mercenary planet/ Responsibility & Retribution (The Soldiers' Road 4)

At least Halation was surprised too. I don’t know how I would have handled it if she wasn’t.

It was a sour surprise. That’s the best way I can describe it. Like lactic acid that has built up in a muscle and suddenly burst through it.

That was one of her metaphors. Or one where her affect flowed through the metaphors of my experience. Which at least she had shared several times by now. There were others in different kinds of bodies, but this one, from my body, was one of the best.

That was something she could objectively compare. You could too, if you wanted to test it. I’m still open. Like link-surfing between qualia, like collecting paint chips at the hardware store for colours of experience - on tense nights this was how I would go to sleep, just following chains of associations through the labyrinth of Halation’s memories. Our dreams had started to merge, though mine retained their own shape, like a cloud within clouds. That was my affect flowing into her metaphors - well-worn ones, encountered again and again by species after species.

I couldn’t pretend there was nothing she could be hiding from me. I would have had to extend, to disperse, all the way through those clouds to be aware of everything in them, like a vapour. But it wasn’t as if she controlled them, could move them all around me at will. (Although she was better at it than me. Among Weirs, plastic control of mind and body were kindred arts of "intra-operability". They even had levels - she estimated herself an 18 physical (having climbed from 15 just since training with me) and a 12 mental out of a known 29. The Servant of Possibility we had faced had been higher, into territory she would consider elite even on Contemplation, or in a dedicated military unit.)

Even then - something important, some carcass growing slimegrass in the deep clouds, could always be escaping me, on its own, just as it had escaped Halation’s own attention.

Escaped her, she used that image, like a deer bolting out of our field before I could take a photograph. There were things she raged at herself about, and this hadn’t been one of them, she hadn’t even thought to look up what happened on Hammers after she had passed into this arm.

Hosts of Weirs always learned to navigate these kinds of information asymmetries somehow. And Weirs who interfaced with computational lifeforms, all the more so. I hadn’t found it particularly hard. I wasn’t a jealous person. Maybe Bennett-Fog was right - maybe I had taken it too easily.

This was all old. I remembered the line that had most impressed her in our first gruelling week of interrogations - If my intra-operability was sufficient to manipulate one of you, I wouldn’t be so attached to this vulnerable host. I wouldn’t fear falling into your hands, or hesitate to cooperate with your authorities.

(That said, it was easy enough to manipulate a person just living with them in physical space. I know girls who would have been very disappointed that an alien from a morally superior civilization, capable of sharing their body and every waking thought, not to mention synthesizing hormones in their own body etc., would have been this scrupulous about consent.)

This wasn’t the distance between us now.

The distance between us now, as I write this, is literal.

Before I got into this, I asked myself again how much it would be possible to be guilty for something I couldn’t know. Not just in the sense of not having enough information you could have spent more of your time and energy hunting out but when the best information, the best model is wrong. Mai had had to cope with the Ender’s Game OCD by convincing herself you couldn’t. It was the same, she said, as when her dad said if she’d been born the missionaries came she would have gone to hell automatically - and of course the book was written by a homophobic Mormon.

But forget Ender’s Game, wasn’t this Oedipus Rex? Meteorology contended that the moral imperative to know the universe accurately stems from the possibility that one is causing harm without knowing it. Retroactive debts can only be prepaid.

That said, nothing we could actually do was absolutely one way or another enough to meet this hypothetical. Any mistake was a result of carelessness, and where I grew up, where she did, any mistake that might have cost even a single life was supposed to be enough to unmoor one’s own. The words I remembered thrown at everyone who could even vaguely be blamed for Delilah’s death… at Sophie, for ‘enabling’ her being the person she would have been anywhere, or at her ghost for daring to break Sophie’s heart… For all I had conveyed about our death planet, wasn’t it strange that we cared this much? That nobody I knew except maybe Mab - and that was what made her different from everyone else - had blood on our hands except by a million papercuts, every twelve dollars we spent on cigarettes instead of reparations or guns or each other? Every politician, of course, was different, but that was why we hated them. Maybe if we spread their power out, death could have the right weight. Everyone could have the responsibility of saving or failing one life, and if they failed they took their own.

I remembered wondering, talking to Jax in hushed tones about whether my dad’s work had ever killed anybody - driven them to suicide or starvation. Because he came to every dinner with a pre-emptive excuse for why they all would have deserved it anyway, how they would have done it themselves if he hadn’t come along first. Until I saw how long people could scrape along at the bottom, I imagined those happened a lot more than they did. I tried to imagine it as the care of a protector until I realized he didn’t. The worst were the stories where he deduced, from some shadow of a flinch or innuendo, that the kids were being abused. He never did anything in those stories, just smirked out some minced prayer and asked us, "jokingly", to thank him. To this day I can’t say for sure what he should have done - confronted them "man to man"?

It was a mistake to think about this qualitatively instead of quantitatively. I already knew this quality of guilt, it was just ratcheting up by exponents, but I didn’t grow as fast as that. Halation hadn’t and for her it had been hundreds of years, most of which just felt like days if I gave myself the time I wanted to procrastinate in them.

I had barely done this since I got on the ship. I didn’t even have my personal drive here, but the Denpa had its own folder of essential files. I had slipped this one in there between our core briefings and Year 24 classics. Delilah’s Dickgirl Jacks Off In A Tent On The Streets Of Seattle series. You have to understand that in her will she said anyone who stops looking at these just because she dies for some stupid reason is a cuck who should just pay Sophie $15 for another Fireball instead. You also have to understand how happy she is in these videos. Growing up as a boy you’re taught that nobody you watch having sex, or have sex with will ever be happy with it the way you are discovering it. You’re always getting something over on someone. The camera hangs in the vertex of the tent, and on the NASA sleeping bag she rolls and kicks her feet in the air as she strokes her golden-smooth dick. She strikes air guitar poses, whips her wet hair in the camera.

I couldn’t get off. The guilt I hadn’t felt since I reversed it had risen again like a seawall. "I" had permission, but would the me that existed now, that Delilah could never have foreseen? How many soldiers on board this mission had looked at these images, did this at night - I imagined her as a Marilyn Monroe pin-up painted on a missile, and although she probably would have loved nothing more, wanted to vomit. And I needed to get off even just to wipe my thoughts for 2-3 minutes so I could live in my body enough to go on thinking, this had been discouraged in the Coven of Domnu and I had stopped trying to force myself to like increasingly rarefied porn both harmless and tasteful enough for my needs which was good but that meant I could be counted on to go into a panic attack (if not, they would induce it) unless I let Mab pick someone for me to service. Mai was the first person to tell me she did it for the same reasons and imagined nothing but swirling strands of light, gently wrapping around her, the birth of a star. I was never able to get the hang of this the way Mai did; I ran out of imagination for abstraction, it reduced to a screensaver; if I tried to visualize spontaneously, like in that Body of Light meditation, I would be walking down some endless concrete alleyway towards an ambivalent blue like the dawn breaking over the first morning metro. Maybe I didn’t even feel desire the way Delilah did, even Mai did, maybe I just needed that light after, that laying my head down. But I needed something outside me to lay my head on.

