Rough draft, excerpt 10: "The Long Watch, volume I," part 2

2.

Hurry up and wait:  this is the order of the day for military personnel across the known universe.  Over just the past few days, he’d found himself rushed into service, standing in line, reporting for duty, skipping instantaneously across the galaxy, and studying volumes of galactic history.  None of it was physically taxing, but all of it was tedious, and therefore exhausting.  He had weeks and weeks of travel time to endure now, and no chance of finding any entertainment or other diversion along the way.  There were no media stations out here other than the commercial channels targeting the miners, and those were pretty drab:  lowbrow comedy shows, bland news programs and commercials.  Sobek could guess why, on the basis of the two moderately derogatory epithets Ibliss had used for the miner population inhabiting the asteroid field and Aten V’s moons.

Free will was something highly prized by the Orrkuttssh.  They certainly loved their military discipline and regimentation, and they were formal and rigid about traditions, but they nonetheless regarded themselves as individuals with individual will, with a chaotic, imaginative aggression that served them well in battle, and with a devotion to spirituality and creativity that distinguished them from most other sentient races.  To be a proper warrior, at least among the Orrk, one had to also be a monk and a poet.  The Orrkuttssh spoken language, for all its variety in dialect, was unlovely and without nuance, but its written form was a model for other races, in terms of expressivity and abstraction, and its character set, composed of representations of claw marks in various orientations and combinations, was—or had been, in ages past—a standard, in simplicity and elegance,  for communication throughout the Empire.  

But there were many other races without poetry, without dance, without even a martial culture.  It was generally true that to become a spacefaring race, or at least of noteworthy enough intelligence to be recruited into the citizenry of the empire, a species had to live atop the food chain of its own planet.  Intelligence and aggression go hand in hand; every member race in the empire, so far as he knew, was a top predator on its homeworld.  But intelligence and imagination don’t always go hand in hand, and many highly-intelligent species are utterly without music, without art, without entertainment of any kind other than the ritualized behaviors dictated to them by their own instincts.  And these races, by virtue of their unimaginative demands on existence, make ideal producers, consumers and cannon fodder for empires.  They just don’t make ideal captains of industry, inventors or military leaders.

“Brutes” were a kind of slave race, or more euphemistically, a work force, used throughout the empire for manual labor.  Their origin was unknown, but they were of a similar stature—and, reportedly, texture—to the mushroom men, and were widely assumed to have arisen on the same homeworld from a common ancestor.  They were Primate-like in shape, but quite stocky and evidently much stronger than the Greys, and tended toward a greenish or dark blue coloration.  They had little concern for recreation or enjoyment and were happy to work for as long as they were given food, shelter and instruction.  “Leggers” were another kind of beast altogether.  Whereas Brutes were essentially automatons in the employ of the empire, they at least had intelligence enough to receive complex instructions and act on their own in the absence of management.  Leggers were mindless arthropods, each bred to one of many differently-shaped castes, each optimized for work in a different environment.  Some had six legs; some eight; some ten or twenty.  Some had body armor that enabled them to work in extremely rarefied atmospheres; some could withstand temperatures that would melt the flesh of other animals.  They were useful in establishing terraforming or robotics plants in environments without organic infrastructure.  They usually formed the first wave of cheap labor in any new deep-space venture, to be gradually augmented and replaced by Brutes, then by the more genteel classes.  Like robots, they could be (and in fact had to be) programmed to perform their specified tasks; unlike most robots, they could reproduce and pass that programming on to their progeny.

Ibliss had implied that there were relatively few Orrkuttssh yet in the system, other than his own crew, and that the bulk of the labor force had as yet few needs other than sustenance, shelter and electrical power.  He’d further implied that he expected this to change in the future, but on the order of years or decades.  This didn’t jibe with what Sobek was reading while studying up on Aten III.  Although the planet was essentially a wildlife preserve, there were half a dozen minor population centers scattered over two continents, and a fairly sophisticated research center set up on one of the semi-detached landmasses scattered around the eastern rim of a shallow northern sea.  It seemed reasonable that mining revenue could support such populations, but not if the miners were mostly Brutes and Leggers.  If the cities down there were in fact resorts, they had to be catering to some rather moneyed interests.  Since there was no other life-friendly planet in this system, Sobek suspected that the cities weren’t resorts per se, but complete urban centers, supported not by sparse mining colonies half a system away, but by some kind of local industry.  If this were in fact the case, then the encyclopedias would have to be revised.  It would mean that Aten III, not Aten V and its moons, was the major population center of this system, and that the system was far more peopled and economically active than was currently suggested by the official press. 

The more he read about the planet, the more intrigued he became.  It was startlingly similar to his memories of homeworld, at least those memories that had been recently reinforced by printed documentation, and also to the adopted home occupied by his family in the centuries since.  He knew it to be larger than Erkhott had been, but both were in a similar temperature regime, similarly deluged with salty water, and similarly green and fertile.  Even better, Aten III was populated by reptiles.

It was a common conceit among the galaxy’s denizens that large brains could only evolve in a large carnivorous species, and then only in a warm-blooded one.  Sobek, as a landed scion of the original Orrkuttssh civilization, was a Keeper of Secrets from those days, and he knew much about that civilization that Ibliss had probably never heard.  He knew their civilization had not been built from the ground up, as had been those of many other races.  He knew that the sea-roamers had come ashore en masse, encountering the short-faced land-dwellers, already established there in the ruins of a much older civilization whose original members had long ago died out.  Little was known about this race, as few pictoral or audiovisual media had survived to depict their shape and sound and movements.  But their science and medicine had been recorded in long-lasting digital media, and over time, as the short-faces took up residence in their homes and began attempting to manipulate their rusting, decaying machines, some of it had been recovered, enough to reveal that they were large, terrestrial, bipedal, and warm-blooded. 

Once they’d achieved long-range space travel, it became clear to the Orrkuttssh that life could take many forms under many different sets of environmental conditions, and that their own world was but one island in a vast sea of organic diversity.  But on most worlds, life’s evolution didn’t seem to proceed much further than a fairly standard mix of sessile photosynthetic producers and motile, oxygen-breathing consumers; indeed, on the vast majority, it only got as far as thermosynthetic slime.  True intelligent life was exceedingly uncommon, and civilization was vanishingly rare, existing only when intelligent life had existed long enough to self-domesticate and discover certain scientific and engineering fundamentals, and not long enough to destroy itself or fall prey to natural global catastrophe.  As was the case with a hundred spacefaring civilizations before them, the Orrkuttssh were simultaneously humbled and conceited by their experience.  Conquest had never been in their nature before their own Great Land War; for millions of years, the long-faced and short-faced varieties lived a life of geographic and phylogenetic separation, each content in its own distinct environment.  But a series of geographic and climatic upheavals had forced the issue, first by compelling a vast population surge in the ocean-dwelling population, and then by closing their migration routes through the continents’ various straits.  For the first time in an eon, they were driven to migrate over land, and in so doing, came into increasingly frequent and violent conflict with those who’d taken up residence in the ancient stone cities there.

It wasn’t a war, at first; it was the attempted extermination of an invasive species.  The sea-dwellers had partially webbed digits on their four limbs, and were at a physical disadvantage in terms of developing and using manual technologies.  But they were at least as intelligent as the land-dwellers whose clever claws had learned to manufacture projectile weapons, traps, nets and poisons.  The mariners died in heaps along shores, in lagoons and on the trails, fighting back only with teeth and claws, with unbridled aggression, and with sheer numbers.  Eventually they captured enough weapons, and learned to teach enough others in their use, to be able to establish toeholds around the coasts and up into river deltas.  After that, a long siege set in, and war began in earnest, each side establishing a military culture, tactics, strategies, and diplomacy.  It was centuries before a balance was struck between the two competing populations, and longer still before a unified nation emerged, but by that time the wartime origin of both nascent cultures had cemented itself into their collective consciousness.  The unified dragon-culture of Erkhott was ultimately no more violent or expansionist than any other had ever been at various times—it was simply more disciplined and duty-oriented than most—but it took on a more fearsome reputation because of the rapidity with which that culture arose, and the vicious physical appearance they still maintained.  Most global top predators had arisen to that post via a slow evolutionary process that had de-emphasized natural armament in favor of expanding brain size; they were formidable not because of strength or claws or teeth but because of intelligence and fingers and fire.  The land-dragons and sea-dragons of his homeworld had found a shortcut to global ascendancy in the abandoned cities and technologies of the long-lost bipeds, and had not to undergo the kinds of gracilizations that their cosmic competitors did.  Unlike most of the so-called people with whom they’d come into contact in the following centuries—the soft-bodied beings collectively termed “lippers,” who modulated their speech with labile mouthparts, and “bugs,” comprising various other odd forms that relied on stridulation rather than a moving column of air to make speech—the People were still growlers:  still unmistakably animals, still unmistakably predatory, and still unmistakably lethal even without any tools whatsoever in hand.

