Gone

“Impossible!” Fleet Commander Nerl gouged a deep groove in the conference table with his rending claw.

“Commander, I would have to say that while it is highly improbable, the evidence is against impossibility.” Political Advisor Grun laid her far larger rending claw on the commander’s shoulder. “It is up to the fleet to figure out where they’ve gone, while you determine the fleet’s response.”

“But the entire forest … gone … disappeared in the time we spent in transit from the realspace translation.” Nerl swung his tail across the bench and dropped to sit with a heavy thump. Grun’s claw maintained its position through the move.

The intimacy of her claw so near his throat, and the way she now stood over his slumped figure reminded him who was in charge. She clicked a small device and the view on the wall-sized screen changed into a split view.

On one side, a lush forest with a few well-maintained roads, and an uncountable mass of biological material, living plants and creatures, and the enemy, hiding like animals in the trees. The other side showed the same area of the moon, but there was nothing but a scar cut deep into the land, exposing the bedrock that had been far beneath the soil of the forest.

Everything above the bedrock was gone. Not a speck of biological material was left behind in the boundaries of the former forest.

“Remind me, Commander, what were the fleet’s orders for this expedition?”

“Are you testing me, Advisor?” Nerl sighed. “Eliminate all traces of the enemy from the inhabited body orbiting the system’s lone gas giant planet. If possible, bring back live samples and any interesting technology.”

“It would seem that the enemy has achieved the minimum goal for you already,” she said with a laugh.

“Now I know you’re testing me,” he said. “You know as well as I that ‘if possible’ means as long as I draw breath, that needs to be my goal.”

Grun clicked the device again and the before view switched to a series of images from all over the moon. Everywhere there had been a settlement of the enemy had been gouged out to bedrock. What had been agricultural fields were stripped as well.

She brushed the scales of his cheek with the back of her rending claw. “Tell me, Commander, how would you accomplish the same results?”

Nerl sat up a little straighter. “I can think of only two methods. One ridiculous, and the other — wholly unrealistic — relies on tech that doesn’t exist.”

“Humor me,” Grun said with a purr. “Start with the more realistic one.”

“When they transformed the moon to make it habitable, they began by placing lifting plates on the bedrock. Then, once they brought in soil and water and atmosphere, and so on, they built only above the lifters. When we entered the system, the lifters raised in groups, to be picked up in atmosphere by some sort of transport.”

Having said it, Nerl blinked in annoyance. “It sounds even more ridiculous when spoken.”

“No, no. It’s fine, dear Commander.” Grun walked around the room, her tail swaying in lazy arcs. “What was the unrealistic one?”

“Teleportation.” He huffed at the thought. “Some sort of magic technology that allows moving matter from one place to another through some dimension outside the spacetime we understand.”

“Both excellent ideas, Commander.” Grun stood before the changing images on the wall screen as though studying them. “While the lifters sound more plausible, I rather like the teleportation angle. Imagine what the queendom could do with that.”

“Even with that,” Nerl said, “they would need to have transported it all out of the system somehow.”

“Well, once you figure out where they might have gone,” Grun said, as she approached and lifted Nerl’s chin with the tip of her rending claw, “we can go get our samples.”

“Yes, Advisor.” The proximity alarm sounded, and he spun toward the door, leaving a shallow cut along the bottom of his chin from her sharpened claw. He tapped the control panel near the door as blood welled along the cut. “Report!”

“Commander, lone enemy vessel sighted around far side of the gas giant, heavy transport. We have a warp trace from there,” the First Officer said over the comms. “Eighteen possible routes.”

“How long to narrow it down?”

“Hard to say, Commander. It could take as long as—”

“Never mind,” he interrupted. “It’s one ship, we are a fleet. Divide us up and make haste for all eighteen possible throughpoints. Don’t forget, we want some of them alive.”

“Yes, Commander.”

Grun ran her thumb along the cut on his chin, collecting the blood. She licked it off and made a noise as if savoring it. “Don’t make me regret the queen’s decision to give some males command roles.”

“You know I won’t, Advisor,” he said as the flagship transited into warpspace.

###

As the last ship warped out of the system, Sena let out the breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. “I can’t believe that worked.”

“We’ll keep the jamming running for a few more hours, just to be certain.” Tris shoved her hands into the pockets of her jumpsuit. “I just hope the crew on the Honeypot are going to be okay.”

Sena typed a command and scanned the results on the monitor. “The fleet left in eighteen different directions.”

“Gives them better odds, I guess.”

Sena laughed. “The Valkor Queendom has been trying to take humans alive for the entirety of the war. I kind of feel bad for the ship that tries to board the Honeypot.”

“Yeah, yeah. Dumb lizards versus a cargo ship full of Marines. Still ….”

“You’re worried about your brother.” Sena patted Tris’ leg. “He’s going to be fine.”

“It’s just feels different when it’s a war fleet rather than some pirates.”

“That’s what we’re trained for.” Sena raised the sleeve of her tee-shirt to show her Marines tattoo. “He’s a good kid, and a good Marine, he’ll be fine.”

Sena looked out the window at the fields that lay between the outpost and the forest. Hectares of specifically engineered crops for survival on low-gravity and low-light worlds like this moon. The forest beyond was populated with animals, plants, bacteria, and fungus also engineered for the environment.

“What started this stupid war, anyway?” she asked. “Weren’t we doing an expanded trade deal with Valkor just a couple years ago?”

“You don’t watch the news, do you?” Tris huffed. “Queen Gret died, Furg took over as the new queen. First thing she did was update the official religion, declaring all ‘warm bloods’ as evil. Second thing she did was declared war on all of the endothermic species. Humans just happened to be the closest.”

“They won’t survive without a regime change,” Sena said.

“How so?”

“If a coup or assassination doesn’t take out the queen, the war will wear them down until their entire economy and society collapses.”

Tris hummed. “Yeah, we’re way too good at wars of attrition.”

“Not just that,” Sena said. “They didn’t bother to look with their own eyes. They trust so much in their over-engineered, hyper-complex technology that they couldn’t bother to look down and see that their scanners were showing them a fake image.”

“What did it look like?”

Sena called up the model that had been fed to the Valkor ships. “This.”

“Those are the cutaway views that were generated for the geologic survey, aren’t they?”

“Exactly. Just without the infrastructure overlays.”

The women discussed it over coffee as they waited for an update from the Honeypot.