I lay there tenser than I had been before, my thoughts duller and more serrated. I tried to sleep and couldn’t. It took less than half an hour for me to jump down and rap on the outside of Halation’s atmosphere tube like a scared child going up to the door of their parents’ bedroom. Her knowledge dwarfed mine, not even just in some standardized value measured in time, but in the size and colour and richness of her world, but I didn’t usually think about us this way, because we felt not that different sized within our own. She was big enough to destroy a research station without even knowing it. And she had been surprised by that too. As big as her own home, that she never left. Who was I to weigh my own guilt in accepting her, like she was some friend I had just read a callout post against. Her own guilt was more than big enough for the both of us. A vast ocean she was keeping silent and still so I could float on it. Even though I wanted it. Her voice crept along my nerves like frostbite. I was reaching out across the universe with my voice - as if, so alone in my ship, I was actually spreading myself into every gravitational cranny of the infinite dark - the flimsy warning sticker of heresy applied to the thoughts - and spreading to everyone who listened to me. I think I actually said that in one of my speeches. Although not that one. I couldn’t keep those thoughts in the same place at the same time - and we both put so much faith in my intra-operability. But if in that moment I had known a station just like mine was being destroyed, I would have said it was for the best. I knew that moment, I’d known people I still would have trusted over most of this army who spent all their time inside it, just never actually acted on it. I don’t even have the excuse of being a pursuit predator with social hierarchies based on displays of aggression like you. I just took my suffering and folded it inside out. And it was bigger on the outside than the inside, now I don’t even know how much bigger. I don’t even know if I should feel bad now. I mostly do because you do, but you know nothing about… I’m sorry. I’ve been in you this whole time, and you haven’t flinched away from feeling any of it with me. For all you’ve been worrying about asymmetries, your focus at any one moment isn’t smaller than mine - you know me as well as I do.

Tears were starting to seep out of my eyes that could neither hold themselves open or shut and I rolled over. I had pulled three blankets up on the hammock but there was a layer of ineradicable cold, thinner and slicker than Halation, covering my skin, airgapping me from all the warmth I had accumulated on the outside, making me wriggle and roll my shoulders and dig my elbows into the fabric for friction. Halation rolled out a layer and vibrated against my pores, a trick she’d learned for when I got these kinds of mentally-induced shivers - god damn it, I was starting to thicken again. She retreated per our agreement, and the tide of cold washed back over me.

My dick didn’t go down, and writhing deeper into the blankets didn’t help. All the tension, all the horror didn’t help - they needed help, the kind they could only get with the dark and the body and its brute physics, memento mori, finishing myself like a shattered skull. Our agreement was, for all the obvious ethical and pragmatic reasons, she stayed out of my most explicit memories except when they came up unavoidably, and I got off while she was in the tube - they were similar acts of self-maintenance. Technically we were already absurdly physically intimate, these boundaries sometimes felt like the kind of parental guidance double standard characteristic of my country, I didn’t even object to sharing my mind while I pooped. But as an anthropologist I understood "sex" as primarily something symbolic, an intimacy that exceeded all others in its ability to stand in for them. And also in its ridiculousness, the ridiculousness that I was doing this while trying to process infinite death and also that I felt weirder about this than I would eating ice cream or downing a six pack.

I’m sorry, I don’t want to make you go back in again right after you came out. At least at Tuber Plug she could revert to her natural body in a real environment, letting her out into the tube always felt like returning a Pokemon to its Pokeball. But then the Weirs’ natural bodies were already so restrictive compared to what they could do in a host - one of the hardest things for me to wrap my head around was why they bothered in the first place, why they hadn’t simply engineered themselves into perfect symbiotes that could live anywhere. Some had. Maybe I would have become a Servant of Possibility if I had grown up on Contemplation - maybe that was my cursed relation to my body, which again wasn’t the same as every trans woman’s, one of the things I watched Delilah for was to vicariously enjoy it as much as she did - although Servants of Possibility weren’t just the Meteorological equivalent of transhumanists, they espoused a more restrictive vision of physical possibility, an obligation to optimize. Fuck I didn’t want to be thinking about this I wanted to be rubbing my shaft and feeling it fatten and leach reality from the rest of my body into its whale-belly but whoops. Halation was still there. I came back for the thoughts - I had something to say - I moved first - I knew you were there but forgot - I can leave, of course - or not.

Power, asymmetry, something humans had made so much of while understanding so little. Meteorology and the Weir symbiosis ethics that were synthesized with it have a whole language for these which are everywhere in the galaxy; that make up the dilemmas I was racking my brain over just a few paragraphs ago. All information asymmetry is power, but not necessarily in the abusive or temptingly abusable ways humans were used to, on our planet where it almost always goes hand in hand with other kinds of power, where everyone either carries a knife behind their back or needs to trust someone to do it for them. The Meteorological concept of consent taught on Contemplation almost as soon as speech included positive and negative information requirements on both sides, their relative symmetry and compatibility. The criteria for this were mostly the same as for hosting a Weir in the first place.

Mai I wish you were here, Mai I wish you had the opportunity to do this instead of me, I feel like I’m robbing you, to feel you so vindicated about everything.

We could still send someone back to symbiose with her. We had been over the idea before. She didn’t want to participate in the war, but maybe if we met someone uncommitted to it, willing to lose themselves in our work on Earth to get away from it entirely…

Tumor has a missionary outpost. (Sorry I can’t not use that word, it’s too funny.) It’s near here. Don’t know if they’ve been drawn in yet.

What’s its strategic value.

You really want to go back to thinking like this already? Her vibrations rippled over me whenever the cold came, matching its regularity. Rolled down my breasts like cool mall fountains. I was hardening predictably but not thinking about it, it felt as impersonal as my bladder filling under an MRI. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe we’re both wrong like we’re afraid we are. In the worst case scenario we can get away, blockade this planet and keep the human intervention contained here, and make the contact worth it some other way.

No we can’t. Nothing you call a "blockade" would last against humans who can build our own Weak Asymmetry Fields. We can’t get away, all we can do is dedicate the rest of our lives to minimizing our own damage. Which is what we’re doing anyway.

So whether we’re right or wrong, we have to do the same thing.

I sank. I collapsed. My hand drifted down the unzipped front of my fatigues. My mouth gaped at this suffocating jelly of reality that seemed to be forcing itself down my throat. I breathed. I told her not to leave. I asked her to do what she thought about when she thought what not to do.

My right hand stopped abruptly and was pulled away behind my back - then the left, wrist to wrist - by autonomous lines of heat I could feel running along the inside of my arms. My feet straightened and stretched to the very end of the hammock. My hands began to move behind me to the other.

The rippling surface over me had thickened until it felt like a tingling shampoo. It was starting to feel warm - although in places, over my breasts, my armpits, out around my navel, it sent out its own inverted waves of cold.

I could just barely look down over my body enough to see the colours softly phosphorescing and swirling together as I was suspended straight from one end to the other. (Halation, in a feat of effort of her own, anchoring herself to the stone nails my hands and feet still hovered centimetres away from.) My cock was now standing up straight, perpendicular, the ripples covering it faster, interfering back and forth. Matched by another set, of (I could feel) the exact same shape and size, taking shape inside me. An exact copy, like a mold.