Intelligence took many forms, in the seas, on land, in the trees, in the swamps and even drifting on the winds of the planets on which it could be found.  It was shaped like lizards, like primates, like cephalopods, and like insects.  It could be found with fingers, claws, tentacles, and flippers.

But civilizations, unvaryingly, were built by beings with hands.  The prevailing physical model for sentient beings was tetrapodal, warm-blooded, almost always bipedal, and always with an armored head containing a single large brain.  Those beings which developed science and technology sufficient to become spacefarers were unfailingly of this basic body plan.  The Slurghh and the Kasmani were definite exceptions to the warm-blooded-bipedal-tetrapod rule, but then, neither of those races had achieved space flight on their own.  Aside from the Orrkuttssh, almost all spacefarers were of the type (often derogatorily) referred to as “primates”:  physically unspecialized, bipedal, two-handed, hot-blooded, furry, large-brained, and lipped.  Even the mushroom men, who could supposedly adopt any shape they wanted, took this general form when appearing among other races, although they, being natural stridulators, weren’t as naturally lippy.  Ironic, Sobek thought, in that the Orrkuttssh word for “primate” implies “primitive.”  To be a primate is to be spectacularly undifferentiated, to lack the claws, jumping legs, whip tail, fins, wings and tentacles that other body plans find so essential.  To be a primate is to lack biophysical armament, to rely on technology for survival.  But at the same time, it is to sport a pair of lips and an air-column noisemaking apparatus that make for excellent modulated speech, and that seems to be the decisive advantage for those kinds of animals.  Indeed, there are few animals as naturally loud as a primate.

The Dragons of Erkhott, once a flourishing phylogenetic tree, now are represented only by the two surviving species of an old reptilian lineage which had all but gone extinct prior to the Great Land War.  Their science, once past its fitful and fragmented start, would eventually discover that their world had once been populated by warm-blooded bipeds, animals with a higher sustained body temperature and perhaps larger brains than they had, and this would in turn inform their mysticism, producing a concept of an ideal form toward which evolution tended.  Dragons have warmer blood than any other surviving reptiles on their planet, and were, at the time of their flight from terrestrial bondage, the most intelligent animals of any kind still living there.  To them, at least in Sobek’s day, the relationship between blood temperature and brain size was ironclad.  But they knew that the universe harbored warmer-blooded animals than them, and larger-brained.  This realization had fueled a collective inferiority complex and had helped propel them into another expansive phase, in which their reputation as conquerors was made.  They experienced conquest not as an expression of greed or hatred, but as an instinctive need to expand the old hunting and breeding grounds and to assert themselves among their cosmic peers.  It was the territorial imperative writ large, with civilized weaponry and domesticated numbers changing the game.  Psychologically, it was simply a migratory urge; they bore no ill-will to the worlds they occupied, or even to the occupants they ate.  Later, once their expansion had been brought to a halt by the collective efforts of the galaxy’s other civilizations, they accepted that they were just one of many intelligent species, that their incursions were traumatic and troublesome to various other long-established societies, and that they would have to curb their violence if they were to be accepted into an ongoing role as a member society of an emerging galactic civilization.  This fact was impressed on them with a minimum of recrimination; even having defeated them, or at least held them to stalemate, the galaxy’s primate population’s highest priority remained appeasement.  Some political urge, long-imposed by their collective governmental system, compelled them to eschew violence, even for punishment.  Still, in fighting the Dragons to a stalemate, they denied them resources demanded for further expansion, effectively containing and isolating them.

It was a hard situation for many to accept, but the Orrkuttssh are nothing if not adaptable.  Their demand for living space could be met by any of a thousand unpopulated swamp worlds; their hunger could be fed by livestock-culture and interstellar trade.  Some renegade units gathered their forces and headed out of known space, presumably to colonize and conquer elsewhere, and were never heard from again.  Some remained bound to the homeworld, defensive and xenophobic, their eventual descendants to witness the total loss of that world.  And some continued to fight, and were eventually hounded out of the vicinity or wiped out by the combined forces of the Lippers, who, while reticent and soft most of the time, could eventually be provoked to a truly hellish degree of destruction.  That was the only example they needed to set, the only war-crime punishment the situation merited.  The rest of the People adopted a less expansionist posture and began drawing down their reproductive rate, self-pacifying in response to constant exposure to other cultures.  As that first galactic Republic advanced, receded, and advanced again, they took on an important, even central role in its organization, and by the time their Age of Legends drew to a close, they formed the backbone of its military, police and peacekeeping forces.

This planet’s global ecosystem bore a striking resemblance to what Sobek remembered, and understood, of that of his homeworld Duat, itself a distant, smaller echo of the ancestral planet Erkhott.  There was one major difference:  on this planet, warm-blooded life was abundant, if not exactly dominant. 

The most widespread and numerous animals on Aten III, as it happened, were dragons.  Dragons of all shapes, all sizes, all walks of life.  Quadripedal, bipedal, long-necked, short-necked, finned, frilled, sailbacked, aquatic and terrestrial.  They scurried, scampered, climbed, ran, jumped, swam, crawled, lumbered and flew.  A rather astounding diversity, actually, compared to what was left on his homeworld.  But for all that, the dragons of this world were stupid.  There wasn’t a trace of civilization beyond the resort cities.  None of the natives could talk, build weapons or control fire.  They were dumb animals, as Sobek’s distant ancestors had been.  They were possibly tens of millions of years behind in their evolutionary process; or so said the encyclopedia.

But the warm-bloods were what got Sobek’s interest; on this planet, many families of animal, even the reptiles—or a substantial portion of them—had achieved warm-bloodedness of a kind that surpassed even the Dragons’ half-warmth.  There had been a religious mania, long ago in Sobek’s youth, over warm-bloodedness.  Many of his people had believed that they could hasten their population’s evolution toward an “ideal” state of intelligence by consuming warmer-blooded prey; they would take on the characteristics of that prey and expand on their potential for brain growth.  Sobek had never fallen for such spiritual fads.  Most of the warm-blooded prey animals he’d encountered, for all their crunch and juiciness, had smaller brains (as a ratio to body mass) than Orrkuttssh did, and no one seemed to be taking on that particular characteristic from their food.  Clearly there was more to brain size than mere blood temperature.  He didn’t disagree that metabolism might be a limiting factor in the size and degree of sophistication a brain could achieve; fast metabolism engendered fast growth, and if ontogeny could adapt to that growth in such a way as to favor brain growth at the expense of less-essential structures, then neonates could in theory be made to develop larger brains than their parents.  And there was paleontological evidence to the effect that once the ancestral population had achieved a modicum of warm-bloodedness, the mass and length of their fat-storing, oxygen-storing tails had become reduced, presumably as a tradeoff for brain growth.  However, the fact that Orrkuttssh gestated in eggs of a fixed size and shape meant that any accelerated growth could take place only in the context of the cytologic material deposited in those eggs before the shells formed, much prior to their being laid; there were physiological limits to how far that process could be pushed.  Either way, it wasn’t a question he had been very concerned with; it was one for the scientists and the philosophers.  But now, with a virtual smorgasbord of varmints of all colors and flavors before him, he found himself wondering about it.

It was true that therians tended to gestate their young in the absence of constricting shelled eggs, and this may have been the reason why some were able to grow such spectacular brains.  But as he understood it, a placental kind of embryogenesis was an effect, not a cause, of the hot-blooded metabolism.  The crucial physiological differences between a cold-blood and a warm-blood, on most of the planets where such a distinction had arisen, always came down to the skin and to the heart.  On Sobek’s homeworld, most reptiles had a two-chambered heart.  Modern Dragons, and their species’ presumed common ancestor, had two three-chambered hearts, but retained the plated, thick hide of the socket-toothed family of reptiles from which they’d descended.  Warm-blooded animals tended to have three- or four-chambered hearts, but they also had skins that were complex, multi-layered, hairy or feathery, and pocked with various kinds of glands.  On some worlds—such as Aten III, but not so far as he knew, on Erkhott—some of those glands were developed into feeding tubes for the young, a fact which explained their lips (an adaptation for creating suction against those tubes).  This was rather a revolting concept to Sobek, among most other carnivorous reptiles, but the biology was unmistakable:  most of the galaxy’s large-brained species were warm-blooded, and most of the civilized, space-capable species were skin-feeders or “mammals.”  It was remarkable how many times, and in how many varieties, a similar phylogenetic process had played out, world after world.  Life begins in oceans as single cells, develops multicellularity and sex, differentiates into wormlike, arthropodic, fishlike, and amphibian forms, along with vascular light-converting plants and scavenging fungi; and these collectively assault the land masses until dry-skinned reptiles with shelled eggs, air-breathing arthropods, and trees arise, at which point the diversification truly begins.  Across the galaxy, one can find cold-blooded reptiles, warm-blooded reptiles, furry reptiles, feathered reptiles, swimming reptiles, even flying reptiles.  Warm-blooded furry reptiles is usually as far as the process ever gets on any one planet before a comet or a supernova knocks the whole process back to the evolutionary (or worse, abiogenetic) stone age.  Some twenty percent of the galaxy’s civilized population was currently composed of species of this kind.  Much less common were those species who’d taken warm-bloodedness to the logical extreme and gestated their young in internal incubators, and less common still were those who provided liquid nourishment to their young, after birth, from their own bodies.  But those species’ populations had a way of becoming disproportionately intelligent, so on a per-capita basis, there were more of these mammalians currently residing as full citizens in the empire than there were reptiles.

