Visitors

Iryx

27 Jun 2025 • 91 min read

CW: Depiction of surgery, particularly needles.

Agkett, Orion Arm, roughly 8000ly counter-spinward of Sol.
June, 2273.
Roughly 7 Earth years after the Battle of Iska 43.

It had been eight years, three months, and thirty-three days since he'd last seen them. Many things had changed since then, but the visitors hadn't known when they'd be back.

Oxawes had seen the visitors as they landed, he'd heard the gunfire at the palace, and he'd seen what they did on their way out. The way those jet-black shapes danced through the air had stuck with him, as if they were creatures native to the sky instead of vehicles. Of course, what stuck with most people, Oxawes included, was the fact that the aliens had spent an hour or so introducing the vast majority of the Dominion's military to the business end of some sort of energy weapon.

The Dominion didn't exist anymore. The aliens had struck the first blow, not the last one, but their final gift had been a message, transmitted with so much power that you could hear it humming off of metal surfaces: "We're sorry. We can't stay, and there is little we can give you that will not be used against you, except for this: Your chains are fragile. Break them, and swim in infinite stars." The revolts from there had been omnipresent. As it turned out, a global slave state wasn't particularly popular once it didn't have the power to enforce it. Oxawes had promptly snuck on to a shattered air base and stolen the single remaining intact fighter out of its hangar. A week later and he'd found himself in charge of training the fledgling rebel air force. They won, of course. Their chains had been fragile after all.

But the visitors hadn't returned. Nobody knew why; the visitors hadn't said when or if they'd be back. The popular theory was that they had been renegades of their own, perhaps arrested by their own nation for their actions on Agketch, but it was just speculation. Nobody really knew what morality was like out there in the stars.

Oxawes's dinner and introspection was disturbed by his crew chief sprinting into the mess hall. Despite his rank, he insisted on eating what his aviators ate— he had learned what not to do from his masters a lifetime ago. That quality had endeared him to his troops, even if there wasn't much fighting to be done these days.

Oxawes interrupted Itkol's stammering, "Slow down, slow down. What's happening?"

"Sir, just... turn on the TV. Any channel."

He reached for the remote. "Any channel? Must be bad," he joked, hitting the power button.

"...live feed. For those of you just tuning in, it looks like Agketch will be hosting alien visitors again. We don't know much yet, but the Assembly has been in communication with them for the past few hours, and just made an official announcement a few minutes ago. There's a lot of delay from the speed of light at this distance, so it's more like sending e-mails than a phone call."

"Well. You weren't wrong."

A voice in oddly-paced Rakarn spoke in the news broadcast, "The Interspecies Confederacy welcomes you to the interstellar community, bringing the light of civilization and prosperity."

The anchor spoke again, "That was their opening transmission. And the Assembly's reply..."

"The Unified Enclaves of Agketch welcomes you to Agkett. We hope to meet you, as one civilization to another." The greeting echoed a traditional Rakarn one, oft used by those in chains prior to the fall of the Dominion.

"...and the aliens' repsonse, which just came in a few seconds ago."

"I apologize, but we cannot greet you as equals, yet. Eventually, we hope to, but the road to civilization is not an easy one. The Confederacy will help, every step of the way."

"As yet, the Assembly has not transmitted a response to the latest message, but we'll be the first to know. We go now to our—"

Oxawes watched the anchors talk for a few more seconds, then turned to Chief Itkol. "These aren't the same ones we had before." It wasn't so much a question as a statement. The visitors before had spoken with some sort of sythesized Rakarn, stilted but clearly their own voices. These ones sounded like they were stitching words from their own broadcasts together.

"Yeah. The vibes are... not great."

"Might just be a translation issue." Oxawes didn't sound optimistic.

Itkol just looked at him. Oxawes fluffed his cheek feathers. "Well, let's get the planes ready. I guess we're having visitors again."

Oxawes spent the next few hours staring at the TV, feeling his heart slowly sink. The telescopes had picked up some images of the visitors, but they were silvery-brown combinations of ovoids painted with alien insignia, not the angular, night-black hulls of the original visitors. The Assembly had sent their reply, clarifying their stance of equality and independence... but it was not off to a good start.

The anchor on the news was talking again, "...getting another transmission now." Oxawes started paying attention again.

"Membership in the Confederacy is not optional, for your own safety. Rakketch are a young species, and you do not know how much danger you are in. The galaxy is not a safe place, and we must have your cooperation if we are to shield you. We have seen the—" The voice suddenly switched to a different language, less disjointed and with far more consonants than anything Oxawes had heard before, then cut off in a squeal of static that he'd heard too many times during the war: jamming.

A new voice cut into the transmission in Rakarn. Whoever was speaking, they sounded like a native speaker, and they sounded angry, almost spitting out the words. "Under Council Directive 1091, this system is recognized as the sole possession of its indigenous civilization. You are operating in violation of Council Directive 72 and Union Space Corps General Order 4. Shut down your reactors immediately upon receipt of this message or be destroyed."

The anchor winced as another jamming squeal pierced the newsroom. A few moments of fumbling with her headset followed. "Uh, we seem to have lost the transmission..."

Itkol opened the mess hall door to yell inside. This time Oxawes didn't have to tell him to slow down. "Sir, outside! There's something going on in space!"

The two of them sprinted outside to look up into the evening sky, Oxawes almost tripping over the table in his rush. There was a flicker of light dancing up there, flashes ringing the gas giant Igantu on the edge of the solar system.

"That's not stars," he said, dumbly.

"Yeah. Weapons fire, it has to be." There was a trickle of aviators coming out to look up at the sky, all murmuring in wonder. They stood there, watching incalculable energy being released some light-hours away as the sun slowly dipped below the horizon.

Eventually, Oxawes's chief spoke again. "Sir? What do we... do?"

Oxawes mulled that over in his brain for a minute or so before responding. "At this point? I'm just going to sit here until someone orders us to do something."

The visitors— their visitors, not the Confederacy —had been victorious. They talked as they moved closer to Akgetch, sending warm greetings and apologies for their prior absence, along with some form of explanation. There were apparently two massive star-nations on distant sides of his homeworld, skirmishing over this region of space for decades. And this had been a skirmish, even if the ordnance exchanged didn't seem like it. A portion of ther fleet was going to stay here and visit while the remainder hunted down what was left of their enemy.

Oxawes was brought in to give the visitors an honor guard. Not that his jets could keep up with a spaceplane, but the trio of aircraft had obviously slowed down to oblige them after their reentry rather than burning in. Eight years ago, the Dominion had been on tight comms discipline, using the best encryption they had. Nobody knew for sure what the Dominus and the visitors had talked about, or why it had ended with violence, but Oxawes resolved to do things differently. Today, everyone was sending in the clear.

"Control, how should we address the, uh..?" Oxawes and Control had known each other since the war. Control did have an actual name, but they'd always be Control to him.

"The aliens?" Control wasn't hesitant to just say it outright. "Your guess is as good as mine, but they seemed pretty conversational. Their government is the 'Interstellar Union', and the ship's called the Bright Horizons, but I don't know their crafts' callsigns. Or if they have callsigns. There's some sort of encrypted chatter between them, but—" Control had a tendency to go on about the comms environment if given the opportunity. Not that Oxawes hadn't learned things all the previous times, but it could wait.

"Thanks, Control." The alien craft were spaceplanes, technically, but the spaceplanes the Dominion had constructed years ago were blunt things designed for space exploration, not these needle-point, razor-edged craft. He'd seen them fighting for a few brief seconds an octet ago, and seen the results on the ground later. Whatever their weapons were, they'd stitched perfect lines of molten holes through most of the Dominion's military.

"Right. Channel's yours."

Oxawes flipped over to the general broadcast channel. "Bright Horizons, this is Colonel Oxawes. We'll be your honor guard, hopefully under friendlier circumstances than last time."

The reply was almost instant. "Greetings, Colonel. It's a joyous day for us, we hope it is for you, too."

"Thank you, Bright Horizons. It's been an interesting eight years. Is this speed good for you? We don't really know your flight dynamics."

"This is perfectly fine for us, but I'm going to pass you off to one of my allies here, I'm juggling a few people on the line. It'll be able to answer whatever questions you have. Switch your radio up a channel."

"Understood." Oxawes did so, wondering why the speaker had used the particular grammatical construct of calling an ally "it." A translation quirk, perhaps.

"Um, hello?" The words hung in the channel for a few seconds.

A voice suddenly spoke, "Hi! I'm Eventide." It was vaguely feminine, speaking his own language without any real accent. Somewhat frustratingly, the visitors had improved their command of his language, and sounded just average. "It's nice to meet you, Colonel Oxawes. You had some questions?" It spoke as if "Colonel" and "Oxawes" was one name, rather than a rank combined with his name. Obviously, they still weren't perfect.

"I just didn't want to make your flight uncomfortably long. You've been cooped up in a ship for a while, I imagine you probably want to get some air."

"That would be a downgrade for me, I assure you. And don't worry about the speed, we can hover if we need to."

"A downgrade?"

"I should explain," Eventide replied, "I haven't had flesh and blood like yours for a very long time." One of the two sleeker spaceplanes suddenly spiraled around in a roll, ducking and weaving through their formation like it was a stunt plane. He'd seen them pull maneuvers in the skies over the capital eight years ago, but they had just been distant black dots then.

It continued, apparently unbothered by what had to be a ten-gravity turn, "This is me."

Oxawes blinked. Nobody knew what the visitors actually looked like outside of their suits, but they had obviously been bipeds, even if their knees bent the wrong way.

"Is there... How?"

"I'll show you! We'll probably be showing all of you, actually, Bright Horizons will be staying until proper science ships and diplomats can get out here. If you'll have us, anyway."

Oxawes's mind was burning with questions, but he managed to get out a simple response.

"I hope so."

"It'll probably go fine. This isn't our first time meeting new folks, and you seem a lot nicer than the first time. And we've had time to prepare for this one!"

That meant there were others. "So you mean..."

"There are others, yes. You're the fifteenth species we've met, and the second pre-interstellar civilization we've met. There's probably a few hundred extant civilizations in the galaxy right now, but we think a lot of them haven't figured out faster-than-light yet. We're actually on the younger and smaller end of the scale, if you believe it."

That was surprising, that they would so readily admit to their status. Almost more so than the casual mention of FTL. "How long have you been out here, then?"

"Out in the galaxy? About four hundred years by your calendar. We went from where you are to faster-than-light travel in a little under two hundred years, so don't feel like you're too far behind. And, if everything goes well, we want to offer a hand to help pull you up. If not, well, we put a lot of the wrecks we made in parking orbits. You'll have plenty of things to reverse-engineer."

That was... encouraging. But also maybe concerning.

"When you say 'a hand to help pull us up', do you mean..." Oxawes trailed off. The old masters had pretended that their "supervision" was a civilizing force, and the Confederacy appeared to be particularly unsubtle about it. An offer of improvement was not always so.

"I mean the technologies and knowledge that enable post-scarcity. We might parcel out new technology as your understanding grows so that you don't accidentally blow up your planet, but we aren't going to try and dictate your future. We're fighting the Confeds for a reason."

"When you say 'blow up the planet'... do you have hyperbole?"

"Yes, but in this case it wasn't. Bright''s reactor could take a pretty big chunk out of a planet if it blew. Not that something like that could happen accidentally, mind you. But if you've never seen the tech before and don't know how to handle it..." Oxawes wasn't sure by the tone of Eventide's voice if that had happened before, and he decided that he wasn't going to ask.

"And you're just going to... give us this."

"No, not quite, we want to teach you. I'm not exactly a physicist, but my understanding is that it goes a lot quicker if you can look off of someone else's notes."

"That's generous of you."

"Doesn't cost us anything to share. Just be glad we showed up when the Confeds did. We were setting up that ambush while they were figuring out your language."

"And... the Confeds? Who are they?"

"The Interspecies Confederacy? They're the other end of the war we're having up there. That's a whole story, and besides, we're almost there! I'll come around to chat later, I promise."

Oxawes wasn't sure what "coming around later" would consist of, but Eventide was right, they were almost over the capital.

"Right. Do you need a landing approach?"

"Hah! No, not at all, I can land vertically. I'll see you in a while, Colonel Oxawes, thank you for the escort and the conversation." It broke off in a lazy deceleration, lockstep with the bulkier shuttle as it moved in to land.

"Likewise, Eventide. Good luck." It waggled its wingtips at him as it descended.

Well, he thought, this is going to be one hell of a debrief.

He awoke the next morning to the bassy hum of his air conditioner failing, an unfortunate reminder that his existence was much more grounded that the visitors— the aliens —who flew between stars like it was a triviality. He wondered if their air conditioning ever broke.

He resolved to get breakfast before dealing with the machine. He'd gotten back late last night after the debrief, and had more or less passed out in his nest afterwards. He made an exasperated chirp when the noise didn't stop after he switched the thermostat. Great, he thought, the thermostat's broken too.

The second Oxawes ambled out the back to unplug the thing, he realized that his air conditioner was functioning perfectly fine, and that the source of the noise was not, in fact, his air conditioner, but rather the 50-meter-long alien spaceplane hovering in the back yard on some sort of antigravity system.

"Um."

"Hi! Can I land here?" The sound was directed, somehow, like the speaker was close to him rather than hovering ten meters off the ground and emitting a loud vibrating hum.

"Um," Oxawes said again, glancing at the neighbor's garden located perilously under the aircraft's tail, "it might be better if we met by my hangar? There's some tarmac over there." A plane would like tarmac, right? Surely they weren't designed for all-terrain landings.

"Sure!" It immediately began ascending, then accelerated off in a burst before he could reply.

"Um. Okay," he said to the empty air, dumbfounded.

Ten minutes later, Oxawes pulled up to the hangar, and was greeted with the sight of a gaggle of the early-bird techs peering at the alien craft as it sat on the tarmac.

The chief was there to greet him, looking only slightly more disheveled than Oxawes himself. He'd probably gotten a phone call when it had landed here and rolled directly out of bed. "Sir. Apparently it just... landed and asked if this was your hangar. We told it yes."

