Friends of the Sky
16. Of Azure and Armpit

1.

The fighters turned back toward the azure moon, orbiting its ice giant a light week away. What was going on there was the opposite of decay.

When the Ngugma explorer-cruiser and the Tasmania landed on the Mars-sized moon, they immediately set about fixing up a more permanent abode, on a stony knoll high up on the highland. The onslaught of the explosive barrage simply concentrated their various minds. Timmis got Apple and Izawa down to the surface and found that the entire complement of both ships had decamped to the building site. Eight Ngugma, including Fonnggark, and seventeen humans, including Kalkar and the pregnant Lafitte and Shelleen, were out digging holes, fabricating beams, putting up frames, and debating about floor plans.

When the seven fighters returned to the azure moon, starting to be referred to as Azure Moon, they were put straight to work. Beta Wing concentrated on glass production, Clay and Natasha and Miz on interior design, Grohl and Santos on patrolling the sky, while Rachel went about supervising.

The moon was orbitally locked to its giant mistress, which it orbited every thirty hours; thus it had an almost normal day, except that, day or night, the planet hung in the same place in the sky, brilliantly blue with orange streaks in the night, glowering and dark in the day. Where the ships were setting up their digs, the planet was permanently rising (or setting); sometimes at lunar dawn, the planet would block out the sun in a moon-wide eclipse. Most of the time, the moon, despite its tenuous atmosphere, seemed flooded with a blue light. Gradually the whole system, including the defunct Enemy depot at the yellow dwarf, came to be called Azure.

By the end of the fourth 24-hour day of work, a sort of ski chalet was shaping up on the flat highland. There was a lot left to do, but the fighters were inside processing air and water, and Jack Dott and Timmis Green and a couple of Ngugma were setting up food (and cannabis and alcohol and caffeine) production. Everyone had their first dinner—lasagna!—and ate standing around chatting in the low gravity.

Rachel, Clay, Natasha, Kalkar and Fonnggark found their way out onto the big balcony in their vac suits. The giant planet loomed up ten degrees above the horizon, its rings rising at least to ten o’clock. Behind all that, the Milky Way stretched across the heavens from one horizon to the other. Its central bulge loomed on the other side of the sky, a foggy mirror image of the rising planet.

“Do you think that whole galactic core is infested?” asked Kalkar.

“Our assumption,” growled Fonnggark, “is that it is. There would be perhaps fifty billion suns in that central bar. It should be everywhere there, at least a little. Perhaps one percent, perhaps ten percent, harbor an infestation like that of, you say, Slime Ball. Volhazzh Phohh. A lovely name. Very, what is that short little word, apt.”

“I’d have to agree,” said Rachel, “if it’s had the time you Ngugma have had, to conquer most of the Orion Arm, then it logically would by now have overrun the entire central bar of the galaxy. Do you think it would have made it into the other arms? The Orion Arm is rather the puny one.”

“We do not think the Enemy has yet grown into the large arm near here: the Scooootooom?”

“Scutum,” said Clay. “Why would they not? Do you think there are other species in the other galactic arms, Scutum, Perseus, Cygnus, also desperately resisting the Enemy Goo?”

“Perhaps,” said Fonnggark. They gazed up at the Milky Way for some time, their eyes drawn down to its sinister central bulge. Fonnggark stretched a fat vac-suited arm up from there. “You call it Perseus. Yes. I was once small, a child you say, I recall looking up at the stars, and at pictures of other galaxies, and wondering if there was a child there looking up at me, you know, billions of stars, the probability would be extremely high.”

“All those open windows,” said Natasha.

“Yes,” said Fonnggark. “All those open windows. I too had an open window.”

“Open windows?” said Clay.

“You know,” said Natasha. “Some little girl was looking out her open window at the sky. Maybe she had tentacles.” She laughed and patted Fonnggark on the nearest arm. “Maybe she was an Ngugma. It didn’t matter. I was in my mom’s house looking out the window—I remember it was a place we lived for a whole two years.” She laughed. “Anyway, it stuck with me.”

“Is this why you went into space?” asked Kalkar.

“Oh, it’s complicated.”

“Tasha,” said Clay, “why did Vera go into the program? I’ve always thought she had some sort of secret, I mean she was quite mysterious about it. But I never found out what it was.”