Aside from these fairly standard morphotypes, the galaxy had a few exotics to exhibit, notably the arthropodic Kasmani and the cephalopodic Slurghh.  There were less-describable forms such as the Ashi, which resembled massive, mobile plant thorns (a large cone-shaped, pointed body with flexible stomach-foot, beneath a thin shell with apertures for pseudopods to be extended through), and the Rengali (flat, broad worms with four prehensile tentacles and a large central stalk, with sensory organs and a sucking mouth, rising from the back).  And then of course there were the weird, mushy beings of the Capstone civilization, whose God Machine currently ruled the empire.  There was nothing else even remotely like them, anywhere.  Their origin was still a mystery, although those who came into physical contact with them reported a distinctly spongy, or sometimes plant-like, texture and consistency.  No one had ever secured a sample of their genetic material…or if they had, they hadn’t managed to go public with it.  Whatever they were made of, it wasn’t meat.  You couldn’t even eat the bastards.

But there was only one non-furry reptilian species, still retaining ancestral amphibian traits including the basic lacertine body plan, residing in the galaxy, as full citizens, in a fully-industrialized condition.  And while their numbers had expanded enormously since discovering interstellar travel, they were now in decline, and greatly outnumbered by those warm-blooded tit-feeders, who seemed to grow and reproduce as fast as insects, quickly dominating food chains wherever they happened to arise.  For some Orrkuttssh, their participation in the galactic community was a source of pride in the exceptional nature of their achievement as a race:  the only “primitive” reptiles ever to master space travel.  To others, the rapid expansion of therian populations, and the degree to which their species dominated planetary systems, was a source of metabolism envy.

Cults arose over the concept of developing a mammalian metabolism.  Mammals were raised, studied, sacrificed, eaten.  Mammal skins were consumed, collected, decorated, revered.  Some individuals (members of non-warrior castes, those who weren’t prohibited from making unsanctioned cosmetic, anatomic or physiologic upgrades)  engaged in medical augmentation:  implants of skin glands, of hair, of metabolic accelerators.  Some had bones broken and reset to resemble the kinds of hip and shoulder girdle structures regarded as typically mammalian.  Some had modifications to the visible portions of the eyeball, to the musculature of the skull, to the face.  Some had lip implants, in mimicry of the facial apparatus that enabled therians to suck from skin-borne feeding glands.

Lips!  What had the universe come to when the youngsters were wearing lips!  It was the first time the Orrkuttssh had encountered counterculture, and Sobek wasn’t the only one at a loss.  Many adults of his generation believed that the cultural revolution was the first step in the unfortunate sequence of events that had led to the planet’s loss.  It couldn’t be doubted that the generational divide had weakened their civilization considerably, at least temporarily, but he had never found an objective and thorough enough history of that time to explain it in detail.  And the Capstone owned all history now.

He didn’t have a problem with the general idea of personal evolution, but he was proud to be a Dragon.  He didn’t think that personal improvement should require evolving into something else.  His identity—his genetic makeup, his shape, his size, his temperament—meant a lot to him, and he believed everybody else should feel the same way.  The Orrkuttssh civilization was singularly two-faced in some regards; the pillars and eaves of the Great Buildings of their government were adorned with gargoyles each exhibiting one long head and one short head.  To outsiders, they were Dragons; but among themselves, they were The People.  Three times in that history, their society had been torn by internal conflict or division, each a new national shame; they regarded the youth movement as no less a paroxysm than the Land War or the deadly schisms of the Primate Wars.

He pondered.  He read.  Weeks passed.  Sobek studied, got in shape, and sketched plans for his “inspection.”  He watched the stars pass his windows as the Talon slowly rotated in its solar heat-shedding roll.  They were pretty here, not as crowded and busy as the sky was closer to the galactic center, and with only a few visible nebulosities to break up the pattern.  The sky was almost uniformly black and glittery, except for the zodiacal band of the galaxy’s cross-section, which stood out magnificently.

The Talon had used chemical rockets to begin its journey at a reasonably high acceleration, but after an hour at full thrust had cut them and switched to ion drive, which would continue to accelerate the craft at a slow, sustainable and heat-manageable rate, letting Aten’s gravity do more of the work as the ship fell toward the center of the solar system.  Shortly before the halfway point in the transfer orbit, the ion drive’s thrust-vectoring nozzles reversed their direction, and the craft began subtly to slow.  The slowing was not initially perceptible, as the ion drive was also working against the acceleration of Aten itself.  Toward the end of the journey, Constrictor would be essentially stationary with respect to the star, letting the planet’s approaching orbital path cross his, at which point he’d fire the main thrusters to catch it and park in a new orbit.  The orbital insertion could all be done automatically, but that wasn’t Sobek’s style.  He was rather thrilled that he’d be meeting the planet head-on, as that would make for a bracing rush of deceleration when the time came, and another opportunity to sneer at danger face to face.  Subadults, bureaucrats and therians timed their orbital insertions for ease, for fuel economy, for safety.  Grown Dragons of the military culture fired their rockets manually, enduring bone-crushing g-forces with gritted, clacking teeth.

There had been artificial gravity aboard the Talon while it accelerated, but this would eventually lessen for several weeks, before the deceleration became palpable, at which point “up” would become “down” within the ship, gravity having effectively reversed itself.  Larger craft used rotating modules to implement artificial gravity, and the Greys were reported to be able to manufacture real gravity on demand, but smaller Orrkuttssh ships like the Talon had to make their own g-forces using old-fashioned engines, and to rely on adhesives, magnets and harnesses to make movement convenient.  Sobek would enjoy the relative novelty of weightlessness for a time, but soon would become impatient for the feel of the ground beneath his feet.

Deep space travel was boring and predictable.  There were hardly ever any good emergencies in deep space.  All the real fun took place in and around orbit.  Those who didn’t like piloting—or weren’t competent to pilot anything but a fully-automated transport—often spent those interminable weeks and months in suspended animation, via whatever technological counterparts to Sleep that their people used, in order to avoid the tedium and conserve life support resources.  Lazy flying was not something the Orrkuttssh did, as a matter of course and of cultural bias.  Unlike the chemically-induced forms of hibernation other races employed, true Sleep took days to properly enter and a day or more to properly emerge from, and was quite simply too big a pain in the tail to deal with for a short hop.

Rough draft, excerpt 9: "The Long Watch, volume I," part 1

“The Long Watch, vol I:  The Beginning”

by Ryan Patrick with Gerald Moore

1.

Sobek was pissed.  For those incapable of interpreting the body language of a large, hostile lizard, he helpfully projected a number of terrifying, hateful noises.  He was also moving quickly, mindful that fast-moving, reptilian predators tend to inspire a fleeing impulse in most other animals.  Everything within earshot was scrambling away from him, except for the underlings who were obliged to hold their posts.  These instead flattened themselves against the wall and clamped down on their involuntarily muscle responses as best they could.

      
In his language, the name of his people was pronounced as a low, rumbling growl punctuated by two sibilant consonant sounds.  His own name was pronounced as a hiss followed by a punctuated low roar, joined by a half-articulated guttural noise amplified by his throat resonator.  Most other species couldn’t understand their talk, which typically consisted a rapid sequence of finely-timed, clicking pulses modulating the drone of a steady, low-frequency bellow.  So those who were in Service, or otherwise exposed to aliens, wore in their armor pectoral amplifiers, or “chestboxes,” that translated it for beings with ordinary ears and projected it from a height appropriate for most other races, and transmitted alien speech translations to their own ears, via headset, or to their internal resonating cavities via electromagnetic induction.  The closest most species ever got to pronouncing the name of his people correctly was “Orrkuttssh.”  His name was most closely rendered, in his own language, as “Chwbkk.” 

      
Vowels aren’t so much pronounced, in Orrkuttssh, as implied.

