Last week I was Bored At Work and was just recovering from a seasonal bought of writer's block, so I drew a few disjointed panels from a proposed comic about the Last War of Green Night.
It's a story that's majorly important to the lore of my universe, but which I've never yet put to paper. Massive TL;DR: when a powerful wizard visits the homeworld of the merfolk, they make war against it. They succeed in inventing the one weapon capable of harming it, but fail to kill it, and lose their home.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
âś“ Live Streamingâś“ Interactive Chatâś“ Private Showsâś“ HD Qualityâś“ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
And what makes them special, among all the peoples?
It's not an easy question to answer. Especially since every human would tell you that humans are pretty much normal. I suppose any true answer would depend on who you ask.
To the Fairies,
A Human is a creature of great power, and great intelligence. Too massive to trade their feet for wings, they walk in strides the width of cities, wielding great tools, leaving deep footprints, thinking high thoughts. Their lives are impossibly long; they are known to possess the knowledge and fortitude to survive entire winters, and have such an abundance of time that they can even waste it. Their childhood and even their schooling can last for years, and in their adulthood they do not die, but age like the trees. Humans are mighty. And yet, they must not to be trusted, for they are alien to these lands, and at a gesture and a whim, could destroy the forest and all the world. They have no mind for the good of any hive, and they care not for laws. Humans are dangerous.
To the Merfolk,
A human is a creature of weakness. They have no honor, and no honesty, and no pride, and really, how could they, when they know nothing of hardship? Nature has been unfailingly kind to them; their summers are warm, their monsters are small, and their winters are short. They stay in place all their lives in bright little homes, feeding ooze to soft children, while their men grow boney and their women grow plump, with never a need to migrate, and never a need to fight. They cannot swim. They cannot smell. They cannot wrestle. They cannot punch. They can barely eat. Still, a human cannot be blamed for being what it is, and they are not all bad. The very fact that they made it here, so far from their home, can testify to their daring, and their tenacity, and their ingenuity. And there are a few which are honorable, and a few which are honest, and most of them are friendly enough. People who have lived among Humans have found them in many ways quite like us, so that they even share our virtues and our flaws. Some have even intermarried. Noble, not so noble. Different, not so different. For now we share a common enemy.
To the Leviathan,
A Human is an industrious and willful little critter. Their short lives are spent in restless rush from task to task, with hardly a pause to eat or sleep. Their societies are large, complex and regimented, with each member serving a unique and specialized task, be it child rearing, farming, engineering, healing, or management. Their lives are short, so they must prioritize their education, work together, and find joy in brief destinies. Biologically, they are intended to move about across the surface of high-gravity planets, so their limbs are incredibly strong and their reaction time is nearly instantaneous. They lack thrusters, radio antennae, and proper eyes, so, when far from home, they must compensate with a plethora of outrageous technologies. Their language is incomprehensible, their flesh is poisonous, and their many needs invite heartbreak in those who care for them, so they are generally more trouble they're worth. But you will never find harder workers, deadlier warriors, or more playful pets, and they can be quite endearing.
To the Natives of the Abyss,
A Human is a short hissing fire, untouchable, blindingly bright, hungry, and loud, loud, loud. The souls which drive the missiles from above. They are fortunately flat, and their chaos does not last. They remember little.
To the Elves,
A human is a biped terrestrial hunter-gatherer, native to a high-gravity, low-oxygen planet of a distant galaxy. The nature of this environment requires a large portion of their body be devoted to oversized digestive and respiratory organs, and their limbs are rigid and inflexible. Their natural hunting method, in a long-ago forgotten age, was to pursue prey to exhaustion across plains, using their upright stance and elevated stamina. Even today this nature remains, seen in their horizontal living spaces and their ability to work long hours. In most other ways, however, they are quite like us. It is probably a good thing they live so far away and have made so little contact, as we love the same sorts of worlds, and would probably begin quibbling and warring over territory. They like the trees, even if they cannot live in them. I don't think we have yet seen the worst that humans have to offer.
To the Vampires,
A human is one. One mind, one will, one nature, one face. They have no wolf living in their gut whispering to them, their flesh cannot think for itself, and would never betray them except in sickness. A human never changes its form or its shape or its nature, but persists and endures as it is. They can always be true to themselves, and be honest to those they meet, which frees them to join together in vast communities, mate for life, form lasting friendships, and accomplish great works together. It is said they have even conquered hunger. But this nature of theirs is a curse as well as a blessing, for the guilt of their lusts, violences, and greed can rest nowhere but their own heads, and no matter where they go or who they mate or what great works they accomplish, they always carry their great sin close behind them, for all their lives, for all the world to see. They are not as tasty as the fairies, and do not hold grudges as long as the merfolk.
To the Dwarves,
Humans are terrible cooks, which is doubtlessly why they're all so thin and unhappy. But they're even worse carpenters; their houses are fragile, all above ground, covered in windows, and obsessively clean to a frankly snobbish degree. They should use all their fancy technology to turn themselves into birds and fly away and not bother people anymore. HA! I'm kidding. Humans are alright. They write a lot of books. They dig septic systems, which are good for the economy. And actually the real reason they're so thin is because their brains are up in their heads. The more you know.
