The Long Shot

Tulon sat on a rock, watching as Gyre worked on the tower that could speak to heaven.

She drummed her thumbs against her thighs, and tried to process everything that she had learned since she had arrived at this island -- but...it was all so much. Too much. An impossible amount to grapple with.

Chinsara had no such issues.

"So, we...are...all...the descendants of-"

"People who came here for a good time, yeah," Gyre said, sounding a bit distracted. "Come on..." His fingers worked on some ancient looking wires and cables that he had pulled from the tower. The tower itself -- the ansible, as Gyre had referred to it -- was not the most auspicious thing that Tulon had ever seen. It was a rectangular shape of grayish metal that emerged from the jungle floor and thrust up to the heavens. It had been covered entirely by vines and moss when they had arrived, but Gyre had pulled the vines away with ease and left it clean and bare.

Then he had sworn a lot.

"I don't understand, what...how...how!?" Chinsara asked.

Gyre sighed. "Okay, imagine it like this. What if you could change your body the same way you could change your clothing?" He asked. "Don't ask how, just imagine you can. Now, imagine, then, if you could sculpt worlds like clay. If you want an ocean, you make an ocean. If you want mountains, you can get a mountain. Okay?" At her nod, he continued. "So, some people, thousands of years ago, wanted a world that suited them and would be entertaining in a very specific way..."

"They made this

whole

world just for entertainment?" Chinsara sounded almost offended.

"World crafting is a high art in the Galactic Concord," Gyre said, leaning back down and scooting his head and shoulders into the belly of the ansible as he started to work on it again. "And I don't think they planned for it to get knocked out of commission like this."

"So, our great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents knew all this and just didn't write it down? They didn't tell their children?" Chinsara asked.

"Oh, they didn't know, I don't think. This was one of the full immersion parks. They did a complete memory wipe before arriving -- then when their tour is over, they can come back, their old memories are reasserted, and the entertainment sticks with them," Gyre said, his voice muffled, and full of grunting as he worked. "The idea is to see who would survive longest, who would conquer the most territory...that kind of thing. Then, once it's all wrapped, you get to admire what you managed in a recording taken from orbit."

"That's insane," Chinsara said.

"Yeah, well, it's fallen out of style over the past few centuries."

"Oh, well, thank the Goddess!" Chinsara said, standing up and beginning to stalk left and right, her hands on her hips.

Yetna laughed. It was not a health laugh.

She was standing off by the corner of the clearing that surrounded the ansible, and as Tulon watched, she picked up a rock, tossed it into the air, then whacked it with a branch. The branch cracked at the end, splintering, and she let go of it, so it sailed into the woods. "Well, that's just

dandy

! Our lives are fucking pointless stupid goddess damned jokes then!" She laughed again, even more hysterically.

Gyre shoved himself out from under the ansible. "That's not the case," he said, seriously.

"Oh? We're the descendants of horny idiots from the stars who wanted to look like hot shark girls!" Yetna snapped. "Everything we fought for has been fucking

pointless

!"

"No," Gyre said, his voice firm. "Because this place hasn't been a paradise planet, or a tourist destination, for two thousand years or more. A planet's just a planet. People are just people. It doesn't matter if you were put here by nature or by design -- what matters is what you've done. And you? You chose to turn your back on a megalomaniac who might

know all of this

and chose to destroy and conquer instead of educate and help. That matters way more than who your ten times removed great grandmother was."

Tulon felt her stomach tighten and her heart flutter at that. She stood, pushing herself to her feet, and put her hand on Yetna's shoulder before the other woman could respond to Gyre. She squeezed and Yetna closed her mouth, actually taking the time to consider what he had said.

"Have you gotten into touch with anyone else?" She asked, seriously.

"No...and that's what worries me," Gyre said, looking at her -- his concerns masking his normal awkwardness around her. He sighed, then laid onto his back, staring up into the bright, blue-white sky that hung overhead. They had been here all evening. "I got into contact with the Corps, but they didn't recognize my auth codes. Those codes change every month or two, so that's not shocking. But I think they're disregarding the signal because the Concord registers this place as a theme park planet."

"Don't they know that it's been missing for thousands of years?" Chinsara asked.