      
The Orrkuttssh use a stiff tongue, rooted in the lower jaw, to approximate sounds that other races make using pursed lips, so their pronunciations necessarily differ from those of others.  All that they and most other species could agree upon regarding the name of his race was  that it had two fuzzy syllables.  No one knew the meaning of “Orrkuttssh”, or its origin; it was widely assumed that it meant “dragon,” as that was the informal name by which his race was known—the name they advertised--throughout the Empire.  Since Sobek was one of the Immortal Decorated, a respectful long hiss officially preceded that name, when addressed by most of the other Long-Faces; and the Short-Faces, except for those of exalted military rank, simply mispronounced it, using an equivalent term from their own dialect.  Only the highest-ranking Shorts found themselves in a position to address him directly by name, though; Long and Short had separate military hierarchies, actually entirely separate subcultures, generally suited to quite different purposes.  Other species’ languages, even those which acknowledged military ranks, had no honorifics specific to positions such as his, but he avoided contact with them anyway, in the interest of interspecies relations.  They tended to be terrified of Dragons up close, and he tended to salivate visibly when catching scent of them.  When dealing with aliens, he usually identified himself as a Captain, which was the common name of two military ranks he’d achieved, one in the Airmobile Infantry and one in the Stellar Navy; the two ranks differed greatly in magnitude, however, as measured by numbers of men under command, and he had in fact gone on to higher rank in the Infantry since achieving that designation.  As a title, it was generic-sounding enough, it conveyed a certain authority that even civilians could respond to, and it was less confusing than the labyrinthine arrangement of ranks and sub-ranks currently subdividing the Service under the Imperial bureaucracy.

      
His current utterance was a long, rambling grumble set against the rhythmic counterpoint of clacking teeth, which translated to a stream of profanity in the dialect of his homeworld.*  He was no less taciturn, normally, than any other mature male of his subspecies, but at the moment quite angry, and an angry Orrk is quite a garrulous reptile, full of hiss and vinegar.  During battle, the hulls of their ships fairly thrum with the bass rumble of archosaurian fury.  When massed on the ground, they can deliver, via grumbling and stomping, an unnerving seismic vibration well in advance of their movements, drawing immense psychological advantage from the instinctive panicked responses many animal species have to such phenomena as earthquakes and dragon teeth.  But military discipline keeps the rank and file relatively quiet most of the time when on duty.  It would simply otherwise be impossible to get anything done over the din.

The great benefit to being an Immortal Decorated is that you get to live essentially forever, or at least for as long as you can survive combat.  Once you’ve proven yourself Decorated by surviving a hundred battles, you gain periodic access to Sleep privileges.  Once you’ve proven yourself Immortal by surviving a thousand battles, your access becomes unlimited.  Hundreds of thousands of Decorated—both Orrk and Kuttssh—still slumber in technological Sleep even now, waiting to be awakened, as by the manpower needs of some future war, by contractual obligation to one’s descendants, or by the ceremonial requirements of the State.  Due to the natural regenerative capabilities of the Orrkuttssh, given a long enough Sleep, a warrior can emerge from the chamber more youthful than when interred.  But this can take hundreds or thousands of years of uninterrupted slumber, and its effectiveness depends on the age of the warrior.  So the downside to being an Immortal Decorated is that while your existence may span millions of years, you may well spend thousands of those in deep hibernation, trying to rejuvenate or at least break even on the aging process.  And you don’t often get much say in when you’re forcibly awakened.  When you are awake, it seems as though you’re always doing something Very Important, something at least Important enough to justify the vast expense of keeping your living corpse half-frozen in a perpetually-maintained Sleep chamber tucked away somewhere in your clan’s crypt.  You are being kept Perpetual by the largess of the State, and the State’s needs set your life’s alarm clock and curfew.  It’s just like being a soldier always has been, only you can’t look forward to retirement.  There is, however, one other perk of the award:  exclusivity and the privileges it accords.  Since the end of the Age of Legends, the upper limit to the number of Immortal has been kept fixed at one million.  In this current age, the Age of Domesticity, very, very few Dragons have earned the award.  A position must first be vacated by a death in battle…and battles are scarce nowadays.

*It had been said in the legendary days of his youth that when he was angry, sparks flew from his teeth.  A tooth-sparking fad had erupted among the young, in imitation of this; some encrusted their teeth with flint to enhance the effect.   When he attempted to distance himself from this silliness by having his teeth polished to a frictionless surface, he inadvertently sparked a tooth-polishing craze among the same youth.

Sobek was irate about his current circumstances.  His official interment contract stipulated that his wife  would always be Awakened when he was.  She was also Immortal, and together they were one of a handful of pair-bonded couples to be awarded a shared tomb.  To be revived in solitude was an indication of an unofficial Awakening.  As he’d initially suspected, the mission he had been Awakened for was clandestine, and solitary, and he’d been unretired with none of the usual ceremony or paperwork.  He’d been rushed into service with only a couple of weeks’ restoration activity, and he was still stiff in the bones and soft in the skin.  And he would have no time with his beloved.

In the old days, fifty thousand years or so ago, he might have eaten an underling or two, or at least bitten off a tail to satisfy his temper.  In these more civilized times, there was no relief he could sink his teeth into.  It was all counseling, relaxation exercises and team-building games these days.  After a solemn but token farewell to the sleeping Wadjet in his family crypt, he slipped into one of his less-armed, more-innocent looking personal transports and departed from his clan’s fiefdom, a warm jungle planet named Duat.  His immediate objective was the clan’s orbiting Transport platform, which would teleport his craft to the Hero’s Platform in orbit over the empire’s current planetary seat, Abob, or “Amun” as lip-bearing aliens pronounced it.  His personal weapons, his uniform and space suit, his tools and survival gear had been packed into crates and sent separately.

Minions were waiting for him at Abob, and he was rushed from the platform into a stealth transport before he could adjust to the temperature and humidity.  At least he was no longer piloting, so he was able to snack on some frozen therians.  It was his first meal in four hundred years.

Members of the Orrkuttssh state, as the Empire’s military, police, and security population, composed the bulk of the galaxy’s official state traffic, but the teleportation technology known commercially as Transport had been developed by their overlords, the Arch.  It had in fact been the technological advantage that made their dominion over this part of the galaxy possible.  (They rarely travelled much themselves any more, preferring to remain within their vast disk craft orbiting at cold distances from selected red stars; they had no homeworld, at least none known to still exist.)  There was also, among the other alien races, an immense commercial traffic, and a certain amount of scientific and leisure travel, all of which was taxed at Arch rates.  The Orrkuttssh didn’t often engage in frivolities like leisure travel.  Almost all their travel was on the government’s needs these days.  Ever since the loss of their original homeworld, the once-mighty warrior race had lost the pioneering spirit.  They had carved out the known regions of space, forging the earliest incarnation of the Empire, but since those days, or rather since the days in which the Arch wrested those regions from Orrkuttssh control, its volume had not expanded further.

Travelling officially had its advantages, in terms of cost and of priority, but was sometimes higher-profile than he cared for; travelling unofficially, while often more casual and private, meant sacrificing some of those advantages.  Clandestinely moving a Hero assumed by the masses to be long dead shouldn’t prove too difficult in a society whose members all looked more or less alike, unless that Hero’s battle scars are so distinctive that entire legend cycles have grown up around them in the centuries since they were inflicted.  Sobek’s iridescent black-and-dark-green neck, back fringe and tail bore piercings and gashes from the mandibles and pincers of Kasmani warriors and tank bugs, and his claws and some of his back plates bore the characteristic chatoyance of accumulated micro-fissures caused by all manner of traumatic stress, impact, and exposure to the vacuum of deep space.  It might be possible to conceal his identity by use of adornment and clothing, but the minions appeared to have made no such provision in their planning, and Sobek was still wearing the light-duty uniform he’d been Awakened in. It exposed his face, his tail, his neck and all his claws.  In any event, he was conspicuous by virtue of his size; he’d been large for an Orrk during the Age of Legends, and to judge by what he’d seen so far, the People seemed smaller these days.  The minions solved the problem by purchasing a vast, plain cloak and camouflaging Sobek as a chaplain on pilgrimage; he wouldn’t have to talk to anyone, and the degree to which he was temporally unconnected with this, the present world, might conceal itself as an ascetic’s detachment.  But traditionally, pilgrims forsook good accommodations, taking the lowest priority on all Transports.  So in order to complete the illusion, there was much waiting to accomplish.

It was said that it had taken millions of years for the Transport network to be set up, that ordinary rocketry and gravity propulsion and ion sails had to be used to move the platforms across many star systems to their final destinations.  It was also said that there was an upper limit to the range and accuracy of Transport, and that as the range increased, so did the number of particles missing from your body, teleported into parallel universes or lost to unpredictable interactions with other particles.  To mitigate physical damage,  Transport was used, at least under non-emergency conditions, over shorter distances whenever possible.  It was theoretically possible to cross a quarter of the galaxy in absolutely no time at all, but in practice it took a couple of dozen hops, and there was waiting to be done at each stop.