In my mouth, where I was already gargling stomach-acid sweetness, I asked for one more.

After I came once, so taken by the synchronized washes of warmth and sensation over and through my whole body I barely noticed, the vibrations started to settle down, retreat to the lines over my body we used in battle, and the restraints slackened. I had shrugged off all my remaining clothing into the mass of blanketing I sank into, but in a way I was still in my battle dress. My battle-body, for the first time, radiating its own warmth - and now the coldness that crashed into me was hers. She was as surprised by it as me.

I want to feel you do the things you watched Delilah do. The images had floated back to the surface, at some point, while we were together. I was still hard - my cock was still almost entirely covered, and a long stem had extended inside the urethra, which had pumped in sync with the ones in my ass and mouth at my peak. I can’t experience dense qualia while extended for intra-operation that complex.

Of course, that was why she went back in the tube at all. Her original body with its native sensory array, rather than a distant shadow of mine; she could perceive nuances of the atmosphere that made the lazy grainy swirls around her as pleasant as a house with a Zen garden. Let me make a fruit for you.

Uhhh… that sounds like a lot more commitment than what we were just doing.

You can understand what I mean perfectly well by thinking about it. In predation-reduced ecosystems, fruiting was widespread outside of reproduction simply as a way of creating food, distributing excess energy to produce the variety of niches a food chain otherwise produced. In social species, let alone symbiotic ones, they were naturally a mode of cannibalistic intimacy.

But if you contribute reproductive material… it’ll flavour the fruit, too. Not like how it tastes to you, I mean. A chemical interpretation of your DNA.

Mouth dry, my hand slowly rode my shaft back and forth as I felt new waves of matter ripple down it, retreating across my body like water flowing in reverse, pooling in lingering, magnetic eddies around the clusters of qualia at my nipples, navel, the dimples in my hips where Mai liked to dig around with her thumbnails, pushing my thumb and fingers apart, feeling more like ribbed putty than oil or rubber. Even once I was no longer touching anything that resembled my own shape I could feel my strokes propagating down the layers - coils and coils of sensors in friction with each other, folded in on itself like a woman’s lining. This form, however, maximizes qualitative experience. Which became my own, as I felt myself from the inside as I began to thrust. Put my back into it, and felt my back underneath the tendrils thickening across it. (I kiss farewell to your rising hairs, the soft mole in the depth between your shoulderblades, the countless sweat drops trembling like a rising storm.) Something I could only see in silhouette in the dark was growing far past my tip, a snaking stem rising between the edges of the hammock, while its vibrating veins wrapped around my every limb, every muscle, every knob of bone. I bit into one that snaked across my mouth, let her feel the tips of my teeth from the outside, almost piercing its tomato-skin membrane. No one could see me without coming into the borehole in which my hammock hung from beneath, but I felt embarrassed anyway as I rolled over - or maybe I just wanted to feel this thing rising out of me pressed by gravity and fabric along the hair-trace of my belly, between my breasts (thank you so much, by the way, so much for pressing on the right glands and helping them grow again even before I got hormones from Edison Lens, now let me squish you between them and harvest their tingly glow), hands caressing and as I tightened digging in all along its length. My hips swinging the whole hammock, tight on my shoulders too. Four ‘petals’, like a smaller version of your normal body’s ‘wings’ stretched on a miniature of its knotted arms, closed in on each other as I came.

We lay together taut and shivering, sweat cooling across my body, as the white-purple glimmering orb pushed out.

Will you still feel anything when I bite in.

The mute, low-information fork of my mind I left in it will, and then it will disappear.

I stared down at it, kneaded it in my hands like a stress ball, for a minute, then five, then ten. Your surviving mind was almost going to sleep when I lifted it to my mouth and bit down. It tasted a bit like lychee and dragonfruit and lemon and half-closed eyes.

Edison Lens Intranet Storage

Strategic Xenosociology Division

Analytical Notes: Caroline Bennett-Fog

On the mission to the Ribbons base, I asked Commander Lillywhite and Liaison General Halation to salvage any computation or surveillance technology they can fit, so we can figure out their capabilities wrt that. Preparations are just about ready. Still insane that we keep having to fucking send her to the front. Does Halation seriously not realize this is just a young pursuit predator’s hero complex/death wish? If it’s not her gambit to appease her handlers: If she dies, there’s no way we’re not getting another intermediary. The Bashtaev incident proves there are plenty of Weirs willing to work with us for their own reasons, we can talk to the Towers even without them, and Sieh’s already got a plan to suppress the whole Lung if their leadership doesn’t go along with it. The longer they expect her to die the longer they don’t just kill her, I get it. But I know it looks insane to a lot of people here too, and right now they’re converging around Sieh. [Log in with private user credentials to view: I wish I didn’t like her so much. First person I can talk to in twenty years who knows how to see dramatic potentials in lore, who isn’t just a grognard. And I’ve never met anyone who smells like that.]

At least we have one convergent cultural form here: using magnetic poles to determine direction makes sense on basically any planet. Our "North" and "South" are their "Quartz" and "Onyx" directions, East and West "Jasper" and "Azurite". But it’s important to remember that "Mercury" - the direction of the core of this planet - extends as far, at the same pace. So the mobs right now are centred at 36 degrees Quartz-Azurite, 12 Azurite-Onyx and 23 Quartz-Jasper. But they’re all spread out no more than 19 degrees away from each other at the extremities and from the observations of our drones, moving closer together. (We’ve had to retire the Bulbuls, which are better for long term observation, because the Towers are too good at shooting them down, and just do high altitude passes with the Eagle APDS.) To be honest the "centres" in terms of density shift all the time, we’re measuring from the positions of individuals who seem like "leaders" which is dumb - each has at least three or four, AI picked out fully fourteen in the Quartz-Azurite mob. Beek and Flagg, agreeing for once, have narrowed that down to six, but I’m not sure this is necessary or useful. The mobs seem, structurally, a lot like the Internexes; a whole pile of factions and individuals making loose consensus decisions. If we knew the language or the culture or anything at all this would be a dream for psyops, but we don’t so we’re down to brute math.