"Imagine if, uh, a random beggar came up to you on the streets of Queen's Crown," Gyre said, still looking up at the sky. "How would you know that he had been missing for ten years? There are more theme park planets than you'd think -- and even if this place made a huge splash when it dropped out of the Concord, that was two

thousand

years ago. The Concord is an incredibly stable society...some might even say stagnant..." He sighed. "But there's so much trivia that gets learned and forgotten in two thousand years."

They were all silent for a bit.

"Then call someone else," Tulon snapped. "Even we know that there's more people you can talk to than just the Corps!"

"I-" Gyre flushed. "I can't."

"Why not!?" Tulon asked, striding forward.

"Because I don't know any other com coordinates!" Gyre said, sighing. "I...that stuff was all handled by my officers -- all the pre-logged com coordinates on this thing are thousands of years out of date, they're signaling to planets that might not even exist anymore, or that have changed their cords." He groaned. "We have a working phone and no

goddamn

number."

Tulon frowned. She stood above the beautiful, frustrating, infatuating man. "Okay. Then what

do

we get by being here?"

Gyre sighed. "We get...access to the automation that still exists." He closed his eyes. "We have the orbital defenses, some security systems, uh, the..." He stopped.

"What?" Tulon asked, squatting down and glaring at him.

"...the backups," Gyre said.

"The backups of what?" Tulon asked.

"...of people," Gyre opened his eyes. "The final safety precaution, to ensure that a vacation doesn't become an obituary. The planet has a huge backup store of personalities, logged and preserved, right below us."

Tulon's brow furrowed.

"Tulon, your husband might be alive," Gyre whispered.

***

Roxi dropped from E-space and to the edge of Omicron Pegasus 52a's solar system with a crackling wave of ultraviolet light. She hovered in space and, for a moment, just...stared.

Supergiant stars were not things that one could take lightly. Maps of the Galactic Concord tended to paint a rosy, comforting picture of the galaxy: A thin band of bright golden paint, wrapped around the map of the galaxy, representing the Habitable Zone that the Concord had colonized and occupied for nearly five thousand years straight. But that was hideously inaccurate -- because even the Habitable Zone was actually not very habitable. There were millions of stars contained in it, and of those stars, the prepondenace of them were either too small and hot or too large and cold for them to create habitable planets.

That didn't mean that these systems were unexplored or even unoccupied. There was famous worlds like Devil's Den and Theerinak which orbited around hostile stars.

But by and large?

People knew to stay away.

Omicron Pegasus 52a slapped Roxi in the face with how most humans would never have stopped here -- and she felt a superstitious shiver slide along her spine and up to the middle of her metallic shoulder blades. It was not merely the size of the thing -- which dominated the hemisphere of sky she could see with her eyes, consuming space like a vast red pit. It was the

color

. The blazing, bright, brilliant red color of it, roaring and roiling, banded with the shimmering curves of magnetic storms that sent up glittering columns of stellar matter into the void, only for them to drop back down onto the hellish cauldron of the supergiant's surface.

There were no planets. There were no asteroids.

Omicron Pegasus 52a would never have allowed such trifling things as partner bodies exist, not without drawing them into its bulk and eating them.

[Wow,] Hugh whispered.

[We're here to do a job, everyone,] Heinlein said and Roxi squared her shoulders.

"Right," she said into the emptiness of space. The sound didn't actually leave her lips, but it did transmit through her head as she started to soar towards the supergiant. "Are we getting the data we need, Caracas?"

[Running initial tests,] Carcass said. [The star looks like she only has a few million years left on the cosmic lifespan. She's a geezer.]

Roxi smiled as she started to orbit around the star, careful to keep herself at sub-relativistic speeds. She looked left, right, up and down, making sure to check every quadrant she could, to make sure there was no sign of others ships. Her senses, attuned and primed for this kind of environment, picked out movement that should have been impossible for a human eye to see...but that was because Roxi

wasn't

human anymore. The automation in her body turned the camera-signals into something that her still quite fleshy brain could process...

So, rather than getting albedo and light-curves and orbital elements, she instead just saw the shape of asteroids in the distance. Tiny bits of space flotsam, caught in the vast cloud of interstellar debris that was this solar systems only bodies other than the immense star. Each time she saw a tiny twitch of motion, her brain -- primed to expect predators in the brush, even out here a hundred light years from home and in a body of advanced technology -- screamed at her.