Rumors aside, repeated Transport definitely inflicted various traumas on the body.  The possibility of genetic mutation, of protein malformation and of metabolic disorder limited the willingness of most races to use the technology repeatedly.  Cancer-resistant species such as the Orrkuttssh seemed to be able to tolerate it quite well, for years or even centuries at a stretch, but they were extraordinary in that regard.  For a long-lived, slow-maturing species, they had adapted rather quickly to space travel and to permanent existence in high-radiation, low-gravity environments.  As a spacebound Orrkuttssh ages, he deposits crystalline layers of boron and carbon in his back plates, a biological response evidently unknown to his planetbound ancestors.  The longer an Orrkuttssh is in space, the thicker his built-in protection against ionizing radiation.  Several specimens, including Sobek, are known to have survived the total vacuum and cosmic ray environment of deep space for at least a few minutes by rolling their scaly backs and tails around their softer underbellies and holding breath.  Whatever damage they incur at the hands of cosmic rays, they seem to be able to deal with regeneratively; it is just another aspect of their ability to defy aging, an accidental marvel of preadaptation.  They are ideal for handling the rigors of a life in space.  Were it not for the Arch’ access to wide-scale, instantaneous Transport, their biological advantages might well have outweighed everyone else’s technological advantages in the race to dominate the galaxy.  They had in fact conquered a volume comprising nearly a sixty-four-hundredth of the galaxy’s total disk, and were solidifying their position by unifying the infrastructures  and governmental systems of their subject races, when the Arch swept in on their Transport technology, purportedly millions of years in the making, assisted by their caste of rabid warriors descended from the Khunjeee. These, as warlike as the Orrkuttssh, but warmer-blooded and fast-reproducing, were bred to serve the Arch, fanatically and without question.  Their biological advantages met and balanced those of Erkhott’s giant bipedal reptiles, and the Transport network proved to be the overwhelming technological advantage that turned the tide.  The little mushroom men peopling the Capstone—another unpronounceable name to many species, but just a simple growl—“Hrorngd”—for the Orrkuttssh—just sat back in their spacecraft and pushed buttons, and once the dust had cleared, the galaxy’s settled regions were theirs for the taking.

For political cartographic purposes, the Galaxy was defined as a vast spherical volume centered on its central black hole; this sphere was partitioned into two hemispheres, north and south, their boundary bisecting the central disk.  Each hemisphere was further divided into quarters, or quadrants, and each quadrant was divided into 800 concentric rings; each ring was divided, grid-fashion, into a varying number of sectors, with the outermost rings having the most.  The settled territories occupied some forty sectors, distributed across dozens of rings, mostly along one particular spiral arm.  What was living in the unexplored territories was still unknown; as of the time of the Capstone conquest, no radio signals or other indication of life had been detected from without, although the Khunjeee homeworld had to be out there somewhere, as did the undiscovered remnants of the Kasmani Empire.

It was widely assumed by recent generations that the Orrkuttssh homeworld had been lost during that war, the greatest conflict so far in the history of the Arch Empire.  It was known to those of Sobek’s generation that it had been lost much earlier, in one of the wars of conquest during which his people began their first expansion beyond their home system, and it was also known that there was a historical connection between those two wars.  But the galaxy’s official history now began with the coming of the Arch, and so the role his people had played in establishing the galaxy’s first massively multi-system civilization was consigned to just the memories of those who had lived through it. 

One thing the Orrk ilk had learned eons ago was that although conquest was a fine unifying force for civilization, and success a great motivator for personal achievement, under most conditions that a hostile universe could throw at you, survival was pretty much as good as it gets.  The name of his people was a contraction of the names of the two predominant races (or subspecies, to the bleeding gizzards who decried the word “race”) of his species, whom together occupied the planet’s top predator niche.  And much of the traditional trappings of their planet’s culture reflected this curious bifold nature; the public-facing elements were generally composed of some sort of fusion of their languages, while at the same time, each subsociety’s internal expressions exalted itself and derided the other.  The shared elements of their culture were all rooted in war, all initially forged as the short-faced drylanders savagely defended their continents against wave upon wave of long-faces, just emerging from the sea after millennia spent in a free-swimming, marine existence.  The former had already mastered fire, steam, zooculture, petrochemical energy and electricity, and were beginning to develop extensive overland transportation mechanisms; the latter had never manufactured or used tools of any kind, and had a rudimentary language more geared toward the vagaries of long-distance moonlight navigation and pack hunting than technology or accounting.  It was a brutal war of pure viciousness against overwhelming technological advantage, boiling eventually down to numbers:  the numbers that could be grown in a short time on land, fed by farms full of nutritious, fast-growing therians, versus the numbers that could be supported over many generations by the endless bounty of the sea.  It was a war of attrition, a war fought only to stalemate, a stalemate that even now, millions of years later, quietly simmered beneath the brows of long and short faces alike.  While outsiders were never given enough depth and detail in their understanding of the Orrk / Kuttssh cultural dynamic, it was fair to say that their society’s unifying principle was a near-even mix of mutual respect and hatred.  The original national symbol was a stylized representation of two forces, like swirling bodies of water pushing on opposing vanes of a water wheel.  Over several iterations of the advance and decline of their global civilization, the symbol was modified, increasingly simplified, eventually stylized as a disk composed of two curving water droplets, drawn in contrasting colors, circling a common center.  The philosophical implication (one which had at various times been expressed in various idioms as the national motto) was that all coherent motion arises from the friction between opposing forces.  It was a philosophy that all Orrkuttssh, however diverse in theology, ideology or economic sensibility, believed to at least some extent.

Sobek stepped off the Transport platform at Station Dread—“Thog” in the Orrkuttssh Common language—one of two orbiting platforms now under the command of the newly-minted Sub-Admiral Ibliss.  Although fearsome in offensive capability, neither platform was as fast or mobile as any attack craft in the fleet; they were designated as sub-strategic combat elements, designed to orbit planetary hotspots and provide defensive cover or offensive support for troops engaged in surface combat, bridging the logistical gap between purely-tactical and purely-strategic installations.  Like many career military Kuttssh, Ibliss had long ago chosen a career path that kept him in the sub-command zone; this had excluded him from many of the larger campaigns, and so his glory and rate of ascension had been limited, at least by comparison to career deep-space warriors such as Sobek.  But it afforded him greater commercial opportunity, by way of keeping him in an occupation administration role in frontier regions.  For decades he had overseen Terror Station— “Thok”—which had been engaged in providing security and police services for commercial interests mining iron and nickel in the asteroid field of Aten, a middle-aged standard white star near the galaxy’s rim, well beyond the Empire’s settled territory. 

This system was interesting for a number of reasons:  several vast gas planets, with radio, magnetic and gravitational energy to spare, and more hydrogen and simple hydrocarbons than an entire military fleet could dream of burning in a Saint’s lifetime; abundant rocky and iron-nickel asteroids for raw materials; a dense cloud of comets and microplanets with more water, in a frozen state, than their homeworld had in oceans.  And there was a particularly warm, swampy, green world nestled among the rocky planets, a world very much like their own world Erkhott had been when Sobek had been hatched.  There had been almost no expansion of the Empire in this direction for centuries; most new territories were long, slender arcs of space that curved generally inward, toward the galactic disk, where stellar density—and that of solid raw materials—was greater.  There was no population pressure here, only exploratory mining operations and scattered camps of pioneers trying to avoid the notice of State oversight.  There were resorts on the swamp planet where miners, security drones and camp followers could vacation, but they were afforded only a very tiny slice of the available terrain and ocean.  Most of the planet was designated “preserve”: officially a wildlife refuge unto itself, with small portions of the surface set aside as safe landing zones for victims of space accident or mining disaster.  But because of its rapidly-evolving ecosystem and impressive biodiversity, it was of great scientific interest, and therefore off-limits to permanent settlement except for scientific observers.  It was only one of three sites in the system where life was known to have existed, although it could be found in only a primitive state on an ice moon of Aten V and had died out entirely, perhaps a hundred million years ago, on Aten IV, coldest of the rocky planets.  Per a strict reading of Arch law (which barely applied out here anyway), all of the settlements, other than the scientific facilities, were illegal.

