The Hierarchy of Now and Forever

Captain John Tangent had but a single moment to react before the Paw boarding party fricasseed his body with kinetic projectiles. While his current (and, in retrospect, poorly chosen) disguise was that of a mighty Krull warrior...it didn't matter how tough someone was when you were facing down half a dozen needler rifles carried by twitchy, snarling Paw Star Mewrines - the dreaded cadre of feline warriors who had protected Paw ships in their anarchic pre-spaceflight days and had continued their bold tradition onto the spacelanes and the battles against the Zemturga Totality.

Now, broken and yoked to the Totality as battle thralls, the Mewrines were just as dangerous as they had ever been.

And so...

John started to tap dance as fast as he could, pumping his arms as the only showtune he could remember from his Academy days - a little ditty about tightening airlock bolts - burst from his mouth. The Mewrines faceplates were polarized and their expression were unreadable, but a few did lower their weapons and glance at their companions, their spacesuit helmet ears twitching with soft whirrs and clicks as they responded to the biological ears they augmented. John finished his dance by spread his hands wide and exclaiming. "The Aristocrats!"

Pixie, who hovered invisibly next to him, whispered: "If we both die, I'm blaming you."

Captain Tygress Starchaser, she of the fearsome bared belly and tiger striped features, blinked slowly at him. Then she burst out laughing, twirling her needler pistol and holstering it on one leather skirted hip. She grinned. "Okay," she said. "Explain. Space anomaly? Time warp? Some kind of cloning experiment or something?"

"Captain?" one of the mewrines - a Pawvite, if the rank tabs were of any indication - asked, his voice muffled by his space armor.

"This is no Krull!" Captain Starchaser said, her tail lashing. "That's

My Leaky Airlock

from

Centrifuge

by Strondgrass and Xeng, there's no way that a Krull would ever demean themselves to sing a song from a romantic comedy about guardian angels on a battleship. Doubly so when it's a

Terran

battleship."

John breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank god," he said, chuckling. "I, uh, didn't think that even my new friend could protect me from that many needlers."

"I could try!" Pixie said, wiggling her eyebrows. "Let me see." She shimmered - and several Mewrines aimed their needlers at her. She waved her hand. "Hiya! I'm Pixie! I'm a mysterious semi-fungal psychic lifeform that lives in Captain John Tangnet's head! Once I rest my psychic muscles, I can turn him from a Krull into a Terran again. WE were trying to do a sneaky trick thing. Cause, ya know, loyalties and all."

"Captain?" the highest ranked of the Mewrines spoke up - she had the rank chevrons of a Manul Snugeant and was as tough as that rank implied.

Captain Starchaser sighed, then stepped over to stand beside John. She turned to face her men and women. "Men. Women," she said. "I know that we have all sworn ourselves to the Totality. We have families that are at risk, if the Totality ever were to discover that we turned our back on our oaths...and the Queen herself has commanded that we do so. But you can feel in your warrior cat hearts that our Terran comrades are not all gone or enslaved. This is a free Terran, and this is a free Terran starship - the Alliance we all remember with reverence has returned. So, I say an oath given under duress is no oath at all, and that the we shall aide our former allies! Does any seek to gainsay me?" She narrowed her eyes at the Mewrines. They exchanged nervous glances - and Pixie narrowed her eyes suspiciously, then thrust her finger.

"You!" she pointed at one of the Pawvites, who tensed in surprise. "He's totally going to betray us."

Starchaser snarled, then sprang forward. Her paw-clad hand lashed out and, with a concussive

crack

, sent the helmet flying off the Pawvite, revealing a short, dark haired male with pale skin and bright golden and purple eyes. He lifted his arm and hissed, his ears flattening against his head...but before he could do anything more, Starchaser had grabbed onto his chest armor and lifted him bodily off the ground. She glared at him. "Pawvite B'ackstebb Klaw, is what that...fungus saying true?"

"We serve powerful masters now, not the pathetic Alliance!" Klaw whined. "We must tell the Zemturga that free Terrans are about! They're worth- urk!" He choked as Starchaser grabbed onto his throat, squeezing fiercely, glaring at him with a mad fury.

