The Rookie

  After second meal, he studied some more. When most of the team went to sleep, Quentin set up shop in the VR field. By the third day, every Sklorno on the team was showing up for the late night sessions: Quentin practiced with three or four receivers, depending on the set, and a full compliment of defensive backs. The extra reps proved invaluable, and his timing started to improve, but it was the defenders that really got him over the hump. He could run whatever play he wanted, as many times as he wanted, gradually building up an instinctive knowledge of how fast the defenders could break on the ball, and how far away they had to be to constitute an “open” receiver.

  And he made sure they came at him with plenty of safety and corner blitzes.

  It would be a long time before Sklorno-level speed became second-nature to him, the way Human-level speed had been back on Micovi. But as he ran rep after rep, threw pass after pass, he regained the belief that he could handle the offense and throw with total confidence.

  • • •

  QUENTIN HAD ASSUMED that no construct could be larger than Emperor One.

  He was wrong.

  Orbital Station Two, or “The Deuce” as it was known across most of the Human worlds, reminded Quentin of an animal he’d seen in his science classes: the sea urchin. The Deuce was spherical, like a moon or a planet, with hundreds of massive, orderly, hollow blue spires jutting up and away from the surface.

  He looked around the Touchback’s viewing bay. All of the rookies were there, of course, as they were to see any new planet. All of the Quyth Warriors were present, as was Hokor and at least two dozen Quyth Workers. Quentin hadn’t even known that many Quyth Workers were on the ship. All of them — Warriors, Leaders and Workers alike — stared at the viewscreen with a suffused reverence.

  He looked for someone to talk to. Every minute of every day, he tried to find any opportunity to communicate with his teammates, to forge the bonds that Pine said were so critical to winning. He realized he’d spent absolutely no time with Quyth Warriors. He walked across the viewing deck to stand next to Virak the Mean.

  “Just how big are those things,” Quentin asked, gesturing to the urchin-spikes that jutted from the space station.

  Virak turned and looked at him. A Quyth Leader’s eye is a huge, glassy sphere that looks about as resilient as a Giving Day tree ornament. A Quyth Warrior’s eye, on the other hand, stares out from beneath thick, bony ridges. Even though a Warrior is more than twice the size of a Leader, a Warrior’s eye is about two-thirds the size of a Leader’s. A heavy eyelid, thick as Mason leather and coated with overlapping scales of tough chitin, hooded Virak’s eye from the top. Quentin’s childhood combat training taught him that the eye was the best place to attack a Quyth Warrior, but combat sims with realistic robots were a long way away from facing one in being-to-being combat. Now that he’d seen Quyth Warriors move in person, and on the field, the idea of poking out a Quyth Warrior’s baseball-sized eye seemed much easier said than done.

  Virak looked at him with a combination of amusement and disdain. Of all the races, the Quyth seemed to share the most Human-like emotions. When Virak spoke, it was with an air of boredom. “They are about two miles long.”

  “Two miles? That’s amazing, they look so thick to be that tall.”

  “The spikes are about an eighth of a mile thick. They are beautiful.”

  Quentin stared at them, and nodded. The symmetrical placement of the spikes did give the space station an ironically delicate appearance.

  “The spikes are a life form,” Virak said. “A silica-based organism that grows in a dense crystalline matrix. They are like bacteria. They grow, feed, and reproduce in numbers beyond comprehension. Only the outside of the spike is alive — the inside is nothing but dead skeletons, but it is incredibly dense and hard. The crystalline structure gives it the strength to reach such massive heights.”

  “What are they for?”

  “They serve two purposes. They reach down to the core. We can vent energy through them to propel the station in any direction. They are also the main supports of the Deuce’s framework. Crossbeams connect to the spikes. You can see one below the equator, there.”

  Virak pointed. Quentin saw another long, green structure, although this one was horizontal rather than vertical. It ran between two spikes.

  “Why is there only that one crossbeam?”