There was only light traffic to the swamp planet Aten III (known to the resort community as “Home,” and to the extended mining community as “Away” or “Blue Away.”).  Every few weeks or so a transport carrying furloughed work crews came in, and a few weeks later it came back out.  There was some cargo shipping to support the resorts and the scientific research station.  On something like an annual basis, some scientists left and new ones arrived.  It was scarcely enough transit to merit much imperial infrastructure, and as yet there had been no move to grace the system with a Transport platform.  All shipping was local; long-range, deep-space craft happened by only once every few decades.  Chemical rockets, gravity-assist launches, ion thrusters and solar sails were the commonly-available technologies this far out in the suburbs, and these operated on the order of months and years.  Some of the Arch personnel—Sobek thought of them as “mushroom men”—kept craft with more exotic propulsion methods, such as magnetic displacement and gravity repulsion, but these were never sold or traded to outsiders, and few knew their purposes or capabilities.  Some of the Hrorngd ships had been reported by reliable witnesses to simply disappear at will, as if they carried within built-in Transport stations and could teleport themselves.  However weak and inconsequential the Greys seemed on an individual basis, their technology was undeniably formidable, and in groups, where they could reinforce each others’ psionic capabilities, they were nigh invincible.  It was said of these little balloon-headed plant people that they could, with some combination of mind and machine, cloud the minds of any other species, that they could inflict fear and insanity at will.  Awe had been successfully used, by many thousands of societies, for many millions of years, to counter the potentially destructive power of curiosity, but the Capstone species had perfected the practice, made a complete science of it, and based their propaganda Machine on it.  They self-proclaimed to be just another brick in the Arch, no bigger or heavier than any other, but the galaxy’s dependence on their Transport made them the one without which the entire structure would collapse.  They were all-benevolent, to all appearances—and according to all their public relations campaigns—but all-feared nonetheless.

Their spacecraft technology was clearly more advanced than anything used by most of the other member races, and as such constituted the only security and property concerns of the Arch in this system.  In the backwaters, they expended vast amounts of technology in order to conceal vast amounts of technology, maintaining a vast amount of outer territory in order to maintain a vast interior territory.  In more heavily-peopled regions, the mystique engendered by the near-total, godlike degree of separation they normally imposed between themselves and their member nations was enough, under most circumstances, to secure their property.  The closer the proximity of any one being to a Grey, the greater the sense—the certainty—that his mind was being constantly monitored for any sign of larcenous or treasonous intent.

This was an unspoiled region, one with unlimited development potential, but it was one the Greys did not inhabit, being perhaps too distant from their seats of power.  There was little in the way of protective technology here, and little in the way of mystique.  With none of their own population to support, the Arch had never bothered with building any of their own habitat here, nor any of a general-purpose nature.  It had all been left to the commercial interests and whatever settlers they’d been able to attract, and was therefore piecemeal, patchy and species-specific.

But there was also the Game.  And the Game generated wealth.  Eventually the Empire would take notice of this wealth and begin civilizing the region.  There would be success and prosperity to be made when that happened, but of course there was also plenty to be made before then, of the kind that would inevitably stop when law and order were imposed.  Those making the money now, and who stayed on too long, would become the examples the Empire later made by way of imposing law and order.

Sobek was able to peruse a few outdated newsmagazines along the way, and asked his traveling minions strategic questions, and so began to piece together some of the geopolitical situation.  There had been recent reports of violent criminal activity—piracy—in the vicinity, and because the Empire had been more concerned with probing its way toward the galactic center than with pacifying the frayed edges of frontier out here, they had simply given Ibliss a field promotion and an additional Fear platform and tasked him with straightening it out himself.  Evidently Ibliss had then used his connections to coerce the current leadership of Sobek’s clan to Awaken him for some covert operations.  This was, he suspected, a mission that would neither arouse the Empire’s notice nor merit its support should things go awry.  In that event, he could expect to be disavowed and abandoned.

Now fresh and alert, having rested and eaten, he had succeeded in obtaining a clean utility uniform, and had applied his standard customizations thereto.  (Whatever else a soldier might be, he is always also a tinker and a tailor.)  His instructions, now opened and read, were to pilot the new platform from Dragonmouth IX, the Kuttssh military outpost near the young blue star Kaa, and deliver it to Ibliss at one of the gravitational equilibrium points along the orbit of the largest gas giant, Aten V.  From there, presumably, Ibliss would deploy it to orbit around Aten III, and Sobek would receive his next instructions. 

Sobek’s first major military citation, awarded after the conclusion of the first campaign of the Kasmani Insurrection, had been for his skill in pacifying a planet with a mixed xenomorph population, and he figured that factored into his selection for this mission.  Most of his subsequent military victories had been after pitched battles with Kasmani fleets in deep space, but he doubted that experience would be relevant here.  He was pretty sure there would be some crowd control involved.

He gave himself a few minutes to breathe and adjust.  Each way station in the military network, as was the case in the diplomatic, commercial and recreational transportation networks, had a staged environmental transition section for allowing travelers to adapt to prevailing local conditions; each stage was equipped to provide a multitude of varying condition sets, to allow travelers to preadapt to any number of latitudes and climate regimes that might be found on any number of the network’s serviced planetary bodies.  Sobek’s instructions had been to preadapt to a moist subtropical climate in a warm-zone planetary belt for a white-to-yellowish sun.  This suggested he wouldn’t be spending much time rock-hopping in the asteroid belt. 

Standing felt good.  Three solid points of contact:  two paddle-webbed, clawed feet and one heavy tail.  Using muscle was good for a Sleep-addled soul.  He stood and continued to breathe deeply.  The minutes stretched into hours.  He meditated.  Then he slept.  He remained motionless. 

The only way to move a craft the size of a Fear station from star to star in useful time, without a Transport station large enough for the whole thing to sit on, is to use a spacetime bridge.  It is expensive, troublesome, and scary, but it isn’t teleportation, so you can be assured of having all your body parts when you arrive…if you succeed in departing in the first place.  It does require a great deal more preparation and coordination than teleportation.  The sending station has to contact the destination in realtime, which can’t be done using anything as slow as radio.  A low-powered version of Transport, TransNet, is used to request the connection instantaneously, by teleporting the communication itself, and to send timing signals that synchronize the clocks and flatten the gravitational gradient across the link.  At the receiving end, gravitational and temporal corrections are applied, based on those timings, in order to minimize problems imposed by the lack of absolute simultaneity across such vast regions of space.  Then at a predetermined interval, both stations create miniature gravitational singularities, which are used to generate the hyperspatial bridge between them. Then it’s a simple matter of accelerating the craft along a precisely-determined course skimming a singularity’s event horizon, and hoping the bridge remains stable for the fractions of a second required to enter the bridge.  The energy requirements are immense, not least to provide adequate radiation shielding for the black hole; to rapidly accelerate an object the size of a Fear platform requires more energy than the Orrkuttssh have ever been able to harness.  They use a high-throughput source of what they suspect to be vacuum energy, purchased from the Capstone Greys,  to power their bridge generators; and because these generators require the creation of temporary free singularities, they can only be operated in safe zones far away from habitable systems.  The exception to this rule is their own military settlements, most of which are also serviced by Transport platforms.  The People have never been particularly averse to living near danger.  They regard a chronic absence of danger as potentially fatal to their long-term survival prospects, and they choose settlements on the fringes of the most dangerous, radiation-heavy regions:  nebulae, globular clusters, stellar nurseries.  Dragons are drawn to the places where the galaxy guards her fiercest beauty.

Sobek, as Dread’s interim commander, had the privilege of helming it out of dock and onto the programmed course, whereupon the autopilot would ordinarily take over and careen it toward the singularity.  But he did not like that kind of piloting; he likened it to the stationkeeping maneuvers of an unmanned satellite.  A Fear station is capable of slow interplanetary flight, but most, deployed in planetary orbit above an occupied planet, rarely fire thrusters other than their orbital correction jets.  Sobek liked flying.  He liked speed.  He liked acceleration.  He left the housekeeping to the minions, whenever the opportunity arose, and put his claws on a joystick.

He remained inert, disciplining himself, cycling between meditation and alertness, as the station was moved onto course.  Bridge travel was not instantaneous; Kaa was about 30 astronomical years from Aten, so the trip could be expected to take several hours from his point of view.  During that time, the station’s minions would be modifying one of its Talon transports to his weapons-heavy specifications.  He preferred to always have one heavy lifter that could really fight its way into or out of a scrap.  The Talon was ordinarily used to land ground troops and equipment on a planet, and normally carried light armament.  Sobek’s required customizations turned it into a flying garrison, or alternately a flying jail, one that could, say, attack a hardened prison camp, stage a breakout, and escape to space with minimal outward damage.  The more powerful weaponry and added armor made the craft much heavier than originally engineered, and altered its flight characteristics in a way that made piloting it rather a dark art.  And it guzzled fuel on takeoff, rendering impractical any attempt to escape quickly to anything other than low orbit without launch assist.  But it could be managed by a single experienced pilot, which suited those like Sobek who liked flying alone.

