Sandra Tanaka watched with amusement as her husband pounded away at the rockfish. Akito was single minded in his determination to get the precious morsel imprisoned by the animal’s two centimeter thick bony plates. Even steamed to the point where human food animals would have their meat falling off the bone, the stubborn things barely budged under Akito’s force.

In the time she had spent living alongside Ti-Zan, Sandra had discovered much about her hosts. For the more abstract, cultural elements that make up an intelligent species, they were very similar to humans, albeit vastly more collectivist in outlook than even the most communal of human cultures. Like humans, they generally heavily favored permanent, monogamous relationships between mating pairs.

Also like humans they had traditional roles the two sexes typically filled (though their monoculturalism makes it difficult to say how much of it is nature and how much of it is nurture). Much like humans, things like hunting, building, working a trade, and the hard sciences were traditionally regarded as “things men do”, whereas home life, organizing social functions, child care, and the soft sciences tended to be regarded as “things women do.” And, again, like humans they have begun to reexamine these roles in the wake of their industrial revolution.

These things have their roots in generalized physical and behavioral differences between the sexes. On paper, the differences between the sexes are quite similar between humans and zani, with males generally having natural physical advantages and females natural advantages in social and emotional intelligence. However, they’re only similar on the surface level. Whereas human males are on average just generally physically stronger and more athletically capable than their opposites, zani males aren’t actually much more strong or athletic than zani females. They are, however, covered in armored plating.

The plates weren’t just for show. Zani men were durable. Sandra had seen a man get hit by a car one day while walking through the capital city streets with Akito. The man had put a zani-shaped dent in the front of the car, and had then immediately gotten up and proceeded to argue with the driver over who was at fault, his only injury a nasty bruise. In comparison, a zani woman was about as durable as a human woman. In many ways, this made the physical gap between the sexes even more pronounced than in humans, despite the difference in actual physical ability being less pronounced. A Zani woman who got into a fistfight with a man would achieve nothing except broken finger bones and an annoyed look from her opponent, and the only reason she’d be unscathed was because zani men took the adage that “you don’t hit a girl” very seriously. When a single punch from your armored fist can crack a woman’s skull open, you kind of have to.

This durability was an adaptation to the harsh and dangerous land they inhabited. Animals on Hent tended to be either gigantic and ravenous or tiny and hyper-efficient. Ti-Zan was a rare example of a medium sized animal inhabiting the planet. The countless tiny animals lived within the intricate network of small streams, brooks, and ponds that were shielded from the eternal sunlight by the vast array of above ground caves and crags that characterized the Zani homeland.

They lived incredibly short lives, only surviving long enough to mate and lay eggs, before dying and flowing out of the caves and into the streams and rivers, where they were feasted upon by fungus. The megafauna in turn came to the valley to feast on this fungus (or to feast on other megafauna, depending on the species). However, eventually the corpses would run out, and so the megafauna would return to the night side of Hent to hibernate and birth the young they’d breed during their feast. Then the small organisms would hatch, breed, and die, and the cycle would repeat.

This cycle of life was the closest thing the tidally locked Hent had to a season. Ti-Zan had found its niche in hunting the megafauna during the fertile season. The males would go out during those times and hunt creatures the size of buildings that could fling them around like they were a toy. When they managed to get a few good kills, they would carve up the carcasses and bring them back to their burrows, where the best meat would be eaten and everything else would be ground up into mushroom food. While they were gone, the females would do their best to grow food anywhere and everywhere they could in the worthless soil of Hent while the natural fertilizer was still around. The males who survived the hunts had been those tough enough to survive being beaten to smithereens by a kick from a leviathan, or quick and agile enough to avoid being hit in the first place.

These males then returned home with their kills and bred with the females who had had metabolisms efficient enough to survive the lean times in between leviathan hunts and mushroom harvests. Countless generations with these selection pressures had bred men that could get run over by a car and have the worst injury they suffer be to their pride, and women that could go months without significant food. It had also produced a culture that was highly organized and strictly coordinated. When you lived on a world that gave you so little room for error, you either worked together or you starved.

Sandra took her eyes off of Akito and looked at her own meal. It was a soup made from mushroom stock, which then had mushrooms added, and was then served with a side of mushrooms. She sighed. Sandra had learned and experienced much of Ti-Zan during her stay on their world. There was much to be admired about the hardy, sociable, and dutiful people that lived here. However, there was one thing that Sandra completely, unequivocally despised about them, and that was their cuisine.

To put it more bluntly: Zani food sucked.

The appalling quality of Hent’s soil meant that even in the zani homeland, the most fertile region on the planet, plant analogues struggled to grow. The food chain was sustained by hyper-efficient algae which permeated everything in the rivers and streams, and by chemosynthetic organisms that feasted on Hent’s countless spewing geothermal vents deep in within the water-filled caves.