To the Blessed,
A human is a vague and fragile thing of flimsy intelligence, too slow-moving, cold, vast, and fragile to earn any interest or concern beside the academic sort. It is a fortunate thing we have never met; they would be transparent and immovable glaciers to us, that melt so readily to the touch and burn so quickly at the sight that we would be hard-pressed to even observe them, let alone communicate. They have been documented at a distance, however, and books have been written detailed every fact to be known about them. There is not much to know. They are as round as the world. We did not intend to curse them.
From the beginning of their history to its end, they never knew peace.
In a cold corner of an outer galactic arm, a lonely gas giant followed an orbit that took it so near the sun that its outer layers foamed into green, while its moons grew so warm that one of them, the third, could blossom with life. But in the winter, the giant circled so far that it turned as yellow as death, and its third moon became cold enough for ice to cover its oceans, cold enough to freeze and wilt all life on its surface. During this season, most creatures on the world, including its people, would migrate to the oceans, transition to a cold-blooded body mode, and wait for spring beneath the ice, in darkness.
This way of life did not breed a gentle people. Their claws were sharp for gripping prey, skulls sloped for deflecting blows, and their forearms were armored in thick hide for catching the bites of predator fish. And they had a second smaller heart, down by their pelvis, which could keep them alive if the beating of their main heart were ever paused by great injury, or great stealth. Males and females were alike in the trials they faced, and were nigh indistinguishable except by smell, and that only during mating season. Their children could swim and stalk and eat from the day that they hatched, and were not nursed or fed but rather tamed, and protected.
It was a difficult life, more difficult perhaps than the lives that many races enjoy. But they met this life every year, and they matched their world in strength, blow for blow, so that their lives were often happy, and their culture often rich, as it still is today. They held honesty and heritage as high virtues, to mitigate springtime fighting over kingdoms abandoned in the fall. Their memories were long, to recall the lessons of the dead. Their hearts were brave, to apply those lessons. And they were careful stewards of nature, for nature would give them their food and their life, and nature would take it away.
But they were also aggressive, brash and proud, quick to speak and to fight and to hate. Peace came slowly, and war came quickly, and they made enemies of everyone they ever met. When the tribes from the North came, they made enemies of them. When the tribes of the south came, they made enemies of them. When the coal miners mined and the engine builders built, they made enemies of them too.
And when the wizard came to their world,
They made an enemy of it.
But as you know, the wizard's hate runs deep; deeper than death, and deeper than war. They sought to wage war against it, but the wizard made such war as they had never known, and took from them the one thing they didn't know they could lose.
The wizard took their world.
They've made other enemies since, in their long exile. They made enemies of the Machines, of the Vampires, of the Grey Reign, and perhaps one day, they will make enemies of us. Such is their way, and their curse. Each one carries a warrior heart inside it, which knows to punch and claw sharks to pieces for food, which remembers the fresh and bitter taste of its native ocean water, which expects a war each winter, which knows the full measure of what it has lost, that knows that it will never get it back, and bravely hopes that it will.
'Merfolk' is the name we gave them, when we found them. They hadn't had a name for themselves before that, as among the company of monsters and old gods, it had been enough to call themselves 'NĂĽrtausk', their word for 'People'. Perhaps calling them Merfolk is just a little more descriptive, but they have lost so much, it would be a shame if they lost the dignity of being called people, too. In any case, the pronunciation of the word has nowadays drifted to match its English spelling: 'Nortusk'.
From the beginning of their history to its end, they never knew peace.
(I'm still working on a good name for this universe, so that i can tag all the worldbuilding posts with it. For now the working title is #GreyStarTales)
Princess to a small band of merfolk in the vicinity of Mirror Lake. She's a gentle young spirit, quite unsuited for leadership or the dangers of war, but the crown carries many unfair burdens.
Merfolk fashion favors clothes which are loose across the chest and belly, since those are where the gills are, but always cover the upper foot-and-a-half of the tail, where the cloaca is. Clothes must function equally well in upright or quadruped stances, and are usually aerodynamic for underwater use as well. Formal wear like this dress would be the exception to that last point.
Merfolk are generally bigger, lumpier and more muscular than this. She's the exception to most cliches about their society.
HERE'S THE STORY SHE'S FROM! It's not a new one, apologies if you've already heard it before.
This next species is a quite unusual entry, yet most important to the history of things, so, as best as I am able, I will explain about the Treasured Ones, who are no more.
The Treasured were energetic nuclear beings, native to the surface layer of a lesser neutron star. Though such a place would doubtlessly be among the universe's most hostile environments to any other form of life, there existed a goldilocks zone at a certain surface depth, where a balance between radioactivity and strong-force interactions allowed raw neutrons to form together into highly complex nuclear molecules. And from those subatomic building blocks, a form of life was forged which operates at several magnitudes of smaller size and higher speed than other life in the universe. Although a individual from the Treasured could surpass a human in mass, complexity, and intelligence, the largest of their cells would be dwarfed by a helium atom, and generations of their families could live long and fulfilling lives, empires and ecosystems could rise and fall, all within mere hours by a human measure.
