“Well, that sucks,” I commented.

  “It more than sucks. Floaters have very low reproduction rates, which is typical for a species that is large, long-lived, and doesn’t have much in the way of natural enemies. And they aren’t useful as villages until they reach a certain size. This Alexander character could single-handedly change the ecology of Jabberwocky.”

  “Want to hit him with a buster?”

  She smiled at me. “Did I accidentally call you civilized? But no. Chances are, one of his lieutenants or children would just take over. We’d have to obliterate a good fraction of the army to stop it, and I think that’s more than even the most warlike Bobs could stomach.”

  “So we’re going to … ”

  “I don’t know, Howard. Wing it?”

  I nodded, then realized she was giving me an expectant look. I replayed what she’d said, then groaned and got a smile in response.

  We took to the air from one of the outer branches, then circled around to glide below the floater. It was slowly drifting eastward with the slight wind from the hills. As we came over a lake, the floater dipped its tendrils and dragged them through the water. Bridget circled, with me following.

  As we came to the far edge of the lake, the tendrils retracted, and Bridget moved in. Dragons weren’t birds, but they did have a lot of the same talents, such as the ability to grab a vertical perch and hang off sideways. Bridget inched her way down the tendril, then began pulling up the remaining length. I circled and watched her work.

  After another minute, Bridget dropped off the vine and caught air. I pulled up beside her as she described an arc that would take us back to the town. “And?” I said.

  “Later. I have to think about this.”

  That meant she’d found something interesting. The wait would be frustrating, but worth it.

  Chapter Forty-Three:

  Learning Curve

  Icarus

  October 2321

  Heading to Centaurvania

  It took more than a week to get up to the point of being able to hold a conversation. The alien ship, which we named Gunther because it was close to the ship’s name for itself, picked up the math concepts immediately. But when we tried moving to language elements such as verbs, things faltered. Dae’s theory was that Gunther was more of an AMI or an AI rather than a replicant, so it had no actual physical life experience with which to contextualize statements like “See Dick run.” I thought perhaps it was just more alien than we were used to. Either way, we had to back up several steps and reduce the graphics to a Pac-Man level before we started to make progress.

  But progress we did, and eventually, we had our translation routine loaded with a passable version of Gunther’s language. It didn’t seem interested in learning ours—or maybe wasn’t able to—so it fell to us to take care of the translation back and forth. Even then, things proceeded on more of a question-and-answer basis than any kind of conversation. Gunther was cooperative, but not inspired.

  Star charts were easy, though. We quickly established that Gunther had come from a budding civilization near one of the leaf nodes of the third hub clockwise from Hub Zero, although it became cagey about specifics. This meant it had come from essentially the opposite end of the empire from us. The bios that had built Gunther appeared to be generally centauroid, in that they had four legs underneath and two arms at the front. The proportions were totally out of whack, though—more like dachshunds with arms sticking out of their necks rather than horses with human torsos. Still, centaurs stuck immediately, and the home planet became Centaurvania. And it turned out Gunther had once been a bio and actually was a true replicant.

  The centaurs had three sexes, according to Gunther—male, female, and worker. The third was similar in nature to a worker ant—no participation in procreation but dedicated to the support of its genetic line. And apparently disposable when a mind was needed for replication into a space probe. Gunther was close-lipped about it, but I got the impression that the word volunteer hadn’t really figured into things.

  The civilization that had built Gunther had discovered SURGE drives and SUDDAR but hadn’t yet invented SCUT communications. That seemed to be a standard tech path, based on our very small sample size of three: humanity, the Others, and centaurs. Once they had the base technologies working, they’d immediately sent out a scout. And done a rush job to beat out the local competition, which explained the bare-bones design. This was beginning to sound a lot like our human history.

  Gunther had found a wormhole at its first destination, then apparently followed a very similar exploratory trajectory to Dae’s and mine, hopping from system to system and mapping each system location relative to the galaxy. This activity had eventually culminated in capture by the sentries and, as we’d suspected, a gradual loss of power reserves until it had been forced to shut down. Unlike us, Gunther had never deciphered the gate IDs. That was unfortunate, because we could have used the timestamps on the packets to determine how long it had been a captive.

  Eventually, we managed to convince Gunther that we weren’t a threat, mostly by pointing out that we’d rescued and revived it, and we were armed and it wasn’t, and there wasn’t a logical scenario whereby lying about our intentions made sense. And it did need to go home to report in.

  So in due time, we all agreed we would head for Gunther’s world.

  The trip through the gate systems was routine—three hops through the hubs, then one hop to a leaf node. This was the star system that Gunther had originally aimed for from its home system. It had, of course, done an extensive survey when it arrived, but we wanted to see for ourselves. So we prevailed upon Gunther to wait while we surveyed the system.

  Like most star systems, as we’d learned by now, only one planet was in the Goldilocks zone, and that was where we found the civilization that had lived here. Based on city layouts and proportions, this was a new species to us, the sixteenth we’d catalogued while exploring the empire. And interestingly, this ecosystem had retinal-based photosynthesis—only the second such example. This resulted in plants that were a rich mauve or purple rather than the traditional green.