"Captain Starchaser!" John said, stepping forward, holding out a hand - it was so easy to forget that he was in the shape of a bestial Krull until reaching out caused half the Mewrines to flinch and reach for weapons. John froze. Pixie tensed. But Captain Starchaser hissed in fury and tossed down Klaw. The pawvite hit the ground and skidded, catching up against three other marines.

"To the brig with the wet cur!" Starchaser snarled. "And to your conference room, Captain Tangent. We have much to discuss."

"

Ladies

," Pixie said, wiggling her eyebrows and flicking her antennas.

Starchaesr shot her a look. "I can hear you, remember?" she asked.

"Oh. Right." Pixie coughed. "...okay, now that I'm invisible again: Laaaaaaaaaadies!"

"I can still hear you," Starchaser said, grinning.

"Ack!" Pixie vanished from even John's perceptions.

"But as a note," Starchaser said, brushing her hair behind her head and starting to saunter towards the airlock's inner entrance. "I prefer humans. And women. Human women."

"For some reason, I guessed," John said, casually, following after as the doors hissed open, then shut behind them.

***

The conference room was full of murmuring excitement as every superior officer on the

Excalibur

came to their seats, each of them buzzing with their own barely concealed excitement at the idea of speaking to an actual member of the Totality with seniority and, more importantly, access to current goings on. John had even requested that Quip Wip the Swiffo captain, be brought into attendance - her ship had been quietly following on with the

Excalibur

in flotilla fashion and...well, the damn Swiffo were so good at hiding that sometimes John felt like half the crew had forgotten that it existed at all. The only problem with getting her there had been, well...

I don't wish my presence to be known to too many people! That includes Zemturga Totality battle thralls!

She had dug in her shapely, shapely heels and John had finally settled on using Pixie to disguise her as a Terran. Of course, a Swiffo that looked like a Terran was still a startlingly beautiful figure, and Quip Wip was quite happy with the look and the disguise, even if she had to be sat next to Dr. Darling to ensure that the Omnidrone scientist could keep her from bouncing in her seat to watch her own bust jiggle.

John nodded to everyone as the last member of the crew required arrived with a slouch and a grumble: Kat, her tail drooping and her ears flat against her head. Captain Starchaser eyed her with a sneering contempt that surprised John. He shot a confused look at Starchaser, but before he could, Kat hissed, her hair floofing out, her ears popping up. She leaped up onto the table, crouching low and growling at the other Paw. Starchaser hissed right back, hunching forward. They both yowled, then Kat batted at the air before Starchaser's face. Starchaser slapped her hand away, sprang backwards, and hissed again.

"...well, this is fun," Delta Vee said from her seat, grinning brightly.

"What is going on?" John asked. "I've never seen Paw act like this before."

The two Paw hissed once more, then Kat shook herself, then huffed. "Hurmph!"

"Fine," Starchaser said, crossing her arms over her chest. "I'll let it drop this time."

"What is happening?" John asked, frowning as he turned to glower at Starchaser.

She huffed. "We don't like to talk about it."

"This is why it's the Yip-Paw-Lop, not the Paw-Paw-Paw," Kat said, her tail slapping Triana in the face as it swayed from side to side. Triana slapped at the tail, but before she could bat at it more than once, Kat had backflipped and landed into her seat. Starchaser adjusted her leather halter top, then stepped up to stand beside John.

"Now," she said. "That that's out of the way - you all want to hear about the Totality and Trade-1, huh?"

"Yeah," Albert said, cheerfully, clearly happy to move past the interspecies oddness. Well, John supposed it'd be in-

tra

-species oddness. "What's the deal? We've heard rumors but like...okay, how the hell are you and the Krull fighting? Why aren't the Zemturga slapping that down?"

"Because the Zemturga are at war with themselves," Starchaser said, her voice grim. "A

civil

war."

Everyone went very quiet and very still at that.

The very idea was almost impossible to imagine. For decades during the war with the Interstellar Alliance, and according to the Sensurians, centuries beforehand, the Zemturga Totality had been completely ironclad in its dedication to absolute and complete unity. There was a reason why the governance was referred to as the Hierarchy of Now and Forever: Lasting from this moment and on until the last star had guttered out was the plan and that plan was wrought in steel and blood, with the elephantine Zemturga sitting on their immense thrones and brooding over a vast pyramid of slaves, thralls and serfs. The workers would labor, the warriors would fight, and those chosen to give pleasure would...

Well.

