Settlement

(English)

I shouldn’t have been so surprised the Casti home system would be so familiar. Relatively speaking.

Muriego was a moon almost indistinguishable from Lakandt. Which made sense. Moons, by nature, weren’t big enough to clear their own orbits. They didn’t have much in the way of atmosphere or features. So architecture became a distinguishing feature.

High Harbor had some cool structures, but Muriego was to the Casti as…well, the Moon was to Earth: older. A lot of elbow grease had been put into the construction and it showed.

The hangar our ships got dumped in was unbelievable. Technically speaking, it wasn’t even a hangar. It was far more reminiscent of a massive drydock. Unlike back home though, this one had ample room for multiple aircraft carriers and then some.

The Fafin was the only ship big enough to peek above the drydock’s ground level, and all the A-ships fit in the actual hangar space carved out of the drydock’s wall.

I’d never been in such a vast space that was still ‘indoors’. Empty space like that sucked up sound like nobody’s business. I had to project my voice like crazy just to make sure everyone heard me.

Twenty minutes of speaking from my diaphragm this much and I was about ready to pass out.

“Okay, next order of business,” I said looking across the bleachers we’d cobbled together. “We’re lining up folks from the Organic Authority to visit for examinations in the next few days. Once everyone gets tested, our food options really start to open up.”

A hand shot up.

“Yes, Graham, that means you’ll get to go see an alien city,” I sighed. “But first, who can tell me what the obvious rules regarding field trips will be?”

More hands shot up.

I was so drained, pointing with my arm was too much. So I just psionically pinged people to call on them.

“Don’t go anywhere alone!” a girl answered.

“Correct,” I agreed. “Who can tell me more?”

“Don’t talk to strangers?”

“You might need strangers’ help,” I said. “But I meant, elaborate about not going alone.”

“Safety in numbers,” another kid proposed. “Even if we’re with another person or even two people, we could still get lost really easily. So…”

“So exactly how complex is our buddy system going to get?” I asked. “I discussed this with the older kids, and we couldn’t quite reach a solution. So I’m opening this up to everyone. How big or small should field trip groups need to be?”

“What’s wrong with two?”

“Five”

“Three.”

There was some short debate, but eventually an unexpected answer caught on.

“Twelve,” Aarti finally suggested. It was a number even larger than the groups we’d amongst each other. “Not on a long-term basis, but it divides cleanly into other numbers. So it’ll work the first few times. We’re already dividing up into groups of twenty-four for the A-ships. So why not lean into it? Psionics make it really easy for everyone to stay in contact. So once we get more familiar with the MO, groups can subdivide. A group of twelve splits into a group of six, three, and three. Or Eight and four. So on and so forth.”

“Groups of twelve would be huge though,” Madeline said. “We’ll…”

Her thought trailed off as she thought better of speaking it out loud. Not every older abductee was thrilled with the idea of wrangling our much younger counterparts.

“I like it,” I said. “Trying to figure out an organizational system probably won’t happen on the first try. How about this then? We have roughly six groups of twenty-four here. Let’s divide such that each group has…say…four of the older kids to chaperone, and a handful of friendly aliens to chaperone the chaperones. Each group can take turns going into the city.”

Nai psionically nudged me from the peanut gallery.

I told her.

“Whichever group is last is going to be upset,” Sid pointed out.

“Taking that in stride…” I said. “Who will volunteer for the last group? The way I figure it, they might have the best time, because they’ll get to hear from everyone who went first. They’ll know all the lame places to avoid and the highlights of everyone else’s trip. Whoever goes first is just going to have to gamble.”

“Gambling is bad,” one kid interjected.

“Yes,” I pointed at him. “Whoever goes first will just have to…take risks.”

“I thought we were trying to avoid risks,” another girl piped up. “The whole point of staying in groups.”

“…Stop trying to screw with me,” I said, rolling my eyes.

The kids laughed.

“Okay, tentatively, we’ll break everyone up into groups after this meeting. Next on the docket is…naming ships. You all got the sheets. Hand ‘em in.”

Papers rustled as a hundred people all handed in worksheets we’d put together. I’d vetoed the idea of just voting to name them. Give a bunch of middle schoolers free reign to name something, and we’d be lucky for some merely obscene to win.

The horrific possibilities were endless.

The sheet Tasser had put together with Madeline and Aarti was decently comprehensive. Instead of just asking for names, we’d demanded at least some rudimentary explanation, helped by the fact that no one had to write their name.