Admittedly, by human standards, the precision is striking. Like an ant mill, that’s the obvious comparison, but it obviously can’t be working on anything so biologically simple… can it? The word Halation has us translating as "mob" (it also comes up as one of the best fits for "army") has a whole range of meaning I’ve been running language models on the Weirs’ datasets to try and determine. We had assumed they were basically standing still because they were moving so slowly, but the whole time we’ve been flying drones over they’ve been spreading out into a dragnet and contracting closer to us, all in moves too micro to draw attention. My hypothesis is that they have some very simple universal directive coordinating the stochastic activity: "wander around however and wherever you want, as long as you go closer to the target and further from the centre of your group, and don’t get out of site of other groups". (The inter-group coordination would be the important part.) We only see movements counter to these hypothetical directives about 11% of the time - which is still significant. They must be using some form of group-to-group if not universal communication; I’ve been trying to figure out the range of those staves but getting different responses from everyone I talk to. They seem to have varied considerably in quality before the Network went down, and now nobody knows who has what. The Rusty Moons were able to eavesdrop on almost all of them with their big underground thing, we don’t know if they have any sensors on that level, but they’re bringing in reinforcements almost constantly so they must either have more powerful ones than we can detect or relay networks. If those go as far as the other nearest elevation, Polyp Massif (imagine a broccoli made of limestone) - which is supposed to have a very dense pro-Adipose presence (Beek is itching to hit it with something) - they could have virtually unlimited reinforcements. We’re already outnumbered. We need a strong element of surprise. And explosives. Small ones - remember they don’t like destroying the ground, and even the things the Ribbons drop aren’t all that powerful, but we could probably get a lot out of just dropping frags and flashbangs, especially if we had some kind of tubes to deliver them to different levels. Butterfly mines should also be useful. On our drone footage we don’t really see much in the way of training, drills, patrols. Sometimes what look like duels - I’ve been replaying this one where a pair of Gatherers have put bladed thimbles on the ends of all their fingers and slash each other to blueberry-slathered ribbons, then lick the regenerative sludge onto each other. [Log in with private user credentials to view: Hell of a ship dynamic, I have to admit, even though I get nothing out of looking at freaky gecko bugs. It’s really funny to me that the universe seems to have landed in just the level of convergent evolution for physical bodies to be absolutely all over the place but mental design mostly convergent enough to make cross-cultural contact work? Omegaverse, Vulcans, all the really romantic stuff is like one or two steps removed in either direction, enough for one big change you can think about in detail. I think I always resented how unlikely we were to get something like that, but look at how bad we are with human-scale differences and maybe this equally unlikely gutter-zone we’re in could be the most merciful option. Leona seems to have spent more time playing around in that sandbox, I need to pick her brain more about it. If I strip whatever I just watched down to its one big detail of "ritual combat with mutual hurt/comfort" you can apply that to any species template. e.g. Drusus and Sokann in the gladiatorial arena?] Mostly they seem to be just milling around, feasting, fishing, much like the reports of the Internexus itself. They have some massive transport morphs carrying food - their movements around the crescent are among the most predictable. Extremely valuable targets. The one difference is that there are no larvae. Who’s guarding them?

Communication from Tactical Squadron Alpha-Four (via Entangleweed)

Captain Thurgood Denison, Delta Force, IEEF Tactical Petty Officer

Internexus "Zith"

Confidential (Strategic Clearance)

Exhilarating, untrammelled victory. I’m starting to understand what the Sol boys (Pvts. Ezequiel Marmol, Danny Rigoletto and Ogre Ito send their insufferable regards) mean about the spirit of war being constrained by too much knowledge, by the ability to construct a clearly defined mission, where even the inevitable unpredictability is reduced to discreet deviations. I’d make them take the bags off the Transport Morph and carry ‘em themselves when they said something like that because every situation I’ve been in you could describe in those terms was a smoking FUBAR gumbo. This wasn’t. Neither of us knew shit about each other, but the things they didn’t know about us were more salient. (Marmol wants to add: Okenn jete dés p'ap jamais anile chanm.) We took out three of their four battle morphs before they even realized we were there. And I hate to admit the Sol boys work great in this kind of engagement - barefoot, naked, hardly concerned about weight or footing, running right through the tall grass of them cutting off heads. The transfer of power was simple, one-to-one, the Entangleweed forces already had the civilians under their thumb. When we promised no reprisals they were pretty happy and helped us get set up with the plant thing I’m using to send this. I’m sorry, I don’t normally talk or write like this, but I’ve had a silver cat-tail shoved into my nose in the past three hours. Apparently I just have to think into this thing, it comes out in full sentences, and it turns out I don’t mind the way it sounds.

Communication from Temporary Patrol I7

Ajax Lillywhite (Lord of the Logs) (via Denpa)

Internexus "Pagaz"

Confidential (Strategic Clearance)

So the bad news is - someone got here ahead of us from "Athan". They recognized us as soon as we showed up, and it was nothing like the chaos in the Athan Briefing. The entire Internexus, estimating at least seven hundred Scouts and Fabbers here and god knows how many larvae or , basically moves as one… not wall, like a 3D carpet with spikes. Is that what a mob’s gonna do because you may need to reconsider your strategy after you look at some of this footage . It’s like fighting… fucking No Face from Spirited Away. We can shoot down… we didn’t want to shoot any of them down, in the first place, when we saw this, I didn’t, I followed the instructions that we were to negotiate first. Offer to do the introduction thing, but they weren’t even letting us in. They considered Athan a breach of the Internexus Pact - it’s not clear if they have exactly correct information? I offered to put them in direct communication with Flagg, explain what they did, but everyone in the mob who was even considering communicating with us was scared of the other members. At one point we saw someone try to come out to meet us and get pulled down under this… cairn of people and Captain Volozhin took a warning shot. They engaged en masse, Pvts Hejaz and Blackwell who had particularly itchy trigger fingers must have mowed down at least a few dozen but we were under like medieval siege levels of fire. I think most of the ones we hit just got pulled back into the mass for healing. There’s like… if you could figure out where in the formation is what Volozhin was calling the "stomach", where they have a bunch of Fabbers in a spiky ball to heal the wounded and send them back out? Volozhin says he saw it, but I don’t know how, we couldn’t even get close. They have like, channels, rows of fingers flexing like cilia to send people back and forth the second someone gets hit. He might be speculating. We found a place and camped out. Eventually a group and some stragglers found their way down within range of our Bulbuls, kicked out presumably for defecting or trying to cooperate with us. The main group of fourteen appears to be what you called Ferrous Masks? So we have reinforcements and they’re eager to come help out as soon as possible, although we’re about 2500m off course (Down-South-East). But not a lot of them, not against a mob.

Over the geopolitically loaded and technologically overhyped products of the American - or any other superpower’s - military-industrial complex, the IEEF (with loud partisanship from Waldo Beek) had chosen to deploy an old Terran standby, that would be a symbol of human military ingenuity to the galaxy as much as it had been to Argentina, Bosnia and Afghanistan: the Navy’s remaining Harrier jump jets. Alien tech would do miracles for maintenance anyway; Contemplation had put as much thought into cheating entropy as Earth had into accelerating it. The Inchworm Drive went in the nose, replacing a lot of the avionics and the ARBS which it could outperform anyway. The translucent plates of the ship’s exterior, which had clustered like a pinecone before, now coated the surface of the plane from glass of the cockpit to the wings, giving it a green scaly shimmer that made it look at least as draconic as its opponents. The Ribbons which I could see all the way up there, tiny curls of lint in the sky but the artillery officers had showed me how to pick out their movements, kept circling as if it wasn’t there. Come out, its voice reached us in the shadows of the secret exit, it’s safe. I’m dedicating my Asymmetry Field to warping all signal around me - light, radar, sonar, probabilistic mesh, everything short of the Adipose itself.