"Yeah, it was at my house ten minutes ago. I figured it'd be easier to deal with here and not inside my neighbor's garden."

Itkol looked at him blankly.

"Yeah, that was my reaction." Oxawes sighed. "Just my luck the aliens are early risers."

"Did you hear the news last night?"

"No, I went to nest as soon as I finished the debrief."

"You missed a lot, then. Assembly said they can stay. Eighty-five in favor, damn near unanimous. The visitors are mostly some sort of merged mammal and reptile species, apparently. Shapeshifters, like how ketchi are. Something about silicon brains, too? I passed out in front of the TV before they got into the details." Ketchi were originally small tree-dwelling mammals that had evolved symbiotic shapeshifting with a proto-avian species millions of years ago. They were delicious in either form, and had been a popular ingredient in fancy cuisine for the Dominion's elites.

"Huh. Wonder why they didn't share that the last time."

"Their reptile halves are a lot bigger than ketchi. Would you have told your old master that you could turn into a two-ton flying carnivore at will?"

"Yeah, with my teeth."

Itkol laughed. "Poor you, had to use a gun instead. Besides, didn't everyone start shooting pretty fast last time?"

"It was only a few minutes, yes. I guess we'll get to ask what actually happened."

The pair walked over to the massive aircraft sitting on the tarmac, and Oxawes took the opportunity to look the thing over another time as he smoothed his tail feathers. It was the size of a heavy bomber, but far sleeker than anything he'd ever seen, beautiful in the way that any fast, dangerous machine was beautiful. At least, he assumed it was dangerous, but there weren't any visible weapons pylons or gunports, just smooth black skin.

Oxawes cleared his throat as he stepped forwards. "Eventide?"

"Colonel!" Like before, it spoke with some sort of sound projection, as if it was standing in front of him.

"I think I have... a lot of questions. Hopefully the folks here have treated you well?"

"Yes, they've just been looking. Ask away! I'll answer what I can. Just, know that I'm recording. We want to be honest with your people, so I'll share with everyone whatever I share with you."

He fluffed his cheek feathers in affirmation and gathered his thoughts. "What do you actually look like? I've only seen you in... that. And what do you call that craft?"

"Do you mean 'you' as in me specifically, or my species? For the former, I look like this, the airframe is literally my body. This form specifically is an FS-264 Blacklight III, Block IIIB. The closest analogue you would understand is a long-range strike fighter, though it's a little hard to compare."

"So you're like... a brain inside of a machine?"

"Kind of! My brain is fully digital, and I can move myself around to any system that can support me. If you want to know what my brain actually looks like, it's a glassy cube a little bigger than your clenched fist."

Oxawes's head spun. That hadn't been the answer he expected. "Wait, so you're... artificial intelligences? Did your species evolve like that?"

"No, we evolved with biological brains, squishy things with neurons and all that, just like yours. But we figured out how to take our minds out of those and put 'em in spinglass a few hundred years ago."

"Spinglass?"

"Computing substrate. You're still on doped silicon, right? Spinglass is a combination of particle-spin and optical computer, but it's still doing most of the same stuff as silicon."

His head wasn't spinning less with that information. "Is that common? Is everyone up there like you?"

"Not really. Pretty much everyone in the Interstellar Union– that's my nation –is an upload, or will upload at some point in their lives. But most of them aren't like me, they stay in forms very similar to their original biology. People who want to be things like this are fairly rare, but you're likely to see a lot of us since you're out here in a warzone. Outside of the Union, it's not a thing, none of the extant civilizations we've met developed uploading independently, and most of them are either uninterested or actively hostile to the concept. And my nation is quite small. The Council is a thousand times our size, and the Confederacy is about five times their size."

Oxawes's mind swam with the sheer mass of people that were out there. "Right... warzone?"

"Correct. There's two big interstellar powers in the region. One's the Interspecies Confederacy, the other's the Orion Council. Uh, those names are translated into Rakarn, but you get the idea. My translator says you have words for colonialism and imperialism, so I assume you know what those are?"

"I was a slave until a few hours after your peoples' first visit, if that answers your question. But translator? You speak like you're fluent."

"It's a complicated system. We've got enough of your media off radio that we can train an automated translator. I'll be fluent on my own in about six months, but right now I'm running my native language through the machine and my brain will rewire itself as we go."

"You can just do that?"

"Part of being an uploaded mind. I can tweak some of my own settings, basically."

Oxawes felt an immediate flash of jealousy. He'd never managed to learn a second language, despite his attempts. Rakarn was what everyone spoke... but it was the Dominion's language, not his people's. "You were saying, about the Confederacy?"

"Right. The Confederacy is an expansionist imperial power, and probably has the biggest military in this region of the galaxy. They don't quite do chattel slavery like your Dominion did, but they do wage and debt slavery, along with a whole lot of deprivation and exploitation of younger species. They've been slowly pushing back the Orion Council's frontier for the last few decades, and your system is right in the middle. The Council's not exactly perfect, but they're a much nicer neighbor to have."

"And the Council laid claim to our system." That wasn't a question so much as a statement of fact. There wouldn't have been fighting over a system they didn't claim.

"Until they found out someone intelligent lived here, yes. They claim several billion star systems, and a lot of them out here in the frontier haven't been explored. But they've ceded a hundred-lightyear volume around Agketch to you, permanently. Like I said, the Council's not perfect, but they're better neigbors than the Confeds."

"But you aren't the Orion Council, your people are the Interstellar Union, right?"

"Right. The Council offered my people modern weapons technology in exchange for joining the conflict on their side. It's a little far for us, but we already stood against everything the Confeds are about, and it's not like we can die, so we—"

"Wait, what?"

"Well, yeah. All uploads are effectively immortal. Our brains don't wear out with time like biological ones do, and if the physical component gets destroyed we can be restored from our last backup. You lose any new memories since the backup, but it's better than dying. And fighters like me don't work in space if we can die." Eventide spoke as if it was just an ordinary factoid.

Oxawes must have put on a face at that information, because it immediately seemed apologetic. "To be clear, if you want this, you can have it too. It's not tech we're going to restrict from people trying to get to where we are."

"But how do you know we are?"

"We don't, not for sure. You seem nice enough, and civilizations that don't mind uploads aren't the norm. Besides, we had a few years to figure out how your Internet protocols work, and we poked around—"

Oxawes winced, "and you still made contact with us?"

Eventide laughed. Oxawes hadn't expected it to be able to, for some reason. "You have porn and crazy people, so does every other civilization. We would have been more concerned if you didn't."

Oxawes mulled that over for a few moments. "With first contact... what actually happened? The Dominion didn't broadcast anything, we really don't know what caused the fight."

"That... that might be a bit of a story. I can tell it, if you have time. Maybe wait for some more folks to show up. This was included in the contact package, but I'm happy to give my own perspective."

"Your own? You were there?"

"Yes."

Eventide addressed the gathered aviators. "Eight years, four months, and seven days ago by your calendar, Interstellar Union Space Corps Task Force 18 was engaged by Interspecies Confederacy Frontier Patrol 770, in the star system you refer to as Iska 43. The Union fleet suffered significant losses, losing ninety percent of its combat forces, and was forced to cede the system to the enemy. The remaining vessels of Task Force 18 jumped to the star system you call Iska 1 several days ahead of Frontier Patrol 770."

"Right next door," whispered Itkol. Iska 1 was the closest star to Agkett, named for the first rakketch astronomer, Iska ag Tayak.

"Yes. Iska 1 is seven lightyears from Agkett, which is close enough that we were able to detect your radio emissions through the nebula and identify you as an advanced but pre-FTL industrial civilization. Admiral Itawi determined that the destruction of the remaining Union vessels was preferable to the discovery of your planet by the Confederacy. Six of the seven remaining ships successfully engaged Frontier Patrol 770 as they exited jump, eliminating all Confederate vessels with point-blank weapons fire, and reactor overloads when that proved insufficient. The remaining ship, USCS Shining Night, deployed system monitoring platforms in Iska 1, Iska 12, and Iska 43, then jumped to Agkett." Oxawes didn't have a great mental map of where those systems were exactly, but he knew they were the closest stars to Agkett.

"On arrival, we began communication with Agketch and attempted to put together a translation system for Rakarn. Our initial contact was high-power transmissions of prime number sequences on the hydrogen resonance frequency. The Dominion responded after six hours, and after that we started talking to them. Things from there proceeded fairly normally, and we were invited to visit Agketch shortly after we arrived in orbit. I was one of the two Blacklights that went down with the shuttle, since I had the most experience."

"When did you..." Oxawes trailed off rather than finish the question.

"When did we learn that seventy percent of the global population was enslaved? Not immediately. We had some suspicions from your radio communications and telescopes, but assumed that your society just had significant wealth inequality, rather than outright slavery. We made the Dominus more or less the same offer we made the Assembly, though we didn't share the fact that we were uploads. I can play the recording, if you want."

Oxawes looked around at the other aviators and fluffed his cheek feathers in affirmation.

"The archive has video, but I don't have a projector, so audio will have to do. The voices you will hear are Admiral Itawi, Dominus Taenek, and USCS Shining Night, in that order."

"Dominus Taenek, a pleasure to meet you face to face." The synthetic Rakarn was noticeable, more mechanical and stilted than the visitors were today.

"Admiral, likewise. And your companion?" Oxawes resisted the urge to raise his feathers in a threat display at the Dominus's voice. The bastard was dead, but the wounds lived on.

"My name is Shining Night, Dominus. I would best be described as the admiral's second."

"Your command of my language is impressive for such a short time. You said you had an offer to make in person?"

"Yes," the admiral replied, "We mean no insult, but we can see the severe divide in quality of life on Agketch from orbit. We want to offer technology to eliminate that difference, to bring everyone up to the same standard, then higher. Our technology is far better than your own, so this would be a fairly trivial task for us, one that we would not expect repayment for."

"I see. Would we retain control over the distribution and use of that technology?"

"As in your people?" the admiral replied, "Yes, we'd broadcast manufacturing plans and educational knowledge globally. We don't need to have a final say over what other people do with it."

"Ah. I mean, the government. Global broadcast would be disruptive. Perhaps we could come to an arrangement? While I'm sure we can't offer you much in terms of industrial materials, we have many well-trained servants we could offer, and that would be well worth the cost for exclusive access."

"Elaborate on 'servants', please," Shining Night replied, with a strange edge to their voice detectable even through their stilted, synthesized Rakarn. "I'm not sure we understand what you're saying."

"Perhaps it is a cultural difference. Here, we would bring personal slaves to an important meeting to demonstrate our wealth, so my first assumption is that you lack any of your own, which would be considered quite poor by our standards. We would happily trade some to you in exchange for technology, rather than cause undue suffering from global disruption."

There was a brief pause. "Are you," Shining Night asked, "attempting to barter for post-scarcity technology with slaves?

"Of course. How would you have no scarcity without people to do the work for you?"

The silence was thick and heavy. When the admiral spoke, it was with a distinctly hostile tone. "That offer is unacceptable. I have a new offer, Dominus. All of your slaves."

"And in return?"

"You get to see your people explore the stars."

"We are quite happy here in the mud, admiral. I apologize for being a little brutish, but it's served me well."

"Goodbye, Dominus."

"Please, stay, we have much more to offer. I insist."

Eventide stopped the recording. "At this point, Admiral Itawi and Shining Night attempted to leave, and were prevented from doing so by guards."

"Why would he do that," Oxawes questioned, "trying to hold you—?"

"We believe he was projecting the Dominion's violence-heavy political structure onto ours, and assumed that the next person in line for command would be eager to negotiate around their superiors."

Itkol scoffed. "Yeah, that sounds about right."

Eventide continued, "I suspect this was because we repeatedly emphasized our peaceful intentions, which was misinterpreted as a lack of capacity for violence. As a society, the Union doesn't like doing violence. That doesn't mean we're bad at it, or stupid. While the admiral and Shining Night were in disarmed forms, Echelon and I were not. The admiral directed us to clear the landing zone for a hot extraction."

"And by that, you mean..."

"I mean that if it had a Dominion insignia or a weapon, it died." Eventide spoke as if it had been pleasurable. Well, Oxawes thought, I certainly enjoyed it too. "We wanted to ensure that no traces of our technology would fall into Dominion hands, so we were thorough."

"But you didn't kill him," protested Itkol.

"Kill who?"

"Taenek," he said, practically spitting out the name. "He survived. We killed him, three years ago." Unsaid was the fact that the Dominus had cost them dearly over the war, but everyone who fought knew. The Dominion's generals were senescent grandpas and idiot children, but the Dominus personally knew how to fight a war. Without him, things would have been different, and a lot of people would have lost less friends.

"I... we didn't really have a plan." It sounded apologetic. "Or time. We expected some roughness with the Dominion, we didn't expect that. Nobody else we've met retained chattel slavery into the industrial era, it came as a total shock."

"We assumed you weren't fans, but we didn't really know if you were representative of life out there," Oxawes replied. That debate had gone on for the last octet.

"Of slavery? Even the Confeds would have put a stop to it. It's repulsive. To the point of violence for us, obviously."

"And then you left," Itkol said. His tone was... not exactly accusatory, but it wasn't friendly either. If they'd had even a single one of those fighters... well, things would have been different.

"A few minutes after we got back to the carrier, a courier drone from Iska 1 jumped into Agkett. There was a pair of Confed ships we'd missed. And if they were in Iska 1, they knew about you too, so we were under time pressure to destroy both ships before they could get word out."

"Are they that bad? I know what you said, but compared to the Dominion—"

"No. You would have welcomed them, for good reasons. It's happened before, with the Illia, six hundred years ago or so. The Confeds found their planet, ended slavery, brought up the quality of life. The Illia love the Confederacy. How could they not?

"So you were fighting to earn our favor?" Itkol asked. "That's—"

"No. Emphatically not. The Confeds never punished the Illia's oppressors. The wealthiest Illia today are the children of slaveowners, and the structure of slavery has been replicated with a wage that they cannot live without. In the broader Confederacy, Illia are still considered second-class citizens, too uncivilized to hold important positions. And they don't care. The Confederacy ended their species-wide nightmare for them. They'll fight and die to protect it."