…Which might be how ‘Boaty McBoatface’ happens. Anonymity protected people from having to defend their choices. It made it easier to take things less seriously.

Just eyeing the first sheets to come in, I saw more than a few that just read ‘I don’t care’ or ‘Butts’.

As irritating as that was, there was more and more to get through. The sooner I chewed through the to-do list, the less likely I was to keel over.

“Okay… next on the docket…”

·····

Meetings. Meetings. Meetings.

After the big meeting in front of all the abductees, I was back in the Jack’s mess hall meeting with the Puppies and other mature kids.

I’d shot an alien not even a week ago, adrenaline pumping, flames roaring, but now life had slammed on the brakes.

God meetings were dull.

I loved it.

It was all just so boring, and peaceful.

Part of me loved the running around, the Adeptry, the creativity. Part of me even loved the danger. A little bit. Okay, maybe not the danger itself. But at least the adrenaline.

But a much deeper part of me was profoundly grateful for the fact no one was going to die in the next hour.

“Is anyone else as frustrated as I am by the jokes?” Jean asked. “I know they’re kids, but why don’t they take this more seriously?”

“Everyone likes to be funny,” Ike said. “How do we feel about the Imperator?”

“Rome sucked,” Jordan said. “Everyone had lead poisoning, and I don’t think we’d want to explain how many times their leaders got betrayed and assassinated.”

“Mmm, yes. I’m not a fan of our leaders being betrayed and assassinated either,” I said.

“I want to float ‘heroes’ as a theme again,” Madeline said.

“It’s still at the top of the list,” Donnie sighed. Other possible themes included ‘animals’ and ‘deities’. Though, technically, that second one had already been done by Nora’s group…who’d been copying NASA.

The lot of us were poring through the responses submitted on the sheets. We had sorted the sheets by no particular criteria besides generally sounding good or bad. As for ‘bad’ ideas…more than thirty submissions had been completely unserious.

The worst part of that was, I knew some of them had probably been trying to be serious, or at least funny. They’d be hurt by the knowledge their submissions hadn’t really been entertained.

It wasn’t like we hadn’t tried to explain.

But not every kid had digested why we weren’t going to name a space ship with bathroom humor.

“Here’s one for the A-ships,” Johnny said, reading a sheet. “Greek letters paired with birds or fish. It doesn’t have any more explanation than ‘Gamma Dolphin’ sounds cool.”

“…It does sounds kinda cool,” Drew conceded. “I think it can at least go on the board.”

Nerin was the only alien helping us with the project, and even then only to practice her English writing skills. But she put the suggestion on the whiteboard someone had Adepted.

“Any of them sound better or worse to alien ears?” I asked her.

“Not really,” she said. “Alien words are going to sound like nonsense anyway.”

Yeah. That tracked.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t actually the crude or silly names that were the problem. It was the inevitable explanation we’d have to give about the ships’ names.

“Ooo, Madeline check this one out for the ‘hero’ theme,” Jordan said. “Quote, ‘the Fafin kind of sounds like Fafnir. Naming spaceships after dragons could be cool’. Unquote. But then at the bottom, the kid wrote ‘or after dragon slayers’.”

Madeline actually lit up at that. Drew too.

“Ooo, yes! That would be a sick name!” Drew bubbled. “He’s like German Hercules.”

“Who?” Johnny said.

“Siegfried,” Jordan answered. “He’s got a legend about him where he kills a dragon named Fafnir, and being drenched in its blood turns him invincible.”

“But you know, it’s an old legend, so the invincible guy obviously dies anyway. Tragically,” Drew added. “But who cares! It’s still a great spaceship name.”

“Sounds like Achilles,” Ben pointed out.

“Hey, Achilles can go on the board too,” Ike shrugged.

“Nerin’s trying to learn English,” I said. “You guys are going to give her an aneurysm trying spell all these Greek and German names…”

“Polish,” Drew corrected. “…Technically.”

I stared at her. Or…through her.

“…Fine. German too. But Polish!” she insisted.

“It’s all eastern Europe,” Sid shrugged.

I paused as the conversation derailed somewhat. Fifteen kids old enough to graduate high school or start college, arguing on an alien spaceship…paring away the odd details, it got me thinking. The conversation was going down a very odd tangent about folk tales, modern history, and human geography.

We were all college age, or close to it. So it wasn’t like we’d all be dumb. But there was no way everyone would have a conversational grasp of…well, folk tales, modern history, and human geography. And not everyone was participating equally. But almost all of us were listening equally.