The steep density gradient of the trineutron sea required its native creatures to be nearly two-dimensional in their proportions. Many of them swam like fish through the viscous semi-fluid, though the Treasured, lacking as they were in any symmetry, propelled themselves using muscular cilia. Their energy came primarily from their electron fountain organ, which pumped its internal cavity down to lower pressure, allowing radiation from the planet to split loosely-bound neutrons into protons and electrons. The protons would stay in the cavity, while the electrons, being lighter, would be forced upward, and rain back down around the creature, generating an electrical current as they were flowed back through its nerves toward the fountain. Their sustenance for growth and healing came omnivorously; some hunted the larvae of the solar whales that floated the star's higher layers, while others anchored farms of accumulator polyps to the shores of magnetic volcanoes. They were asymmetric and hermaphroditic, and there is more to say about their biology, so much that it must wait for another time.
There is certainly more to be said about their culture and heritage and society, as even a short length of time for us contained great wealths of history for their dense and energetic lives, and they were known to have thousands of our years of history. Their knowledge of science, and their advancements and cultural wisdom were perhaps unmatched in the wider universe, but sadly, I can speak no more of such things, because the Treasured are no more.
Perhaps there was once a time when they knew nothing of other worlds, for the stars would appear utterly dim past the radioactive auroras of their perpetual day. But surely, as all societies do, they must have divined the nature of the universe, or found a way to see beyond their hellish atmosphere, to see up out of the immense depths of their glittering gravity well, and gaze upon cold infinity.
It follows that they would want to explore that infinity, would want, as all species eventually do, to leave their glittering paradise. But of course they could not, for their neutronium bodies would evaporate most violently if separated from their world, and 180 billion Gs is an impasse for any spaceflight, even that of the smallest probe. So their initial attempts were doubtlessly slow indeed; perhaps they used tractor beams to refine and assemble asteroids in orbit, perhaps they somehow constructed a mass driver around their world's frothing equator. Perhaps they gathered enough mass from a neighboring neutron star to build a ship that could support their life. Perhaps they mastered the secrets of gravity. I do not know. It has not been recorded. But what is known is that eventually they succeeded, and succeeded too in spreading, and colonizing many neutron stars in their home galaxy.
And we also know that somewhere along the line, they became proud.
And that pride sowed a seed of an idea, an idea for a will which could not die, a unity that could not be broken, a peace which could not end, and a soul which could not bow.
We know what happened on that day. We know what a third of them did, and became.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
âś“ Live Streamingâś“ Interactive Chatâś“ Private Showsâś“ HD Qualityâś“ Free Actions
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Elvish anatomy is laid out according to dominant-branch axial symmetry, a body plan which no Earth creatures share. In this symmetry, a creature consists of a number of sections branching out radially from a central point, with one branch being distinct from the others, and the digestive system running from the organism's center to the terminus of the distinct branch. By this symmetry, the elves are composed of 4 to 7 arms, with the distinct member being the head. In turn, the head branches into 3 to 8 brain/eye/ear/lung lobes, with a distinct mouth branch. The mouth branches into 2-9 chewing jaws and a distinct tongue, and the arms branch into 3-8 fingers, with a distinct thumb. Race, family, and birth defects all effect the number of branches at each point, and every non-dominant branch can regrow from injury.
They are remarkably humanoid in their reproductive methods, being sexually diamorphic, giving live birth, and nursing their young. Only difference being that their milk glands are located inside their wombs, which expand after birth to form a pouch. Children are born with a set of armored petals, to protect them from long falls before they're strong enough to climb trees on their own.
The elvish languages are almost completely visual, as their book lungs don't push air through their throats to make noise. They instead communicate via a complex system of colors and shapes, relayed through chromatophores in their faces (and arms, in some dialects). The only audible component of their language is clapping and teeth-clicking, which is socially equivalent to yelling or screaming, and is used exclusively for getting attention. The multiple openings in their eyes allow them to more easily focus on details in their periphery, which was primarily useful in foraging for food and keep an eye out for predators, but also helps in holding conversations.
In a long-ago forgotten age, the elves dwelt exclusively in the trees of their homeworld's tropical regions, subsisting on a diet of berries, fruit, and other high-sugar items. The warm, low-gravity, high-oxygen environment allowed for a great number of large, airborne predators, which used to prey upon them. However, the elves' stealth, mobility, and intelligence benefited them greatly in these trials, so that they drove the majority of such predators to extinction, and were able to live in peace. In the days before this peace, before they had conquered scarcity and age and all toil and allowed themselves to homogenize and languish, they were said to have been a proud race, and capable warriors.
Now, tens of thousands of years later, their homeworld and their origins are far behind them, they have evloved almost as far as their wondrous and strange technology, and have become something very different. Humans have only ever known them in their modern form, and that only by their furthest explorers, for their home is very distant. The pictures and biological notes here attempt to show them as they once were. We called them 'Elves' because their real name has no pronunciation, and 'The Greys' is a touch xenophobic.