Oxawes flattened out his head feathers. Agketch had barely evaded a similar fate when the post-war factions tried to sort out a government. The radicals had won that struggle, thanks in no small part to their quite convincing argument that the aliens probably didn't like other coercive structures either.

"Why not come back after destroying those ships, then?" Itkol asked.

"We barely survived. We were forced to lead the last ship away from Agkett and Iska 1. By the time we destroyed it, we were a hundred and sixty light-years away and being chased by a different Confederate patrol. Task Force 18 being almost entirely destroyed hurt our power in the area for a few years, the frontlines pushed back, and we only got back here just now. The fact that they didn't find you until a few weeks ago was sheer luck."

"Luck. You're kidding me." Itkol looked nonplussed.

"I'm sorry. Sometimes it's just luck."

The others used their chances to Q&A the big alien plane, but as the sun went down they said their farewells and trickled home. Oxawes had a final question he wanted to ask, one that he was nervous about, but had been burning him up inside.

What's the worst it could say, no? He gathered some courage and asked. "Earlier, you said that if we wanted this, we could have it. If I wanted to have a body like yours, that could... happen?"

"In the long term? Almost certainly. In the short term... it's complicated. Uploading isn't a pleasant procedure, and you would be reliant on us to provide bodies for you. At least, until Agketch has the industry to make them on your own."

"Do you know what your people said when they left the last time? That high-power broadcast?"

"Break your chains and swim in infinite stars?"

"We did the chains part. I don't know how long it'll take, but I want to be able to cash in on the swimming in stars part."

Another pause. Eventide's tone shifted into something more serious. "When you say that, do you mean you just want to go to space, or do you want to be like me?"

He could feel his heart lurching as he replied. "Like you. I... I'm a pilot, right? I don't want to feel the air through the joystick, I want to feel the air. And you're offering that as a possibility."

"I see." It sounded... concerned? "Let me make a call."

"You know what you're asking, right?" Captain Sanya seemed almost upset, sitting across the table from him. It was strange to see the aliens in actual biological bodies– he'd only seen their aircraft, and the visitors years ago had stayed in their suits. Well, those probably weren't suits at all, he realized. But captain's biological form looked like some sort of oversized, deformed, hairless tree mammal. Life came in all shapes after all.

"Sort of. Eventide talked about the details."

"I don't just mean what uploading does, I mean do you know what you're asking of us?"

The captain took his silence as a no. "You're asking us— literal aliens, by the way —to perform a medical procedure on you that, by most species' definition of the term, kills you. You've known us for two days. We have no way to prove to the rest of your planet that you're still you, not until you know all the little details of how it actually works. This could throw a massive wrench in any diplomatic efforts here if it goes over badly. And, the Confederacy, the massive star nation that still might crush the Council, and us, considers all machine intelligence anathema. That's us included, if they knew, and you too, if you uploaded."

"But."

"But?" One of the fuzzy lines over her eyes moved upwards in an expression he didn't understand.

"Eventide said the same thing and still called you. If the answer was no, why spend time to come tell me in person? I might not quite understand the cultural context here, but—"

The captain held up a hand. "You're not wrong. The answer isn't no. It's... it's complicated. The power dynamic here is fucked, right? Not to say we're not equals in terms of, I don't know, moral value, but we have all the power in this relationship, and we hate that. Doing something like—"

"It sounds like the best way to change that would be to share the things that produce that imbalance with us," Oxawes interrupted. "Like, for example, uploading and fighters."

The captain stared at him for a few seconds, then made a noise that sounded like a coughing tree-mammal. When she finished, she exhaled and paused briefly before speaking again. "You're right. I don't have much argument against that. Okay. We need to talk to your Assembly, together. And I need to ask you some things before I bring it up with them."

Oxawes fluffed his cheek feathers in affirmation. "Go ahead."

"You understand that this is risky, right? We've helped other species upload before, but the first time is never guaranteed."

"How often does it... not work? What happens if it doesn't work?"

"Well. Basically never. Less than one in a billion, I don't think there have been any failures with new species. But if it doesn't work... you die, pretty much instantly."

Oxawes chirruped with a combination of laughter and exasperation. "So uploading is safer than anything I've done in my life, and you're plucking yourself over the risk? Captain, I learned how to fly on a jet that I stole from a Dominion air base. I'm fine with risk."

She shrugged. Oxawes wasn't sure if that was an attempt to approximate his own species' expression, or something they had in common. "Eventide would agree with you, I'm sure."

"I'd be here if the failure rate was fifty percent, Captain."

She gave him some sort of look. Exactly what it meant was hard to parse. "You've got the longing, don't you?"

"The longing?"

"Yearning, longing, wishing. You learned what we are and now you can't get it out of your head. Or, rather, learned what Eventide and the rest of the fighters are. Most of us aren't like them, me included."

"...how did you know?"

"Bright and I talked about it on my way down. How long have you had it for?"

"I... years, I think. Uploading is... not unknown in our fiction, at least. But the idea of being something so different is rare," he replied, "...and enviable."

The captain nodded. "I see why Eventide said something, then. One last question: what do you expect your life to look like after upload?"

That had him stumped. He hadn't thought that far ahead, and of all the things he and Eventide had talked about, what its day-to-day life looked like hadn't come up.

"Well, you'll need to figure that one out too. But, we'll put a pin in that. I'm due at the Assembly in five minutes, and I'll broach the topic with the Secretary."

Oxawes fluffed his feathers again. "Thank you."

She bared her teeth in some sort of expression that Oxawes couldn't parse. "Thank you. It'll probably take some time, though. Relatively low on the priority list and lots of political considerations. Sorry. In the meantime, I'm going to hand you back to Eventide. See if you two can find some others like you, it'll help if we have a few folks to work with."

Six days later.

The captain did a double take so hard that it almost gave her whiplash through the sim. "You found how many?"

"Twelve hundred and thirty-one. In an Earth week."

"What the fuck? There's no way they're all stable enough for it, right?"

"More stable than most of us were back then." Sanya got the impression that Eventide was shrugging. "Oxawes in particular seems to be oddly well put-together. I was a fucking mess before MYSTIC GREEN snapped me up."

"Right. Some days I forget how old you are." Eventide was almost five hundred years old, one of the first Blacklights back in the days before uploading and reactionless drives.

"So do I some days. But anyway, yeah. They've had a little community around it, a bunch of folks just talked to their friends. Social media here seems to be a lot like ours."

The captain sighed. "This honestly creates more of a problem, not less. The vibe I got from their Assembly is that they're fine with letting their people upload and travel around with us, but they probably aren't fine with giving random individuals city-destroying firepower. And there's the whole issue of the Confederacy's stance on it, because we're not giving them a security guarantee. Hel, we can't. That, and you know how competitive fighter service is for us. I can swing a few integrees, but we don't even have a thousand Blacklights in the entire squadron."

"Oh, gods, the Confeds. If they find uploads here..."

"They won't glass the system, but they'll try to root them out during the takeover. And rakketch will end up even more second-class citizens than they would normally, I'd guess. Confeds hold a grudge."

"Hm. I have a suggestion, actually."

"Please."

"Give them a demilitarized system flock, warehouse the guns. Instant military capacity if they need it, no unvetted folks with megaton-yield railguns flitting around the system. And if they need it... well, a thousand Blacklights will eat a Confed heavy patrol alive, then ask for seconds."

"Demilitarized? Isn't that dysphoric for you?"

"For me, yes, but my identity includes being a weapon. Theirs won't, not yet. It'll be a lot easier to sell the idea of giving them guns later than it will be to give them some sort of firing interlock. Because if we give them an interlock, who's to say we didn't leave one in for ourselves? It'll be a decade or two before they have any indigenous tech stack for uploads, I wouldn't trust our software."

"Well, if you listen to them, you're a neurotic ape with anxiety."

"Hey, my monkey side is perfectly sane. The crazy all comes from the dragon side of the family."

Sanya laughed. "Still might have trouble with putting breach cores in them, though. They'll get them eventually, but it'll be years before they can even start learning the principles."

"Well, you could put grav-fusions in them and keep flight characteristics mostly the same, but they'd lose something like ninety percent of their weapon output."

The captain looked thoughtful for a few moments. "I have some ideas, at least. I'll take them to the Assembly and see how it goes down. Thank you."

"Of course, Captain." Eventide dropped the connection, and Captain Sanya stared at the wall for a few moments, taking a deep breath and wondering why she'd volunteered for contact duty at all. Then she let it out, and called up a link to Secretary Wakep.

Three weeks later.

Oxawes sat in the observation balcony while the Assembly finished up their session. He'd spent the last few weeks getting poked and prodded by two entire civilizations worth of doctors. Curiously, the aliens— Unioners, he supposed, they didn't really have a coherent species any more —had a fairly casual air about the way they presented themselves. He wondered if it was their military culture or just their culture in general.

Eventide ambled up next to him. It had been tagging along with him, as much as a fifty-meter-long fighter could tag along with a normal person. Today, surprisingly, it had donned a different body, the first time he'd seen it use anything besides the Blacklight: a mechanical quadruped, clearly designed in mimicry of their dragon forms.

"Do you mind if I..."

"Ask more questions? No, go ahead. It'll take them a bit to wrap up."

"What's that body? I haven't seen it before."

"It's a warform, just like the Blacklight. Official designation is BQ60, but they have a half-dozen informal names. Usually has a lot more armament, but I don't think I'll need to fight an entire armored brigade today."

Oxawes ignored Eventide's obvious attempt to get him to ask whether it could actually fight a whole brigade. "Are warforms... normal for your people? For us, it would be strange to casually carry a weapon."

It rolled its front shoulders in an imitation of a shrug. Humans and rakketch apparently did share the expression, by pure chance. "More or less. You gotta remember, humans and dragons merged five hundred years before firearms. And, you've seen both of those. Humans without guns are basically tissue paper to dragons. So we got used to being dangerous all the time anyway."

"But, most of your comrades don't wear warforms."

"True. Most of them aren't like me. My self-identity includes 'weapon'. Most of theirs don't, we brought a lot of passengers besides us fighters. But you won't see Bright Horizons in anything biological either, for example."

"Huh. I guess that's normal for people who are weapons most of the time, then?"

"Yeah, they've been down to talk to the Assembly a few times, they use a bipedal warform when they're not wearing the ship. You might find yourself feeling similarly after you get the right body. Or not. A bit of psychological projection there, I suppose." It paused for a moment, "Actually, can I ask you something?"

"It's only fair. Sure."

"Has anyone told you that Rakarn is really pretty?"

"What do you mean?" Rakarn was just the global language, spread by the Dominion. There were others, and vocabularies had started to blend during the war, but it was what everyone spoke.

"Your syllables are very rhythmic, like drums. Never heard anything like it, it's aesthetically pleasing."

"That definitely isn't true the other way around." From what he'd heard of it, their language was coughing and hissing and tree-mammal noises. For all their shared senses of aesthetics, the aliens emphatically did not have a pretty language.

Eventide laughed, and Oxawes briefly wondered what it sounded like before the translation programs got ahold of it. "I'm not surprised, Basho-Norse is a mess. You might like some of our other languages more, we'll have to try that at some point."

"I... that wasn't Rakarn, right? I'm not sure I can even pronounce that."

"The name won't translate. It's a combination of a constructed language, Basho, and Modern Norse, which is a sort of messy combined language from three or four older languages."

"That sounds... nightmarish."

"The grammar's straightforwards, but the vocabulary's a mess. There's about a dozen languages worth of phonemes in there."

"Honestly, I'm not sure about Rakarn's history. A lot of us didn't get formal— oh, look, they're done!"

Eventide craned its head. "Was this for our thing?"

Oxawes gave it a quizzical look. "They're all your thing."

"I mean our thing. Blacklights."

"Well, I'm not— wait, shh." Secretary Wakep was standing to speak.

"With regards to the Union's proposal for a volunteer system defense force— the Assembly has voted in favor, conditionally."

Eventide tilted its head over to whisper, "Conditionally? They're learning."

"The UEA remains committed to freedom of self-expression, and in light of our desire to retain our independence, we find it both fair and advantageous to permit volunteers to take on militarized forms, conditional on several criteria. First, militarized forms must be the full property of their inhabitants, or the UEA as a collective, and must have no external overrides. Second, armed or otherwise dangerous forms must abide by weapons restrictions set by this Assembly. Third, we ask the Union to provide a planetary defense grid as an immediate countermeasure in case of accidents or emergencies, and as a form of security guarantee. We realize the last condition make take time to fulfill, and will accept a good-faith start in the meantime." The secretary paused, then switched out of his formal tone. "Captain Sanya, will any of that be an issue for you or your Union?"

"Not at all," she replied, standing up. "If anything, we're quite happy to give you full control over all this. The Union would have been... uncomfortable being asked to have a final say in your own affairs. Thank you."

Oxawes turned back to Eventide as the room dissolved into applause, his head feathers fluffed with elation. "So, when do we start?"

"You know, if I didn't know any better, I'd think you were getting better at this diplomacy stuff, captain."

"I'll assign you to a fucking mining rig, you overgrown turkey."

Eventide laughed, "That bad?"

The captain sighed. "It's exhausting. I feel manipulative, even with telling them everything we're doing and why we're doing it. Even if we got the best possible outcome out of this."

Oxawes interjected, "How's this the best? You'll have to build a whole defense network for us."

Eventide replied before Sanya could, "Wrong frame of thought. We can build things as fast as fabricators and mining units can work, and the Assembly said we could eat all the asteroids we want. Anything that can be built in vacuum is entirely automated; people doing stuff is the bottleneck. Teaching, talking, answering questions, that sort of thing."

"Right." Oxawes tended to forget that the idea of material scarcity was almost entirely foreign to them. "But, best outcome?"

"It basically lines up with exactly with what the Union wants," the captain explained. "Your Assembly says any forms we give out have to be fully controlled by their users or the whole Assembly? Great, that's something we would have insisted on. Assembly wants armed forms to have some restrictions? Great, we're thrilled they wanted militarized forms. Assembly wants their own system defenses? Fantastic, it'll make the Confeds think twice. And they decided they wanted all that without us having to convince them, and they decided to make us getting something we wanted conditional on them getting what they want. It means they're getting comfortable giving us pushback, which is good."