  “There are thousands of them, but they are buried,” Virak said. “The Deuce is built in stages, and each stage takes several cycles. With that crossbeam in place, workers will add to the station’s mass.”

  As Quentin watched, a small, speckle-coated asteroid drifted down below the spike points and towards the surface. It took his brain a second to register the scale involved — the speckles were actually ships, and the asteroid had to be at least ten miles across and five miles thick. As he watched, the speckle-ships (which were each probably larger than the Touchback) drove the asteroid down. About a half-mile from the surface, the speckle-ships broke off, flying away from the asteroid like a slow-moving cloud of gnats. The massive rock continued its descent until it smashed into the surface with a huge, billowing cloud of dust and debris. The cloud seemed to hang in the air, floating lightly, pulled back down ever-so-slowly by The Deuce’s weak gravity.

  “That is how it gets bigger,” Virak said. “Every day ships go out and find asteroids. They bring them back to add to the surface. As the mass continues to grow, so does the gravity, and so does the density of the Deuce’s core. Additional matter on the surface compresses the core. The original living levels have long since been smashed flat by gravity. Workers constantly dig new levels creating an exponentially increasing living area to accommodate a high birth rate. Immigration to the Orbital Stations fell to a near standstill after Whitok and Ionath were colonized. Now those seeking to escape the overpopulation of Quyth head to those planets instead of the Orbital Stations.”

  Quentin stared at the asteroid, a small pebble in a slightly larger crater. Crater and asteroid both barely a pimple on the surface.

  “How long does it take to bring the asteroids in?”

  Virak thought for a moment. “It depends on the materials needed. Some trips take only a few months. Others seek out asteroids comprised of rare or vital minerals, such as platinum or iridium. Those missions can take hundreds of years. It is common for a crew to leave The Deuce knowing that they will be long dead of old age before the ship returns, and their children or grandchildren will pilot the vessel home.”

  “How many ships are there?”

  “Somewhere around a hundred thousand.”

  “A hundred ... just how long does it take to build that thing out there?”

  “The Deuce has been growing for almost three hundred years, and The Ace is just over three hundred and fifty years old.”

  Quentin shook his head in amazement. All his life he’d been told the Quyth were only semi-intelligent beasts. Yet here was an engineering project that rivaled the terraforming of Solomon, a race so unified in purpose that they sacrificed themselves to build a home for future generations.

  “It’s not that big,” Quentin said. “I mean, for an artificial construct, it’s massive. But from a strategic perspective, I can’t see how the Creterakians could take over entire planets that were twenty times as large, but not be able to take The Deuce.”

  “They took over other planets by swarming across the surface and overwhelming the enemy by sheer numbers,” Virak said. “Here, the surface doesn’t support life. They had to fight their way into the shaft to get at the living levels. They tried the same technique they used against the big ships — launching thousands of landing vessels, trying to overwhelm our shaft defenses. We slaughtered their people by the millions.”

  Quentin raised an eyebrow. “You sound like you actually fought here or something.”

  “I did,” Virak said. “I was born here. “When my time came, I fought not for new breeding grounds, but for defense of my birth-home.”

  Virak ab
sently brushed a pedipalp hand across a long list of short, alien words etched into the chitin of his right arm.

  “What are those?” Quentin asked, gesturing to the writing.

  “Names of Warriors in my fighting pack. Warriors I had lived with most of my life. They died in the battles. I lost everyone in my fighting pack, but the Creterakians paid a terrible price for their assault.”

  “How many died?”

  “Over two million Quyth,” Virak said. “Including all my family. We estimate around 22 million Creterakians died trying to capture The Deuce. We kept rough count up to 10 million, but they just kept coming, and counting the dead was last on our list of needs.”

  Quentin tried to imagine fighting an enemy without number that came in wave after wave after wave. “That many, and they never broke through?”

