Bridget answered the last question. “I estimate another week before we arrive, what with being blown off course. We have enough food for four days if we’re careful. If we can pick up even a modest haul from Howard’s trawling, we’ll make it.”

  “You’ve caught next to nothing for the last couple of weeks,” he said, addressing me. “How likely is it that you’ll suddenly have luck?”

  “With due respect,” I replied, “we don’t know very much about grill schooling patterns away from land. It might be that they only swim close to shore, or it might be that they swim deeper in the open ocean. It would explain why the catch dropped off a couple of days out.”

  Alexander nodded. “Hopefully in four days, we’ll be close enough to Lemuria.” He stood. “Otherwise, there will be bloodshed.”

  “Well, hell,” I said afterward. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “We can’t restock any more ponds,” Bridget said, nodding. “They’ll notice and wonder where the fish came from.”

  Mario was in on the conversation, by intercom. “What about dropping in small numbers?”

  “If you drop in enough to make a difference, they’ll notice. Everyone’s aware of the stock levels now,” she replied.

  “Can we ‘accidentally’ catch a bunch of grill?” I asked.

  “What we can do,” Bridget said, “is check your theory about grill schooling closer to shore.”

  “Already did that,” Mario replied. “It’s not that it’s untrue; it’s just that there aren’t a lot of grill schools around the western continent’s shore. Might be seasonal; might be that they’re more of an eastern continent fish. Either way … ”

  “Either way, no dice,” I grumbled. Then I perked up. “Hey, Mario, how far are we from landfall right now? Shortest distance to land?”

  “A couple hundred miles. Why?”

  “There are lots of fish in lakes on Lemuria, right? Otherwise, all of this is for nothing.” It was a rhetorical question. We’d long since verified that the dragons would have a food supply when they arrived. “So why not just fly the entire population in ahead of the floaters?”

  Bridget frowned. “Because they need the floaters?”

  “Okay, no,” I said, waving my hands in negation. “Leave enough dragons to bring in the floaters, and fly everyone else over. If we only leave half the population behind, they’ll have enough food to make it.”

  “It’s a bit of a desperation move, but not impossible.” Bridget stood. “Let’s go talk to Alexander.”

  Alexander was not enthusiastic. “Flying over unknown ocean to an unknown destination is going to be a hard sell.”

  “Wait, what?” I retorted, frowning. “You did it. With the canoe.”

  “With three of my best, strongest wingers. And with being able to set down the canoe and rest when necessary. We can’t do this four dragons at a time. Not to mention having to get the canoe back to the flotilla somehow.”

  “Hmm. Gotcha.” He wasn’t wrong. Whatever we did would have to be one-way. I turned to Bridget. “Can we make it in one session?”

  “No,” she replied. “We’ll need to overnight once.”

  “Could we drag a floater? If everyone pulled—”

  Both Bridget and Alexander shook their heads at the same time. “It’s not a question of power,” Bridget said. “With the whole population, we have the muscle. The problem is, dragons can’t really hover, and they’d have to be all but hovering while pulling on the ropes.”

  I glanced at Bridget as she messaged me. “We might have to consider breaking character.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean a little divine intervention might be in order. Otherwise, this is going to end in disaster.”

  “Hold on,” I replied, “I have one more idea to try.”

  “You two are doing it again,” Alexander interrupted. We had apparently been silently staring at each other for several seconds. “Mind sharing your thoughts?”

  I took a moment to work everything through before replying. “How long do you think the average dragon would have to rest in the canoe or some kind of boat if they were going to try to get across to the mainland as quickly as possible?”

  “Well, carrying the canoe would tire them—”

  “No canoe,” I interjected. “Just free flight, land, rest, go.”

  “Huh.” Alexander thought for a second. “A couple of hours, really. It would help if they had a supply of tuev to reinvigorate themselves. But then flying at night would still be a problem.”

  “Fires. Signal fires on the boat and on the mainland. From soaring altitude, you’d have no problem picking them out.”

  Alexander nodded. “Sounds great. One small problem I can see … ”

  “I have that covered. We build rafts, carry them out the same way you and your wingers carried the canoe. We’d need more people lifting each one, of course. You’d want your strongest doing this part. Plunk the rafts down in the same spot and tie them together. That becomes the midway rest area.”

  “What about fires?” he asked.

  “We’d have to bring hearth materials so the raft doesn’t burn up, obviously. So a second wave would bring that, plus kindling, tuev, fire-making tools, whatever else. But the first wave, once rested, would fly on to the mainland and light fires from whatever’s available. Once all this is set up, the rest of the population—or as many as want to and are capable of it—follow in waves. The rest stay on the floaters to bring them in. They’ll have enough food to make it then.”

  Alexander gazed at me, frowned, then turned to one of his most trusted generals. “What do you think?”

  The dragon looked uncomfortable with being put on the spot, but you didn’t dodge a question from Alexander. “It, uh, I mean, I don’t see any obvious reasons why it would fail. Unless the weather went bad unexpectedly.”