“She had an argument with her mom,” said Natasha. “Do not tell her I told you.”

“What?? Of course we won’t. But—what?”

“She had an argument with her mom, and then she broke up with her fiancée, and she had this offer out there, she was going to just let it sit, but she got mad and joined HHP. Human Horizon Project,” she explained to Fonnggark.

“She joined up on a snit?” Clay couldn’t think what else to say: he was struck by the memory of Vera Santos smiling at him through their visors on the Moon, giving him her serious look just before that kiss, that first kiss. Vera. Killer. Scourge of Primoids, Mouthholes, Fyaa and Ngugma. “Well,” he said, “my dad died, and I was bored with my job.” He laughed. “I was bored so I joined up. And here I am.”

“It’s as good a reason as any,” said Rachel. “I got divorced. My husband cheated on me.”

They stood there on the balcony, watching the moon’s plains grow dark even as the giant planet didn’t move in the sky. The sun was already set; the Milky Way glowed brighter and brighter. Fonnggark and Kalkar excused themselves and went inside to play chess; Natasha went down to meet Vera landing, as she and Grohl were replaced on patrol by Apple and Izawa. Rachel and Clay were left on the balcony alone.

“Clay,” said Rachel.

“My love?” he replied.

“I want to live right here.”

“What?”

“I want to live right here. This is it. This is the place. You and me. And our, um, friends. Here. On Azure. You still want to be with me, don’t you?”

He looked at her. “Well, who needs, you know, air.” Then he laughed. “Of course I want to be with you,” he said. “We have all the air we need. You’re my air.” He grabbed her hand and twirled her about and let her fall back into his arms, and they bumped visors. “I will always want to be with you,” he said.

“That’s especially convenient,” said Rachel. “Because I will always want to be with you.”

2.

The little fleet stayed at Azure for two weeks. By the end of their working vacation, they had built a five-story chalet, with the ten fighter pilots housed on the top floor around a common room with a tub. There were three squash courts carved from the moon rock underneath the chalet.

Meanwhile they were setting up their communications and astrometric systems. They certainly were at an interesting spot in the galaxy. Lying on their backs on the lunar surface, just up the next hill from the chalet, Clay and Rachel and Apple and Izawa gazed up and out beyond the nearby bluish star and the yellow dwarf ten light days away, and straight into the Empty Lanes. To the right and above them loomed the heart of the Milky Way Galaxy, a dome of bright dusty haze covering forty or fifty degrees of sky. Looming near on their right stretched the long dust lanes and bright nebulas of the Scutum Arm. To the left of them and below, the Orion Arm curved away, drawing back from a minor bulge that stuck out from Galactic Center. That was it: their country. They were residents and patriots of the Orion Arm, a couple of billion suns that had peeled off between the Scutum and Sagittarius arms. The “less fashionable end” of the galaxy indeed.

“That star,” said Rachel, “at the end of that stretch of nebula? That’s Armpit.”

“Looks normal to me,” said Clay: even in their enhanced views, the star was just a dot.

“Yeah, well,” said Apple, “there’s a fight over there and I kinda want to join in.”

Armpit still lay over 1200 light years from Azure. Tasmania and the ten fighters would all go straight there and see what was to be done. It was decided that Fonnggark would shoot back to Slime Ball, or Volhazzh Phohh, and use its explorer cruiser to explore a little, and that everyone would meet back at Azure in 2,416 years.

“We’re not done fixing you,” said Padfoot, when Clay and Rachel decided to snoop around in the basement mech rooms. Six Ghosts, one of which Clay was sure was his, lay half taken apart. Padfoot, Poto Wall, Gene Bell, Raea Chee, Jack Dott and a couple of Ngugma were at work; Timmis and two Ngugma were discussing Timmis’s flector system.

“Is everybody here?” said Clay. “No wonder our parties are boring.”

“Hey now,” said Rachel. “Hey, Angele! Is she cooking up something? Her and Shelleen?”

“Is she cooking up something?” Padfoot repeated, looking at Angele, who just smiled. “We’ll just say that as per usual, we have taken your real-world data and applied it to the problem at hand, and I think you’ll be pleased with the result. But what I have to talk to you about is navigation.”