(I'm still working on a good name for this universe, so that i can tag all the worldbuilding posts with it. For now the working title is #GreyStarTales)
It was on the morning of the forty-first of February, year fifty-three hundred and three, (Gladius Major 2 standard calendar,) when I first thought to think that the war was over.
“So I talked with Katie the other day.” Dunkalk broke the silence rather suddenly.
“Oh yeah?” I drug my eyes away from the deep layers of whirling abyss I’d been admiring in my coffee, and glanced up at my friend. “That’s cool. You two getting back together or what?”
“Huh? Oh, no, no, no. No.” He shook his head, and his eyes wandered out the window. “Y’know. Just catching up. Work, bills, the like. She’s a clerk at the naval office now. Nice salary… And besides, I mean, she’s gone and found another man. They’re engaged now. Wedding’s in June or something. Happy couple.”
“Ah.” I tried to offer my consolation. “That’s too bad.”
“Ha ha, yeah, you’d think so, but I’m not twisted up over it though.” Dunkalk wasn’t actually talking to me, and I didn’t know who he was talking to. Maybe the rising sun out the window. Maybe the buildings. Maybe his reflection. “I mean, I’m glad for her. It never really would’ve worked out between us, and… Hmm. You shoulda heard the way she talked about him… Happy couple.”
“Hmm.” I nodded wisely.
“And it’s not like she just found another jock with a taller shell than me, either.” Dunkalk waved a claw dismissively. “He’s another human. They’re fixing on starting a family.”
“Hmm.” I nodded wisely. The information finally worked its way from my ears to my brain, and I perked up with a frown. “Really? Katie? She never struck me as the homemaking type.”
“Yeah, well. You never knew her as anything beside a pilot.” Dunkalk scoffed.
“And you did?”
“No. That’s the funny part.” He plucked whimsically at a loose pebble of exoskeleton on his chin. “And maybe that’s why I’m not sad. Because she’s not a pilot anymore. She can… Be who she is. Be who she was. I don’t know. She’s got a life of her own now.”
“Huh.” My eyes drifted back down toward my coffee. It was very dark, deep down in the depths of that drink. Black like the void of outer space, but shiny, and the sun shone off my coffee just as it had shown off the canopy of my fighter. And there were bubbles in the coffee, faint and tiny bubbles around the edges like drones popping to life on my HUD, dodging around and peeling in closer, loosing flares and bullets and whatever other tools they had in their bellies, fighting for their lives just as desperately as I fought for mine, but I knew them better than they knew me, and my fighter was just a touch quicker, my aim a touch truer.
The bubbles popped.
“Yeah.” I agreed.
The war really was over.
“Eh.” Dunkalk shrugged. “Anyway, speaking of women, how’s Authia been doing?”
“Good.” I nodded. “She’s getting her numbers up in the simulator. But she needs a lot more cockpit time than she’s been getting.”
“Yep. Ain’t no substitute for experience.”
“Nope. Actually, we were gonna take the Skips up later today, as a matter of fact.”
“Cool.”
“You wanna come?”
“Naw. Tom and I were gonna hit the fair later. Blow some cash on the races.”
“Oh. Well that’s cool. Tell him I said to suck the lemon.”
“Copy.” Dunkalk downed the rest of his drink in a single swallow, rolled to his feet, and made for the door. “But uuhhh, hey Marshal, do we really have the money to spend on flight time? Deuterium prices being what they are, and the jobs ain’t coming.”
“They’ll come.” I finished my drink, and followed him. The air outside the diner was crisp and fresh, and smelled faintly of cherry blossoms and rocket exhaust. And compared to a year ago, the former was now much stronger, and the latter much fainter. “They’ll come.”
~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~
A Series-82 GDRL Combat Skip handles a lot differently than a single-engine propeller-driven crop duster. It had been invented several thousand years later, for that matter. But the machine war had been so large, and so long, and had taken so many things from so many people, that on a few of the poorer frontier planets, folks could still be found flying single-engine propeller-driven crop dusters, for lack of anything else with which to fight.
That was all she'd had to fight with, at least, when the machines first came. That little plane had carried her to safety when the deforestation units leveled her planet's western hemisphere. It had later carried a machine gun between its wheels when she'd tried to dent the endless lines of dust-belching excavators. It had protected her from that dust for years, as she patrolled between the lookout posts on the border. She'd been flying it when she first heard news of planetary liberation: the burning streaks and sonic booms of the Grand Liberation Armada reentering. She'd been flying it when she first saw a Skip in action. She'd been flying it when she first met Marshal.
She'd flown that same plane into enemy territory under the dust,carrying missiles to the auto-factories while Marshal and his team distracted the machines in the upper atmosphere. She'd ducked beneath that plane's canopy to shield her eyes from the blasts. She'd glided it home on fumes, landed it on a beach just short. She'd flown that plane until it was so old it was falling apart beneath her. She'd flown it right up until the day that the GLA was ready to move on, and Marshal got up the guts to ask her whether she wanted to join the team and go with them, and then, she left that little old plane back on her homeworld, and never saw it again.