"How?" Albert asked at the same time Eugene asked. "Why?"

Both questions seemed equally as important.

"How? That's the easier question to answer, but it's a lot more complicated. Why? Why's harder. We only have theories - maybe they have conquered the whole galaxy, and now they can't decide on how to run things. Maybe...though..." Starchaser frowned, slightly. "Maybe this was always their plan. It's not like the Zemturga were super

open

about their plans."

John frowned. "That's why their empire is falling to infighting?"

"Exactly," Starchaser said. "Now for the

how

...that's where things get worrying."

She turned to the main screen in the conference room, then slotted in her data-crystal, plucked from one of her...actually, John took a second glance at her sheer uniform and realized he had no idea where on Earth she had stored the damn thing. The screen hummed and whined to life, then displayed the all too familiar shape of a Zemturga Warsphere, bristling with its weapon emplacements and fighter launch pods. There were two other Warspheres in formation around it - a blue-green world of methane clouds and ice drifted beneath them. The screen shook slightly, buzzed, then focused again as Starchaser explained.

"This image was taken from a Singapura class far range scout, patrolling near the center of Zemturga territory. The scout saw these Warspheres and started to record, as we hadn't actually interacted with any Zemturga, not for a long, long time." She shook her head. "Then this happened."

The three Zemturga ships flared their forward thrusters, then shunted themselves down into the first tier of the SOF - their forms becoming faintly hazy from the realspace perspective of the Paw scoutship. Then the camera swung back, zoomed in, and showed something brand new arriving. It was roughly the same scale as the Warspheres, but the shape was all wrong. The launch bays were gone. In their place were additional shield emitters and armor plating - a kind of suicidal defensive feature as far as John understood interstellar warfare.

Yes, you could toughen ships by removing fighters. And there was a role for 'brawler' ships. But those ships had to travel with other carriers. If they ran into fighters, even a relatively paltry number, then there was no chance at all. A sentient piloted fighter could dart into and out of the SOF, taking advantage of its special properties to avoid point defense and dropping torpedo after torpedo into a capital ship. The extra armor would merely prolong the ending. It was

possible

for the enemy to run out of ammo, but considering how few torpedoes it took to chew a ship to pieces...

John shook his head as he saw the Zemturga Warspheres launching their fighters. The new ship - painted black, he noticed - swung itself to bear and started to launch its projectiles. What came out was no weapon he'd ever seen before.

It looked, for all the world, like a spinning buzz saw blade, freed from its mooring any any safety shroud, whirling wildly. But rather than being made of metal, it was made of crackling red energy, malevolent and bloody. It threw off sparks that hissed around it - like wood chips being sprayed as it cut into lumber. The fighters that tried to bank around the energy saw were struck by the sparks, unerringly. John saw their trajectory

change

, to bring them into contact with the fighters. As they blew apart, the Warspheres tried to evade. They were bulky ships, and one was a little too slow: The saw bit into the hull, cleaving through shields and armor like...

Well.

Exactly like a saw like this would.

The black ship continued to fire saws - and while several fighters evaded, and the Zemturga began to return fire with their main guns, the fight was so clearly over with that first strike. The Zemturga lost one crippled Warsphere to a direct strike, the saw cleaving the immense, three hundred meter long ship from stem to stern. It tumbled into two halves, spilling battle thrall crew and, somewhere in the profusion of wreckage, a single Zemturga. As the two halves drifted apart, the other two tried to flank the black ship. One was struck a glancing blow, and this time, it didn't survive to be bisected. Instead, the buzz saw cut in deep...and then the screen whited out. The other warsphere glowed cherry red from the proximity, and the black ship's nose blazed brilliantly with radiant energy.

The last warsphere fired shot after shot into the approaching ship's shields, blasting through to blister and burn away the armor. But here, the brawler design showed its mettle: It cruised through plasma and beam fire and fired a shot point blank through the spine of the warsphere.

The footage wrapped with a growled voice - picked up by the Paw's microphone, saying: "Get us the hell out here before that monster ship spots us!"

"Holy shit," Delta whispered.

"That saw blade weapon, can anyone tell me how that might be working?" John asked.

"From my analysis and the data we have available..." Dr. Darling said, her voice as breathy and soft as ever. Her breasts heaved as she reached up to adjust her glasses with gleaming silver fingers. "I believe that it is a weapon that has only been theorized before...it's an Downspin weapon." She tapped her fingers together. "It's putting realspace physics into the space opera field - something that we thought was possible, but..."