So they went and got a coffee, and Padfoot, for once, talked their ears off. Clay’s accidental nav discovery was a real thing, said Padfoot. “And yeah, you could expect some weird effects at light speed, but you totally mess with their big veggie brains.” She also insisted on pushing the fighters to nine nines past the decimal, at which bizarre and unprecedented speed they would barely coast at all in their own chronologies.

Two weeks passed. It was such a long stretch on one world, in one star system, that Clay really started to think of Azure Moon as home, and of the queen-size bed he shared with Rachel as his actual bed. And the Mars-level gravity made that all the more interesting. Then they’d wake up, he’d shower, he’d meet the girls (and Timmis) for breakfast, and they all could have been back on the Moon again, the one that orbited Olde Earth.

But then the time came for them to be off about their work. Earn their pay, hardy har har. The crews, Ngugma and Human and feline—seven of those, now?–piled onto the cruiser and the freighter. Clay and the other fighter pilots watched Tasmania and Fonnggark’s ship take off, and then they waved to each other, got in their fully refurbished Ghost 205s and followed. Behind them, the chalet on the azure moon went to sleep, ready if called upon to inform visitors that its residents were out of town. They would be back in about twenty-four centuries.

3.

Clay Gilbert from Rockland accelerated toward the speed of light. He knew already that the zone of reality very near light speed was full of peculiar things. Soon they were in that country, and those things, whether they looked for them or not, were all around.

And when they were there, at a velocity so close to the speed of light that the light itself gave up on them and they wandered in a realm of holes and expanses and strange sliding perspectives, ten fighters huddled together in the blackness, the order went out. They did the unthinkable: they maneuvered at 99.999999999% of light speed. They dropped sideways, waited precisely one tick, and hit 120% deceleration.

And sixty hours later, when they were supposedly down to 25% of light speed, the darkness around them had not dispelled.

And twenty hours after that, they were still dragging the tenebrous drapes of light speed around them.

And then the system began all at once to appear. The ten fighters, the armored merchant behind them, were decelerating hard still as they approached the orbit of the outermost of the four gas giant planets. Ahead of them, the bright yellow star glowered upon a large terrestrial planet with three moons and a deep coating of evil slime. It was co-orbital with a dozen big flowers, six big battleship-things, four planet-sized spheroidal globules, and hundreds of those woody cruisers.

“I’m picking up a lot of ships,” said Li.

“But the important thing is,” said Rachel, “they’re not picking up us.”

“For now we see as in a darkened glass,” Clay quoted, “but then, we will see the real thing, as we will be seen.”

“I get to say it,” said Aliya. “It’s the biggest fleet we’ve ever faced.”

“If there are miracles and gifts of healing,” he went on, quoting from memory, “if there is speaking in tongues, these things will be taken away.” He laughed, a tear in his eye, not really sure what he was feeling, aside from a strange peaceful confidence. “And now only these three remain, faith, hope, and love.” He laughed.

“Well, regardless of that,” said Natasha, “the Ngugma are still here.”

Indeed, in orbit around the innermost of the four gas giants, harboring amongst the big planet’s rocky rings, lay a veritable fortress, the furthest-flung base of the Ngugma, which only looked small because of its surroundings. It was armored and heavily armed, and protected by a fleet of cruisers that could all scoot inside its bays if necessary. The cruisers were out just now, but as the Enemy fired off volleys of its fiery globules, the Ngugma got their ships under cover.

“Nice fort,” said Apple. “Too bad it’s doomed.”

“They do have really excellent defensive technology,” said Timmis. “I only understand about ten percent of it but that part looks impressive. They have a force field for the fireballs, all kinds of gun emplacements, including enfilading fire, and those things that pop up and shoot at you from behind, about five different kinds of missile or fighter. And booby traps, of course.”

“But could they afford to build their fighters here?” said Natasha. “If not, they’ll run out of fighters and missiles very quickly. If so, then they’d need to be able to tap into the metals trade.”

“Along that line,” said Vera, “I’m picking up wreckage, freighter wreckage. Looks like Big Seventeen or Big Twenty-Six or something kinda met a sticky end.”

“Stretched over a hundred million k,” said Apple, “I would guess it was like Big Seventeen through Thirty-four, inclusive.”

“Pull up,” called Rachel. “Contact the Captain. Gettin’ an idea.”