Now here she was three years later, wearing a space age flight suit, holding a EM-shielded pressure helmet, looking out her apartment window toward the Series-82 Gravity-Drive-Rocket-Lift Combat Skipper parked outside the hangar, wondering if she could ever possibly master it in time to make herself useful in the war... At least, that's what she used to wonder. Before the war ended.
There was a clattering of straps and pressure seals coming down the hallway, which stopped outside her door and knocked. "Hey Authia, you all dressed up?" Marshal asked.
"Yep! Yep." She buckled the last few latches on her space suit, stood up from bed, and stepped out the door. "All ready?"
"I'm ready." He gave his helmet a little toss. "I had Briggs run the coolant already, so we should be good to launch as soon as we get the fields charged."
"Sweet. Charging to 30% today, right?"
"Right. And how much altitude is that?"
"Eight point four kilometers. You know I know the math."
"Yeah, I know."
It was a short walk from the apartments to the hangar, then a far longer walk to make it across the width of the hangar itself. Theirs weren't the only craft here, there were countless others: retired spacers kept little fusion dinghies here, civilian hobbyists with planes, loggers and teamsters with cargo helicopters, even a few other mercenaries stored Skips like theirs. But there weren't that many fighters out in the open anymore; they'd all been mothballed by now, wings folded, fields depleted and coolant drained, hoisted onto racks on the wall and wrapped in tarps, waiting for something; waiting for what? Waiting for another job? Waiting for the airshow? Waiting for another war? Or waiting for this last war to be covered over by enough years of nostalgia that the dated tech could be sold to collectors?
Most days, today being no exception, her own team's Skips were the only starfighters to be seen. And that was just as well to her, for they stood out. They gleamed. To her, they were the most beautiful machines on the world. A proud row of four stubby, angular knife-shapes, propped up on narrow landing legs, shining like shards of mirrors in the sunlight; the shape was for radar stealth, the shine for warding off lasers. The skips' g-drives were all completely internal, so the only openings on their surfaces were the cockpit canopy, the fusion-powered thermal rocket on the back, and the barrels of weapons. The light glinted slightly differently off the fins, flaps, and the texture of the reentry tiling on the belly, but the seams between were invisible.
Beautiful machines. Proud, sharp, polished, deadly; begging and pleading to be deadly again.
Briggs intercepted them about halfway across the tarmac."G'morning kids." She croaked, at which point she reached her limit for the number of polite things she could say per day, which was one. "You both reek." Smell was about the only one of her senses that battle and age hadn't damaged in some way, but as the ancient stories say, she'd been just as grumpy young.
"Morning Briggs!" Marshal smiled at her, as if by enough years of so doing he might change her. "How's it going?"
She ground her mandibles together with a truly awful noise. "Oh, I'm having the time of my life." She spat, which was her way of saying she was perfectly miserable, which was her way of saying that everything was going fine and normal. She fished a claw around in her bag and pulled out a pair of clipboards that she tossed toward the pilots. "Alright, same thing every week, same for both Skips. All 7 preflight safety pins have been removed and stowed for both craft, cryostats holding pressure at ten hundred, supercon stable, deuterium level ninety-five hundred, propellant flatzero so keep the intakes open and don't break atmo, fins locked in atmospheric position, G-fields charged along the laterals to 30%, launch brackets linked to pilot release, base power connected, inbound and outbound paths already cleared with the tower. All systems green, I hope you both crash and die."
"Copy that." Marshal glanced down the checklist and handed it back. "Did you replace that compressor bearing from last time?"
"Of course I did."
"You're awesome, Briggs."
"I know." She stated matter-of-factly, hefted her bags over her shoulder, and walked off to let them get on with their preflight. Authia had just begun checking pipes and running down a checklist of her own when she heard Briggs call over her shoulder. "Same time next week?"
Authia caught a hint of uncertainty in the question and glanced at Marshal, suddenly unsure how many 'next weeks' there would be.
"Eh." He closed an access panel and gave it a little pat, with no idea either. "One day at a time, how 'bout?"
"I tell myself the same thing." Briggs grumbled. "So am I gonna miss my show again next week or not?"
Marshal hoped so. He glanced at Authia. She hoped so too.
"Let's plan on it." He nodded.
Briggs slouched back to wherever she lived, while the pilots ran through their preflight, and birds sang over the empty runway.
~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~
It wasn't a big place, this town. A shallow valleyon the outskirts of a larger city's wreckage, little hills and little buildings around a little river, dangerously overpopulated by refugees from every land. A few years ago the valley had been half crime-ridden ghetto and half barb-wired staging grounds for the armada, but Marshal had seen it transform into quiet suburbs and golden farmland, as the apartments had grown and the law had come and the armada had left, when the war had ended. He and Authia's Skips hardly had time to raise gear before the place disappeared into the distance behind them, and all they could see now were the blooming wildflowers on the concrete shores of the crater lakes, where the bigger city used to stand. The control tower told them they were clear to begin maneuvers.