  “They eventually created a beach head on Shaft Two and Shaft Four. We let them bring in troops and resources, then we used nuclear weapons to destroy those shafts before they could penetrate further. Eventually, technologists from Satirli 6 were brought in to engineer a way through the two miles that separated the surface from the living levels.”

  “Did they get in?”

  “Yes, several times. But we distributed tactical nuclear weapons throughout The Deuce. Citizens were under strict orders — at the first sign of a breakthrough, seal off their section and detonate.”

  Quentin’s jaw dropped. “At first sign? But how long did it take to evacuate the sections before you nuked them?”

  Virak looked back into space. “There was no evacuation. Citizens sealed their section, then detonated.”

  “How many Quyth would that kill?”

  Virak thought for a moment. “Depending on the section, anywhere from 150,000 to 250,000. It did not matter — as long as the Creterakians did not establish a beachhead on the living levels, from which they could re-supply and swarm through the entire station, any sacrifice was worth it.”

  “But to kill a quarter-million of your own people ...”

  “It was necessary,” Virak said. “The Creterakians do not control us. Freedom isn’t free.”

  Quentin tried to imagine even the most hard-core Holy Man pulling the trigger on a nuke that would take out not only him, but 250,000 of his people.

  “We maintained maneuverability,” Virak said. “As big as it is, the whole station can enter punch-space. We moved towards the home planet, to help defend it. The three Orbital Stations are more than just ships, they are self-contained ecosystems with planetary-level manufacturing infrastructures and resources that are inexhaustible in the short-term. That meant we were moving three full war-factories to defend the homeworld. We left the Creterakians with one choice — completely destroy the orbital stations, exterminating all life, or fight the ships the stations produced for decades to come.”

  “So why didn’t they blow up The Deuce and the others?”

  “We don’t know,” Virak said. “Maybe they didn’t have the technology. Relativity bombs, like the Sklorno used on Whitok, would have completely destroyed The Deuce, but the Creterakians either do not have them or did not use them. It doesn’t matter anymore. We beat them back once, we’ll beat them back again. The Quyth protect their homelands.”

  There was more than a hint of condescension in that comment. The Quyth, who despite their military presence were considered the galaxy’s poor cousin of intelligence, had resisted the swarming Creterakians when all the “superior” governments had surrendered. The fact that most of the Quyth planets were irradiated wastelands seemed irrelevant, at least to them.

  The conversation faded away as the Touchback maneuvered towards a massive shaft, perhaps two miles wide. Rows of lights ran down the sides, disappearing into the depths, reminiscent of the mine shafts back home. Ships, large and small, flew in and out of the huge opening. As the Touchback approached, traffic faded to nothing — exit traffic ceased, and entry traffic hovered in place.

  “Why is all the shipping stopped?”

  “Because they clear everything out when a bus comes in,” Virak said. “They need to prevent possible terrorist attacks. If a ship even gets within a half mile of a team bus, it is destroyed.”

  The Touchback descended the shaft, sinking like a pebble into a miles-deep, dark-water chasm. Large ships docked against greenish projections that jutted out from the walls up and down the length of the shaft. He saw thousands of small ships, but many larger ones as well: cargo tugs hauling long lines of hexagonal boxes, space liners sporting sleek lines, bulky freighters loading or unloading payload to haul to other systems, and something that Quentin had never seen — warships.

  There were dozens of warships, big and small, bristling with bulky shield generators and the long, thin, unmistakable shapes of weapons. Quentin felt a shiver, thinking of the days when weapon-loaded ships like these had permeated the universe, fighting and killing more often than not.

  The Touchback slowed, almost imperceptibly. A light jarring motion indicated they had docked.

  [BEINGS ON FIRST SHUTTLE FLIGHT, MOVE TO THE LANDING BAY. FIRST SHUTTLE FLIGHT LEAVES IN FIFTEEN MINUTES.]

  “You come with me,” Virak said.

  “But I’m on the third flight.”