Forty hours later, the movement of the ten fighters resumed—it would be a bit much to call it an onslaught. Four of them—Beta Wing, as it turned out—accelerated toward the enemy’s right. In the middle, a wrecked freighter coasted along under no power whatever, dark. It was a maneuver any Ngugma commander, any Primoid captain or Tskelly wing leader would have seen right through, having already fought and lost to the Earthlings. The herbaceous Enemy instead saw four fighters peel off, and it sent its muscle that way, led by dozens of mouthholes and shzhawkhor.

Li led her wing hard to the right, and the woody cruisers began to bunch up in front of the Betas. They pushed their normal components to the maximum, and suddenly the four Ghosts were moving hard to the left, where they burned through a thin spot in the covering forces and came up against a trio of cruisers. These laid down a hard fire of the spiny missiles, but the Ghosts responded curiously. They hit their proverbial brakes and came to a complete stop relative to the cruisers. Their passive countermeasures snapped on, and the missiles lost all power and drifted. From behind this shield, the four opened fire on the leftmost cruiser and soon had it bursting into hot flames. The cruisers began leveling close-range fire on the Ghosts, and knocked out a few flectors, but another cruiser went dead and began to come apart.

By then, Beta was no longer commanding attention.

Behind them, the wrecked freighter (its name had in fact been Double Big Twenty) was accelerating now, though its energy output was masked. It headed leftward toward orbit—toward one of the gigantic spheroids. Shzhawkhor came after it, but six fighters emerged and blasted their way across the field of tiny foes. Bigger ships would be needed, but the invaders had somehow gained a tempo on the defenders. They went for a 100-kilometer pass of the first spheroid. Rachel and Clay flew in front, Apple and Izawa to the left, Aliya and Grohl to the right, clearing the way. They began to meet a sort of convergently evolved cousin of the Ghost 201—something that seemed designed to do maintenance but which was armed to fight. The first few wings of these, six each, were a bit of a shock—Clay lost his shield against a pesky one—but they got the hang of it.

So, one little deadly clash at a time, the Earthlings won the space around the first giant spheroid. It was the size of Mars—the size of Bluehorse. It was, their data told them, compartmented into huge tank sections, all filled with something or other; it had complicated organ structures around its south pole.

“Ready,” called Padfoot.

“Ready,” said Vald Singer, the gunner.

“Well, let ’em have it,” said Kalkar. “We came all this way.”

Singer launched six missiles, then six more, to hit the spheroid in various places. Rachel was already sending new nav to everyone. They bent to the right and up, Tasmania keeping the wrecked freighter hull they had bolted on. Another force formed up to challenge them: one of the battleship-things, looking like a cliff, along with seven of the cruisers, a dozen of the pod fighters and, of course, hundreds of shzhawkhor.

But this force found itself under fire from behind, and it reacted, and by the time its mind had grasped what was in front of it, Rachel had led Tasmania across a flank and into the orbit of a second of the four giant spheroids.

Behind them, the first was already visibly deflating. Sections of rot had formed near its skin, and tanks of goo were blowing out into space. Ahead, through another thin veil of shzhawkhor, the six fighters were clearing the sky. Another twelve missiles were fired, and the little force turned again and accelerated hard toward the third of the four.

“These things aren’t just their storage tanks,” called Natasha as they spent a couple of hundred seconds crossing the gap. “See down there? It’s budding out those fighter things.”

“It’s a quick learner, making something Ghost-size,” said Rachel. “It’s imitating us. It’s gonna replace out, the only us is us.”

“Amen,” said Vera.

Nothing attacks suddenly in space, but as they came into the vicinity of the third of the spheroids, an attack materialized from many directions. The Enemy was reacting faster, its defense playing zone, but with a thousand players covering eleven. Rachel and company reversed thrust hard and soon were backing away, and Tasmania fired off six more missiles at the Enemy ships in front of them.

Then they dropped and shot forward, with Apple, Izawa, Grohl and Aliya covering Tasmania against the Enemy group, which had stalled and seemed a bit lost. Twelve more missiles came at the third spheroid, and eleven landed and hit.

“Holy crap,” said Grohl, “that hit one of their cruiser things.”

“It’s turning,” said Ram Vindu. “That cruiser is turning and accelerating out of the system.”