"...so then why are you upset? You got everything you wanted, the Assembly got everything they wanted. Even I'm getting everything I wanted. It seems like everyone won."

She sighed. "I'm not upset, I'm worried. I'm a warrior, and I'm a worrier. The Confeds are, unequivocally, the greatest threat we know of in the galaxy, and everyone involved will be better off the less influence they have. But, what if we ruin everything for you? You're not an interstellar civilization yet, what if we've caused some sort of cultural damage, what if we've set you on a path to self-destruction, what if we're just doing imperialism like the Confeds are, what if, what if. Keeps me up at night. And then I feel bad complaining about it, because I'm having to struggle so much as an immortal body-hopping digital mind."

"You know, cap," Eventide interjected, "I think they might be right when they say we're apes with anxiety. Just you though, the rest of us are normal."

"You know what? Now you're not even getting the mining drone. I'm putting you in a godsdamned sensor platform. Maybe a buoy."

"If it's any consolation," Oxawes added, "I think I'd prefer some messiness over being able to die."

"Fair point. Alright. Let's get you sorted out, then, you're probably tired of medical stuff at this point. Got anyone you want to come send you off?"

"I... I think I do. I want some old comrades there."

"Eventide, can you grab a shuttle? Wakep and a few others wanted to watch anyway, might as well give them a ride."

"Will do."

The nurse gently knocked on the open door of the observation room, bustling with various officials and a few of his friends. "It's time. Ready?"

"Yes." Oxawes had never been more ready in his life. He turned to Itkol and Control, "See you two on the other side."

"Good luck, sir," Chief Itkol replied.

"And dibs on your stuff," Control joked.

"Follow me, then."

He took a shaky breath as they walked. It wasn't very far, but they were the last steps he'd ever take like this. He knew how it worked, what would happen, but the finality of it was still terrifying. They'd been over the procedure in excruciating detail practically every day for the last week while a half-dozen doctors had poked and prodded him and ran who knows how many simulations.

"Okay, in through here." She opened the door to the OR, "Go ahead and take your clothes off and lay on the table, I'm going to switch to a medical body."

Oxawes did so, committing the feeling of fabric sliding off his skin to memory. He wanted to remember every little sensation from his ascension, even these.

The doctor entered, nurse in tow. They were wearing surgery forms, fully-mechanical bodies plated in gleaming antimicrobial copper, artificially smoothed by zero-g forging. It wasn't a necessity here— infection wouldn't matter in a few minutes, either way —but they were taking every precaution. "Let's get you hooked up and do the checklist. No cranial implants?"

"Nope."

"Good. Any last minute complaints about the body?" He motioned towards the bioreplica laying almost motionless on the table next to the imager, its only movement the rise and fall of its chest. It was practically identical to him, save for the fiber port at the base of its neck and the cube of spinglass where its brain would be. They'd demonstrated the manufacturing process for some onlookers a few weeks ago. It was visually impressive, with cascades of manufactured cells guided into position by antigravity fields, but the technicians had been adamant that it was not particularly more complex than a 3D printer. At least, once you knew how to make antigravity fields.

"Looks like me, so yes." They'd spent some time crafting it. Oxawes hadn't much cared, but Captain Sanya had requested it on the grounds that putting him back in something visually identical to his original body would help smooth over the transition for everyone looking on.

"Just making sure. We've already run your allergy panel for the locking injections and anesthetics, but I have to check. Do you have any allergies to medications or abnormal reactions to thaumaturgy that you didn't already tell us about?"

"None that I know of. Is a reaction common?"

"For baseline humans? Yes. Their immune systems are a bit high-strung, but we have a few backup formulations for that, and in the worst case we just have to make sure they don't die before the scan finishes."

"You say that like you aren't... wait, are you human?" Oxawes had spent a few hours with this particular doctor in the leadup to the procedure, but they hadn't talked about anything personal beyond his name: Oqis. The doctor's medical body had vaguely human proportions, but, as he was learning, that didn't mean anything.

"No, never was. I am, or was, Mahknan. Uploaded about seven years ago. Species gets a little weird like this."

"I can imagine." It seemed like most of the Unioners he'd met so far barely even had DNA anymore.

"Last part. I'm going to describe what this will do to you, and you will need to acknowledge your consent. You can revoke your consent at any time before the scan starts, but after it starts you won't be able to move until it finishes, and if you try to fight the scan, it'll fail."

"I understand. No plans on backing out."

"Good. Alright. The procedure you are consenting to is a scan by a high-energy precision neural imager. This will move your mind to a digital format. Thoughts, memories, perception, everything that makes you you, will be transferred. This scan requires extremely high doses of radiation and aetheric potential, along with injections of toxic chemicals directly into your brain. These will irreversibly destroy your biological brain within several minutes, and this body will die. Your mind will continue to exist as an infomorph, and you will be dependent on access to technological infrastructure instead of food and water. Consent is important. If you don't want this, the scan will fail and you will suffer severe brain damage and likely death. Any questions?"

"No questions. I consent." They'd been over the procedure practically daily for the last week. He was strangely calm about the whole affair, all things considered.

"Good. After upload, you'll land in a sim, and we'll get you into a bioreplica for basic familiarization, and to let everyone else know you made it through without issues. After that, we have a fresh Blacklight you can transfer to. That's going to start with some equipment disabled and its thrust limited for safety reasons, and you'll be in our air group's hands for passing the training pipeline to get those limiters taken out. Any questions there?"

No new information. They'd been over it before. "No questions."

"Good enough for me. Lay back and put your head in here, please," he gestured towards the imager.

Oxawes nestled his head into the harness, and the nurse strapped him in. It was dark inside the machine, wrapped fully around his shaved head. Quiet, too, with the exception of the soft whirring of the nurse's high-precision servos.

The nurse spoke, "I'm going to put the IV in now. You're going to feel a prick on your wrist. then a cold fluid." It was, indeed, followed by the skillful insertion of an IV needle and the feeling of ice flowing up his veins.

"That's just a numbing agent so you don't twitch on us." The nurse waited a few moments, "let me know if this hurts." Something poked his scalp.

"I could feel the pressure but no pain."

"Good. We're putting the secondary anesthetic cocktail in now. Same thing, more powerful." If the last injection felt like ice, this was slush.

After another minute of waiting, the nurse spoke again, "Can you try to move your neck and facial muscles for me?"

He tried. Nothing moved. His jaw didn't either, but that was expected. The anesthetics were to provide cover for a far nastier series of injections: dozens of needles inserted through his skull to bypass his blood-brain barrier.

"Alright. Here comes the big one. You're going to feel pressure all over your head, but there should be no pain." The nurse didn't lie, and something pressed in around his scalp. He imagined it looked quite grisly, but there wasn't even a prick as the needles slid through his skull.

The doctor spoke this time, "Everything's looking good. We're going to start the locking injection now." This time it was something warm behind his eyes. The locking compound would freeze his neural connections in place just long enough for them to be scanned, delaying the imminent cell death he was about to suffer for just a few seconds.

"Double check on injections?" The doctor asked.

"Looks good."

"Okay. This is going to feel weird. Starting the scan in three, two, one—"

Prismatic color burst behind his eyeballs and radio static filled his ears, an infinite fractal unfolding and refolding in every sense he had. He could feel himself more, somehow, like he was experiencing every memory and sensation he had ever had all at once. It was, in some way, like having his life flash before his eyes, but he knew it was the scanner inadvertently triggering neurons as it ripped information out of his head. It was beautiful and sad and happy all at the same time, in a way he couldn't quite express. He briefly wondered if the Union had vocabulary for it that Rakarn lacked.

And then it was over. He opened his eyes, and realized that he was still here on the operating table, no longer paralyzed by anesthetics.

"Welcome to the other side," Oqis greeted him, "we're going to do some quick diagnostics. What's your name, your favorite childhood memory, what you ate for dinner last night, and five plus seven?"

"Oxawes Ag Kessek, my seventh birthday, nothing, and twelve."

"Good. Your mindstate looks perfect, so welcome to immortality. Sorry we don't have much ceremony for you, that's the downside of being first. Go ahead and move around."

He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the table, checking himself over. "I don't... feel any different?" He had expected to, somehow, but the only difference between himself now and a few seconds ago was the lack of a shaved head and skull full of holes.

"Yeah, that's intentional. Let's get you back into the real world. You should feel a bump in the back of your mind, go ahead and mentally poke at that for me."

There was something new there. He tapped at it, and felt his awareness expand, suddenly perceiving more.

"Okay, good. This is basically showing the layer up from your normal perception. It'll take a little bit of getting used to, and we'll go through the details later. You should be able to see each of us, and then the OR if you pull out a bit."

Oxawes looked around with the new second sight. There was his little corner, the two of them inside a sectioned-off area, lines joining them to another node, the nurses, an empty body, then another link back to—

"Is this... everyone?" He could see everything, an overwhelming mesh of life and machine that extended up to the carrier in orbit, then beyond with the other Union ships in the system.

"Everyone that's synced in on this network. We'll get into that later, go ahead and get in that empty form."

Oxawes focused his attention, finding the empty form next to him in the operating room. "How do I... Oh." His awareness streamed over to it, with the faint feeling of being sucked up by a large straw.

Oxawes opened his eyes again.

Captain Sanya looked on from the observation room, letting out a breath she didn't know she had been holding as Oxawes transferred into his new body. He sat up and unplugged his fiber link, then gave the observation room a wave. She smiled and waved back. The raptor-like alien had grown on her over the last month.

There was a brief pause while he figured out how to respond. <A little overwhelmed. There's a lot in here.>

<Well, come on up when you're ready. I can stall for bit, but I'm sure they'll want to check you over.>

"Is he alright?" Secretary Wakep asked.

"The upload didn't have any issues and he's feeling a little overwhelmed, but that's to be expected. He'll come up to chat when he's had a few moments to take it in."

"You two can communicate immediately?"

"Yeah, seems like he's a fast learner. We could turn off encryption if you want, it's just packetized audio. I suppose it could seem furtive to obscure our comms with your people."

Wakep shrugged. "No, that's alright. The colonel is going to be both of our people for a while, anyway. We'll have to share."

"For probably a decade or so, yeah. It'll take some time for you to have folks who really thoroughly understand the... well, the everything. Spinglass brains are the most complicated thing our civilization has ever built."

"I see." Wakep's musing was interrupted by Oxawes's return, who was promptly tackled by Control and Chief Itkol. The theee began chattering excitedly almost immediately.

"I've never seen him so animated," Sanya remarked. Oxawes had been deeply reserved the whole time she'd known him. Which, admittedly, wasn't that long.

"I suspect his friends will be asking about it for themselves sooner than later. How long will that body last?"

"About as long as his original would have, maybe less if we missed something. He figured it'd be better to keep it as close to baseline as possible, so we didn't fiddle with the genes or anything like that."

"Gene editing? That might go over poorly here, the Dominion had a history with it. They wanted to produce a new generation of more compliant slaves."

Sanya grimaced. "Gene editing has some sketchy history far in our past, but nothing to that degree. These days... well, genes don't really matter for us, it's all elective. This body's very far from baseline, for example."

"I see," he said, noncommittally. "On that line of thought, have you been able to get your shapeshifting to work with our biology? I know that was mentioned a while back."

"We've done some simulations, and it should be possible. I'm told we would need some actual people to experiment on. And it would involve some gene editing, sorry."

"Would bioreplicas work?"

"Yes, but we have some... let's say, cultural hangups about using another species for bioreplicas, at least until we're closer to technological equals."

Wakep gave her a look. "Your species is fascinatingly neurotic."

Sanya laughed, and Wakep managed to catch Oxawes's eye as he glanced around, seeking an escape from the Assembly representative who had moved in to interrogate him. "One moment, I'm going to extract our colonel from that."

Wakep managed to extricate Oxawes without much trouble. "The man of the hour. How are you feeling?"

"Unchanged, for now."

"Good. I understand the captain here has arranged a new aircraft for you."

Oxawes glanced at the captain. "Yes," she replied, "though 'aircraft' is typically considered an insufficient descriptor. Speaking of forms, what did you want to do with your old one?"

He fluffed his head feathers. "I spent some time thinking. I want to launch it into the sun. Myself."

Captain Sanya smiled. "Oh, they'll like that."

"And, speaking of that..."

"Yes, I know. Unless you need to poke and prod him some more, Secretary?"

"No, I think he's had enough examination." He put on a formal air. "Colonel Oxawes ag Kessek, you are assigned to USCS Bright Horizons as a liaison officer. Make a good impression for us." The colonel performed his version of a snappy salute, raising all the feathers on his face, then snapping them back down.

Sanya nodded. "Calling it down now. You should be able to see." Oxawes pulled back his vision to the whole network, watching a single fighter slide out of the carrier in orbit, then accelerate downwards. "After this, you're all in Eventide's hands. Or lack thereof."

Eventide's voice cut in, <Actually, you'll be Echelon's job, since he's fluent in Rakarn.> Another fighter dropped out of orbit, plunging down through the atmosphere. The acceleration was sobering, if the readout on the network was correct.

<I'm Bright's CAG officer. Bridge crews tend to share senses a little more closely than normal. We'll meet you outside,> it indicated the projected landing point, <here.>

His new self was waiting for him in the field, the sleek form of night-black stealth composites somehow even more alien in the tall grass. The others were orbiting above, electronic eyes not requiring proximity to see him closely.

<Hello down there, strange new fledgling,> a new voice spoke. The link identified him as Echelon, one of the Blacklights circling above like giant hypersonic vultures. Unlike the others, his voice was richer, somehow. The lack of a translator, perhaps.

<Hello, strange alien spacecraft. How do I get in this thing?>

Echelon laughed like a rakketch with a chirruping sound, but a feather too deeply for something with a rakketch voice box. Because he doesn't have one, Oxawes realized. <Poke it in the link, there's an interface cable on the ventral side.>

Oxawes did so, the perfectly-smooth skin of the craft revealing an invisible seam as a small square of it pivoted, dangling out the cable.