The atmosphere on Ibliss’ platform was cooler and dryer than the climate settings on Dread had been. The Sub-Admiral evidently spent little to no time on the swamp planet, and kept conditions within a cold desert climatic regime similar to those experienced by many of the mining facilities.  Sobek had to surmise that either he spent a lot of time on those facilities, or hosted mining personnel on Terror fairly frequently.  A Fear platform was equipped and roomy enough to take on additional personnel, such as refugee populations and even entire garrisons, for reasonably short layovers.  They weren’t ordinarily particularly comfortable accommodations, but Sobek supposed it was possible, with a bit of capital outlay, to modify the quarters and common areas to be less spartan and more friendly to civilians.  He guessed that the public areas had a warmer, lusher climate than what he’d be able to experience while on board.

Sobek had never played the Game.  He had heard of it, but he considered the Orrkuttssh, or at least his own clan, to be above such things.  Constant decadence was the one thing corrupt aristocrats and ignorant subjects had in common; soldiers had the good sense to blow off steam episodically, when on leave, and live a disciplined, focused life the rest of the time.

He had no conception of how corruption and vice are drawn to frontier regions, nor why Aten III was such an attractive prospect for Gamers.  Wealth had never been an end goal for himself or any of his recent ancestors; competition, the Fight, was his reason for living.  Wealth is just one convenient means of measuring success in the Fight.  But so are rank promotion and military glory, and he regarded these as altogether superior in the warrior’s way of  life.  Sobek saw the pursuit of wealth as a lesser pursuit, one for those incapable of truly fighting their way through life the way Nature intended:  a pursuit for civilians and bureaucrats.  And although his contempt for civilians was altogether more benign and indulgent than his contempt for soldiers of fortune, it shared with that, and with his contempt of Gamers, one principle.  Nature plays only one game.  And survival is the only way to win.  To exceed that mandate, in the opinions of many duty-minded Dragons, is to needlessly contribute to the hastening of the universe’s ultimate heat death.

Sobek reported to the landing deck officer, having used the Talon Constrictor to transfer from Dread to Terror.  Ibliss’ deck crews busied themselves with securing, refueling and checking up on the Talon; the deck officer gave Sobek a passcard and told him to report to the officer of the day.  Ibliss, it seemed, was not available, and would summon Sobek when a meeting was possible.  In the meanwhile, he should check in to temporary quarters and avail himself of the cafeteria, gymnasium and pool to regain his flexibility and conditioning.

He grew impatient that first day, but was happy for the relative relaxation his private quarters afforded him.  By the second day he was feeling quite invigorated, even mildly euphoric, and found himself altogether more patient and accepting.  It was on his third day of residence on Terror that the summons arrived, in the form of a minion tasked with escorting Sobek to the bridge.  At the bridge, he found instead an executive officer who told him Ibliss could be found in his office-cum-observation deck, which adjoined the bridge via a private elevator.  The minion was dismissed, and Sobek granted access to the reception area.  His suspicions were increasingly confirmed by the circumstances of this visit.  Ibliss wanted to meet in a covert manner, away from the ship’s log and the video recording devices on the bridge.  Presumably the deck officer and crew were either under orders to ignore everything they witnessed, or had been bribed to look the other way…even if, as he assumed, they had no idea who he was. 

He rang the office door by presenting his passcard to the scanner.  After a moment, the door chimed and flashed and opened.  Sobek stepped into the presence of his new, erstwhile commander.  “Reporting as ordered,” he grumbled loudly.  The office was dimly lit and had an expansive curved desk.  The dramatically high-backed chair on the other side of the desk was turned away, toward the observation port, which filled the rear wall of the office.  He could hear Ibliss’ breathing, and surmised that the commander was simply extracting all available pomp from the available meeting time.  Then he caught the faint whiff of skin polish and realized he was also hearing the faint whine of a grooming buffer.  Ibliss was primping, shining his scales.  After a few seconds of waiting at the position of Attention—three points of contact with the floor, and the tail smartly curved so the tip pointed up at a half-right angle—the chair rotated to face the desk, bringing the short face of a Kuttssh land-dweller into view.

“Ssssobek,” said the commander.  Short-faces had funny ways of pronouncing things, and it seemed that accents and dialects had a way of changing while he was Sleeping the centuries away.  He expected to have to strain to understand things for a while until his ears and brain caught up with the times.

“Commander,” replied the soldier.  Ibliss was neither in Sobek’s natural chain of command, nor was he on official active duty, so he did not reply formally with the otherwise obligatory “sir.”  His participation in this mission was a matter of contractual obligation, not of ordinary service.  

And there was rarely much military formality, he knew, in an off-the-books mission.  It was one of the perks of clandestine work.

“I trust you have acclimated well?”

“I have, Commander.  Pardon, but have we previously met?”

“No, Captain.”  As expected, Ibliss, a Naval officer, was addressing him by his Naval rank, not his officially higher Infantry rank.  “But my clan has had some history with yours in the days since you first fought, and your deeds, although increasingly a well-kept secret of the Empire, are of great renown among their descendants.  I have need for someone with your skill and resolve.”  It wasn’t strictly necessary to use Sobek’s rank in address, given the informal nature of the mission.  A reminder of past glories, perhaps, to pander to his sense of duty.  Or an ostentatious familiarity to put him at ease.

“What you’re saying is that some of my recent relatives owe something to you, or to your recent relatives.”  Blood debt was an acceptable reason for a secret Awakening, or at least it had been when Sobek last went under.  Not that he much cared for the notion, but it was something you agreed to when you clawed your imprint onto the bottom line.

“Something like that, yes.  I’m not Ancient like you, as it happens.  The debt took place before I was hatched, and now I’m just a party to it, same as yourself.”

“I understand.”  The sins of the sons are visited on the father.  Tradition is tradition.

“You probably do, at least to a point.  But the universe has changed since you were last abroad. The influence of the Orrkuttssh nation is waning.  The little grrorrknn”—this was a military euphemism roughly meaning mushroom monkeys—“have been squeezing everybody else out of the Empire’s inner apparatus.  We maintain a military presence at Kaa, and we still play a role on the frontier, but we are fewer and more thinly distributed than at any point in your previous lives.  To fill the population gap, Ancients are being Awakened in greater numbers than ever before, at any time since the days of the first Crypts.  For the first time in perhaps a hundred thousand years, there are more Orrkuttssh awake than asleep.  It may become necessary for everyone to come alive again and make a stand to preserve our races.  We are becoming rare.  Many debts are being called in, and many new kinships are being forged.  You and I are simply caught up in the flow of events.”

“I see.  I must make a study of history and current events.”  Ibliss was laying the drama on rather thick, he thought, but somehow he found it rather thrilling.  This was how you pushed a Warrior’s buttons.

“You should.  Much won’t be relevant to the task at hand, but in the context of the greater arc trending around us, yes, you will find it of great interest.  You will have time to get caught up while en route to your objective.”

“Are you suggesting that we may have to make a play against the Empire?”  That would be one very good reason for keeping the mission under wraps.  An Orrkuttssh warrior was always a loyal servant of the state, except when that loyalty came into conflict with his loyalty to his species.  According to the official history, though, that had never happened.

“No, of course not.  We may eventually have to find our destiny outside the Empire; who knows what the future might bring?  Right now, as always, we’re just scenting the air.”  This was an old military euphemism for determining as to whether Fight or Flight is the best course of action; in peacetime, it had little import, and could translate to simply maintaining constant vigilance. “But the Empire is always desirous of territory, and before it brings an official presence to my little corner of the universe, it wants to see how well I can produce order.”

“And my mission serves that end.”

“Tangentially.  Currently there is no Imperial presence here other than this isolated Sub-Command.  In the absence of a civilian government, power rests in the region’s ranking military command, whose commander is de-facto Governor until any formal organization takes place to supersede it.  In order to consolidate our position in this system, I need to clean it up.  There is little law and order on the inner planets, and there is an economic cost to anarchy.  If we are to have a society here on the fringes, even a temporary society, we must either eliminate the criminal element, or drive it out.”  Sobek wasn’t sure he agreed with this.  If more Orrkuttssh were coming here, then there should be ample dragonpower and equipment to root out pirates when they arrived.  Most likely, Ibliss had a still more covert agenda that he was not sharing in full, but it was of course his privilege to withhold intelligence as he saw fit.  If there were others working on this mission from different angles, information would necessarily be compartmentalized.

Ibliss paused, ostensibly to fidget with his desktop keyboard, but more probably to let this sink in.  Sobek resisted the urge to clack his teeth together; he was still at the position of Attention.  But the situation was becoming interesting enough to engage his warrior’s sense of righteousness.  Instilling frontier justice wasn’t exactly full-scale warfare, but it did at least sound as though he’d get to stage an invasion of sorts.