Was that just psionics? Making it easier to keep notes, and stay organized with regards to the information we took in?

…No, because too much of this was background knowledge.

It was only a hunch, but I cracked open a psionic folder I hadn’t touched since Nora.

‘Abduction Criteria’.

It was a pretty thin file. What few notes Nora and I had put together had quickly become obsolete. The word ‘California’ was crossed out, because not only were abductees not from the state, some people hadn’t even been abducted from the west coast.

In the messages we’d exchanged, Dustin had told me about Ken’s group of abductees. They’d been found in V6, but the abductees themselves were from all across the pacific. More than half were from Okinawa or around Busan, but a few were as far south as the Philippines.

It had been a while since I’d really gone over any of it.

But seeing everyone sink their teeth into ultimately frivolous academic debate while Nerin failed to keep up…

“Hey, pause,” I said.

“…Why?” Sid asked.

“It’s off topic for ship naming,” I admitted. “But humor me. I have a hunch.”

Like I’d prompted, everyone answered psionically. It was quicker, and it let me collate the data in seconds.

The lowest GPA was 2.7, but the average was almost a 4.0.

“Our sample size is small,” I said. “So the GPA might not be that important. But look at these numbers…”

I materialized a sheet with how they’d rated their schools.

The lowest grade was a seven.

“None of us went to crappy schools?” Johnny asked.

“Technically all that tells us is that none of us think we went to crappy schools,” I said. “But the schools themselves is what I’m thinking about.”

“Above average,” Jordan noted.

“There must have been some criteria our abductor used. The more abductees we find, the more we should start looking at who exactly got abducted and what we all might have in common,” I said.

“And you think one of those things might be smarts?” Maddie said.

“Maybe,” I shrugged. “But the more I think about it, the more it seems like it wouldn’t actually be that helpful to intentionally abduct idiots.”

“What if you wanted to manipulate them? Exploit the fact that they’re dumb?” Jean pointed out.

“We ‘Puppies’ are something of a counterexample,” Johnny grumbled. “Smart people aren’t necessarily harder to manipulate.”

“Johnny’s right,” I said. “Smart and stupid aren’t exclusive. You absolutely can be both, even at the same time.”

“Kinda like this idea,” Ben said, reading another name suggestion. “We should name the A-ships after elements from the periodic table: Potassium, Uranium, Sulphur, Erbium, Carbon, and Flourine.”

A second passed before Madeline, Jean, and I all broke out laughing.

“What?” Johnny said.

“Rearrange the elements, turn them into their abbreviations, and you get…?” Jean said, wiping a tear from her eye.

“F-U-C-K-Er-S,” Ben said. “Is it bad that I’m almost impressed?”

“Maybe a little bit,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean they aren’t impressive for trying.”

“Eh, I’m a little insulted they thought we wouldn’t notice,” Madeline chuckled. “Potassium’s the only unintuitive element there.”

“It also means there’s a kid here smart enough to know the periodic table of elements,” Jordan noted. “Caleb might be onto something.”

“It’s food for thought,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to get us off track. I believe someone was saying something about Germanic folk talks?”

“Eh. The topic shifted. I like the Siegfried though. I’ll call a vote for it. Rename that Flourine, Uranium, Carbon, Potassium, Erbium, Kemon’s ship to the Siegfried?” Madeline said.

Hands went up along with some chuckles.

One, two, three…fourteen, fifteen. Unanimous.

Renaming Kemon’s ship was always going to be easy. It was the other A-ships people were more attached to. Except me.

“Then I think we can move forward Madeline’s ‘hero’ theme,” I said. “The Jackie Robinson already fits, more or less, and we don’t have a huge rush to name all the A-ships. We could come up with a pool of ‘heroes’, however we define the category, and have more kids pick which ones are better.”

“They’re all going to be superheroes then,” Johnny frowned. “The median age here is like fourteen.”

“It’s actually closer to thirteen,” I said. “But I take your point. But I don’t think there’s a problem with one or two ships named after fictional people. I’d fly on a ship named after Spider-Man, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d fly on a ship named the Peter Parker, or the Clark Kent,” he said. “But if we don’t want to explain dumb stuff to people curious about our ships’ names, do we really want a ship named after the MCU?”

“If you hadn’t said exactly that, I would have said the Endgame would actually be a decent spaceship name,” Jean pointed out.