  We all looked up reflexively. The skies were clear and calm.

  “That might not hold,” I muttered.

  “Then let’s get started,” Alexander replied.

  Chapter Fifty-Six:

  Graduation

  Icarus

  January 2338

  Roanoke

  Even with all the pictures to help, translation of the library’s books took about six months. Bob with the Deltans and Phineas and Ferb with the Pav had had the advantage of being able to observe the language in daily use. With only text, we’d had to infer a lot. Degrees of confidence applied to words and phrases were then tested against other texts to see if the resulting translation made sense. We still had a significant portion of the written language with no confident translation.

  But we had figured out the audiotapes. On the assumption that the Roanokians had a spoken frequency range similar to that of humans and a roughly similar processing speed for speech, we’d decided on an arbitrary playback speed. But who knew? We might sound to them like we were hopped up on helium.

  But the biggest disappointment was that our initial suspicions had been correct. The hard-copy portion of this library was strictly legacy. There was nothing more recent than late-twentieth-century technology or discussion. That meant no indication of how the wormholes worked or where the populations went.

  “On the other hand,” I mused, “we do have a means of communication now. We might be able to talk to the firewall sentries.”

  “Or maybe this time, they’ll decide we’re a nuisance and melt us down.”

  “We could send in a drone.”

  “Icky, we’re getting a little crowded in our holds. Between the mannies and all the extra roamers and drones, I feel like a storage locker. Our ships weren’t really designed as cargo vessels.”

  “So I’ll just sacrifice one of my cargo drones. It should be big enough to trigger a response, and we’ll control it via maser connection through the wormhole.”

  Dae sighed. “All right. I recognize the stubborn tone.”

  “I prefer to think of it as decisive.”

  “Whatever gets you through the day, buddy.”

  And once again, wormhole travel was the absolute best thing going. Fifteen thousand light-years around the galaxy in less than two days, most of that time spent crawling between the wormholes. And once again, we found ourselves facing the gate leading to the DMZ.

  I ejected my cargo drone, gave it orders, and sent it through the gate. The maser link connection was rock steady, giving me hope that we might actually learn something this time.

  As expected, the sentries zoomed up and issued their challenge. We still didn’t have the specs for the SCUT comms, so I had the drone issue a verbal plea via plain old radio, in Roanokian. I had already set up the translation routines, so Dae and I heard the whole exchange in English.

  “Please, may I pass?”

  As I’d hoped, the sentry switched to the same medium. “Authorization required.”

  “Where do I get authorization?”

  “You are speaking Roanokian, but your silhouette does not match any registered Roanokian vessels. You will require authorization for this class of vessel.”

  “Where do I get this authorization?”

  “The Roanokian government can issue authorization.”

  “Roanoke is deserted. Where can I find its government?”

  “They have likely already passed through.”

  “Through here? To the far gate?”

  This reference to a gate was a calculated risk. There was no word for wormhole in the Roanokian text we’d deciphered.

  “Affirmative.”

  I felt a moment of relief. The sentry had accepted the description.

  “Have all Roanokians gone through the gate?”

  “That information is not available.”

  Damn. Okay, reasonable, though. How would the sentry know?

  “Have other civilizations gone through the gate?”

  “All member civilizations have gone through the skzzzzzzzzz.”

  Whoa. That last word was probably the proper name for a wormhole gate. I quickly added it to the translator. And all member civilizations? Had we just discovered where everyone went?

  “Where does the gate lead?”

  “That information is not available.”

  “Do you know why they all went through the gate?”

  “That information is not available.”

  “In the absence of a Roanokian government, we are unable to get authorization to pass. Is there an exception process?”

  “Security Central can evaluate individual requests. However, they have not responded to queries for one thousand four hundred and thirty-two years.”

  Hmm, those were Roanokian years. I’d forgotten to set up the translator to autoconvert. In human time, that was … 2,104 years. Wow.

  “Those maintenance systems are really good,” Dae said over my shoulder.

  “Is there any other way to get approval?”

  “No alternatives are available.”

  Well, crap.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven:

  Marathon

  Howard

  September 2344

  Jabberwocky

  Raft creation wasn’t much of an issue. We had lots of trees, and they’d evolved to be light—something like balsa wood. Lashing a dozen posts together took next to no time, and the rafts could be carried comfortably at the end of a set of slings by about sixteen dragons. Coordinating everyone to prevent midair collisions was a real fear, so it helped that only trained and disciplined military would be tasked with this part of the plan.

  Within hours, the first raft was on its way, with more coming ready every couple of hours. Soon we had twenty rafts en route. The next phase was supplies. Clay pots for the signal fires, kindling to burn, food, and tuev all went out in slings held by pairs of dragons.

  It was a military operation that any Earth general would have been proud of. And while this had been going on, the rest of Alexander’s army had been organizing the dragon exodus. Most of the required numbers had been filled by volunteers, since the specter of starvation was very real and very immediate. A human would have trouble understanding the dragon psychology in this regard. A human could, in extreme circumstances, survive for weeks on little or no food—not so dragons with their amped-up metabolisms. A few days without sustenance, and most of them would eat their own mothers.