Ibliss finished tapping on his keyboard and picked up a small personal data device, presumably having just finished programming it.  He stood up.  “At ease, Sobek.”  The other relaxed somewhat, enough to lean forward and grasp the PDD profferred in Ibliss’ three-clawed hand.  “I would like you to take a Talon to Aten III.  Most of the planet is reserved for biological preserve, but it has some settlements that provide recreational services to the miners here.  There is some property crime, but a bigger concern to me is ecoterrorism.  My sources inform me that in the towns, and possibly within the major biological research site, there are cells whose purpose is to undermine and destroy any semblance of civilization on the planet.  Their agenda is to keep the planet entirely wild.  It evidently has some religious significance to them.  The planet itself is of little strategic or commercial value at the moment, but that could change if the mining operations here expand.  Currently the workforce is quite small, mostly Brutes and Leggers and robots, but it could grow to include softer-bodied bureaucrats  and salesmen one day, and they’ll need someplace warm and wet.  So presumably the terrorists’ aim is to deny the use of the planet, should it eventually be cleared for settlement.  The mission parameters are on the PDD, and navigation data will be transferred to your ship.  And I will have your library computer updated with history and news reports.  The journey will take several months by rocket, and you will be able to use the time to study and get into shape.”

“So I am to perform an antiterrorism operation?  By myself?”

“Nothing so elaborate, to begin with.  First, you are to infiltrate the biological research center by posing as an investigator in search of pirates.  I will have documents prepared that will identify you as an agent of the Empire, on hand to inspect the premises for safety and security issues, under the guise of regional welfare policy.  You will use your time there to identify potential terrorist threats, and to examine the facility’s early-warning and defensive systems in case I have to land a garrison there in support of your mission.  We plan to launch investigations into the various resort towns as well.  While you are en route, I will be performing modifications to this station, and once those are complete, I will be moving my entire command to Aten III as well.  If counterinsurgency operations are required at that point, my entire garrison will be at your disposal.  Until that time, it is crucial that the terrorists not be aware that Dread is coming.  If you can prevent them from detecting my approach, I will settle into orbit at the libration point on the far side of their moon.  Depending on the situation, you may remain on the planet, as a one-man toehold, or you may opt to take your Talon back into orbit.  Once you’ve identified any threats, you will have a great deal of discretion as to how to proceed.  However,  Dread will not be in a position to follow, much less to monitor or assist, for as long as three months.  You will have to be self-sufficient during that time.  I suggest that your inspection be thorough and convincing.  The cover that we have provided for you in the documentation is a piracy investigation.  You may familiarize yourself with the details en route.”  He was subtly implying that security systems and sensor arrays had no doubt undergone substantial improvement since his initial training on the subject.

Sobek inserted the PDD into a slot on his body armor, interfacing it with his personal systems and instantly uploading the mission profile to his ship.  “Understood.  I will make way as soon as maintenance is complete on the Talon.”

“There is no great hurry, Sobek.  You may stay a night or two and enjoy the amenities here, if you wish.  I’ve done some hosting of civilians and dignitaries, and Terror has some pleasures to offer.”

“No, thank you, Commander.  I’m too soft already from disuse.  I’ll enjoy life when the mission is over.”

“As you wish, Sobek.  But while you’re there, do take some time to take in the wonder of that world.  There’s something about it that I think will appeal to your sense of mystery.  And also be sure to check out the moon.  There’s something about it, too.  I’ll include coordinates to a known-good landing site there, to use as a rally point.”

Sobek nodded, came to Attention, and then backed a few steps away from the desk before wheeling back toward the door.  Orrk had longer tails than Kuttssh, and Sobek needed more clearance than Ibliss’ office had been designed for.

He did wander a bit through the station, looking for the athletic facilities.  He could use some limbering up, and thought a good long swim would be just the thing.  While poking through the public areas, he got some indication of the size and scope of the “amenities.”  The station had, by way of a substantially-retasked cargo hold, a rather enormous hotel section, with game rooms, theaters, shops and an arena, which was currently secured, closed against all but high-ranking guests.  He got his swim in, but ignored the other facilities.  This was not the time for distractions.

Now that he could bring himself to feel there was a legitimate purpose to his being here, he was no longer particularly unhappy to be Awake, just lonesome without Wadjet.  He would have to wake her up and show her around the new universe when he got back.  They hadn’t spent much time together in more than four hundred years.

February 20, 1997: Professor Richard King

“So I think we should start radiation right away.  The chemotherapy can wait a few weeks, I think.  You’ll want time to prepare for that.”

“You didn’t really answer my question.  I asked you what kind of cancer this is.  What kind of tumor I have.”

The oncologist hemmed and hawed.  “It’s difficult to say, Richard.  The cells I’ve biopsied are odd.  They have an odd appearance, I mean.  They’ve mutated in a way that makes it difficult to identify the source organ.  They look like nothing else so much as stem cells.  If I had to make a guess as to what they are, I’d say they were embryonic stem cells that failed to differentiate during your embryonic growth, and have been floating around in your bloodstream since they formed.  But I should be able to find out more from the culture.”

King considered the many times he’d found lumps in his arms and legs—lipomas, inflamed lymph nodes—and never acted on them.  He had to know whether that weird cyst in his left foot, removed a year ago in a drunken fit of self-surgery, had done this to him.  He did not have any samples of that tissue left to show the oncologist or his regular physician, who had referred him to this guy after finding something weird in his bloodstream.

“Is it possible that breaking a cyst wall might introduce tumor cells, or stem cells, into the bloodstream?  If I, for instance, received a deep puncture that punched through one?”

“Why, have you?  I don’t know, Richard, but I don’t think so.  Depending on the kind of cyst, and how long it had been there, any cells walled off inside it should be dead.  Most dermoid cysts are entirely benign, and I don’t believe I’ve encountered any instances of, say, a sebaceous cyst including cancerous cells.  At least living cancerous cells.  Now, we know some tumors have a viral cause, so if there were any cancer-causing viruses or infected cells in that cyst, then they might have gotten into your system, yes.  Is there a particular cyst you’re worried about?”

“There’s one on my foot.  What’s left of one, anyway.  Could you maybe take a biopsy from there, too?”

“Sure, we could do that.  How long ago did the cyst…er, get punctured?”

“About a year, I think.”

“Hmm.  A virus doesn’t sound very plausible in that case.  I would expect much longer-term exposure, with a dormant period in which the virus remained latent, in unassembled form, within cells, where they could interfere with genetic transcription and duplication.  That's how you make cancer.  It's not from the disease itself, because it doesn't emerge from cells that are killed by the virus replicating itself.  It emerges from the cells that survive the infection, and they survive the infection by assimilating the virus' DNA without expressing any of its cell-damaging features.  Since the virus' shell proteins aren't manufactured by the cell, or are manufactured incompletely, then the virus won't burst out of the cell, and the cell may survive long enough to divide.  If it does, and the virus has been incorporated into its nuclear DNA, then each division will carry the same insertion mutations to both daughter cells.  If any of the inserted DNA masks important nuclear genes, or interferes with the production of vital enzymes, the cell will not operate correctly, may be prone to higher energy consumption in order to overcome that inefficiency and survive, and may not be properly inhibited in reproducing.  Anyway, I'm over-explaining.  The point is that any virus that could spread pervasively enough to cause tumors within a year’s time would probably have made you very sick in the process.  More likely, we're dealing with something that you've had a long time and simply came to regard as an aspect of your health, rather than an illness.  You say you’ve felt fine this entire time?”

He’d been fit as a fiddle, for an old man, for well over a year.  Except for those unpleasant lumps now and then.  “I haven’t been sick a day since.”  Since excising an unidentifiable foreign growth from his skin.  “What about fungi?”

The doc shrugged.  “Wouldn’t be unheard-of, I guess.  You might be a candidate for candidiasis.”  He seemed pleased with this verbal juxtaposition.  “We can do an antibody test for that.  Why this sudden interest, though?  Had somebody suggested this possibility to you before?  Or are you just agonizing over what you might have done to bring your illness about?”

King stood up, regarding the consult as finished.  “You know how it is, Doc.  A smoker with lung cancer can blame his habit.  An IV drug user with AIDS can blame his habit.  All I’ve got to blame is Act of God, and if God could do this to me, I might not be able to expect Him to stand by me while I face it.”

The doc’s pleased expression gave way to blankness, and this pleased King.  Never pass on an opportunity to share one’s inner blackness, he thought.  But if he were going to die of cancer, it wouldn’t be God he held responsible for it.  But the guilty would be just as difficult as God to hold accountable for this.  Gods they might as well be.

November 17, 1994: Ryan Patrick, to Gerald Moore

While singing along to Roger Waters:  “’Christ, it’s freezing inside, the veteran cried—‘“

“He’s saying ‘veteran’ there? I always thought he was saying ‘Bedouin.’“

“Dude, why would he be saying ‘Bedouin?’”