In the cockpit even the controls had been ripped out, replaced with four blocks of foam into which I inserted my hands and (just imagining Alasdair’s doofy mug when he hears I had to take off my boots to get in) feet. (It’s crazy that you don’t design all your tech with somatic impact in mind - Tell me about it.) These were the interface of a basic peer-to-peer nervous system, comparable to an aux cord, that you kept around in case you ever got stranded on a planet and had to repair using unfamiliar parts or send a distress message from some local system. Not only did this let us wire the plane’s systems, the Drive and the plates (each connected to its own "stem" of the aux through centimetre-width holes in the wings), it was much lighter than the metal wiring and mechanical systems it was able to replace, allowing the Harrier to hover while carrying its full armament (even without using the Drive to just reorient inertial vectors directly).

As soon as they were enveloped in what felt at once relaxing, anaesthetic and stable, as if each extremity was simultaneously resting on solid ground and could move at a moment’s notice in an emergency, I felt my sensory axis, my transparent eye, leaving my body and reorienting itself over the plane’s surface. Each scale was an incredibly finely tuned sensory receptors, eye (telescope) and ear (oscilloscope, radar) and nose (microscopic sieve) all in one, constructed at the molecular level for detecting the minute traces of information that made it through the void of space. Even compared to Halation, it was overload. It was waking up. The clear air was now a murmuration of trembling silk waves of wind currents, dust, piling in thinning layers all the way to the stratosphere. The stars spackled the back of the sky like stains on the side of a car. The nervous-extensive movement a bit less impressive after piloting the Corpuscle - but far more fluid, more complete. I wasn’t splitting my senses between a cramped human perspective on the inside and an affectively thin game-view on the outside. I hadn’t thought I’m flying in there the way I would in a type of dream people only had in songs and movies but I think I had as a kid exactly once. (I remember thinking, in the dream, about how it worked.) And we had real control. It felt like dragging myself across a screen (or the cubic modelling space projected by the Weirs’ standard-issue computing blocks).

We were going so fast I couldn’t resist slamming through one of the Ribbons in midair, tearing a wisp of a rippley cloud formation in half with its pulverized body.

The other corkscrewed straight up toward the hive. We were on track to get there first.

No probabilistic pressure even this close. That thing’s either flabby or overstretched. I could only take their word for it. But when we hit it, I wondered if it had just been boasting.

The Asymmetry surface itself was already the ship’s main sensory organ, the scales were just for us - there was almost no way for a lifeform designed for to share an Asymmetry Field’s sensorium without going insane. So the contact felt like nothing - yet I somehow had the distinct, horrible feeling of my own mind turning against itself. Of things going the opposite direction my gut expected them to go. All right, we’re going to make a drill. The most efficient form for dedicating all of a Field’s processing power to negating another’s at a point small enough to bore through. But the white-hot spiral of plasma forming in front of us (a little reminiscent of a certain anime, if you know what I’m talking about) never even reached the surface it was aiming for. It had expanded in a bubble around us and gripped us from the sides. The ship’s vision had no asymmetry between above or below, front or back, but the gnarled horizon wrapping around one side was above us and we were running in place not to fall into it. Sinners in the hands of an angry God, suspended by a hair above the spires of hell.

In a flash, the drill flattened into a disc that flashed around us like a 360-degree sun-sliver and broke through the Asymmetry Surface of the the enemy’s extension. A broken Asymmetry Field was a dangerous place, prone to probabilistic anomalies and random bursts of spontaneous order. We clipped out of there and around to the weakest spot we could find on the other side. Senses I couldn’t share screamed through two layers of symbiotic soundproofing like tinnitus. The interval between our reformed drill making contact and the enemy’s field reallocating to defend against it could be measured in second-exponent units but was enough to get us inside. Which being inside a field that had reallocated processing power to reject you was the riskiest part of the standard boarding procedure. I remember a blizzard of floaters, complete static of every sense, even RGB glitching at the borders. Hyperconcentrated Asymmetry explosions around us while we maintained our most consistent defensive rotation to avoid the minefield. Don’t worry, we wouldn’t have survived so long floating across battlefields we couldn’t even see without our secret defense algorithm, [Inverted] Water Strider, donated by a top research committee on the Synod when we accepted our mission. We were close enough to see the holes in the surface of the silver-blue orb, surrounded by stochastic spiral creases as if miniature black holes had suddenly formed on the skin of an elephant. And of course there were Ribbons whipping around and dropping mucus-bombs on us, although like my car when I had tried to get out from under our Field the first time they just didn’t go any further. They were mostly using their own flailing attacks to maintain a visible perimeter of our Field and stick to us in case they - or we - brought it down.

Inside the hole reminded me of those caverns in Antarctica - another artificial ecosystem, although this one more artificial than the Lung, more architectural and less literal, the surfaces looked less like ice than soft mercury, decorated with complex meshes of overlapping circles and whorls. About half the Ribbons we saw were curled up in these little recesses that sank around them and sprang back up when they lifted off. They were trying to pile bombs on us now, exploiting the tradeoff in surface calculation between throwing them off and fighting their own. But the algorithmic rotations of [Inverted] Water Strider threw them off in consistent spiral patterns. When the bombs hit the walls they didn’t take any permanent damage, just bounced like cartoon speakers on a dropped bass, dispersing the force as harmlessly as possible, albeit usually shaking another couple of Ribbons out of their nests. Bullets, on the other hand, pierced through enough surface to spurt some blue fluid that looked like antifreeze.

Our Asymmetry Field couldn’t fight off an enemy Asymmetry Field and maintain sufficiently precise control to take out material enemies at the same time. Halation was like, they’d used the analogy on finding it in my undergrad research, a journalist sent across a warzone with the protection of a particular army, but still just driving a regular jeep. So the plan was to get inside and extend as large and stable a space as they could where the two Fields cancelled each other out for us to move around in. We would still have a plane, which was almost certainly faster, deadlier and more durable than any of the Ribbons, albeit hard to maneuver in here - but easier with the finer nervous controls. Piloting at full speed in spaces this tight, however, would be hard on both our brains. Another reason for implementing the aux controls was of course not having to rely on Earth’s limited supply of pilots trained on the "unforgiving", phased-out aircraft - but as soon as the Field stabilized and stopped intervening for us directly, it became apparent how much, despite the turbulence, it had been making things easier for us. Halation pumped a cocktail of numbing and stimulant chemicals through me as I felt the vibration of the plane’s chassis at once around and on the surface of "my" body. An instinct kept screaming at me that I was about to lose control, even as I didn’t.

Our main objective was to find the Drive and take it out manually, even as our own held off its effects - though this might be impossible or require focusing our own Field again if theirs had more internal layers, which it probably did. If possible we also wanted to find the leading Ribbon, the one who had taunted us from between the sickly rinds of the moons, and trap them in with us. Halation could pick them out in their memory - small and jerky like a cat’s tail, with long whiskers and a chipped third shell - but not surrounded by hundreds of them. AI at the Lung (still more powerful by at least an exponent than Azoth’s best) had scanned the photographs our spy-drone had taken, feeding a recognition model into the nervous aux’s local memory.

Our enemies and their scattering bombs receded further and further until we just stopped seeing them; either our field surface had extended beyond our field of vision or they were just warning ahead of our approach, tracking us. There didn’t seem to be anything obvious to do damage to in here, and it was too close to just bomb and outrun our explosions without using the Field, but we could keep shooting and see what happened. Eventually, we picked up something coming around behind us - bombs suspended in little ring-shaped harnesses with butterfly wings. They were slow but as we sped up we almost immediately ran into more of them.