Danger! Danger!

[Do you want to nuke some, would that make you feel better?] K'iren asked, dryly.

"It might!" Roxi admitted as she banked left -- but then Carcass's voice pinged through her mind.

[The star checks out -- she's right on the edge of supercritical. We can iron bomb her.]

"Got it," Roxi said. "Plot a course for the next star on our checklist."

[I can't believe we're actually going to be bombing our own suns...] Hugh said, quietly.

[I'm shocked they even have iron bombs,] K'iren said as they darted into E-space. The shimmering, crackling fields that were thrown up by the supermassive star forced her to slow down, picking her way through the extra-dimensional space carefully. She grazed her palm upon one of the fractal, endlessly recursive clouds of quasi-matter that made up the higher reaches of E-space, feeling the buzzing, crackling feeling of them against the smoothness of her palm. [I've done reading on them, they're ancient and we never even used them, back when they were new.]

Why not?

Roxi asked, having to focus a bit harder now as she realized that the quasi-matter ahead of her was getting more jagged and thornlike. It reached out towards her and she had to go even slower to avoid running deeper into them.

[It's a ton of work for a little reward -- like, if you're going to blow up a sun, you can just...relatavistic...] She trailed off. [Okay, is it just me, or is E-space getting gnarlier than it should be?]

[It's not just you,] Heinlein said. [Carcass?]

[There's no way that anything in realspace would be making these formations, not unless they were blowing up stars, and we'd get warned by the q-coms if they...were, damn it!] Carcass' normally snarky, sly voice grew heated as Roxi found herself unable to advance without thrusting herself into jagged thorns. She backed up -- then hissed as she felt the space around and behind her closing off.

We're dropping out of here!

She thought.

Get ready, load the nukes.

[I'm way, way, way ahead of you,] K'iren said, chuckling as Roxi felt her ankles

clunk

loudly, the heavy weight of munitions sliding into her ankle launchers feeling...weirdly comforting to her. She tensed.

[Dropping now,] Carcass said.

E-space swept around her, like diving feet first into a deep, dark pool. Roxi dropped into intestellar space -- every star a distant, glittering gemstone around her, none close enough to provide more than the faintest gleam. But despite that all, she was not alone: She was surrounded by bulky shapes, octagonal and looming, each one easily ten, twenty kilometers wide, like huge fat lugnuts floating through space. They were each thronged around by smaller craft -- each one a cruiser or a battleship or a destroyer.

[And now, you get to say, wow, K'iren, you're a genius, spin!] K'iren said and Roxi, hastily, spun. Her body twirled and the munitions launched from her ankles and-

Brilliance.

The heat and light was so intense that she felt it bathe along her entire body. Something clipped against her elbow -- jarring against her, like she had just slammed her elbow into a wall. She started to tumble out of control and then her limbs stopped moving. Roxi tried to jerk her head around -- but instead, she just kept looking forward as the stars and the Voidbringer ships spun past her. She tried to speak -- but instead, her jaw simply hung open.

Uh, K'iren, what the HELL!?

She snapped, mentally.

[That's a weird way to say 'wow, K'iren, you're a genius',] K'iren said.

As she tumbled, Roxi saw that she was moving away at a pretty sharp tangent from an expanding cloud of debris. Her back and her arms ached faintly -- the sensation of her launch ports all having not only opened, but having launched way more than her normal payload masses. She wanted to blink in surprise, but her eyelids refused to move.

K'iren, you're a genius, I'm going inside.

She focused, and when she appeared in the bridge, Roxi found that the bridge itself had been seriously downgraded -- the normally perfectly realistic simulation had transformed into a kind of quasi-stylized kind of cartoony looking thing. Everyone had thick, pixilated bodies and obvious polygons rather than their normal fleshy tones and regular looking forms -- all this digital downgrading was required to run this simulspace on a fraction of the normal power. Roxi realized that being very cartoony actually felt...disquieting. She couldn't feel her skin. She couldn't breathe -- she didn't

need

to breathe, but...that didn't change the fact her brain was starting to panic slightly about that. Every sound she heard had a faintly tinny, unnatural quality to it.