“It’ll come down to how people defend their answers,” I said. “When we pose more names to everyone, I think we shouldn’t have it be anonymous. Responses can be prepared and written or presented in front of everyone. But I think the important thing is that people be passionate about the names they’re proposing.”

“…You didn’t name the Jack after some guy who could swing a stick and run,” Aarti nodded. “You picked someone important. Inspirational. Universal.”

“Humans don’t have a monopoly on curiosity,” I said. “Everyone we meet is going to be fascinated and terrified of us. If we want to assuage the paranoia we’ll inevitably encounter, it’ll be super important that we’re prepared to explain some of who we are. The names we give our ships will reflect some of that.”

“…Say that again,” Madeline said, fishing out her phone. “I want to record that. If the other kids hear you put it that way? They’ll take this more seriously.”

“We’ll all talk to them,” I assured her. “What else have we got besides the Siegfried?”

·····

In the end, we only named one-and-a-half of the A-ships ourselves. The rest we’d get broader feedback on.

Our little Flotilla was shaping up quite nicely though. The Siegfried as the flagship, with the Jackie Robinson as a smaller lead ship. The Fred Rogers was unexpected, but none of us could argue with Ike’s case. Mr. Rogers had been a hero. No doubt about it. We still couldn’t decide between the Clark Kent and Peter Parker but that was another thing we could put to a larger vote.

The Organic Authority was salivating over the prospect of more group data for humans. They were apparently this close to a general nutritional index that would accommodate ninety-nine percent of humans.

Shinshay was talking to Sid and the kids who know some computer science and engineering. It wouldn’t be more than a few weeks before they started trying to make hardware that would topple the alien computer industry. Maybe.

Psionics were catching on more too. Seeing how much Serral’s crew had taken to them, the now Siegfried’s crew were similarly adjusting their methods. All the aliens who’d stayed on the crew felt guilty as hell about Kemon, and it showed. They were chomping at the bit to repay the abductees and teach us all about operating the spaceships we were living on.

Serral had formally folded the Siegfried into the Jack’s diplomatic mission, and he was more than suited to the second captainship. We’d even pried the fabricator out of the Jack’s cargo bay and transplanted it into the larger ship.

The engineering team were drooling at the upgrades and modifications that would be possible with that kind of hardware.

Nai and I started housebreaking the Puppies too.

Muriego was still the heart of the Coalition, and there were dozens of Adepts—military and not—eager to watch even a few minutes of Nai’s coaching. Three weeks of training before Johnny and Maddie working together put a scratch on Nai’s invisible armor.

The looks on their faces? It was like their very souls broke then. Nai just had too many layers to her defense, and they finally got to realize just how far out of their league Nai and I were.

I was surprised to put myself in that same league, but I understood just how much of Nai’s mind I’d been exposed to now. Ajengita. The Vorak weren’t wrong to have given me a name. Sobering thought, that.

I’d struggled against Win, but I’d also gone into the fight blind, and his Adeptry had far outstripped my own.

I was trying not to be vindictive though, so I went easier on the Puppies than Nai did. Still, that might have made it worse. Even going easy on them, I could still lay out two or three of them at once without seriously hurting them.

Still…just like Win, every one of them—save maybe Donnie—had superior Adeptry to mine.

And they were learning. Fast.

·····

Busy as my life had gotten, I did enjoy quiet evenings on Nakrumum’s moon.

Tasser and I were hanging out with Nai and her sister. Nai had strung a hammock on the Jack’s cargo shelving, while Tasser and Nerin lounged on Adept-made beanbag chairs. Nai was having a grand time dumping her pet worm Toe off the hammock onto the soft beanbag chair, only for him to squirm his way over the shelving, writhe his way back up the structure and flop into Nai’s hammock again.

Nai materialized a second hammock when I climbed down from the deck above.

It was good to keep time for my friends.

And enemies.

“What got you there?” Nerin asked.

“Close,” Tasser corrected. “You swapped some words.”

“…Okay,” she grumbled. “What… you got there?”

“This is Kemon’s laptop,” I said, wiggling the bulky device. “Finally found where he stashed it.”

“Where?” Nai asked, the only one here not speaking English.

“Captain’s ready room, behind a wall panel—get this— lined with dynamite.”

“Wow. Paranoid guy.”

“Dynamite? ‘Boom?’” Nerin asked. “A bomb? Do I have that right?”

“Bzzt,” I said. “No swapping to Starspeak, even to confirm…but yes. It was a bomb.”