We quickly realized we had been trapped in a very limited set of tunnels, which were being filled up with the autonomous bombs to the point that there would be no way to avoid them. We would have to find the tunnels that had been recently closed off and shoot or bomb our way through. This wasn’t obvious as the surfaces were pretty fluid. But they clearly didn’t have general control, like an Asymmetry Surface. What the material seemed to behave like was a kind of gel whose surface hardened in contact with the architecture and softened under heat - either body, or bomb-heat, which meant it could at least disperse it more or less efficiently. The temperature up here was as low as one would expect around the Tropopause on Earth - which wasn’t uncommon on Hammer. We tested this by just hovering and bombarding it with our vectored thrust nozzles, which produced such impressive ripples we might have had real structural effects, or just shook the entire place up, if we kept it up. One thing we noticed was that the patterns didn’t renature as quickly as the rest of the surface, if at all. So we just had to look for places the walls had scarred smooth. And then, if they couldn’t handle bullets… just bust through in a flood of blue gore.

And regular gore, as we’d accelerated enough to ram straight through two Ribbons. Which wasn’t the best idea; one was clipped and only lost a bunch of lower segments but clung to us immediately, just shitting out bombs one after the other and pressing them suicidally into us. They might have been enough to blow a wing off if we hadn’t done a barrel roll that shook about half of them along with the dying body, and still crashed us so badly we ground to a halt half-encased in the wall. We had to use the jets to shake ourselves out of there, by which point the bomb-drones had surrounded us and stripped scales like a tree in an autumn’s first rainstorm. They were redundant and mostly covered for each other in our "subjective" experience of the plane’s senses, but even that took on some noise.

We outflew them as soon as we were free and sprayed ahead just to keep the coast clear. Like the anti-aircraft guns, the GAU-12 Equalizer was more than heavy enough to equalize us against the Ribbons. The only problem was that they could break off damaged segments and keep flying without them, so we tried to aim for the heads or the bombing organs first. We flew over ones we’d hit curled up on the bottom of the tunnels, inching forward dragging trails of mixed colours - milky white, thin shimmering gold, globs of orange - trailing behind them, burning and exploding in their own viscera, rearing up and screeching and flailing their whiskers as they flew over us.

Wherever we saw a recently closed off section we broke through it, at once to slow ourselves down, do more damage and find more important areas. The first we found our way into appeared to be a food storeroom. Four massive bubbles floated in the centre of a spherical space, filled with smaller bubbles separating unrecognizable biological ingredients: cross-sections of giant leek-coloured trees, segmented folding spirals. I felt nauseous and not just from the flying. I wanted to know whether there were likely to be civilians or children here, whether they would more easily get more food from off planet or starve here but our bullets had ripped through several before we even made out what it was. I tried to think of them like any army on my own world, but their obvious unpreparedness was not making it easy. Several jumped out to ambush us and just got torn immediately apart. But then we came under a volley of bubbles of different kinds of chemicals - I think one was actually white phosphorus. It was still pretty similar to dealing with the Towers’ ranged weaponry. If we were flying with human controls it would have been almost impossible to navigate as we darted around the stores to shoot at them, going back through twice before we hit them all. Our adrenaline was pumping and we relented and released a pair of missiles.

Then as soon as the chamber was mostly empty except for multicolour splatter and slime on the walls, a closed gap we hadn’t even noticed opened and our recognition model went off. Except something was different about the Ribbon that had taunted us from between the moons. It looked armoured, its segments larger or just further apart and covered in graphite-black carapace. And coiling around the line of our gunfire on the basic intuition that it was a line of perspective, they darted in and out of our blind spots with a speed mostly equivalent to ours. Judging by the steam-lines around them, the armour they were using was itself equipped with some kind of jets, and their "whiskers", too, lashed out like metal whips. Wrapping around our tail and pulling a fin off. Whipping it back at us. Gripping at the top of the cockpit and trying to pull it off.

So they have some military tech at least.

That’s not military.

I drew closer to the dry ice lodged in Halation’s mind. Those are hunting modifications. Except, of course, they don’t actually hunt anymore. It’s more like a sport, or an art form. There are hundreds of variants I couldn’t recognize. Vague images flashed through our mind - chasing spindly, brightly coloured drones at high speeds across striated glaciers; darting through fields of airborne bubbles, plucking a shell out of one in passing. Some probably do count as combat sports even by human standards. Weirs who go to Hammer… at least the hard core of tourists, a lot of them like to "ride" on modified hunters.

"It’s not just a hunting armour. This is a combat armour," they screeched in their Hallowe’en organ Ahasurunu. "Your Algal Blooms aren’t the only species that has fought them. Although I had to requisition a museum to get this one, from our own Canal Wars. We will soon have many more like it. Observe:" They wheeled over us, and from where the bombs normally fell, golden-orange liquid spraying in rotating streams like a sprinkler. Where it hit the plates they sizzled away, sparking and damaging adjacent ones, and even the metal below corroded. We immediately did a back roll, both minimizing our profile and blowing it back with the jets, which they avoided with another evasive spiral. The moves were relatively predictable, if I could calculate the way our opponent could I might have been able to intercept it - we still weren’t real warriors, were we, just strapped in an unholy death machine that would switch from others’ to our own at the shift of a statistical wind of relative advantage.

The air was also getting colder. I had compartmentalized the altitude indicators into another "mental interface" I hadn’t been looking at but as I noticed they sprang to mind of their own accord, or maybe Halation’s: we were rising.

"Despite the death toll of your little killing spree, which I won’t gratify you by revealing, you’ve given us enough time to evacuate. I’m the only one left in here with you, and in ( ) units ( )-exponent this temporary environment will leave the atmosphere. This armour has atmospheric supplements for extra-vehicular operations in space; I’m sure you have atmosphere for a Weir in that ship’s internal body, but does your pet barbarian?"

Right. They were talking to Halation, and Halation alone. They didn’t take me seriously as an opponent at all. No sooner had I started to hyperventilate than the vines under my feet and wrists sent a feeler up to my face and covered my mouth and nose. Of course we had instructed the frame to include an atmospheric support tank for humans too; the problem our opponent probably hadn’t even anticipated was that human aircraft couldn’t fly in space - at least without using the Asymmetry Field, which would divert its power from resisting theirs. The Harrier’s maximum altitude was 43,000 feet - only about 134 units fifteenth-exponent, not much higher than the Tuber Plug, barely into the stratosphere by Towers standards, and the Towers atmosphere was already thinner than Earth’s. Unlike the Lung, they didn’t seem to be using any special atmosphere in here either. So we had only about a couple dozen fifteenth-exponents higher we could go… was it just the Asymmetry Field moving us, or were there some local engines to this too we could destroy? The Asymmetry Field probably could have no-clipped us into space in a split second, so it probably had its hands full with ours, whatever it was doing. Could we call for reinforcements? The warrior-Ribbon was darting around us now, feinting and lashing out with their extended whiskers at the spots where their spray had done the most damage to our wings. Our guns managed to hit a few times, but didn’t seem to be strong enough to penetrate this armour. We took the first chance we saw to get out of this bubble, into the narrowest tunnel we could find; at least that way our jets would be facing them.