"How would that make it so effective?" Eugene asked.

"And how would it take out those fighters?" Delta Vee asked. "Realspace physics are stupid, they can't do tricks like that. Right?"

"That's just it," Dr. Darling said, her voice grim. "The Space Opera Field is convenience incarnate. It makes possible many things that should be implausible or impractical - from faster than light travel to force fields to artificial gravity to interstellar space fighters. A downspin weapon brings reality to those

concepts.

The sparks seek out fighters because the fighters attract them by their very construction. It relates to the metaphysical shape of the engineering!"

"Isn't

that

too convenient too exist?" Kat asked, her read resting on one of her palms as she slouched against the table.

"That's exactly it!" Dr. Darling exclaimed, springing to her feet. "Since the concept was hypothesized, it has always failed under that inherent contradiction - the science supporting it was so complex it drove mathematicians trying to understand it insane, and every attempt to build it has caused reality implosions, wormholes, madness plagues. We've always thought it was impossible. And yet here...the Zemturga have it! One of their factions, I should say."

"The Zemturga haven't told anyone what their enemies are called," Starchaser said, her voice grim. "But as they are using warspheres that have only been modified, we assume that they have to be Zemturga rebels, yes? And...well, there are Zemturga warspheres that fight other Zemturga warspheres more traditionally - civil war is the only answer. Isn't it?"

John rubbed his chin. "Possibly. Shey...what kind of defense could we have against...that?" he gestured to the paused screen - the frame stilled on the black Zemturga ship. The...well, it wasn't a warsphere anymore, was it?

Shey watched the image, her finger playing along the table - bringing up the interface to control the playback. She ran the image back, then forward again, then back, then forward again. Her eyes were shadowed as she looked back into his.

"Don't get hit," she said.

***

Captain Starchaser growled as she slammed down her communicator. John, who had listened to the hissing, yowling tirade in Pawish that she had snarled into it, arched an eyebrow. "I take it the other frigates are beginning to ask uncomfortable questions."

"They think that you're still a Krull ship and are asking what's taking so long. I've given them the story that I'm checking your slave pens," she said, grumbling quietly under her breath. "Taking extra time to fuck with you. But this means all of them will expect a Krull captain to get off."

John nodded slightly. "It's not a terrible disguise. But I'm going to guess that the captains of the rest of

Waa

squad are more loyal to the Totality?"

"Yeah," Starchaser said. "They're all people born after the war ended." Her eyes looked a little distant. "You have no idea what that was like, do you."

"Only stories. And so far, only stories from Earth," he said. "Terrans being whisked up en mass, scooped away and made into Pleasure Serfs across the Totality. What..." He paused.

"What happened to the Yip-Paw-Lop?" Starchaser asked, her tail drooping as she looked down at the communicator that hung from her belt. She sighed, quietly. "After the Alliance fell, it was chaos. Confusion. Every fleet was so intermixed, and everybody wanted to get back to their homeworlds. For me? I arrived after the Zemturga arrived in orbit, and their damn warspheres crowded the skies above our homeworld. There, they broke us apart." She closed her eyes. "The Lop were taken. The Yip were put onto the planetary surface. And we Paw were left in the ships, alone. Do you know what it's like to be alone like that?"

John thought of Kat. He bit his lip, slightly. "Is it harder if you're used to it?"

"Oh yeah," Starchaser said, breathing in slowly, then letting it out as a sigh. "Part of me hopes that young Paw engineer you have never meets a Yip or a Lop. Never realizes what she's missing."

John put his hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently.

Pixie slowly floated into view. She wiggled her eyebrows suggestively.

John arched an eyebrow right back.

"Okay, wait, actually, I have an idea," Pixie said, then drifted back down out of view. John, feeling faintly concerned about that, had no chance to respond before Starchaser rolled her shoulders, shaking his hand off her.

"It's fine," she said. "We just need to kill the Zemturga - both factions - and get the galaxy back under our command, huh?"

"Just so," John said. "Now, do you have an excuse to let us go once you head back to your ship?"

Pixie appeared in a spray of sparkles between them, her hands spreading wide as she sang out: "Rooooooomance!"