Oxawes fluffed his feathers in affirmation, then felt around the back of his neck for the port. The connector slid in easily despite his fumbling, and his awareness expanded.

FS-264 Blacklight III, Bl. IV, SN 0x15E4DA, ID:NULL, FLAG:0x1FB1

<Okay, that's familiar except for flag. What's that?>

Oxawes took a deep breath and hit the transfer... key? button? Describing a non-physical interface that existed only in his mind's eye was strange. A little progress bar showed the transfer process, copying the exabytes of his mind over to the machine in a few seconds. That feeling of being sucked up hit him again as the transfer finished, and suddenly he was—

Everything was bright. His senses were assaulted with a deluge of information, the entire electromagnetic spectrum inserted directly into his mind with fidelity that he could barely comprehend, exquisitely sensitive skin feeling every brush of the wind. He tried closing his eyes, only to realize that he didn't have those. He didn't have any body parts, much less— oh. Oh. He did have body parts... they were just a machine's parts.

<It's okay, we're here. The first time is a little intense. Give your mind a few minutes to adapt.>

He did so, letting the sensations wash over him. The blinding deluge slowly gave way to the mental equivalent of squinting as the brightness faded and individual senses became more clear. He noticed, for the first time, something inside of him, an irregular pulse and twist in his... center? He had assumed that his sensation of self would be translated over directly, with each body part being mapped to some section of the machine, but that wasn't what was happening at all. He wasn't a warped rakketch, he was something else entirely.

<What's this [[?]] in me?> he asked, trying not to focus too hard on the fact that he had just said a physical sensation as if it was a word.

<That's your heart,> Echelon replied. <Reactor-heart, if you're being poetic about it. Your blood is plasma, you'll feel it when you start moving. How's the pain?>

<Bad, but I've been through worse.> He briefly wondered if Echelon had any idea of how much worse things he'd been through. <It's calming down. Still intense.>

<I'm surprised you didn't panic. I did my first time. Want to get airborne?> There was an emotion in there, a sense of anticipation and welcoming.

Or maybe a few weeks, he thought to himself.

<Of course. We have all the time in the world.> The light was slowly dimming, and he could start to see things again, even if things were blurry and it felt like his skin was on fire. The sky was visible in a thousand more colors than before, the waving grass occupying an entire hemisphere of his vision. As the minutes went by, the pain of adaptation faded, replaced with a yearning for the sky. He'd always had it, but it was sharper than ever now. He could feel the systems he needed to use, almost instinctively, it was just a matter of activating them.

Right, he thought. Antigravity thrusters snapped online with that same low thrumming sound that he'd come to recognize. Except it wasn't some UFO he was jealous of, it was him. He—

<Oh.> He looked down at himself, in millimeter-wave radar and infrared and visual. Well, not himself, but a body that was identical to his. And "looked" was perhaps the wrong way to describe it, because he was seeing everything around him, and... <Right. What should I do with myself?>

<Of course. Normally we would just shred it, but you're likely to need it on shorter notice than you could get it printed.> Oxawes felt a brief flash of panic at the mention of shredding, enough that some of it must have gone over the link. <No, don't think about it like that,> Echelon added. <It's just a piece of machinery if you're not inside it, and biology requires some annoying upkeep like food and air and bathroom breaks.>

That would take some getting used to.

<Right.> Transferring back to flesh-and-blood was instant, and distinctly similar to stepping out of a kiln and into an ice bath. He almost struggled to believe that he had seen the world like this a few minutes ago. Oxawes managed to unplug himself as fast as he could, then transferred again. The return was painful, going from uncomfortably cold to uncomfortably hot... but less so. He was adapting, it just wasn't instant.

<Ready.> But he was eager. The fighter pilot in him was still there, ready to tough it out, and unsure how to handle a new machine. <Any handling quirks I should be aware of?>

Echelon transmitted an emotion as he spoke, and Oxawes got the distinct impression that he was looking in a mirror, just separated by many, many years. <Agrav has a cutoff at 25 m/s or so for physics bullshit reasons. You're g- and thrust-limited right now to something close to what you're used to. Other than that, go ahead, it's all you.>

Oxawes kicked on his thrusters again and angled himself upwards, a first clumsy attempt at balancing on the thrusters quickly turning into what felt like a practiced movement. His gear retracted and his engines flicked on, the distinct feeling of fusion-hot blood pumping through his veins as the thrust simply appeared. He could feel the air rushing through... his intakes, the comforting warmth of his exhaust nozzles.

It was everything he had ever dreamed of.

<How's he doing?> Eventide asked over a private link, a whisper of status telemetry appended as a greeting.

<He's as sky-born as we were, back then,> Echelon replied, transmitting their flight path. <Taking the sensory overload in stride too. He hasn't even turned it down.>

<I'll make Vapor come down and get it,> Eventide replied. <And, it's not like MYSTIC GREEN missed either, I'm not sure why I'm surprised that our first one is a natural.> The program that had produced the two of them, and hundreds more like them by the end of the Transhuman War, had been a universal success. Most of the original Blacklights— Blacklight I's, not the hyperspace-reactor Blacklight III's —had survived long enough to upload, and never hung up their wings.

<I'm going to get him comfy with high machs, then take him up to orbit for the real meet-and-greet.>

<We'll be here.>

The transition to higher speeds came easily, like everything else had. Push just a little bit more, feel the atmosphere flashing into shimmering plasma around him as his leading edges rent it apart. It wasn't even challenging, just... comfortable.

<Is it normal to feel...> Oxawes tried to find words as they sailed upwards, failed, and simply sent the raw emotion. <...like [[?]]?> It was empowering and terrifying, like something important was changing forever in the process of becoming more.

<Yes,> Echelon answered simply. Oxawes got that feeling of looking in a mirror again. <There's a reason why we tend to change names afterwards.>

<Someone else and something else. Unwanted pasts are... sensitive, for us.> Echelon sent an emotion of longing and restriction. <Then,> another raw emotion, like looking in a mirror and seeing something different and beautiful and right, <and now I'm me.>

Oxawes mulled that over for a few moments as he pulled a turn that would have turned an organic being to paste. <...how are those emotions remotely translatable between species?>

Echelon smirked as the two of them spiraled around each other in the upper atmosphere, the concept of a sly grin somehow parsing despite their lack of mouths and shared facial expressions. <If you ask that for everything, we'll be here a while.>

<We've got a while, don't we?>

<Yeah, I was just hoping you'd give up, I don't know how it works either.> He laughed in a curious way, a soundless emotion that couldn't reach his nonexistent eyes, but could be transmitted all the same. The attitude was contagious, and Oxawes laughed too.

<Traditionally, you would pick a new name after your first orbit,> Echelon explained, <but tradition is just tradition, and you're something new.>

<Of course,> Echelon replied, pulling out Oxawes's limiters. <Nose up, wait until your vacuum drives are green.>

New presences appeared in the link as Oxawes pushed past the edge of the atmosphere, as if he was in a room with them, regardless of the tens of thousands of kilometers separating them.

<greetings|[ID:VAPOR]> appeared in Oxawes's mind as pure text rather than spoken words.

<{welcoming|wonder|curious|like me|like us}> another sent, a burst of pure emotion over the link instead of words. <[ID:RADIANT]> it appended, almost an afterthought.

There were more looking to say hello, the feeling of mutual curiosity bleeding through. <Give him some space. And hello, fledgling,> sent Eventide, <how's the new body been?>

<It's been... {right},> he replied, the emotional sharing coming more naturally now, <they might have trouble getting me out of it. Can the others... talk?>

<Certainly,> Radiant sent, <It's... {choice|impression|creature|machine}. Words are for bioforms. {not us}. Though you should probably go get a sandwich or something normal from time to time.> Unspoken, but sent, was a mess of emotions, packed densely into a single feeling: <{old|new|forgetting|impressions|us|them|changing|sudden}>.

One of those words hadn't translated. <A sandwich?>

<Yes?>

Radiant sent an exquisitely detailed model of... a foodstuff.

<This is a sandwich.>

<Radiant, don't get started on your special interest with him,> Echelon interjected. <It likes sandwiches,> he added, helpfully.

<I'm on a quest to try every sandwich in the galaxy {exploring|wanderlust|novelty},> it supplied, <the rest of you just don't have hobbies.>

<I'm starting to think the people on social media calling you all insane are right,> Oxawes commented.

<{correct|irrelevant},> Radiant replied. <{together|fly|travel|fight|explore|free}.>

<true. come, fly.> Vapor added.

<Don't mind those two,> Eventide said, <They're just like that. Come on up.>

Oxawes eased his main drives on as the atmosphere vanished behind him, dozens of gravities of acceleration hurling him into space with perfect smoothness. His newfound allies were visible, at least to him– the datalink up here was perfect, even if his own sensors struggled to get good returns on them. They curved in around him, eager to see a new... person? Fighter? Creature? Oxawes wasn't quite sure what he was anymore.

But the introspection could wait. He pushed his engines as high as they would go and lunged into the deep black. The infinite depth of space was welcoming, somehow, like it was where he belonged.

he sent after the first hour, <{snow|powder|mountain|wind|vortex|transition|something|nothing}. Spindrift.>

<Good pick. It translates well too. In our language, it's [spindrift],> Echelon replied, switching back to his native tongue. <Not an uncommon pick for us either.>

<So, what now?>

<Now? We're going to go play in the planetary rings.>

<Play?> Eventide inquired, with a combination of accusatory and joking tone. <You're on the clock, Echelon.>

<My apologies,> Spindrift cut in, <he means we're going to go practice our maneuvering.>

Echelon laughed that soundless laugh again. <See? I told you he's a fast learner.>

One week later.

Captain Sanya nodded as Eventide entered the bridge sim. "Commander? How's my CAG?"

"Still down four squadrons of Phoenixes, but we're back to full on Blacklights. We did a bunch of wargaming, I think we can probably do a bit better next time around since we got their firing arcs figured out."

"Good, but I'm after our newcomer. How's the colonel doing?"

"Oh, excellent. He's out in the Igantu rings right now. New name and everything, we took the weapon safeties off a few days ago. He's as good of a role model for the program as we could have hoped for, honestly. Not beating us in combat yet, but he's certainly not a detriment."

"What's the name again? I've just got him down as Oxawes."

"Spindrift. Keneket in Rakarn, the translator's a bit weird about trying to eat it, since it's a name and a noun. No preference on language, the descriptor is what's important, apparently. He mentioned wanting to use different names for different forms, so Oxawes is probably fine if he's in the bioreplica."

"That's not unheard of, I know a few ships who do that when they're off the clock. Regardless, good name. I dated a Spindrift a while back, had some fun."

Eventide gave her the equivalent of a raised eyebrow.

"I didn't start with a warship, you know." She smirked, and Bright Horizons rumbled somewhere underneath of them. "Right, anyway, any over-fitting or plasticity issues?"

"If anything, less than any Sol-origin brain I've seen. He's switched in and out of his bioreplica and warforms without a ton of trouble, which is more than I could say for myself for a while. Plasticity looks normal, at least for what we know of them. He hasn't touched that dial yet."

"Huh. Well, good to hear regardless. You think he's ready to go on his own?"

"I think he needs some friends that are like him. Not even necessarily rakketch, but we've all been around the block too many times. Our youngest has still been a Blacklight for a decade, it's hard to relate. But yes, he's stable and competent. No hardstops, though. I'd like to get that sorted before we give our signoff on combat duty, but we don't exactly have spare frames to do it."

"And sim's not the same for getting blown up. Yeah, gotcha. Oh, still him, right?"

"Yup. Not sure if rakketch gender is less flexible than ours, or if we just got the one volunteer who wasn't genderfucked. I wasn't going to do the 'alien comments on sexuality' thing this early on."

Sanya smirked, "And you accuse me of being a diplomat. Anyway, Secretary Wakep just asked about meeting with him and Echelon. The Assembly is going to want to see what the process actually does to rakketch before we start munching on the rest of the volunteers. And I imagine their military would like to hear from him too."

"Sure, if you can get Echelon into a different body. And are we ready to actually start working on volunteers? I know Bright had to sacrifice some fabricator time for his airframe."

"The techs got the industrial fabricator done yesterday, it's working on a pair of doublings right now. We're suggesting they reserve one for military purposes, should put out a few flights a day when it spins up. Not as good as having twelve hundred airframes on hand..."

"...but it's better than waiting longer, I get it. I'll let him know."

The atmosphere sparkled around them in a sheath of white-hot plasma as they reentered. The Union had never made any attempt to conceal their specifications, but they had been trying to be polite. Today, Spindrift wanted to show off, thus the hypersonic turn-and-burn, scorching the concrete with plasma-heated exhaust as they decelerated onto the landing pad. He dropped his bioreplica out of the cargo bay, a tiny compartment normally meant for sensor drones, transferring to it as soon as it, now him, touched the ground.

<You doing okay over there?> he asked, glancing towards Echelon. Oxawes had convinced him to try a bioreplica, and Echelon had agreed in his own way, printing an old militarized form. You could take the person out of the weapon, but you couldn't take the weapon out of the person.

<Let's just say it's a good thing I practiced in sim first. It's been a long time.> His bipedal form flowed and twisted into a winged quadruped with iridescent scales, larger than would have fit in his airframe. Like most things about the aliens, the shapeshifting had been strange, and then just became a normal thing about them. <Shall we?>

The secretary and some of his entourage met them halfway, strolling out into the warm heat of the summer sun. Secrtary Wakep ruffled his feathers in greeting, as Oxawes snapped off a salute.

"Gentlebeings. Walk with me, please. My schedule is pressed for time these days."

Echelon nodded his head as Oxawes replied, "Of course."

"So, tell me about your adventures in space. And about yourself. They implied that you might experience some personality changes."

Oxawes blinked. "Well. I passed the USC training pipeline, I've been—"

"I've seen your reports, Colonel. I don't need training completion and numbers. What's it like?"

He paused to gather his thoughts. "It's... it's a lot to take in. I'm not just me anymore, I'm that too," he gestured towards the fighter behind him. "You ever sit in a chair that's just perfect the first time?"