Terrestrial plants which lived in the soil on Hent were small, nutritionally bankrupt, and so difficult to digest that the only reason they didn’t completely blanket the surface was because Hent’s worthless soil starved them before they could. What few decent-sized plants existed were relentlessly cultivated by Ti-Zan. Not to eat, but to burn for fuel, or make tools. “Wood” was a foreign concept to the species. The best they had was particularly sturdy stems or reeds.

There was exactly one plant species that Ti-Zan had managed to cultivate into something resembling edibility, and diced up bits of one of its many breeds were currently floating in Sandra’s soup. It was a plant that grew short and straight in every Zani garden in the land. It was kind of like broccoli, except it was all stem, no flower, and had even less flavor. But it was also the only nutritious plant consistently available to the species, so it was in everything. There were no cereal grains, beans, fruits, or other edible plants of any consequence available to the species.

The closest equivalents to those within Zani cuisine was their staple “crop” and the foundation of their civilization: mushrooms. Through millennia of selective breeding, Ti-Zan had forged several species of mushroom with fruits the size of small bread loaves that would sprout dozens of times, given that they were provided with enough nutrients. The meat of leviathans was a secondary objective of the hunts. The real goal was to grind the beast up into feed for Ti-Zan’s precious, precious mushrooms.

The huge beasts were lean, tough, stringy, and almost inedibly gamey. More like eating a predator than a proper human meat animal. The best cuts were carved up into steaks and feasted on at the end of the hunting season, and absolutely everything else was fed to the mushrooms. This huge influx of nutrients would cause the organisms to explode with fruit, which would be eaten on the spot, roasted, fried, cooked into a soup or stew, dried, or (more recently) frozen. It was a super food, nutritious, hearty. The foundation of Zani civilization.

Which is why it was a shame that it was so god-forsakenly bland.

Sandra poked at the bits of it floating in her soup, growing increasingly disheartened with every prod. It was like a spongy, stringy potato, with none of the flavor. But, combined with the strange broccoli stem plants, it was one of the only consistent sources of food in the harsh environment of Hent. And, in one of the many merciless and cruel ironies of the stars, the two foods were some of the only organisms on Hent that humans could actually digest.

Zan “spiced up” their cuisine (not to imply that they have many substantial seasonings other than salt) with, well…anything and everything. The uncountable species of tiny fish, amphibians, reptiles, and other crawlies that existed in their brief life cycles before the fertile times would be caught and eaten by Zan at any and every opportunity. If it wasn’t poisonous, it went in the pot, more for their vitamin and mineral content than any real calorie gain.

Unfortunately, these little beasts were almost universally inedible to a human. What little flesh existed on them was intermingled with forests of bones, spines, armored plates (an apparently very popular adaptation on Hent), chitin, guts, and other things that would rip a human’s insides up. If you carved up every ounce of flesh from one of the critters and ground it up, you could get about a third of a chicken nugget’s worth of meat that a human could eat. Even hosts as gracious as the Zan were not willing to go to all that trouble for their guests when there was perfectly edible mushrooms and broccoli stems they could feed them instead.

With their gizzards to grind the bones and spines and chitin into powder, and their ruthlessly efficient stomachs, the Zan could scarf down the creepy crawlies with little in the way of digestive trouble. Unfortunately for humans, the small animals were the only non-mushroom or broccoli part of zani cuisine that was readily available. So, the two humans with their soft teeth and weak tummies had simply had to deal with it once their rations had run out.

Once, after one of their many long consultation meetings with a board of zani scientists, the department director had treated the human couple to a leviathan steak dinner. Sandra had been practically frothing at the mouth at the prospect of tasting another flavor for the first time in weeks. Then the steaks had arrived, and Sandra was painfully reminded that the forces of irony were the true power in the universe. There are two kinds of leviathans: the ones that eat fungus, and the ones that eat other leviathans. They are also almost all muscle, some of the leanest meat imaginable. They are also loaded to the brim with pathogens, so the only safe way to eat a leviathan steak is well-done. Because, of course it was.

Yet, despite it having the flavor of panther meat and the texture and chewability of shoe leather, Sandra had still devoured it like a ravenous predator (which, all things considered, is exactly what she was). However, her stomach had voiced its displeasure at having to digest the disagreeable meat not long after the dinner, and so Leviathan was off the menu. Sandra and Akito were back to square one, it had seemed.