“The first spheroid,” Emily Gray said, “has lost integrity and is falling. The second is significantly infected. The third is definitely infected, early stage.”

“Here comes navigation for Number Four,” said Rachel.

“Oh Jesus,” said Clay.

“Yeah,” said Vera, “looks like we got ourselves a fight.”

4.

The six fighters flew on into the planty teeth of the Enemy. Beta Wing curved in to join them, with Tasmania, still hiding in its hermit-crab shell, behind. The guys at the guns, Gene Bell and Vald Singer, had their hands full, but their guns—they now had eight of them they could fire at once—were keeping the shzhawkhor and the mouthholes off the freighter’s tail.

The Enemy was not attacking the tail. The Enemy’s weapons were in front, from tiny thorn missiles to cruiser-things and battleship-things. The thorns were merely a nuisance now, but there were now things that looked like fighters and fired laser blasts: not great shooters yet, but a lot of them.

The ten fighters zipped about in front of the big freighter hulk, sweeping back Enemy ships and deactivating Enemy missiles. It was too easy, of course: the cruisers and battleships began laying down channeling fire to contain the Ghosts, just as any Ngugma or Primoid admiral would have.

The fighters responded by continuing to evade and concentrating their fire on one cruiser at a time. One went up, then another, then two more, and meanwhile Tasmania got a missile through to a battleship-thing, which quickly went dead.

Now the Enemy threw as much war materiel as could fit in the space around the ten fighters and the freighter. The human offense, now on defense, bent with the onslaught, and rebounded. The pod-fighter-things went down in rows. Tasmania took care of the shzhawkhor; a particular electromagnetic pulse Padfoot and Bell had come up with took out waves of spiny missiles; attacking cruisers were literally cut to pieces by the fighters. Clay was cutting through one side and practically came to grief from Millie Grohl’s lasering on the other side. They saluted and went on to the next one.

At that point, the onslaught became a rout. The Enemy could not stop throwing its rotten gourds at the Tasmania and its ten attendants, but nothing was getting through. Sixty seconds of this ended with a clunk and then quiet. “I’m okay” lights lit up on everyone’s panel.

“No serious damage?” called Rachel. The noes were unanimous. “Okay, then,” said Rachel, “sending attack pattern. Let’s put an end to this.”

“Let’s go tend the garden,” called Apple. “Open season on green slime,” called Izawa. “Let’s crush this,” said Aliya.

Li set off a buzzer in everyone’s fighter and called, “Everyone, please! The Vow. Please.”

Ten pilots opened their maneuver programs. Five couples turned together to five targets: Apple and Izawa, Aliya and Grohl, Santos and Kleiner, Li and Green, Andros and Gilbert. Smirks formed on ten faces. Clay hit play and the opening notes of “Gimme Shelter” jangled across ten Ghost 205s. Dropping from the scene of the great slaughter, Tasmania followed Aliya and Grohl in for a can’t miss bombing run on the fourth of the giant spheroids. The other eight fighters went off to clean up what was left of the Enemy’s biotic navy. And lo, from the gates of the Ngugma stronghold, there issued forth the Last Fleet, two dozen cruisers and an antiquated battlecruiser and hundreds of patched-up robot fighters, and set upon the already decaying foe.

Before Clay had gone more than a few thousand kilometers, he had a message. He poked the message button, and there was her face, the face he loved more than any other, on the left half of his screen. “Here we are, Clay Gilbert,” said Rachel Andros. “Gonna keep the Vow. Made it way back on Bluehorse. Still keeping it.”

“I know,” said Clay, wiping a tear.

“Aww, baby,” she said. “We’re gonna do it. We are going to frickin’ do this thing. It’s amazing. You’re amazing. We’re amazing.”

“I know,” he said. He looked out on the system, spread against the veils of the galactic core. They were tiny things, grey two-meter grains floating in dark vacuum, among the stars and voids. But they were the mighty ones.

“Clay,” she said, “we are alive. This thing before us, this is not life. Life is us.”

“Oh, I know,” he said. “Life’s winning again.”

Half the screen was filled with Rachel’s grin. “I love you,” she said. “You read the rest, right? And now only these three remain: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.”

“That’s what it’s all about, baby,” said Clay. “So let’s go kill something evil.”