"North Heston" had been the name of the city. "Strawberry Bend" was the town that remained. Neither had ever felt much like home to Marshal, or to Authia, or maybe to any of them. Places of dust and scars and memories, weren't they? The war may have died, but it had bled and spat and urinated itself across all this land before it had, and the smell would remain. Strawberry Bend would not, could not forget anything in this lifetime, nor could any town on this planet, nor could countless other planets besides, nor for many lifetimes more.
The Skips had been running on their thermal rockets until now, with their noses angled steeply upward to let their little wings catch the air. Now that they'd reached a safe distance, Marshal signaled to Authia to spread out to 300 meters, so they could activate their gravity drives.
Ordinary gravity-powered vehicles, like shuttles and tugs and those little floating baseballs that kids have, need their drive coils to be continuously supplied with power from an onboard reactor or battery or something, then have the whole engine on a gimbal for steering. Fighters, however, don't have the luxury of extra weight for a reactor or a battery, and couldn't risk anything as complicated and fragile as a gimballed drive. So the Skips' cores were closed systems; no electricity in, no electricity out, no moving parts. They were built as a tangled mass of magnetic coils and bottles of exotics facing every which direction, each wired into each other in a way that allowed the pilot to shunt energy from one to the other. Also unlike most commercial g-drives, which are only designed to expend energy by pushing off of nearby matter, the Skip's were designed to rapidly swap to and from a reverse mode as well, where they recycle energy by 'braking'.
Marshal eased off the throttle on the thermal rocket, thumbed on the g-drive, and pulled his joystick upwards. Briggs had charged the lateral coils up to 30%, so that the drive had essentially been trying to pull him both left and right at the same time for this entire flight. As he touched the joystick, the engine dumped all the power from both into the upward coils. The ship's invisible 200-meter-wide gravity field finally decided on a direction, grabbed all the air around the ship, and forced it straight downwards, propelling the Skip straight upwards, at more than 40 Gs. A set of reverse-wired coils in the core acted enough like a compensator to keep him alive; he only felt about 2-3 Gs of it.
It carried him upwards about eight point four kilometers, at which point it ran out of energy, and he slowed to a hover. On his left, a half second behind, Authia bobbed up level, and fell in. They punched the rocket throttles and bore back downwards now, letting the movement of masses of air through the fields charged the cores back up.
At a kilometer altitude he hit the G-drive again, instantly slowing his descent and peeling off to the right, with her just behind him. From the ground, it would have looked like both of their ships hit an invisible midair wall, and rebounded like billiard balls.He turned the sticks this way and that now, and his Skip bounced around the sky chaotically, while the gravity fields climbed and kicked and churned up great currents of air, filling the sky with a thunderous 'whumping' noise whenever they collided. Authia matching him movement for movement, step for step, move for move, but always maybe just a touch slower, maybe at a slightly wrong angle. She finally slipped up and fell out of sync entirely, and careened off East, back toward a nearby crater.
Two bounces and a second laterand he was right behind her again. He thumbed the radio to tease her or offer some advice (he hadn't decided which by the time he opened his mouth,) but then realized too late that she'd been baiting him, as she bounced straight backwards. She passed below him within about 50 meters, close enough for her drive field to encompass not only a lot of air, but his Skip as well. With the enormous traction that offered, she shot off to the North at more than 60 Gs, propelling Marshal at about 20 Gs south.
...Back overland.
"Alright, alright. Nice one. Didn't see that coming." He steered himself back toward the 2-kilometer-wide crater lake, where she was currently hovering still.
It was a game the team played over the craters, something between dogfighting and sumo wrestling, trying to throw one another out of the 'ring'. She liked it better than maneuvers or actual combat sim because she was willy enough to win almost half the time. He'd been trying to ween her off it since it didn't teach actual useful skills and largely just wasted fuel and encouraged them toward increasingly risky almost-collisions. But how could he bring himself to say no, when it was really so fun, and he liked seeing her win as much as she did... And so what if her combat skills stayed a little dull?
Wasn't the war over?
He dived his Skip down close to the water's surface, so close that his drive grabbed traction on the liquid itself, and jerked him forward, left, and up behind her at 90 Gs. The airframe shuttered in the turbulence, and by the time he should have been in range of her, she had anticipated him, dived down and south toward the water, baiting him again. He bounced after her, taking the bait willingly, thinking about how he would bounce down at the last second, bouncing her up and breaking her traction with the water, then... Well, what if she tried the same thing? What if they both grabbed each other and the water and launched themselves downward to their dooms? Would they be able to realize before impact? What if only one of them realized it? Which would? And then what?
It was a dangerous game with no reward. He hesitated.
The hesitation was his loss, as he found himself thrown out of the ring again before he could even react, and heard her laughing over the radio.
He glanced down at the water and the hard ground. "Alright, no more games." He wondering how close he'd been to death, or whether he would ever know. "You need to practice your maneuvers."