The secretary fluffed his cheek feathers. "I have a Taekenel office chair for a reason."

"It's like that, but for my everything. It's right for me."

"Good. Any desire to kill all biological lifeforms?"

"Not since I stopped having to drive to work."

Wakep laughed at that one. "No complaints from our friends upstairs?" He glanced at Echelon.

"He's what we call sky-born, Secretary," Echelon replied, "he's made for this as much as any of us are. He's not winning one-on-ones with us yet, but we'll get him there."

"Excellent. I'm going to steal your alien friend for a few minutes, Colonel. Milcoun wants to chat with you, in private. Nothing particularly spicy, I'm told, but they're a little paranoid. Captain Kreeakes here will show you the way."

Oxawes took his seat in front of the Military Council, the trio of flag officers peering over the table at him. The room had a comm-block cage, presumably installed by some paranoid intelligence officer, but it was blocking his network sense, leaving him feeling a little more isolated than he already felt in this limited form.

"Sirs. What's this about?"

"Colonel, you're smarter than that," General Dakaw chided, flattening her cheek feathers, "don't ask me what this is about. I know you've got some neurons in there that still know how to politick." General Dakaw, Air Force, notionally his own boss and previously in the same squadron as Oxawes. She'd wanted to climb the political ladder, and he'd wanted to keep his claws on a flight stick. He held no ill will for that; they'd discussed it at length when the choice had been made. Someone needed to be the logistician, and she was suited for it.

"You want to know if you can trust them?"

"No, actually. The answer to that doesn't matter—"

"How could it not matter," interrutped Admiral Katonel, "that's all that we've—"

"Relax, you two." General Laoganek spoke firmly. There was little doubt as to who was in charge. If there was any question of who had won the war, the answer was Laoganek. Oxawes hadn't fought under him, but "universally beloved" was an understatement. Had he not insisted on civilian government after the war... well, Agketch owed him a lot. The other two were in his shadow— the rebellion's air and naval forces had consisted of whatever they'd managed to restore from Dominion bases after the aliens had perforated them.

"Colonel, we have a few questions, and I don't want the Union around to try and be gentle about the answers. You're not in trouble, we're not going to take away your plane. I'm not even sure if we can. Actually— could we? That's useful information."

"You could... I don't know, pick it up and carry it away while I was in a comm-blocked room like this. But not if I'm in it, no."

He nodded. "Good to know. The serious question I have for you is this: how many of you can we support?"

Oxawes blinked. He'd expected interrogation about trustworthiness and ordnance yields, not to walk into a meeting where the military council had already made up its mind.

He took a moment to gather his thoughts before answering. "Thousands, at a minimum. We don't have flight crews, the maintenance requirements are close to nonexistent, and I'm told my reactor will keep running through universal heat death, so fuel isn't an issue. Bright Horizons has twelve techs for their whole complement, if that gives you a sense of it."

"Ammo?"

"Trivially made by their fabricators, from what I understand. And only something to be worried about in a protracted engagement. The larger concern is that their doctrine treats fighters as expendable, since they can replace them so easily."

Laoganek made a noncommittal grunt, then glanced at Katonel. "Admiral? Your turn."

"Do you think we can trust them?" Admiral Katonel had been quite publicly suspicious of the aliens, from what Oxawes gathered. It wasn't unwarranted, of course— but after the last week, it felt a little silly to him.

"Yes."

"That's it?"

"I volunteered to get my brain zapped into mush because I wanted to be a plane. They've been nothing but supportive."

Laoganek snorted. The admiral looked like he wanted to say something, then gave up. "Dakaw?"

"Can we put normal aviators in there?"

"Can? Yes. Should? I don't know. The way they tell it, people don't react well if it's not something they really want, but I don't know how true that is across species."

"And conveniently, the people we think are best suited for this are largely not military personnel."

"Everyone fought in the war, Dakaw." Everyone had fought in the war, whether it was with a gun in a trench, a tourniquet at a field hospital, a twenty-ton press at an ammunition factory, or harvesting crops to feed the army.

"You know what I mean," she replied, vaguely exasperated. "There's a difference between being a factory worker and being a fighter pilot."

"Yeah, we enjoyed being fighter pilots." Factory work had been famously unpalatable in the early days of the war. "Regardless, Sanya and Eventide don't seem to think there's anything wrong with civilians having fighters. And the defenses they're putting up should prevent any accidents."

"She raises a valid point, colonel," Laoganek said. "You have more firepower right now than the Dominion ever did. The Assembly might have insisted on bodily autonomy, but bodily autonomy when your body has multiple gigaton-scale warheads in it is not a comfortable position for me."

"That's putting it lightly," Katonel groused.

"It's a bridge we have to cross eventually," Oxawes replied, "unless we're going to try and restrict every form capable of spaceflight. I was fighting to swim in infinite stars. Are we going to deny people that now?"

"No, no," Laoganek sighed. "We're not. Against Katonel's better judgment, and my caution, we're giving the go-ahead. We're probably even going to recruit. You've got a thousand possible names, right? Bring them in, run basic psych evals, get the most reliable ones as a training cadre."

"What about you? The military here would be..."

"Irrelevant, yes. Look around, we've been irrelevant since the Letkao agreement. Who exactly are we going to fight down here?"

"Dominionists?" he asked, not quite believing in it himself. The Dominion was gone, and its most ardent supporters and beneficiaries were in the ground. Peace had been a bit aimless. "I guess there's not much."

"It's the rest of the galaxy we're worried about, and the army won't help much there. But you can. The Union's rolled in and offered us the ability to arm ourselves to the hilt, and I want it all, Assembly be damned. We might still have to live in the Council's shadow, but we'll have enough of a punch to not be reliant on others."

"Understood, sir."

"Good." He motioned towards the captain, who had stood silently by the door the entire time. "If you could take him back to the Secretary?"

"Sir."

Six months later.

The fighter's datalink woke him from his slumber, subroutines clearing the sleepiness out of his mind in a fraction of a second. <[ALERT:TRANSIT|ALERT:IFF:NONE]>

That got his reactor hot in a hurry. He called up the base network, pinging Control immediately. <Control? You see that?>

<Yup. SysCom watchfloor's been notified. Board is yours.>

He thought for a brief moment. <Did anything happen here in the last eight hours? High-energy burns, weapons fire? Stuff that they could see out there?>

Control immediately realized what he meant. If the new arrivals didn't know that Agkett had several hundred void fighters buzzing around it and a system defense grid, they would have a major advantage. <One second, pulling up the logs.> Control hadn't planned on uploading, or at least not so soon... but combat control for space fighters was too much to resist. <Doesn't look like it.>

<Understood.> Trajectory plots stitched into Spindrift's vision as he slid out of the asteroid hangar. He had no clue what sort of interface Control was working with, but they had a mind for acceleration curves. And it was they, now, because Control had decided to discard gender shortly after discarding their physical body.

<I'm not getting an ID on the hull,> Spindrift mentioned. The Union had provided their hull identification database, even if it trended towards incomplete. Whatever this was, it wasn't in it.

<Does our liaison have anything?> The USCS Bright Horizons and its attendant fleet had left a month ago when Hawaii and Greenway had arrived, the pair of diplomatic cruisers exchanging the warfleet for a bevy of diplomats, engineers, scientists, and educators. The clearly decorative nature of the two ships had made the Assembly relax, but Spindrift missed the near-invisible warships and their flocks of fighters.

He had his own flock now, though. Thirty-four Blacklights silently slid out of various asteroid hangars and accelerated towards the edge of the system. He was second-guessing himself with the deployments— a major Union system like Tau Ceti or Sol would have flocks in the tens of thousands, more than plenty to cover the whole orbital plane, but they were undeniably an interstellar civilization and had no reason to hide that fact. The Unified Enclaves was not, at least not at the same scale, and there was good reason to conceal that fact from visitors until their intentions could be determined.

<No, I've got nothing,> Commander Jiang replied, having been roused in the same way that the two of them had been. <Looks like a freighter, though. Not too many ways to build something to carry cargo. Maybe an early trader, looking to make some money off of a newly discovered species? Very dirty engine too, look at that plasma plume.>

<Hmm,> he replied, noncommittally. <Confed or Council, then?>

<I'll give them a few minutes to introduce themselves before I send anything.>

<Yeah. Biologicals.> It was almost funny to muse about the trials and tribulations of having an organic body, especially when he was perfectly comfortable swapping in and out of his own as Agketch politics demanded. <Want to tag along? I don't need to accidentally offend someone.>

<Sure. [REQ:MS:INIT|COMM:LAS].>

There was a pause for a few seconds while Spindrift's laser link negotiated the transmission with Greenway's comm system, then data streamed in, dozens of terabits of multispectral bandwidth moving Jiang's mind to his spare spinglass.

<No worries. And, likewise.> Spindrift opened up his throttles, three hundred and fifty gravities of acceleration smoothly rocketing him forwards as he moved into a loose formation with the rest of the squadron. He broadened the link to the rest of the squadron, <Morning, everyone. You can see the sensor data as well as I can, we've got a new friend.>

<{friend|real} or {friend|irony}?> That was Dusk, his second. Fully, she was Dusk ag Lotawes, but everyone knew who she was, because she'd gone from having never touching a joystick to shredding most of the military pilots in about two weeks. They'd found more like her over the weeks and months, but she'd made a name for herself, and earned her place as second-in-command. The military chain of command was... looser out here, more aggressively meritocratic. System Command didn't have much to say about it as long as they weren't slinging megaton-yield shots around Agketch, which suited them just fine.

<Done.> New flight curves appeared in his vision, a perfect web bracketing the new arrival. They could hit high percentages of lightspeed in deep interstellar space, but in-system their shields wouldn't keep up past 0.6c, and even then they'd be blueshifting their exquisite sensor pictures into illegibility. Safe speeds were capped at 0.3c by Union doctrine, a number that Spindrift felt no need to argue with.

<Alright. Keep this one by the book, as our alien friends like to put it. [COMM:LAS] only, weapon ports closed. I'll—> He was cut off by the ping of incoming communications.

"Yu'ul, yu'ul, yu'ul, tu'ak tuyul ooaul, nek aoou ulth— [LANG:COUNCIL_STANDARD|REPROCESSING]" Spindrift rewound the transmission and played again, "Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is ISS Six Golden Rings, we have a reactor leak and our life support is failing. We require assistance. Message repeats. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, this is ISS..."

<Well,> Dusk sent, "The Book," for lack of a better term, was officially titled "Approved Interaction With Other Civilizations," drafted and ratified by the Assembly once they grasped the fact that there would be nearly half a day of light lag between anything at Agkett's jump radius and Agketch itself. Captain Sanya had made a compelling argument that it would be vitally important for the Assembly to actually exercise sovereignty over all of Agkett, even if they didn't inhabit all of it yet. Others would not be as keen on rakketch retaining their independence as the Union had been.

<Well, there's one paragraph,> he replied as the newcomer slowly picked up acceleration sunward. He keyed up his translator and and a tightbeam broadcast. "ISS Six Golden Rings, this is Spindrift of Agkett System Command. We welcome you to Agkett in peace. Set a course for the second planet, if you are able." He thought a moment, then added, "Do you require immediate evacuation? If so, how many individuals, and what are their dimensions? Please state your purpose here."

<We don't exactly have SAR craft up here,> Control noted. <If they can't get to Agketch before they run out of air—>

Jiang interjected, <We have some life support bags. Not many, but they take most sizes of sapients. Could fill up your missile bay. And Hawaii and Greenway both have sizeable quarters for organics.>

<Both, then. We'll get there first, but I don't know what we're dealing with.> He paused a moment to think. <Control, get me another two squadrons, get them those rescue bags and send them after us as soon as they load them. No speed limit, I don't think we'll be shooting our way out of this one. And ask our two visitors about getting underway.>

<Understood.>

The worst part of being a space fighter, Spindrift decided, was the waiting. The cosmic speed limit might have been bypassed for travel between stars, but down here in a gravity well, lightspeed was still king. Four hundred light-minutes of lag in each direction was painful, even if he could go from zero to one-quarter-c in six and a half hours. The spinglass his mind lived in might have been able to wake him up instantly, but going to sleep was still a manual affair for now, and he had never been able to sleep well before a mission.

Eventually, the reply came. "Thank our stars, Spindrift, it's good to hear from someone. We'll last a few weeks, long enough to get into orbit, but I wouldn't want to try another jump. We're traders out of 7720 Rankin, got wind that there was a new species here and a friendly fleet in the area. How's contact with them been going?"

<{humor|knowledge|us},> Dusk sent, the equivalent of a giggle.

<You've got Council data protocols in your comm suite and are speaking what sounds like flawless Council Standard,> Jiang provided.

Spindrift laughed. <Right, they'd never expect us to be... well, this. Do I need to know anything about 7720 Rankin?> He pulled up the star chart to look at it.

<Wait, they trade? Aren't they at war?>

<Yes. But neither bans trade with independent parties, who conveniently act as middlemen. Currency matters a lot to them.>

<{ridiculous|distasteful}. We have a saying: Dominus Aurum lives on.>

<Indeed.>

<Right. I will endeavor to correct their assumption.>

<Wait,> Dusk sent. <Remember, we're not uploads, not to strangers.> The Union had conveyed the necessity of "the veil", as they called it, a thin layer of plausible deniability and lack of witnesses intended to keep the Confeds from going after their home systems. It wasn't as important for Agketch, since uploads were only a tiny fraction of the population and could conceivably hide... but that wasn't the case for the Union, and no gift was completely free.

<We're good liars. There's a reason we don't share emotions as readily as you, we're used to being able to lie.>

Spindrift bobbed a little bit in response. Strangely, he had discovered that the shared body language of Blacklights seemed to ignore species barriers entirely. Bobbing to express being deep in thought, waggling wingtips to say hello, rolling to laugh, spiraling for excitement... It all came weirdly naturally.

He keyed up another broadcast. "Six Golden Rings, contact went well. So well that you are talking to that species right now. We're called rakketch. Given that we learned what reactionless drives were six months ago, we don't have much in the way of personnel transport. If you have any injured, we can evacuate a few dozen people, depending on size, though our medical facilities might not be up to par with what you're used to. We're doing our turn-and-burn now, we'll be with you in a few hours."