"Running away already? I can show you the way to the nearest exit!"

That didn’t mean much, all exits except the one that led us out or into an ambush had presumably been closed off anyway; we would have to blast through another closed tunnel they weren’t expecting but that would mean pivoting, risking turning both our jets and our guns away from our pursuer. And this whole base wasn’t large for a jet plane so we didn’t have much time (even to see or decide).

Yet somehow we weren’t going that fast anyway, and it wasn’t catching up. The blue walls around us took on a green-yellow shimmer, even the lines of their markings distorted as if through water; our Asymmetry Field had contracted a new shell around us, slowing us down even as our engines should have been pushing Mach 1.5, the Ribbon held at a constant distance behind us. It had shrunk its effective area even outside this shell significantly to protect us at close range. We turned our jets in a direction our drone’s scan of the basic structure of the nest, saved in our navigation intelligence, indicated was toward the centre. Even if they had evacuated, that just left our most important target unattended: the Drive. As we burned through the barrier without moving, a drill of pinkish fire took shape in front of the armoured Ribbon, piercing the outer layer of our own Field.

Too many crucial tactical decisions - like the timing of keeping the second layer up long enough for us to spin the engines back in the right direction to start propelling us again, without the second layer getting pierced by the drill - were taking place at the level of 3rd or 4th temporal exponents I couldn’t hope to perceive. I wanted the Fields as far away and stalemated as possible, so the battle would be thinkable in real time. But at least our Fields were something of a match; could we say the same of ourselves and this opponent?

In real space, real time, the exponent was still fourth or fifth. My stomach emptied without warning onto the mostly empty frame of the controls and half by reflex I paused the jets, switched to the more manageable vectored thrust nozzles. (The word "VIFFing" had driven me crazy in air training. "Viff in hell!" tragically wasted on a non-furry.) Our opponent shot over us and out of sight. We sent our remaining missiles after them.

Then as the world stabilized (not enough) I forced myself back through the window of opportunity and accelerated again.

A hundred crystal sensors stung with sickly floral blue mist and the pool-piss smell of AIM-132 smoke. Five or six walls had thrown themselves up to be pulverized into a roiling cloud in which we could barely see the whips lashing out at us. But barely was enough as we rolled on our side and made contact.

To grab on like this in combat was the equivalent of grappling as long as it stuck to the motor systems and executive loops surrounding them. The instrumental surface of the mind was like the instrumental surface of the body; the motivational surface like the meat and muscle. The magical, private zones protected by repression were, mercifully, still protected. But there was this distinct patina - a sky.

The enormous sky of Hammers - even though the planet was smaller, colder, than Towers, the sheer richness of its nitrate topaz made it seem enormous, and the circuitboard Mountains of Madness architecture of mica mesas. Thin trains of wavering white reflection pooled in the page-edges of grey-black shield and the interlocking curves of ornamental canals, sometimes eleventh, sometimes twelfth exponents across; white-furred hopping coils with spiral shells clustered where algae thickened in the water.

But it was under their bright-edged shelf of shadow, among thickets of what looked like fungal antlers sprung from stagnant pools in the ice, surrounded by sundial flowers where they floated on the surface of the nutrient-rich water.

Blue-green arcs of cloud like ripples from the impact of a huge stone on the surface you liked to imagine yourself under, far above.

A park ranger - scientifically trained as an ecologist, in the old Hammer traditions dating back to before Meteorology, but tasked with hands-on maintenance of one of the areas Weir tourists frequented.

The most essential function of a park ranger, especially on a world that has minimized predation, is to keep out invasive species.

Of course, according to Meteorology, no such thing, only monopolistic species, whether endemic or epidemic. Where Holdfast worked, that wasn’t how they thought of it. They practiced traditional management systems to preserve their traditional ecosystems, predation included.

Holdfast - as in the root system of a seaweed. Or something close enough for the translation. Their name.

They couldn’t handle the shame, the confusion the first time a Weir rode them. They understood it. They took refuge in understanding it, on an academic level, but couldn’t participate in it. So they didn’t participate in the hospitality themselves. They wandered parts of the lichenwoods off the migration routes, where almost nobody went.

How was I knowing this? Logical resonance. I had no idea what that meant, but I felt it. Like an overtone in the mathematical grammar of different nervous architectures. It usually happens with similar experiences. It’s rare, but happens more often in first contacts. I could guess from that what they were learning about me.

Incredible your body wasn’t pulverized by all that. Demon.

They first heard one of Halation’s missives routed by a Weir through the voice and native language of their host to everyone in earshot - a discourtesy that seemed to them at the time more offensive than the news item of the destruction on the moon. The pair were talked down from the disturbance and separated by the more political category of ranger, but something about the propaganda stuck in their craw. They sought out its source and pored over it, hoarded transmissions like someone in my department might Syrian jihadi forum posts. (I grew up thinking the military didn’t listen to experts enough, got to school and realized they listen to us too much.) Most people around them were sympathetic though apathetic to Contemplation’s cause; those who weren’t were isolationists, predatorists, cranks who resented Contemplation’s presence on Hammer at all.

Something about the intensity of it made them sure their planet was sleepwalking into something it didn’t want to be part of.

Like me, their sheer dedication to peace got them singled out for war.

Though they were still frozen physically, something of their consciousness in the resonance was holding us back, calculating and anticipating our force enough to wrap the limp body gently around us as we careened blind through layers of gel. Cognitive reflexes implanted by the next person they’d been able to talk to about the war in the depth they wanted, an old Meteorological heretic who had replaced their outer nervous network with computational crystal. This wasn’t their heresy; nearly every Weir in the Synod had this procedure. But the particular crystal was a loan from the Outer, the original decipherers of Adipose signals. The original exchange of atrocities that had sunk the sides of the Adipose War in so deep was the Outer’s pre-emptive assimilation strike on neutral networks, appropriating their processing power to resist a larger anti-Adipose coalition, and their subsequent mass deletion.

Tantamount to genocide, but of the aggressor.

Hadn’t Mab laid out a case for genocide of the aggressor? Hadn’t I been horrified by Mai’s horror when I presented it to her?

Halation recognized the specific name of the defector: Blue Jet. They had been one of the more important pro-Adipose Meteorological theorists before the war broke out. Their crystal body had survived the deletion because it had been disconnected from the Outer’s cloud, but some suspected the Outer might have cached important secrets in it. Don’t get distracted probing for their whereabouts - we had already almost missed that they were dribbling some sort of fluid out of their bombing organ, and at our speed it was crawling back along our wings and chassis right into the jets -

Pain. The ship sensors weren’t supposed to have a pain signal, but certain reflex associations were unavoidable. Noise and heat and friction and - all these things we were already experiencing, simply from the fact of the jet behind us and the racing air in front of us, so what was it about the back half of the plane tearing off that the telephone game of my nervous system, already stimulated beyond its limits, experienced as the same white-hot featureless urgency my body had been built to learn and avoid? But then it wasn’t just the plane’s sensors (the cloud of green scales spiralling back into the tunnel behind us) or Halation’s transmissive surface - I could feel all this on my actual body again, the unbreathable air pummelling the back of my chair with sparks and shrapnel, the seatbelts digging between my breasts as I lurched.