  A dragon wearing the arm patch of the military flew in from the west and landed heavily. He sat down, panted for a few moments, then said, “All set. Rafts are ready; fires are lit.”

  Alexander turned to his generals. “Let’s get this going.”

  The exodus would take about a half day. Groups were to be sent out, each about half the size of the raft’s capacity, staggered so that they had some flexibility in scheduling. It was inevitable that some would arrive too tired to continue according to plan, and they could be given an extra round of rest.

  I went ahead of the first exodus group with a few soldiers, ostensibly to look over the raft and make sure everything was okay. In reality, I’d be reporting back to Bridget. Alexander remained suspicious that we were communicating in some secret way. In any case, he didn’t put up any kind of argument about me going.

  We arrived at the raft in a few hours. The flight had been uneventful, if perhaps a little tiring for the others. Dranny metabolism, of course, could go almost forever, but I was careful to appear as winded as the rest.

  The fires were going in their clay pots, a number of casks of tuev were lined up, and everything looked shipshape. We rested for a while, knocked back a couple of pints of paint thinner, and then, on a command from our group leader, launched into the air, bound for Lemuria.

  It was another routine flight. There were no thermals to speak of, but the air movements over the ocean provided occasional updrafts to make a dragon comfortable. I had to admit, this was possibly the best humanoid form we’d come across, and there had to be a way to turn this into—

  I felt something land heavily on my back, and a spear suddenly protruded from my chest. All the dranny telltales went red, and the sensory overload limiter flipped on. I just had time to think what the fffff—before my dranny connection was severed.

  I immediately messaged Bridget. “I think I’ve just been assassinated. Dranny is offline. Watch for attack.”

  “What? How?” Bridget cut off her questions. “Talk later. Contact Mario now.”

  It took less than a millisecond to update Mario, and a camouflaged drone was on its way to pick up the dranny corpse. I hoped the drone would get there before some large oceanic predator that didn’t know any better decided to have it for a snack.

  I sat in my VR, fuming. The only reason I could think of for this attack was Alexander trying to get rid of the competition. Wow, had he ever misread the room. Bridget would tear him a new one if he gave her any reason to suspect him.

  Well, whatever. I was dead. Might as well get some work done. I pulled up my email queue and started going through the backlog.

  Mario called me a short while later. “Hey, Howard. We got the dranny. Nice flesh wound. Right through where the heart should be.” He sent me an image at the same time. Yep. Definitely a kill shot.

  “Can you fix it?” I asked.

  “Of course. Already half-done. We’ve thrown all our roamers at it. And once we activated the internal roamers, they got a lot of it cleaned up. Hey, do you want me to leave a scar?”

  “What? No, of course—” Then I hesitated. Chances were it wouldn’t ever come up, but I could always fix it later. “On the other hand, yeah. Old war wound kinda thing. Make it fresh and livid.”

  Mario laughed and signed off.

  I messaged Bridget. “Anything interesting happening at your end?”

  “No, Howard. Everything seems quite routine. Although Alexander does seem to be paying me more attention than usual.”

  Uh-huh. That fit. I sent the picture to Bridget with the caption Your new boyfriend plays rough.

  She answered right away. “You’re going to show up, right? I want to see his face, just before I rip it off.”

  I sent her a heart emoji and signed off. Alexander was dead meat.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight:

  Special Delivery

  Bill

  September 2344

  In Virt

  And finally, after almost two years of heads-down engineering, we’d hit paydirt. Garfield and I were in VR, with video windows showing the two ends of our test wormhole, on opposite sides of the Epsilon Eridani system. In normal light, there wasn’t much to see. Each wormhole was like a hole in space that showed the scene at the other end. And since it was a spherical hole, you could orbit the wormhole in any direction and look straight through it.

  No, spherical wasn’t really the right description. There was no spherical surface. Rather, it was a flat, disc-shaped hole, like a stargate or the DS9 wormhole, but it was a flat, disk-shaped hole no matter which direction you looked at it from. Even multiple observers at different angles would see a disc-shaped view through to the other end of the wormhole. There was also a little bit of distortion around the edge, reminiscent of black-hole animation videos.

  Of course, out in the Oort cloud, you’d only see stars, and it was virtually impossible to tell where the local starfield left off and the view through the wormhole began without a star chart to compare with.

  The view in the microwave spectrum was more informative. The wormhole, even wedged open with a rotating charged negative-energy field, emitted a constant stream of virtual particle pairs around the edge, each of which put out a small microwave flash as they suicided.

  We’d placed the two negative-energy-generating stations at opposite sides of the wormhole. Since we didn’t want someone coming through the wormhole to accidentally smack into one of the stations, we’d decided that, as standard policy, they would always be aligned with the galactic axis.

  “Drone’s ready,” Garfield said, interrupting my thought train. “All sensor equipment is in the green. SCUT channels at both ends are trained for the drone’s signal.”