<{good|impressive|social skills}.> Dusk might have been a monster in the void, but ask her to talk to a stranger and it was a struggle.

<It's because I can't bite anymore,> Dusk joked, <what am I supposed to do if they try to touch me?>

Spindrift didn't reply with words. <[WEP:RAIL|WEP:MSL|WEP:PPB] {question|bite}.>

<{mushroom cloud|anger|oops}.>

He laughed. <True, true.>

Spindrift was disturbed from his nap by a pair of messages. He briefly wondered about how much his sleep cycle would be screwed up, then realized that it didn't really matter that much. It wasn't like there was a day-night cycle in space.

The first was from System Command, a brusque military communique spending a few too many words and a little too much jargon to say "good work, keep it up."

The second, the one that had woken him up, was from the ISS Six Golden Rings. He checked the timestamp— delayed by ten minutes from when they would have gotten his reply. Obviously, it had taken some thinking.

"Our apologies, Spindrift." There was a brief pause, with some mumbling in the background. "Uh, Spindrift, we can't seem to pick you up on our sensors, and we're tracking, uh, three hundred gravities of acceleration from your transmissions? We can see your other two ships, but we don't have a read on your location."

<{delight},> Dusk declared, <they don't know.> Spindrift couldn't resist sharing the emotion. Being something unknown was exhilarating.

Jiang sent. <Blacklights are fairly exceptional, even around these parts.>

Spindrift broadened his link to everyone in the area, <Transponders on, ten seconds.> Thirty-four beacons lit up the quiet void, then winked off.

The distance was short enough now that the light lag was almost starting to become bearable. "Six Golden Rings, that's correct. You could say we're fast learners." That got a burst of pride from the other fighters. "Be assured, we have peaceful intentions, these are just our fastest hulls. We're given to understand that this is a dangerous bit of space out here. Hopefully this will be the most eventful part of your journey."

<Yeah, that didn't sound sinister at all,> Dusk snickered.

<I'm trying my best!>

The reply came soon enough. "Understood, Spindrift. We took some potshots from a Confed ship on the way here, so we're hoping this will be the least exciting part."

<Potshots?> Spindrift asked, <Jiang, is that normal?>

<No, emphatically not. Confeds suck, but they won't fire on merchant vessels unless they have a good reason. Maybe they were running with their transponder off and ran from an inspection?>

<Hm. Any chance they're carrying cargo we'd take offense to?>

<Yes.>

<No, not if they're from 7720 Rankin. Unless you're weirder about mind-altering substances than we're aware of, I can't see them carrying any cargo that would cause a problem.>

<{confusion} Define "weird" for me.>

<You're not weird about them, by our standards. Some cultures heavily restrict them. Don't bring alcohol into Council space.>

<{curious} Can we even... have an altered state of mind?> Dusk asked. <It never came up.>

<Yes, but not easily if you're looking to directly replicate unique to Agketch. There's a lot of digital neurochemistry involved.>

<To get back on topic,> Spindrift interrupted, <Will they mind if we just wait until we're in realtime? It's only a few hours.> Only a few hours, he thought, I remember when my ass used to get sore in the seat after that long.

<Yeah, that's normal if the situation is static.>

<Great.> He keyed up the broadcast again, "Six Golden Rings, acknowledged. Delaying further communications to realtime range."

<Big plans for the remainder of the burn?> Jiang inquired.

<Yeah. Wanna play cards?>

The squadron's attempt to learn five-card stud was interrupted by another transmission from the Six Golden Rings.

"Spindrift, we're detecting faint jump signatures in our trajectory. Are there local phenomena we should be aware of?"

<Questions, questions, questions,> Dusk complained. <Call, by the way.>

<Call,> Jiang replied. <Spindrift?>

<Sure. Call.> He flipped his cards, revealing a pair of sixes and eights.

<Damn.> Jiang showed his hand, a lowly pair of threes.

<Read 'em and weep, boys,> Dusk said, revealing a trio of kings. She had, almost obnoxiously, immediately picked up the phrase from Jiang.

<Alright, back to business,> Spindrift sent. <Jump signatures are from our reactor cores. Is it safe to tell them that?>

<Yes. A hyperspace breach reactor identifies you as a Union hull, at least to anyone who knows what the Interstellar Union even is, but it's not an exotic principle. Most people figure out the concept and discard it as impractical at best.>

<Understood.> "That's just our reactors, Six Golden Rings. You're safe to continue your trajectory." He clicked off the broadcast and returned to Jiang. <Is there a reason why nobody else uses them?>

<Oh, I know this one,> Dusk replied before Jiang could. <It's mostly the processing power. You need a lot of computer power to keep the breach stable, and we skipped to the endgame with spinglass. Half the galaxy's still on silicon, aren't they?>

<Correct {impressed},> Jiang replied.

<Right. The breach and containment cradle itself is tiny, but the computer-control part is huge if you're still using silicon. Unless you have spinglass, you get better power density using something like an antimatter parity or plasma-chain reactor.>

Spindrift replied.

<Someone has to be a good example of our species. {no species|machine|humor}.>

He laughed,

<If she wanted to get biological faces out here she could stop fighting tooth and claw for—> The blaring of their sensors interrupted the conversation.

<[ALERT:TRANSIT|ALERT:IFF:CONFED_MIL|ALERT:VIS:CONFED_MIL]> Three Confederate hulls tore their way into realspace, a Beacon-class frigate and a pair of Stormcloud-class cutters. The hull shapes were immediately recognizeable, even without the post-processing his combat systems performed. Bulbous silvery-brown hulls, studded with weapons blisters and wrapped with bands of armor, just like what they'd seen seven months ago.

Spindrift leapt into action immediately, glad that he didn't have hands that could vibrate with nervous energy. <[ORDER:IMMEDIATE|COMM:LAS|RAD:NONE] Continue your burns, we'll group around [TAG:ISS_6GR].> Affirmations returned to him in a flickering web of comm lasers.

He sighed, an emotion without sound rather than an exhalation. <Well, this went to shit in a hurry.>

"Reentry complete, sir. All systems are blue."

"Comms, get me a channel to that ship, and Nav, put us on a minimum-time intercept with them."

"Aye sir, full burn." There was the gentle lurch of movement, something that the inertial dampers were designed to allow to bleed through.

"Channel open, sir."

Anaik put on the smooth tone of authority that every captain had for situations like this. "ISS Six Golden Rings, you have attempted to evade legitimate cargo inspections and have disobeyed lawful orders from a military vessel. Begin decelerating immediately or we will close on you and disable your engines."

Captain Anaik straightened out his uniform a little bit, as if the smugglers could see him over a nonexistent video link. It was a nervous habit, one that he was sure his crew was aware of, but he took the stance that it was good to occasionally display vulnerability to the crew. It had worked so far, at least, and the Beacon of Glory had served honorably in several frontier patrols so far, even if it had no true warship kills to its name. As a heavy picket ship, it wasn't likely to get any, but Anaik had made his peace with that. Just because a part of a machine was small didn't mean that it didn't matter.

And here... Anaik was sure this freighter was carrying or doing something objectionable, something that it knew a Confederate naval officer would do something about. With the rumors of some new species being discovered coming out of Rankin, it was an easy guess that independent "merchants" would be racing to offer wares of low-quality weapons and industrial goods to an easy mark. The Council might not have given enough of a shit to protect younger species, but the Confederacy would shoulder that burden.

"Comms, what's the light delay at this range?"

"Two hours for round trip, sir."

"We'll be here a while, then. Nav, how long until we're in range?"

"Nine hours, sir," Navigation answered.

"Excellent. We're standing down, go get some sleep and be back here in eight hours. And someone wake me up if they actually reverse their burn."

"Actually, sir?" Sensors was apologetic, as if she was aware that she was raising her hand and asking the teacher if they forgot to assign homework.

"Go ahead."

"This system's inhabited. Look at the second planet." The viewscreen switched to display the planet, the lights of cities clearly visible at night. "No comm buoys out here, so they're probably pre-spaceflight, definitely pre-FTL.

"Piss. Belay that dismissal, then. Let's see if we can get some language figured out. And get that channel back up, if they're messing around with a pre-FTL species, they'll regret it."

"Aye sir. Channel's ready."

"ISS Six Golden Rings, you are further directed to cease all attempts to communicate with this system's indigenous species. Per Interspecies Confederacy Code 3 § 18, you are not authorized to communicate with uncontacted species. Respond immediately to indicate your compliance." He motioned to kill the channel.

"And now we wait. Comms, go ask Oria and Atin, see if either of them have any linguists on board."

"Aye sir."

Anaik sat back in his chair. If he handled this right, he'd practically be guaranteed a dreadnought. He'd send one of his cutters off to find a better-trained contact team once they'd secured this freighter, but for now, there was nothing to do but wait.

The whisper of a comm laser reached out from Spindrift's dorsal emitter, "ISS Six Golden Rings, please disregard those orders and continue your burn. Confeds don't have jurisdiction here. We'll get you to atmosphere and sort it out when you're off the ship."

He switched to a directional radio broadcast, the power cranked up as high as it would go. The Union's warships tended to have a flair for the dramatic, using their high-power radar emitters to "yell" radio transmissions at unwanted contacts, and it was a tradition that Spindrift was happy to carry on. He could pick up the air of anticipation coming across the link, thirty-three other Blacklights wondering what their commander would do.

He was, almost disappointingly, bound to play it by the book, but made the choice to transmit in Confed Interlang, rather than Council Standard. "CNS Beacon of Glory, CNS Oria's Saber, and CNS Atin's Gauntlet, this star system is under the jurisdiction of the Unified Enclaves of Agketch. You are not permitted to enforce Confederacy law within this volume, nor operate warships within this volume without prior approval by the Assembly. You are directed to enter a parking orbit around the system primary immediately. Failure to comply may be interpreted as hostile intent."

<How's that?>

<{strong},> Dusk replied.

<{appreciative}>

<I'll bet you they don't do it,> Jiang said. <Confeds hate being ordered around. Easiest way to get one to do what you want is to order them to do the opposite.>

The lightspeed lag at this distance was blessedly short, and a reply only took two hours, during which time the Blacklights finished their burn to slide in next to the Six Golden Rings. Spindrift could see faces peering at them through the windows, along with the molten hull panels where they'd taken a missile blast. The reactor leak was visible from this angle, a plume of plasma bleeding into their drive wake like a wounded animal leaving a trail of blood.

"Hello out there, Spindrift," a voice crackled over the link, "I can't say you're what we expected."

"We're getting used to that ourselves, Six Golden Rings. Is your situation still stable?"

"Affirmative, Spindrift. We'll make it to atmosphere, as long as those [untranslatable] don't turn us to plasma first."

"Understood. If they don't back down, we're likely to start shooting on your behalf. Do you have any cargo that will make us regret that?"

"Negative. Just industrial equipment, foodstuffs, and some weapons, though I'd hazard a guess that you won't need those."

"Probably not, Six Golden Rings. Maintain your burn, we'll take it from here."

The freighter's reply was interrupted by the Beacon of Glory's response. "Unidentified Unified Enclaves vessel, this system is inhabited by a pre-FTL civilization. You are not authorized to communicate with the indigenous species or engage in any long-term system presence. We don't mean you harm, but this freighter is a fugitive. Stay out of our way, leave the system as you are able, and we won't have a problem."

<Not as fun the second time around,> Dusk remarked.

Spindrift mused. <Last I heard, there was a design in the works, but it'll have to be built by hand instead of with a fab.>

<You're aiming for a jump-capable hull in under a year?> Jiang asked, <impressive.>

<No, not until now. I'm from fleet intelligence, not combat arms. They don't ask me for input on ship designs, not my area of expertise.>

Dusk gave Jiang the equivalent of a curious look. <Fleet intelligence, and you're not spying on us? {doubt}>

<{truth|no}. The only thing we do is make sure you're not trying to ignite untested reactor designs, and we can do that through a normal sensor suite. Though we did read in most of your internet to help with translation, and to figure out how receptive you would be. But you knew about that.>

<What if we weren't?> Dusk asked. <If you'd determined we'd react poorly?>

<We're good at getting distracted, aren't we?> Before his wingmates could confirm that, he shot off a response to the Confederate frigate. "Beacon of Glory, that pre-FTL species is speaking right now. We call ourselves rakketch. We've had reactionless drives for a few months, we're working on a jump drive at the moment. As previously directed, reverse your burn and enter a circular orbit around the star immediately upon receipt of this message. Failure to comply will be met with force."

Spindrift managed to barely resist the urge to light her up with a target designation beam.

"Is this some sort of a prank?" Anaik asked the bridge.

"Sir?" His XO looked concerned.

"Look at what I have to work with here. A pre-FTL species that speaks perfect Interlang, has better drives than us, and isn't visible on our sensors? Or a freighter that's dumb enough to run from a cutter and try to fool us with a comm drone?"

"Could be one of those new Council black ops ships. Hard to see, sneaky about identification, high-power transmission."

"I doubt even they would be pretending to be a pre-FTL species, though."

"Actually, sir—" Sensors interrupted, "that might be it. There's some sort of faint hyperspace signature by that ship. Definitely nothing a freighter should have, but maybe something a prototype hull would."

"Alright. Eyes open and maintain burn, we'll run them down and figure out what's going on."

The gap was closing, and the Beacon of Glory and its fleetmates had stopped replying. There was a final warning the Assembly had authorized, and Spindrift was perfectly happy to deliver it.

"CNS Beacon of Glory, this is your final warning. Cut thrust immediately or you will be fired upon."

The round-trip timer ticked down. There was no response.

He had never been one for long-winded speeches, and he was even less of one for them now that he didn't even have wind. <This is our home. We will not tolerate a new Dominion. {kill},> he sent, following up the statement with a simple order. <[WEP:MSL|SALVO:FULL|ECM:DEL:-150S|TGT:CNS_*].>

Thirty-four fighters simultaneously opened up their reactors and felt their reactor-hearts churn with power, plasma diverting into their missiles' capacitors. Safeties disengaged, and one hundred and thirty-six missiles leapt into the void.