However, irony had finally thrown them a bone. A very thick, armor-like bone. It seems that, ironically, the most suitable animal on Hent for human consumption was the one encased in a suit of armor. The rockfish had a very strange body plan. It was essentially a long, delicious hunk of muscle puppeteering a gigantic bony shell. This meaty center would stew in its own juices if you boiled the whole animal. After that, if you were willing to spend twenty minutes cracking the damned thing open, you’d be treated to about one and a half bites worth of the most delicious fried fish you could ever hope to eat. It was the only thing in this accursed world that had a meaningful amount of fat in it, and boy oh boy did it show.

Akito gave a muted little whoop of joy as the stupid fish finally cracked wide open, revealing the precious morsel hidden within. He pulled it out tenderly with his finger, smiling wide.

“Akito, my love, are you planning to share with your darling wife?” Sandra said, fluttering her eyelashes exaggeratedly and speaking in a jokingly seductive voice.

The man eyed the piece of fish, then eyed his wife.

“You’ve got your own.”

Sandra smiled. “Yes, but you’re going to do the gentlemanly thing and not make me have to crack it open myself, right?” She said, joking.

Mostly.

Akito looked at the fish, seemingly in deep thought. Then he popped it into his mouth, stone faced and looking his wife in the eye as he chewed. Sandra gasped in horror and sighed dramatically.

“It really is true. Chivalry is dead and buried.”

Akito swallowed and rolled his eyes. “Give me the damn fish.”

Sandra put her hand over her chest. “Be still my heart. Keep it up, dear. I can feel a swoon coming on.”

Akito shook his head as he worked at the stubborn creature, unable to keep himself from smiling in amusement. Sandra smiled, sneaking a glance at her fellow restaurant patrons, almost all of whom immediately looked away, embarrassed by their own gawking. Sandra couldn’t help but quietly chuckle at that. They really needn’t have been embarrassed. Were the situation reversed, and it was a zani couple inside of what passes for a human restaurant these days, there’s no way that they’d have been left to eat in peace like Sandra and Akito had been. The hypothetical zani couple would likely have been distracted by the crowd plying them with a million questions, or just standing around openly gawking.

Zan took their manners seriously. The humans being fascinating alien visitors from the most distant stars didn’t make it any less rude to interrupt their meal.

Sandra watched Akito as he worked away at the rockfish.

“So, do you think the new ships will make a difference?” she asked.

Akito shrugged, not stopping his work. “Against another lone interceptor, sure. Between the missile pods and these new ships, they should be able to pull off a win. But it’s a moot point, because if the Diln come back, it will be with a raiding party. Maybe even a proper invasion fleet, if we’re unlucky.”

Sandra grimaced at the thought. Ti-Zan had been at peace for centuries, they had no army to speak of. The closest thing to a martial tradition that they possessed were their professional hunters, but - much to her and Akito’s astonishment - they still used black powder in their rifles. It was almost anachronistic compared to the otherwise quite advanced zani civilization. With no wars to fight, weapons development had been stagnant, even in the middle of an industrial revolution. Most zani firearms were just the comically large elephant guns that they used to hunt leviathans. They suited the job just fine, so why try to reinvent the wheel? Even just a single battalion of Diln heavy infantry would probably be enough to topple the zani government if they managed to land troops. Which was why it was so important that they didn’t.

Though it was largely unspoken between the couple, they were both starting to lose hope of ever seeing Janea and Lance again, nevermind seeing any help they might bring. It was becoming increasingly likely that they’d be stuck on this planet, possibly for life. So, when the zani government had enquired with their alien advisors on the feasibility of constructing warships of their own, Sandra hadn’t dismissed them out of hand like she would have normally.

The zani had rapidly thrown together some zani-versions of several old fashioned human designs for reusable chemical rockets. They were building them with astonishing speed. Ti-Zan’s government may seem like a bureaucratic nightmare to an outside observer, but when the government was of one mind like it currently was, the raw productivity put other civilizations to shame. Although it could be argued that this productivity was mainly because their homeworld, for once, gave them an upper hand.

Hent, being tidally locked, did not spin on its axis. So, there was no day or night within the ring of habitable land wrapping around the prime meridian. This meant that civilization could run around the clock, without any reduction in efficiency that would normally come on a “night” shift. So, zani construction crews had effectively been working non-stop since the humans had revealed themselves. They had been expanding Ti-Zan’s fledgling space industry to meet the enormous spike in demand. Dozens of workshops and laboratories and fuel refineries and countless other crucial pieces of infrastructure had already been built, and were busy spewing out the materials and products necessary to catapult the young species into the space age, and countless more were still under construction.