“It really is a boggling machine,” Nai said. “The Vorak have some portable computers, but they’re not like this one. They’re just display and interface units that trade signals with a nearby machine that does all the real computing.”

“Not this bad boy though,” I said, running my hands over the clamshell. “This is an independent unit.”

“Have you found anything on it so far?” Tasser asked.

“Just started getting messages a few minutes ago,” I said. “They’re trickling in, so they’re not in real time.”

“ No dialogue then. Just slow lightspeed-limited exchanges,” Nai surmised.

“Yeah, but SPARK is eager to talk,” I said. “The first message I sent was a few hours ago. I kept it simple.”

I showed them the screen. Still in English, I’d typed out ‘I win’.

A few unrelated replies had come in, checking for Kemon presumably. But I’d bothered to dig into the rudimentary settings, and sure enough, there’d been an option to type in English instead of Starspeak.

Kemon wouldn’t talk to SPARK in English. I was eager to learn if there was a way to dig through what exactly he’d exchanged with SPARK, but for now, there was a new message.

‘Congratulations, you fooled a lawyer and shot a drug addict. I hope you’re not too proud of yourself.’

“Huh,” I said.

“What?” Nai asked, peering over my shoulder. But it was in English, so she couldn’t read it.

“What do Farnata have in way of…narcotics, I guess?” I asked.

“Uh…can I get some context?”

“SPARK called Win a drug addict.”

“It’s certainly possible,” Nai said. “He and Kemon might have met through the justice system.”

“I guess I’ve never thought about aliens having drug problems,” I said.

“Casti biotech isn’t just for Casti,” Tasser said. “Our medical revolution got to triple up on itself with aliens. That’s done a lot of good, but…”

“That’s not even getting into Adept-made drugs,” Nai said. “…Caleb, you seemed nervous when you showed me Win’s body. Was it just because he was Farnata?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, there’s my whole squeamishness about killing in the first place, but specifically…yeah. Billions of Farnata dead…doesn’t feel good adding one more, even if he deserved it.”

“I’ve killed a Farnata too,” she admitted. “It wasn’t easy, or something I did lightly, but the long story short was they were manufacturing a technically safe, but ultra-addictive drug. They distributed it for free, only for people to get hooked on just a dose or two. Then they’d condition and coerce their victims into obedience, and the Adept was the only supply.”

“So you killed the supplier?”

“Yes. Practically in cold blood too,” Nai said. “I…always want to say I’m not proud of the decision. But I don’t know, and the older I grow, the less sure I become. I do know there was no other way to help those people though. As long as the Adept was still alive to…Dira, to give them hope…every one of the addicts was one of her hostages. They would have done anything for that monster. So I killed her.”

“I can’t help but notice your pointed usage of the word ‘hostage’,” I said. “Not a coincidence, I assume.”

“No,” Nai said. “You and I both did what we had to.”

Another message trickled in on the laptop.

‘But I shouldn’t be too sore. You played the game better than Kemon did, however slightly. And luckily.’

This was how long distance deep-space communication usually went: slowly, and parallel to other discussion.

“Well technically Nai killed the dealer, and Caleb apparently killed the addict,” Tasser pointed out. “Surely that makes a difference.”

He was trying to make a joke. Lighten the mood.

But he didn’t need to.

“I’m still not okay with killing people,” I said. “But I can live with this outcome. Everyone came back safe.”

That really was unexpected, at the end of the day. All my humans had died leaving Earth. I’d gotten Nora shot when I met her. Then she’d stabbed me in the— chill Caleb…

I wasn’t used to having good outcomes with humans. This one was good. Even if there was a cloud to go along with the silver lining…

Another message blinked on the laptop.

‘What I’m curious about now is…do you think you’re through with my games? Did you win? A proper win? Or are we still only beginning?’

“That’s prompting a response,” Tasser noted. “You sure you don’t want to talk to Serral first?”

“He put it in my hands,” I said. “But I’m still checking in with him regularly.”

“No rush,” Nerin pointed out. “Provoking might be a bad idea. There is time to respond carefully.”

“SPARK seems temperamental though,” Nai said. “Might be better to respond aggressively. Dissuade him from seeing us as easy targets for further ‘games’.”

I commented.

Nai asked.

I said.

Tasser noted.

“It’s my call, isn’t it?”

The three of them nodded.

I started typing.

‘Your game was no fun. From here on out? We’re playing mine.’