"Aww." Her Skip turned in a lazy little roll. "Well can we buzz Glasstop Island along the way?"
"...Oh alright." He relented. "Fall in."
Their maneuvers took them away from the craters and the city, past the machine's old landing units and a few of the auto-factories that had been destroyed mid-assembly. Past the dead husks of fallen ships, friend and foe, finally down dozens of kilometers of coastline, past the mountains and the poisoned reefs, far and away until a parting in the clouds allowed them to see Glasstop Island, the city-sized potato-shaped rock floating in the sky. Well, not floating, exactly. More like it had been undergoing the slowest reentry in history, and had been doing so for two years now. Thirteen gravity tugs sat anchored comfortably to its bottom side, converting the massive energy of the asteroid's slow descent into electricity, enough to feed the industry of half the continent. Every hour, on the hour, the tugs would drop a full battery into the ocean below for recovery, and every day, high at noon, massive winches would lift a couple dozens batteries back up.
Glasstop Island currently floated 27 kilometers up, in the upper reaches of the mesosphere. That was no problem for the gentle, thousand-kilometer-wide fields of the tugs' drives, but the Skips' short-range G-drives couldn't get enough traction on the thin air to climb that high. And since their thermal engines were intaking air for propellant too, they just had no way up.
None, of course, besides the batteries.
It was almost the hour.
Authia hit the throttle and went vertical, and Marshal behind her. The rushing air charged their G-drive laterals up to 100%, but they didn't use them yet. Instead they kept the thermal rockets floored, as the air grew thinner and their hull temperature began to climb from the friction. At hypersonic speeds the air intakes began having problems, but by that point the rockets were beginning to overheat anyway, so they cut out the engines and drifted as high as they could. Their altitude read 19 Kilometers, still 8 short of Glasstop, when high above, they saw the battery release.
Their fingers twitched on their G-drive controls for a few minutes of anticipation, as the battery plummeted slowly down toward them. The pumps in their thermal engines sucked in a little air, enough for a quick burst, and that was all. As soon as they got a good estimate of the falling mass's trajectory, they fired that burst and coasted toward it. Marshal had gotten used to how big things could be in space, but Authia never had, and it always took her off-guard to see these things up close. Just this one battery was taller and wider than any of the apartment buildings in Strawberry Bend, bigger than some of the armada's ships, impossible to really conceive of, and seeing her Skip's shadow for scale didn't help.
They passed within spitting distance of the battery's underside, close enough for nearly the entirety of its dense material to be inside their fields. Soon as they reckoned it was, they fired their G-drives and bounced away from it at more than 120 Gs, nearly quenched their drive coils, straight upward toward Glasstop. The battery was falling a fraction of a percent faster below, while above, they'd achieved hypersonic speeds again all of a sudden. Their ships shuddered and almost glowed in the heat, but this time, they didn't slow to a stop until they were up past 27 kilometers, close enough to get traction on Glasstop itself.
They kept it slow now that they were here, and not by choice; their G-drives didn't have any energy besides what they got from their tiny braking approach of the island. So they bounced lazily around the island's underside, past the tugs and their huge domed drive cores, past the massive nets and pitons used to hold the island together, past the strange pairs of walking arms in charge of shuffling around the batteries, past the island's jagged skirt of rocky spires.
Then across the top, so smooth and shining after having been melted to glass by the asteroid's first few aerobraking passes. There were buildings up here under construction, apartments and houses and roads, fancy and exotic land already bought and paid for, by investors and benefactors anticipating the day when the island would finally be set down in the ocean. Ordinary folks like Marshal and Authia would never be allowed on this land when it finally did; there would be rich people living here then, in their mansions carved of glass, playing golf on smooth translucent hills, and drinking Champaign from goblets of stone just for the irony, but for now, Glasstop Island was still technically in space, and space was free.
They dropped gear and set down on the roof of some pretentious villa, and sat still for a moment in the silence, for no reason but to see the bizarre and breathtaking sight again: this flying crystal city luxuriating above the sky, resting on the backs of a baker's dozen steel Atlases whose grip was failing slowly enough to bless the world beneath with thunder, while all around, a green and gold horizon tinted by peaceful blue stretched out in an endless curve.
And from up here, it was hard to believe there had ever been war.
Marshal glanced over at Authia. Saw sunshine lighting her helmet yellow from behind, planetshine blue from the front, and saw her eyes and her mask and her hair beneath it. And he wondered if whether or not, even after all this time, he had ever known her as anything besides a pilot. And he wondered who she was, and who he was, and whether she ever wondered the same.
He saw her eyes wander across the horizon, saw her catch herself, and return her attention to her cockpit. "Alright." She radioed over. "Glasstop Island reached. What's the next waypoint?" And he knew this was correct of her to say, for she truly was a pilot, and so was he.