If there was any civilization that could go from experimenting with primitive satellites to throwing together an honest-to-god space warship within barely a year’s notice, it was this one. Of that, Sandra was confident. Still, going from simple chemical rockets to the atomic warships they were planning was like going from canoes to guided missile destroyers. For starters, all a rocket really needed in theory was some combustible gasses and solar panels, and it was set. Warships needed, at minimum, a nuclear fission reactor (which didn’t exactly grow on trees) and a primary thruster that had both a high thrust and a high specific impulse. In other words, a torch drive. Doing that without fusion power was like trying to make an airplane that ran on a coal-fire steam engine. They hadn’t gotten beyond the workshopping phase.

Akito gave a little whoop of triumph, and presented his wife with the exposed morsel of meat. She popped it into her mouth and chewed as slowly as she could manage. When she was done, she smiled at him.

To her surprise, her phone rang. A small pang of worry went through her. She’d rigged up a point-to-point radio system that work with her and Akito’s mobiles, but the zani never called her for the fun of it. Had something gone wrong with the prototype? She answered.

“This is Sandra.”

“A small fleet of starships has appeared in the system, presumably from Dark Space. Get to mission control as soon as possible.”

“On our way. Ships detected in the system, we’re going to mission control.” Akito’s question died on his lips as his wife’s second sentence answered it for him.

He waved over the waiter.

—

Sandra and Akito rushed into the mission control center, greeting a very nervous Mediator and several agents from the Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of Rocket Science. The Mediator greeted the human pair.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice. We were hesitant to attempt contact without your presence.”

Sandra nodded. “Mediator. May I see the sensor data?”

He nodded, and directed her to the console. She scrutinized the data for a long moment.

“With these emissions, I’m reasonably confident there aren’t any military ships among them. Don’t get too relieved yet, it could still be privateers. We should hail them, but get ready to activate the defense satellites if you have to.”

The zani communications array sent out a hail on the standard frequency taught to them by the humans. Somewhat to Sandra’s surprise, there was an immediate response and a channel was opened.

“I say again, this is Lance Kristiansen, please respond.”

Sandra’s heart swelled as she heard the voice of a friend she’d thought dead.

“Lance, we read you, what in the stars happened to you two?”

There was a pause. “Allie got ambushed by slavers. Janea and Ti-Ro were captured, I was left for dead. Long story short, we turned things around and started a revolt. We’ve got a transport ship full of freed slaves and a bunch of salvaged escort ships. Janea and Ti-Ro went on in one of those ships to continue the mission while I brought everyone back here.”

That was way too much shocking information for Sandra to process now, so she shoved it aside in her mind and focused on the much more pressing question.

“Not that I’m unhappy to see you, but why would you bring them back here?”

The Mediator chimed in. “Yes, I’m wondering that too. Would it not be preferable to just return the rescued captives to their own worlds?”

There was an audible sigh over the speaker that made Sandra very nervous.

“That’s the thing. The Coalition suffered the worst defeat of the entire war while we were stranded on Hent. They haven’t totally lost the war, not yet. But things are looking bad. Everything’s falling apart out there. We have no way of knowing what is and isn’t safe. Everything beyond their core territory is effectively on its own. They can’t project power anymore, especially out here.”

The room stood in stunned silence at the news.

Sandra was more shocked than she’d expected to be at the news. Everyone knew the Coalition was losing, but they kept it tucked away in the back of their minds. People had faith that things would turn around, eventually. That’s what was supposed to happen, right? The Coalition were the good guys, they had to win.

You’d figure a human of all people would’ve figured out that that’s not how it works, but evidently not.

Sandra managed to find words first. “So, these are refugees, then?”

“Of a sort. The main point here is that I’ve brought several armed, modern starships back with me, and I’m turning them over to the zani government. The Coalition forces out here are going to be bunkering down now that the news has reached us. The Diln will be free to run wild. We need to start upgrading these ships with anything and everything we have, and you zani need to start building ships, yesterday. Because there’s nothing to stop them from scraping together a raiding fleet now.”

Sandra closed her eyes. “Do you think Janea can get the fleet back here?”

“I sure hope so. I’d like to think our odds are better than before. With the Coalition falling apart, there’s nothing to stop the Diln from tying up all of the loose ends they were too busy to deal with before, and humanity is one of those loose ends. They won’t ignore us forever. If Admiral Khatri has any sense, maybe he’ll see that.”

There was a pause.

“But we can’t rely on it. Ti-Zahn needs to be prepared to defend itself.”

The Mediator looked at the floor. “We’ve only just begun to touch the stars, and they are already falling into tyranny.”

He looked at Sandra. “It seems the universe is a crueler place than my people had ever imagined.” His expression hardened. “But we will adapt, as we always have. We will take the hand the universe has dealt us.”

Sandra smiled sadly. “Us humans know that feeling all too well. You can count on me to help anyway I can”

We’re intimately familiar with fighting impossible wars, after all.