  “It’s really odd,” Dae grumbled when we’d completed the planetary mapping. “By all measures, retinal should be a better basis for photosynthesis. It’s simpler and more energy efficient, and most stars radiate more powerfully in the green band, which would give retinal the advantage. Yet almost every planet uses chlorophyll.”

  “There might be some obscure reason in evolutionary biology,” I replied. “Like the question of why virtually every species uses left-handed amino acids. We just don’t know what that is.”

  Still, a new civilization was always a great view from space, and a purple-hued planet was especially striking. We took a lot of pictures for our blog—assuming we were ever in contact with the Bobiverse again.

  The locals had, like most species, colonized most of the rocks in their system, as well as building a couple of megastructures. And like all the other civilizations we’d visited, everything was abandoned. No heat signatures, no radio traffic, no traffic, no nothin’.

  I pinged Gunther. “Was this abandoned when you first arrived here?”

  “Yes.”

  Talkative as ever. Once again, I resolved to stop asking yes–no questions. “Why did your civilization send you here first? Did they detect radio signals? Heat signatures?”

  “Anomalous microwave sources,” Gunther replied.

  Of course. The microwave from the wormhole. Wait, sources? I did a quick sweep. Sure enough, there was another wormhole at minus ninety degrees. “The other wormhole—did you explore it?”

  “No.”

  I rolled my eyes in exasperation, mostly at myself. But really, Gunther had been presented with a coin-flip situation and had made a choice that opened out into the empire.

  “Is it worth checking out?” I asked Dae.

  “Let’s at least send a drone through.”

  We checked with Gunther, and it was willing to stay the extra week.

  A few days later, we found ourselves floating near the second wormhole. Yet another one, I thought. Then I caught my own attitude and mentally pinched myself. I was actually becoming bored with wormholes.

  Dae had prepared a drone and sent it through with the usual precautions. The drone did the standard stellar survey and returned.

  “Hmmph,” I grumbled when we’d finished the analysis. “I had half hoped it might put us in a system that’s a little closer to Gunther’s home, but no such luck. Fifteen light-years away in the wrong direction. Indication of planets, but no other wormholes and no traces of an active civilization.”

  “Icky, this is really beyond weird and well into spooky. I’m beginning to worry that we might never find out what happened.”

  “I know, Dae. These quickie surveys from space really aren’t getting us any closer to figuring things out. We might have to bite the bullet and do a full archaeological deep dive on one of the abandoned planets.”

  “That’ll be next. For now, let’s visit Gunther’s system. That probably has a better chance of us meeting someone.”

  “But they won’t have the answer, either.”

  “One thing at a time. Let’s go.”

  Chapter Forty-Four:

  Investigation

  Howard

  January 2344

  Jabberwocky

  Bridget wanted to explore more of the planet, but I was concerned enough about this Alexander business to want to investigate further. After some discussion, we compromised.

  We started our day by finding a large updraft near the Hunter, which we would consider our home floater and base of operations for the moment. Riding the updraft, we were able to climb to an altitude of almost five klicks. A real dragon would be gasping at that height, but still able to operate. We could have gone higher, but it would have attracted attention.

  From this height, the horizon was almost two hundred and fifty kilometers away, although, of course, things disappeared in the haze far short of that distance.

  “Lots of haze,” Bridget commented. “Probably volcanic. I count”—she paused, turning her head—“forty-two individual hotspots. That’s a lot of activity.”

  “Kind of surprised there’s as much complex life as we’re seeing,” I replied.

  “The Siberian Traps caused the Permian extinction two hundred and fifty million years ago on Earth,” Bridget said, glancing at me. “That was way worse, and there was already complex life.” She paused. “That was a relatively sudden event. Something similar is happening here, it looks like, but much more gradually. It would explain why so many life-forms have taken to the air. It’s the only reason I can think of for a species to risk hydrogen flotation.”

  I grinned. “I bet selection pressure was a real bitch for a while.”

  Bridget laughed and circled again. “I see twelve floaters, randomly distributed, and it looks like a compact group over in that direction. A dozen or more floaters, I think.” She pointed to illustrate. “Want to bet that’s Alexander’s ‘nation’?”

  I followed her pointing finger with my gaze and frowned. “That’s more or less where we came down on our first outing. Those could have been Alexander’s scouts who chased us.”

  “Or scouts from a nearby floater thinking we were Alexander’s scouts. Either way, it’s an explanation.”

  I paused and tried to keep a straight face. “So what do you call a collection of floaters?”

  Bridget rolled her eyes. “I suppose you have a suggestion.”

  “A flotilla?”

  A sigh was her only answer. I considered that a victory.

  “So what do we do?” she said, changing the subject. “Just fly in and introduce ourselves?”

  I started to answer, then stopped and squinted. Something was moving in the distance. I activated telescopic vision and zoomed in.

  “It seems the decision is being made for us,” I said, pointing. She followed my line, squinted, and went silent. After a few moments, she turned to me. “Looks like those ‘sympathizers’ were more like scouts. That’s a raiding party.”