"Well, K'iren, this sucks," Hugh said, his large wolfy body looking even cuter in this stylized form.

"It's better than getting splashed across an entire light year by a bunch of Voidbringer torpedoes," K'iren said, leaning back in her seat, exuding a kind of overdone casualness -- which meant she was definitely not enjoying this either.

"What information can we get?" Heinlein asked, rubbing his hand along his head as he tried to not start pacing. His leg kept joggling, though, against the ground as he sat at his chair. He wanted to get up and pace.

"We have passive scanners," Carcass said. If he didn't like this condition, he didn't show it. "The Voidbringers are searching the area of space we were in -- but in interstellar space, there's a lot of places for them to look. We're currently as close to absolute zero as we can get, but...there's still a tiny heat splotch where your brain is, Roxi." He nodded to Roxi. "If they pick that up, they'll shoot us out of the sky."

"I thought we were going to fight," Roxi muttered.

"And then die? Or, alternatively, we can get some intelligence..." K'iren said as the forward view skimmed back, showing the huge lugnut ships. "What are

those

? Those are bigger than the voidbringer scouts we'd expect."

"They have to be core hardened to be that big," Carcass said. "The most obvious thing that they would be doing would be creating the E-space fluctuations that forced us out. I'm not detecting any emissions from them though, which..."

"Wait, wait, wait, formations like that, those were structures like

stars

going nova," Hugh said. "Those things can't possibly be producing that much energy."

"As I was about to say," Carcass said, his voice drying up even more. "The only possible explanation is that the voidbringers are able to put the energy from their ships

directly

into E-space, skipping the energy loss by emitting shit into the surrounding galaxy. It's like the difference between flattening a building by creating a radiant burst of energy with a fission bomb and using a nuke pumped X-beam."

"...shit," Roxi whispered.

The lugnut ships vanished, folding in on themselves as they darted into E-space, the ultraviolet flashes consuming them in a series of winks. Soon all that was left was a pair of battleships and their cruiser and frigate escorts, which were continuing to search the area, their radar pings sweeping out and skimming over her slender, feminine figure. Roxi counted the ships.

Then she began to smile.

"Say," she said, softly. "Think we can take them?"

"Our standing orders are to not engage scout forces," Heinlein said, quietly. "Those are are an actual task force."

"But..." Roxi said. "They're hunting for us. How long do Voidbringers hunt for hiding ships?"

They were all silent. K'iren sighed. "According to what I've studied? They don't give up for weeks."

"Can we all take weeks like this, waiting for them to leave?" Roxi asked. "Every second we're not heading back to Corps headquarters to tell them about these...these...interdiction ships..." She blinked. "Oh no."

"Shit!" Heinlein had gotten it too.

"They're cutting the fleet off!" Hugh exclaimed.

"Ready to come back to a hundred percent?" K'iren asked.

Roxi smirked. "I was born ready. Well, er, uh, when I got...turned into a ship, that's...yes!"

"Wow, for a second there, I was actually feeling confident," K'iren said, before winking at her.

Roxi blinked as she came back to her physical body. Her fingers twitched and she felt the energies that suffused her flaring back to life. Her engines were online, her shields were up, her X-beams and her grazers were up and she could feel the

cha-chunk cha-chunk cha-chunk

of her missiles loading into her shoulders as her HUD came online, glittering red targeting marks appearing around the battleships and their escorts, and then more tiny marks appearing as Voidbringer strikecraft were isolated and identified.

"Lets do this!" Roxi said, trying to feel confident and not terrified. But the back of her brain was painfully aware that this was emphatically

not

a simulation.

This was not practice.

This was not real.

I'm not ready,

she thought, in the private little corner of her brain that was still all biology and squishy flesh -- that didn't communicate with the rest of the bridge crew. The part of her that was still Hornet Abernathy.

Then a glimmering green line appeared before her, branching off into a curved trio of arcs, each one corkscrewing through different parts of the Voidbringer formations -- with assessment identifiers and threat sigils that let her, at a glance, see the danger of each part of their formation. Beady red lines spread out from them as she saw those were the firing lines of the battleship's petajoule kinetics and antiparticle impact beamer turrets.