A forbidden hurt lingered always in his chest, a thing he could never say and never admit, even to himself, for it was too horrible: it was a longing for the war to return. Oh, how he missed the war, the action, the excitement, yes even the pain, because back then he knew who he was, and had friends who knew the same. "Let's take a dive through Philippian Gorge, then two laps around Springland Peak." He answered her, as he raised gear and bounced back over the edge of Glasstop, down toward the planet again. "And no daredevil moves this time, alright? You gotta be a precise. Gotta be 5 moves ahead. Like a computer. You got me?"
"I got you." She stopped her antics and went serious as she followed, for she really did want to be a pilot, and for the rest of the flight, she really did try.
~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~
"Marshal! Hey yo Marshal come in, would you pick up already!"
Marshal thumbed the radio over to isolate the ground frequencies. "Copy that Dunkalk, you're coming through loud and clear, over."
"Awesome, hey yeah, listen, Tom and I are at the fair, right, and we were in the livestock section, because, well I guess it doesn't matter why, but we were looking at the pigs, and there was this guy there who was selling these long little brown little piglets and he was selling them real cheap because he was tryin'a get rid of 'em because he signed on as a colonist but anyway we got talking and anyway we might have a JOB!"
"A job doing what, selling long brown piglets...?" Marshal frowned, with his attention momentarily split between Philipian Gorge and this nonsense gossip.
"Oh lick a battery Marshal, I mean it's a pilot job! Escort!" He could hear Dunkalk's mandibles clattering excitedly as he tried to string words together as fast as possible. "And boy are you gonna hate it, but you gotta answer fast though, like, you gotta give me an answer in like 100 seconds because he's literally on the phone with the colonial office right now to delay them making it public because then everybody and their mom is gonna be applying, so-"
"Wai-whoa hold on okay slow down!" He pulled the Skip hard back to a standstill hover, dumping all its momentum into the laterals. The cockpit became suddenly silent. "What's the job?!?". Authia's Skip circled his and jerked to a stop as well as she listened in. "Why will I hate it? What's the job?"
"Escort...! As... I said!" Dunkalk made a distinctly audible effort to make the words come out slower. "So! They're fixing to launch a colony toward one of the wiped worlds, it's like, 50,000 passengers, right? Tom, what did he say the pa-...? Yeah, 50,000. Fifty-grand folks signed up for this, and they launch in 9 days. They've got a colony together, habitats, fusion plant, underdrive tug, they even got authorization for a nuclear arsenal for O-prop and/or pirate-be-gone, all they need now is a couple mercs to run patrol, in case they run into any leftover machine nests. 8 month journey, 206lightyears, it's food, lodging, air included in the contract, it's a good deal. Easy money. Ee-saaayyy mon-naaayyy-"
"Yeah, okay, okay, but why would I hate it? You said I would hate it, this sounds great."
"You'll hate it, because the underdrive tug they're using is one of those military surplus type-35s. Nowadays they're so cheap that the whole thing costs less on resale than the fuel needed to make the return journey... So they're gassing it up for one-way. We ain't coming back, Marshal. We'd be colonists."
"Oh." He let go the controls and just sat and blinked, in stunned silence.
"But like, we're down to like 50 seconds to make a decision though man, like seriously right now right now this could be the deal of a lifetime, we'll retire as I dunno farmers or something, you down? I'm down."
"You're asking me to just leave my whole life behind in the next 50 second?!?" He frowned hard at the comm as if this would somehow impress Dunkalk with the seriousness of the matter.
"45, but yeah."
"You talk to Briggs and Poppa about this yet? If we don't got the whole team I-"
"Briggs'll do what whatever we tell her and Tom's on the phone with Poppa now uh- hey gimme that Tom." He heard the sound of Dunkalk snatching Tom's phone, and the speakers and earpieces of both phones being pressed together.
"Heeeey there Maaaarshal." Came the elderly, drawling voice of Poppa. "Saaaay did you hear about the little ol' gig Dunkalk just drummed up for us, hmmmm?"
"Yeah, yeah, I heard, what do you think about it? No take-backs on this one."
"Weeeell I think I need to finish this game..." The clack of a checker tile. "Then yeaaaah I'll be right there, gimme uhhhh five minutes I'm still in my pajamas I gotta find my flight suit..."
"But you think it's a good idea? You wouldn't mind a new world?"
"Listen sonny boy, if you think Ima chicken out a' this one you can come bite my aaaaaaaaaaa-"
Marshal flipped the comms off for just a moment to make a brave, if futile, attempt to think this through.He'd just started to try to start to get used to starting a civilian life, and now here it all was being uprooted again and lobbed onto some other planet he'd never heard of. Forever. He glanced out the cockpit at Authia, and thought what a tough place she'd been in without them here, but what if she didn't want to go?? And it occurred to him that perhaps the years had run him dry of things to tie him down, until now there was only her. "What do you think?" He mimed at her though the glass.
She looked around, contemplating. Then held up a thumb and nodded happily. It hadn't been a hard decision for her. He flipped the comms back on.
"Poppa, let's do it. Dunkalk, you there?"
"Yep, here!"
"We'll take the job. Tell the guy yes. We'll own this."
There were some scratching noises and some excited talking on the other end that he couldn't make out, then Dunkalk hollered "We got the job!"