  Sure enough, what looked like a couple hundred dragons were flying a ground-hugging route that seemed aimed at the Hunter. I suppose there could have been a more innocent explanation, but it seemed unlikely. “Should we head back?” I asked. “Help defend?”

  “I don’t want to kill anyone,” Bridget replied. “Let’s wait and watch. We can always head in afterward. We have a legitimate reason to be there, so the worst they might do is toss us out.” She hesitated. “I hope.”

  Within minutes, the raiding party was spotted, judging from the sudden increase in activity on the floater. But by then, it was too late. The attackers flowed up from underneath the massive floating island, relying on it for protection and cover. At the last moment, they flicked up over the edge and came in to land, spears in hand, where defenders were setting up with something more like pikes.

  As someone who grew up in twentieth-century America, I wasn’t used to seeing such levels of direct violence—at least not outside of TV or theaters. Even from a distance, the fighting was brutal and unmerciful. A lot of dragons died. A lot more would be crippled for life, assuming they didn’t die of infections. Dragon medical knowledge was at about the same level as any Iron Age civilization—a lot of ad hoc procedures, most of which were as likely to be harmful as helpful, or just flat-out wrong.

  The fighting lasted perhaps ten minutes. The attackers had targeted all three villages at the same time, and their timing was impeccable. A few dragons had fled, many hadn’t fought at all, and the Alexandrians didn’t seem interested in those individuals. Thank the universe they didn’t seem to intend some kind of pogrom against the residents.

  Once things cooled off, we flew in and landed at our village. A couple of Alexandrians, easily identifiable from their bright-blue and white armbands, came over to intercept us. We found ourselves facing a half dozen or so spearpoints. “What’s your business?” one of them said.

  “Uh, we stayed here last night. We’re just passing through.” Bridget gestured vaguely up at the hotel pods. “You don’t seem about to burn things down, so I thought our hotel might still be in business.”

  The leader snorted and brought his spear to parade rest. The others followed suit. “True enough,” he said. “The Hunter is under new management, that’s all. Mind your manners and keep your nose out of things that don’t concern you, and you can go about your affairs.”

  We nodded to them and headed very carefully and slowly to our tree. A quick hop and we were at our hotel pod. “So what now?” Bridget asked.

  “We should maybe nose around. Carefully!” I rubbed my snout speculatively. “Wouldn’t want to have it cut off for being a snoop.”

  Things were settling down. The dead had been taken care of—apparently, the corpses were thrown into pits on the floater’s topside and became part of its diet—and survivors had been bandaged up as much as possible. Well, poulticed. They didn’t really have bandages. Or antibiotics. I expected the body count to rise for another few days.

  The Alexandrians had garrisoned the town, and presumably the other two, but other than that, they seemed to be mostly standing around playing tourist. However, I noted that the Hunter had changed course and was now running an ungainly tack across the prevailing wind, in the general direction of that knot of floaters we’d seen from above. Joining the flotilla, perhaps?

  Things appeared very calm in the village. Once the proprietors had realized it would be business as usual, they’d gone back to, um, business as usual. Customers were eating at kiosks, buying food at the market, bartering with shop owners for goods, and so on. Even some of the occupying army were engaging in some personal commerce.

  I accepted two cups of tuev from the proprietor of the kiosk, then paused and looked around. “This all seems very peaceful,” I said to him. “Is this normal?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t think so. I’ve heard about the Alexandrians setting fire to entire floaters in retaliation for resistance and putting entire populations to death. This sure doesn’t fit.”

  “Maybe the tales are exaggerated?”

  He gave me a hard look. “How do you exaggerate burning down a floater? Doesn’t seem like something you could do partway. And the descriptions I’ve heard—well, they sounded more like eyewitness accounts than fanciful tales, you know?”

  I nodded and grunted out a “huh.” After pausing for a sip of tuev, I added, “I guess we’ll find out one way or the other soon enough.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “They’re steering the Hunter toward the Alexandrian fleet,” I replied. “Or what I assume is their fleet. We were up high in an updraft when the attack came, and we could see a large knot of floaters close together. That’s the direction the raid came from.”

  “Bunch of floaters close together? They don’t normally stay together. Not like batlings, bunching up in a tight flock.”

  “One more mystery,” I muttered, and took my tuev back to where Bridget was sitting.

  Chapter Forty-Five:

  Everyone Goes Ballistic

  Howard

  March 2344

  Trantor

  Sooooo, marketing campaigns. Not worth their weight in bird droppings, apparently.

  I sat on the couch in our Trantor apartment and read the report from the Hawking Institute. The hueys had been rolled out across all civilized worlds, too much hoopla in all available media. A huge blitz, extolling the advantages combined with some well-applied FOMO for those who might resist. Piece of cake, right?

  Yeah, no. The Luddies went ballistic, FAITH went absolutely apeshit, talking heads everywhere expressed skepticism, and about half the governments of the UFS expressed guarded concern (the half, I noted silently, that were on the more authoritarian end of the political spectrum). I wasn’t quite sure how hueys threatened them, but it was obvious they did.