  “I have more to show you,” Virak said. “You come with me.”

  Quentin followed the muscular Quyth warrior from the viewing deck down to the landing bay. He boarded — a few of the veteran starters gave him a quick look, but most shrugged (or gave the respective alien equivalent of a shrug) and went back to whatever they had been doing. The shuttle slid out of the landing bay and descended the shaft.

  The shuttle finally slipped past the bottom of the shaft and into a cavernous, dome-shaped space. Endless rails of the green crystal ran in curved arms along the dome shell up towards the two-mile wide shaft mouth, which was also ringed by a thick band of green. Ships, probably personal cars judging from their tiny dimensions, flew in every direction like a thick swarm of gnats.

  The air looked crowded with vehicles, but not around the shuttle. Off the port side, he noticed a squat yellow and black ship, lethal-looking and bristling with weapons. It struck him as an artistic interpretation of a bumble-bee crossed with an automated factory robot. He didn’t know the reason for its rather un-aerodynamic shape, but there was no mistaking the ship was a fighter.

  He watched the fighter out the window. It matched speed and altitude with the shuttle. Then he noticed another fighter, and another, also matching speed. He looked out windows on the other side, and saw many more. Dozens of mechanical bees formed a sort of protective sphere-web with the shuttle at its center.

  The Deuce reminded Quentin of Ionath City and Port Whitok — a huge, dome-shaped city. Although this time the dome was twice as large, at least eight miles in diameter and over two miles high. There was no sprawling city playing away from the downtown — here bare rock marked the city’s edge. A winding river, at this height no more than a blue-green ribbon, ran through the center of the city, emanating from one domewall and disappearing into another on the far side.

  This place did not have the fine radial symmetry of Ionath City. Rather, it spread outward from the center the way a bacteria colony might grow on a Petri dish: orderly but in a biological fashion, as if it had grown naturally without the guiding hand of a city engineer. Lights glowed from almost every building, adding to the city’s biological feel, as if it were a bioluminescent colonial organism in some deep ocean. Roads wound through the city with little more order than the meandering river.

  “How did they put a river in there?”

  “Comet harvesters,” Virak said. “Same as the asteroid harvesters. Water is very important for life. Females breed in water. On Ionath and Whitok, we have special water-filled facilities for breeding, but here we can do it naturally, right out in the open like it is done on Quyth.”

  The buildings had looked squat from the shaft mouth, but as the shuttle descended, Quentin saw that was just an illusion. The towering, org
anic-looking hexagonal structures reached to heights of two hundred stories and more. The shuttle banked to the left and followed the line of the river. Buildings seemed to link together, their green crystalline structure branching out like neurons to connect to all their neighbors, several times at several heights. The number of buildings, their densely packed proximity, their height — Quentin’s head spun with one obvious question.

  “How many beings live on The Deuce?”

  “The last census put us somewhere around 742 million. It’s not as open as Ionath City, but it’s not nearly as crowded as the homeworld.”

  All in a space less than half the size of the Earth’s moon. The Quyth homeworld was only slightly larger than Earth — and populated with 72 billion Quyth. The race seemed to have mastered dense-population living.

  The shuttle dropped to a hundred feet above the water as the river banked sharply to the right. Around that bend lay Demolition Stadium. A smaller affair than its counterparts on Ionath and Whitok, it had purple seats 500 rows high running parallel to each sideline. Demolition Stadium looked kind of like a freeze-frame sculpture of a thick book being closed. Both end zones were open, free of the towering bleachers which rose at such a steep angle Quentin wondered how anyone could climb the steps. The field surface was a pale, milky white, with yard markers written in a deep blue.

  “The surface is Tiralik,” Virak said. “Very springy and giving. Soft surface cuts down injuries, but stains jerseys badly.”

  A multi-shaded purple building dominated one end zone, while a platform of some kind dominated the other. The shuttle set down on the purple building.