Rogues come back. Balancing those is going to be hell.”
Das looked past him at the strange amphibious armored personnel carriers coming to a halt nearby.
“I’m glad that’s your job,” she told him. “I’m concerned enough about the frogs with assault rifles over there.”
“We’re here to help them, Lieutenant Commander,” Octavio replied. “Everyone is going to be all right.”
His smile concealed a tension of his own. The dozen power-armored Marines he’d brought with him would make short work of the platoon of locals, but that would doom his attempts to save them in many ways.
Not least because Octavio wasn’t wearing body armor of any kind himself.
Despite his paranoia, the armed Vistans were their ride and rapidly delivered them to a sprawling structure Octavio assumed to be the house of government. It consisted of five broad, shallow domes that made the engineer in him wince. You could build like that, but those domes were too shallow for their height. Either the dome continued underground for stability or it needed supports—which negated the engineering value of the dome.
He rapidly found himself wading as they approached the central dome. The main promenade was knee-deep in water, soaking the legs of his uniform, and he glanced back at the two Marines escorting them.
“Suits are sealed airtight,” one of them reminded him over his earpiece. “Air tanks are only at standard levels, though, so I hope they remember we can’t breathe water.”
The armor could operate in vacuum. Octavio knew that, at least theoretically, but he’d been a warp-drive engineer, not an armory technician. He did remember that standard levels meant his Marines had about thirty minutes of canned air. They could trade ammunition or fuel supplies for more air if they expected to need it, but a standard load allowed a Marine to operate for forty-eight hours without resupply—assuming the air only need filtering.
Vista’s air didn’t even need that. Lower in oxygen than Exilium, it was still more oxygenated than Earth. Otherwise, there was nothing toxic in the air, and it was a warm, moist feeling as he breathed.
Even the water he was wading through was warm. Almost uncomfortably so for a human, but he figured it was probably calibrated to exactly what the Vistans needed.
The waterway continued through a massive set of stone doors that could have admitted Scorpion’s shuttle into a grand audience chamber that Octavio wasn’t convinced wouldn’t have held the warp cruiser itself.
Water poured out of the walls in a dozen different places, beautiful waterfalls with an oddly muted sound. The water flowed in patterns on the floor, different temperatures mingling in ways only barely visible to the human eye.
He suspected those patterns were more visible to the echolocation and heat-focused vision of his Vistan hosts. Even to him, the audience chamber was stunningly impressive, and he had to wonder how awe-inspiring it was to the species it had been designed to appeal to.
For human eyes, however, attention was drawn to the centerpiece: a raised dais underneath what looked like a giant shower.
A Vistan with mottled green skin was seated on that dais waiting for them, clad in plain—but clearly waterproof—white robes. Two dozen other Vistans stood nearby, their skins varying from bright, almost solid green to a mottling pattern that was more gray than anything else.
Closest to the Vistan on the throne was one of the Vistans with the gray mottling Octavio was guessing was age. Unlike the robes the rest of his hosts wore, this one wore a more form-fitting outfit. One with intended-to-be-concealed technological additions that Octavio picked out instantly.
Like his own uniform, Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters’s outfit served double duty as a light space suit. At least he knew one person here.
Approaching the throne, he gave Sings and the ruler a crisp salute.
“I am Captain Octavio Catalan of the ESF cruiser Scorpion,” he told them. Speakers mounted on each of his shoulders trilled along as he spoke, mimicking the two-mouthed speech of the Vistans.
“You are welcome here, Catalan,” the Vistan on the throne told him. The same system that was translating his words to her turned her words into English in his earbud. “I am the Shining Mother of the nation of Shining Rivers. I speak for what appears to be the largest intact nation left on our world.
“My friend Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters has spoken of your courage in coming to our aid, and of your plan to help those of us who survived,” she continued. “We are desperate and will turn aside no helping hands, but I must ask why.”
The alien stared down at him from her throne, probably the driest place in the room despite its continual rain shower.
“Why help us? Why risk your ship and people to fight for us, and now offer us ships and technology well beyond our own to save us?”
Octavio paused, letting the translation run out as he thought for the words that might convince this monarch—and titles be damned, there was no question that he stood in front of a monarch. A monarch that he’d likely have no choice but to help make the ruler of all of her species.
Engineer or commander, though, he was no diplomat.
“Because we thought it was the right thing to do,” he told her. “Because we are very far from home because we chose to do the right thing once, and we see no reason to break our habits yet. Because we work with the saner version of the robots that tried to wipe you out, and they owe the universe a debt they have not begun to repay.”
He smiled and bowed slightly.
“I could give you reasons of state, of the help we hope to get from you in the future once you’re resettled, and those are part of why my Republic is sending ships and hands to help. But I fought for your world because it was the right thing to do.”
The audience chamber was quiet. No space containing a Vistan, let alone twenty-odd of them, would ever be quiet, even without the waterfalls, but they did not speak.
“And if I were now to demand that you do things you did not think were the right thing to do?” the Shining Mother asked. “It would serve many purposes, perhaps, for me to force the survivors of our people to kneel to me by spear and rifle. If I demanded you provide soldiers, guns, orbital fire to support that quest, what would you do?”
“I don’t have the resources to provide any of those things,” Octavio pointed out. That was only half-true. He didn’t have orbital-bombardment rounds or firearms to spare aboard his ship, but he could easily fabricate them.
The chirping from the Vistan Queen sharpened for several seconds and she rose, walking to the edge of the dais and looking down at him.
“And I have not demanded such,” she noted. “But if I did?”
“It would depend on whether doing so would save more people, according to our judgment,” he told her, looking at the bulbous, near-useless ey
es on her head. The gesture was meaningless, but he suspected his posture would get across much of it.
“Good.” The trilling behind the translated word was very soft. “The name of a Great Mother is not lightly given, Catalan. Only the closest of allies and friends ever learn the name of the rulers of a nation.”
He continued to face her, his shoulders squared. It seemed they’d come to an understanding, which meant he would have to learn much of their etiquette in the months to come.
“My name is Sleeps-In-Sunlight,” the translated voice told him. “We will meet in private, you and I and Sings-Over-Darkened-Waters. We have much work to do.”
14
Even though the Exiles had invited them and were expecting them, Matrix ships arriving in the Exilium System was a nerve-wracking moment.
There was no way to validate whether the pulse of tachyons that announced a ship arriving by punch represented a friendly ship or an unfriendly one. Even the ships themselves looked the same.
“We have fifteen tachyon-punch signatures,” Captain Margaret Anderson summarized to Isaac. “No details yet on any of the masses, but I didn’t think they were bringing that many ships?”
With Vigil still in the yard, Isaac commanded his fleet from the flag deck aboard Dante. Given the nature of the current Dante, that meant he was actually standing in the flag deck from the old Vigil, incorporated into the “new” ship in a single piece.
“I was expecting eleven,” he confirmed to the tall woman commanding his only active battlecruiser. He turned to his own staff. “Commander Rose, please take the Fleet to Status One.”
Rhianna Rose had been the old Vigil’s communications officer, but he’d stolen her for his personal staff after the amalgamation of the two ships. She’d proven intelligent and capable—and if nothing else, she was directly responsible for Exilium’s first election being fair and open despite an attempt to steal it.
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