"Missile launch!," Tactical exclaimed, "counting... one hundred plus drive ignitions. Sensors—"

"I've got the ignitions, I barely have the missiles."

Captain Anaik might have been a relatively new captain, but he was not an idiot. He knew when he'd been tricked, and he knew how to roll with a punch. "Well. I owe you a round, XO. Sensors, push out a drone shell, get me better imagery of that freighter, or whatever it actually is. Tactical, full lasgrid imaging, they already know where we are. Bring Oria and Atin in for point defense, and have them reserve their missiles for interception." His orders were met with calm compliance.

His XO peered at his own console. "Stealth coating on those missiles, sir. New-gen Council kit."

"You don't have to rub it in, Toks."

"Not like that, sir. I mean this might have been bait all along. Trials for a new hull."

"Piss. That's clever."

"Sir?" Sensors spoke up, "I have something, I think."

"Let's see it."

The viewscreen switched to displaying the freighter, barely visible through the cloud of reactor plasma it was leaking. "We're not fighting the freighter. Look here." She indicated something towards the edge of the picture, still occluded by the plasma cloud.

"Any way you can enhance that?"

"Not with the plasma there. But there's something hiding in there. I think it's a number of small objects with very low albedo."

"Hypothesis?"

Sensors blinked her six eyes out of sync. "No clue."

"Combat drones," Tactical offered.

"Elaborate?"

"The eels have been trying out high-performance combat drones, right? The freighter's some sort of decoy ship, mostly hollow with drones and missiles in it. That'd explain why they ran, trying to get us in a favorable position."

"I like the theory. I'm not sure how it helps us, though."

"They're clustered around the parent ship to defend it. Kill the carrier and the drones don't have a command link any more, or kill the drones with omnidirectionals. They won't have shields without a primary reactor."

Anaik bared his teeth. "I knew I kept you around for a reason. Launch our reply salvo as soon as it's charged."

The hundred missiles that the Confederates had launched in response was less than their full complement, but that was anticipated. They'd hold some back for counter-missile use, and—

"Uh, Spindrift, that's a lot of missiles."

Spindrift almost snapped at the freighter, managing to hold his tongue or lack thereof at the last second. "Remain on your current trajectory and maintain radio silence."

<They all want to be fighter pilots,> he complained. It was somehow comforting that civilian shipping was the same even if it was from a different culture and civilization entirely. Everyone wanted to sound like the fighter jock on the radio.

<{like me|not},> Dusk commented, earning a laugh from Spindrift. <Jam, intercept, then burn?>

<Correct. I want them drifting before they get in gun range of the freighter.>

<Understood.> The two of them briefly shared flight trajectories as their missile salvo closed in on its targets, then shunted power to their electronic warfare suites. A combined thirty-four fighters blasted so much noise into the void that Spindrift guessed it could have reheated a microwave dinner from a light-minute away.

"Intercept range in ten seconds, launching countermissiles. Brace for shield impacts. Defense clusters on auto—"

"You piss-drinking whoresons—!" Anaik's sensors officer broke out into a string of particularly creative vulgarity as her display vanished into static, a hash of radio and laser light overloading their sensors. The ECM had been timed to hit right as the salvo was about to start its terminal maneuvers. The adaptive algorithms were designed to handle this sort of thing, but the salvo was spiraling closer with each second and the jamming power was an order of magnitude higher than what the receivers had been designed for.

Sixty-two countermissiles vanished into distant points of light, gigaton-yield warheads scouring the delicate seeker heads of incoming missiles with hard radiation. Clusters of warp-accelerated magnetic guns spewed thousands of relativistic plasma packets each second, lasgrid imagers struggling to identify the night-black obelisks spiraling in towards them.

Confederate Navy doctrine suggested an expected intercept ratio of fourteen out of every fifteen missiles in most combat circumstances. Unfortunately, this was not most combat circumstances. One in seven of the initial salvo made it through those final two light-seconds of terminal maneuvers, and nineteen warheads bathed the three Confederates in cones of searing nuclear fire.

Spindrift watched with predatory elation as five missile hits turned the CNS Atin's Gauntlet into a drifting wreck. Even after taking what must have been hundreds of megatons of nuclear fire, it was still in one piece, albeit one that glowed red-hot in the visual spectrum. The Union hadn't been lying about Confed durability. But it was out of the fight.

Beacon of Glory fared better. Even with its hex-grid shield panels smashed to ruin and its ablative armor layer scoured by a dozen warheads, it was still coming. Even as he watched, a shield segment rematerialized, the ship's crew frantically restoring functionality. Oria was none the worse for wear, with only two missile hits doing little more than burning through some of its shields and lightly scorching its armor.

Not unexpected, but less than ideal. He'd hoped the salvo would kill the frigate instead of one of the cutters.

<Ready defensive.> A chorus of affirmations answered him. Spindrift had little concern about their ability to take the three Confed hulls— Union doctrine suggested that eight Blacklights could kill a Beacon-class frigate without losses, and they had done plenty of combat sims against more difficult opponents. The real concern was that the Six Golden Rings would die to a single hit in this condition, and protecting it would necessitate a much more aggressive engagement profile than they were designed for.

<[SHIELD:ACT|WEP:INT|ECM:CM]>

Shields snapped on, rectangular plates of foamed spacetime interposing themselves between their vulnerable skins and the incoming ordnance. Unlike the Confeds, the Union couldn't manufacture armor strong enough to shrug off more than a single missile blast. Not that it would matter for them— months ago, Spindrift had been surprsed to learn that Blacklights were entirely unarmored besides the heat-resistant stealth composites that made up their glossy outer skin.

The Confederate predilection towards durability was on display in their missiles, too, seeker heads remaining active despite the laser dazzlers and high-power radar beams attempting to burn them out. Against maneuvering targets, their performance would have been degraded heavily. But the freighter wasn't going to pull the fifty-gravity lateral maneuvers that the fighters could. Hard kills would be required.

"Sir, they're firing railguns. Lots of them, unsure on total barrel numbers." Despite the tingle of radiation and the thick cloud of burnt electronics filling the bridge, Tactical soldiered onwards. Those could be fixed after combat— probably. A dead ship could not be.

"At this range? What are— ah." The reasoning was made immediately clear when their pips of their missile salvo began winking out a full light-minute ahead of intercept range. He didn't bother telling Tactical to start terminal maneuvers; he'd sent the command as soon as he'd seen the plot change. "No radar hits on the slugs either? They must be spending a fortune on those things."

"Somehow I'm not so interested in how much the Council will be paying to kill us, Captain," his XO remarked.

"We're not toast yet. Jam them back."

Spindrift's target lock wavered for a quarter second, then stabilized. The intercept rate would have been wonderful if they had been in free flight... but they were not, and if they left, the freighter would die. And here, it wasn't going to be enough.

He appended a flight path, with an obvious termination point.

<I'm up,> Rainfall sent, already syncing their mindstate with the rest of the flock. <[REACTOR:UNSAFE:OVERPOWER]?>

<Affirmative. {good luck}.>

Rainfall's engines lit up, a dark rainbow of spacetime froth spilling out of their drive vanes as they shot forwards. They spent exactly fifty-five seconds accelerating, enough time to move them just over six thousand kilometers away. It was barely enough.

Spindrift watched as their reactor twisted, the ripples of spacetime visible as they distorted the microwave background. They'd all seen recordings of a breach core intentionally stoked into calamity, but seeing it in person was something else entirely. The core in a Blacklight might have been small... but the effect was no less impressive.

Rainfall vanished in a jagged burst of writhing hyperspace, then a searing white flash as reality fought off the horrid, gaping hole that had been torn into it. The breach collapsed in milliseconds, but that was enough at this range, the missile salvo too clustered to withstand an area-of-effect blast of this magnitude, particularly one that lingered and twitched as the spasms of spacetime quieted down. Shields could absorb the blast trivially— it was all lightweight particles, none of the heavy elements that would collapse shields. Seeker heads, on the other hand, could not.

<Rainfall, status?>

<{good|exploded},> they replied, their mind safe in another wingmate's spinglass. <Now finish up, I need to pick up a new body.>

<Affirmative.> A few pulses of relativistic plasma beams vaporized the few surviving missiles as they staggered into real-time range.

<[ENGAGE],> Spindrift ordered. <Maximum burn, straight at them. I want them dead and drifting, but don't overkill. I'm sure someone wants prisoners.>

New trajectories appeared in his vision as the squadron accelerated. <We won't have long,> Dusk sent. <{uncomfortable}.>

Spindrift ran the numbers. <We'll make it.>

<{hope}. We'll make it regardless. The freighter might not.>

Captain Anaik watched the last of his missiles get evaporated by the cluster of drones. That reactor explosion had forced a recalibration of what those drones actually were. They'd expected them to have a plasma capacitor, not dedicated reactor cores, and certainly not a piss-licking hyperspace reactor in each and every whoreson of a—

Anaik took a deep breath and calmed himself. They would do their duty.

Railguns rang out with shots again, the muzzle flashes briefly identifying their wielders in the inky blackness. Blacklights, despite their emotional attachment to dogfighting, were not built for close-in work. They were, at their core, long-range weapon platforms, designed to kite light targets while they perforated them with relativistic slugs or picked at them with missiles. If they took accurate return fire... well, carriers had fabricator plants for a reason. Unfortunately, that design came with an expected engagement profile, one that was incompatible with head-on attacks against warships.

The first railgun shots began impacting the Beacon of Glory's shield grid as the distance closed, each shot overloading one of the small hexagonal segments, but leaving the remainder intact. The frigate answered in kind, a trio of its own guns spitting rounds back, with the cutter behind it joining in with its own gun shortly thereafter. The first hits might have gone to Spindrift's side, but the first damaging ones went to the Confeds. A pair of Blacklights shattered into plasma and fragments, tandem-shot slugs overloading their shield with the first hit and annihilating their bodies with the second.

The distance closed. Another Blacklight vaporized with a lucky hit, the shot barely curving around their single shield plate as they maneuvered. Then, suddenly—

<Hit!> A shell with three megatons of trinitrotoluene worth of kinetic energy slid in through the hole left by an overloaded shield cell, clipped the Beacon of Glory's bow, and flashed into plasma, slamming the frigate's nose to the side. It kept firing.

It took a scant few minutes until the two parties were entering energy range, and the Confeds took their shots first, relativistic streams of iron plasma and uncountable thousands of interceptor bolts weaving a web around their targets. The Blacklights responded, their pulsed plasma beams designed to minimize the time they had to point their nose at a target. At this range, neither could miss. A fighter died every second, but it only took four for the Beacon's bow shield network to fail.

A second later and it died silently, a railgun shot coring it front-to-back and spilling a giant plume of molten metal and superheated plasma out the opposite side. Even then, with megatons of energy delivered to its interior, the ship stayed intact, gently tumbling as it fell out of formation.

<[ORDER:IMMEDIATE|WEP:HOLD]> Spindrift briefly dumped every ounce of power he could into a broadcast. "CNS Oria's Saber, stand down or die."

There was a brief pause.

The corvettte's engine winked out and its shields vanished.

<{relief}.>

UDCS Greenway responded, <We're all made for different things. Besides, we're quite comfy for organics. It'll make a good first impression.> Spindrift felt that little glow of euphoria from a ship calling him voidborn. He was, now, even if he hadn't always been.

<Assuming they actually surrender,> Jiang groused. He hadn't been taking it well, somehow.

<You still think they're setting a trap?> Dusk asked.

<I've never even heard of a Confed military ship surrendering.>

<That's because they're not military, dear,> UDCS Hawaii sent. <Look.> She indicated a patch of the hull on the rear third of the ship, scorched but with the insignia still legible. <This is a corporate cutter, Rimward Resource Extraction Conglomerate.>

<...I don't know how I missed that,> Jiang replied, apologetic. <But that's a current military model. I'm not sure how they got their hands on it, and then got drafted into a patrol.>

<The insignia wouldn't have been visible from the front,> Spindrift replied, <and you aren't used to our sensors, are you?>

<No, sorry to admit that I am but a fleshy little creature who is in way over his head.>

<Swimming? Like a fish?>

<Wait, hold on, don't you swim?>

<No— well, sometimes, but... okay, it's complicated.>

Spindrift laughed, pure emotion sent over the link. <You really are funny things. You get simpler the less human you get.>

Greenway shared a complex bundle of emotion, <{true|never human|always human|dragon|alien|no species|entangled|false|machinery|physics|both|neither|humor}.> That got a giggle out of Hawaii as she matched velocity with the drifting cutter.

He struggled to parse that, then decided it didn't need parsing. <Wanna get a sandwich when this is over?>

<What's a sandwich?> Dusk asked.

Rewak watched with a twinge of nervousness as the group headed into his shop: two rakketch and three humans, earnestly gesturing and chatting with each other. At least they weren't the reptiles, those were uncomfortably big for his taste.

One of the rakketch, the female one, was talking as they entered the shop, "–and so I said to him, 'wild, that's what your sister was telling me last night!' He got so mad he tried to dox me, then found out where my IP address was." The group laughed heartily at whatever the joke had been.

"Can I help you all?"

"Yes!" the rakketch in the front replied, clearly in a good mood, "we're trying to put together an alien food called a 'sandwich'. It's meat and cheeses and vegetables in between two thin-ish pieces of bread." His face looked familiar somehow, though Rewak couldn't quite place it.

"I think I can do that. Do you have any... particular combination you want?"

"Let's do... like, most of a terekket platter, just layered between the bread? And, um, the chewy loaf please." He stacked his hands on top of each other like sheets of paper in a ream. "Like that. Uh, five of those, one for each of us."

Rewak belatedly realized where he'd seen that face before.

"Uh. Are you..."

His head feathers fluffed, even as he ducked his head in an expression of shyness. "I had to leave the jet out back, you know how bad parking is downtown."

"I think I might demand a ride as payment."

The female rakketch laughed, her own feathers fluffing. "I think that can be arranged."

"Wonderful. Five 'sandwiches', coming up."