The Inchworm Drive was still in the nose in front of us. Some kind of stem had shot out of it, branching and catching some of the floating plates, pulling others back like a magnet and even stripping them off the fuselage, reassembling them into the kinds of whorls I had seen in Edison Lens’ truck. (But these our opponent thrashed against as we careened. They reformed as fast as they shattered.) The Field could still protect us - in some vague new sense, I felt it contracting until the nose of the plane ran into its boundary and held still without momentum, friction, force.

I pulled one hand out of its block to unbuckle my seatbelt and extricate my Beretta from where it had been tucked under the seat. I chambered a round under my coat, from which I had conveniently extricated my arms but hung soaked across my shoulders. I hesitated before pulling the other out. Halation was stretched half across my right arm and half- I couldn’t see how far they went under Holdfast’s armour, but presumably not as far as their explosive organ. Or for that matter their back jets, which now gave them a massive speed advantage over me, albeit one they couldn’t use without whipping me around. If they whipped me around enough my brain would probably be mushed against the inside of my skull. I prayed to the Asymmetry Field around me (still didn’t quite know how to talk to it, knew its options were as limited as God’s) to intervene somehow to equalize us or just- paralyze it so I could get a shot in. Halation contracted, pulling me directly up and onto Holdfast’s body. At least at this range it - they - couldn’t shoot me with mucus bombs. - We were in the middle of a conversation.

-No, we’re trying to kill each other.

-Do you think I’m not aware of that?

-You haven’t said a word, and you think I’m a barbarian.

-No, I think you’re an invasive species, I don’t know what a barbarian is.

-It’s something like that.

We had been so open to each other when we weren’t thinking about it, and as soon as we recognized each other it was all friction, another grinding background noise. -I’m talking to Halation. They had walled me out. My head was gauzey quiet as I climbed up onto its back. It had stopped. I didn’t feel like I was moving at all, even as the patterns on the walls blurred around me.

How could I hate them? How could I kill them? They had made the same mistakes as me.

Well, then, at least I would get to kill one person who had made those mistakes.

I lowered my gun. My body froze. I was being struck by lightning. My bones vibrating in place while my surface felt like it was melting away. All the information I was receiving through our connection melted into a nausea of numbers - then disappeared, as the string of Halation between us slackened, sagged, dripped.

Anti-Weir neural pulse. You think none of us know how to deal with their kind? Our species developed these in case a symbiote tourist loses sight of their Meteorological principles of consent. Whatever they tell you, it does happen.

…often? I wanted to ask directly but our connection was dead - whatever Halation was going through, they were keeping me out of it. So I could focus on… aiming through this armour somehow? It was still flailing around, the plan had been to pull up onto it and…

Halation will go back to atonement on Hammer. But you, superpredator… They slurped Halation’s body slowly away from me as they spoke. What to do with you. I imagine if you turn back, your people will not.

"Yeah no, I’m… I was kind of trying to be the main thing holding them in check."

Would you be willing to follow orders? Or at least, accept ecological supervision? To constrain your people, to sabotage them?

"What kind of ecological guidance? We have a word for that too, eugenics, it doesn’t have good precedents on our world." I knew I was being disingenuous. I knew I was stalling for time.

Of course it doesn’t.

"But I already plan to restrain -"

Of course you do. I saw that much when we were connected. Your plan is bad, it won’t work. You have placed yourself as a bottleneck to your own species and expect them not to remove it. You want to fight against them while fighting for them. Consider this carefully, without Halation in your mind. Right now you have the opportunity to act decisively. You will not for much longer.

"Are you saying you or Hammer… need any help? Like specifically, concretely?"

We hung in total silence. I couldn’t even be certain it was shock.

You are that shameless? You think I am merely asking you to… switch sides? You think we would trust yours, of all planets, with the Adipose?

"Sorry I don’t know how you’re picking up the words I’m using, but I didn’t say anything about sides." I stared at the seemingly depthless blue of the walls around me, letting my insides feel like that. "I still only sort of understand the sides in this war in the first place, and I imagine I’ll still only sort of understand them if you explain yours. But I don’t want your planet to become like mine. If that’s what you want too, there might be better ways to coordinate."

The easiest way for our planet to become like yours… is for you to come to our planet. What I wanted to negotiate with you is a cull. A loss deep enough to persuade your people that sending more ships to more planets - for either side - is a losing deal. But for you to reverse my words like that… I think I need to kill you. You’re Machiavellian evolvers on top of everything else, aren’t you? Obviously the Ahasurunu arabesque they used doesn’t reference a Florentine guy, but it does reference the hypothesis. I actually never believed that. It just reifies one of all the other ways social complexity feedbacks with its own genetic requirement. Maybe they weren’t me after all, I can think back now with a gallows giggle. Maybe they were Caroline.

I would regret not having the chance to find out.

The floor bulged under the nose of the plane.

The missiles we had fired had been wrapped in Asymmetry bubbles our field had detached from itself like Halation’s fruit. Too ephemeral to even reach the attention of the larger field, they had just reached their real targets.

The patterns on the walls around us warped and stretched until I could no longer make out the topology of a consistent space around us, whether we were in the tunnel or inside the wall - like outlines broken by water, different spatial dimensions of the same objects slipped in and out of each other as whole layers of the base’s destabilized Field formed and disintegrated. A wobbling ball of concentric slices of jell-o. If any reinforcements had been planning to come back in once we were captured or killed, they couldn’t now. I reattached the mask from the cockpit over my face as I cracked open the emergency canisters of ammonia, methane and hydrogen fluoride on my belt. Holdfast opened their belly (I couldn’t avoid thinking of it as that) and sprayed. I jumped - Halation no longer tuning my body in real time, but the novel chemicals she had flooded my endocrine system with still in my bloodstream - and grabbed onto one of its whiskers. Just in time for it to whip me at where the corrosive chemicals were eating through more of the plane. The Field rotated its internal gravity to slide the plane away from us. Holdfast thrashed around the inside of the bubble and I stayed limp and focused my awareness in my white knuckles as I felt Halation wake up and thicken along the silicate ropes. Over my hand, strengthening my grip. I inched closer to their head, lashed by strings of acid launched into the air by the field’s rotation, but at this point the pain barely even registered as exceptional. I focused on the bubble of private, pure mental space Halation had formed in the palm of my hand, held myself as securely as the enemy’s whip, in a cavern of still deeper blue.

As they watched this, or perhaps watched the wreckage of their own station, their mission - and as the atmosphere filled up with elements that were as toxic to them as they would have been to me - their movements slowed into a languid circling. I was almost too exhausted to notice what they were doing until I saw the translucent bulge of a mucus bomb poking from between the mandibles of their stomach-mouth.

Even as small as it was, it would probably consume all the atmosphere in our tiny bubble wherever it exploded.

Before it left their belly, I shot. CLAMP network storage

Location: Lung Command

Folder: Live field communications