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Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

    “So how do these even work?” She poked at one of Keeleeticktick’s thrusters.

    “Hey, don’t touch that!” He laughed, and slapped her hand away. “Your glove could be dirty. You’ll tarnish it.”

    “Oh! Yeah. Sorry.” She pushed away from him to a slightly further handhold. “You asked about legs last week, so tonight I was curious about you.”

    “Of course, of course…” He’d been in the middle of some task on the hull, and now put away his tools, and turned one eye around to regard his own propulsion. “…There aren’t any creatures on your world that move with thrusters, are there?”

    “Nope. Legs to the last.”

    “Huh.” He considered that. “Well… Sure, take a look, I guess.” He lifted his silk dress forward, so she could see his thrusters in full.

    He had about twenty of them, in 4 clusters. Four were larger booster types, pointed all backwards, and with longer bells to improve efficiency. The others were smaller, more flexible, and were clustered around the bases of the larger. The roots of his 8 tentacles were set in the gaps between clusters, and in front of each cluster was a pair of large bulbous organs. It was a strange, radially symmetric arrangement, that called to mind the designs of jellyfish or a squid, or perhaps even that of a human spacecraft.

    The dress (his only clothing besides his tool belt and pack) looked a little strange and silly to her, but it was about the only type of garment that could cover such a shape. It had a hole on the front for his ‘head’ to stick out, sleeves for his tentacles, and was open at the back, so that his thrusters could safely fire.

    As for the engines themselves, each one was a fleshy, translucent bell with a shiny liquid film on the inside surface. At the base of the bell, where artificial human rockets had their fuel mixer and combustion chamber, there was some hard structure resembling a snail shell, which, aside from his beak, appeared to be the only bone in his body.

    “Does the fuel burn inside these things?” She pointed to one of the shells.

    His eyestalk stretched to see where she was pointing. “Yes. Those are the combustion cores.”

    “And what are these, are these fuel tanks?” She pointed to the bulbous organs.

    “Yes. Oxygen in these ones, hydrogen in those… Or maybe it’s the other way around, I can’t remember. The hearts pump it into the thrusters.” He pointed to a great number of muscular tubes joining each of the fuel bladders with each of its thrusters. “Four hearts for every thruster.”

    “Could you show me one firing?”

    “Sure.” He gripped his tentacles onto the hull, and ignited one of the smaller thrusters. The fleshy bell inflated to its full shape, the hearts contracted violently, and a tiny spark inside the combustion shell grew into a cloud of dim blue flame that flared up through the bell, and pushed him forward slightly. The hearts throbbed again, and the thruster flashed again, as cyclic and as steady as a heartbeat.

    “That’s so cool…” She held out a glove behind the jet, and felt the hot gases thump against her palm.

    “Don’t do that!” As soon as he noticed her sticking her hand in, he spun it away from her. The hearts stopped beating and the bell curled up. “You’ll burn yourself!”

    “It didn’t feel very hot.” She shrugged. “…I didn’t feel much of anything.”

    “Really…?” His eyestalks shifted up and down, which she’d gathered to be equivalent to a frown. “…Those must be pretty thick gloves, then.”

    “I guess so…”

    “Hmm… Uh… Well. I’d better be getting back to work, then.”

    He straightened his dress and turned away.

    “Anything I can do to help?”

    “You want to help?”

    “Sure. I’m sick of being a passenger, I can work. What’re you doing?”

    “Just… Inspecting the nets.” He gestured to the woven sheets of silk which were keeping the cargo in place. “If you want to help, feel your way around the edge of that one, and tell me if you see any damage. It will be very small, some fraying around the ends at the junctions where it joins. Use this.” He handed her a marker.

    “Got it.”

    Twenty minutes later, she finished the inspection, and was happy to report no frays or damage whatsoever.

    He made her do it a second time, because there had to be some tears, and besides, the inspection was supposed to take about an hour. She gathered she just wasn’t looking closely enough.

    Two hours later she straightened back up, blinked her sore eyes, and replaced the cap on the marker. “Okay, 49 frayed ends!” She reported back. “All marked in red… And there were 32 more that I wasn’t quite sure about, and I marked those a little higher up.”

    “Alright, very good job.” He nodded with approval. The lenses of his eyes extended and narrowed as he peered down at one of the ends she’d marked. “Excellent job. Yes, we’ll have to replace this whole net.”

    “Couldn’t we repair it?”

    “…I guess. But repairing is a lot of time and work. And replacement is easy, and we recycle the silk anyway, so no point in having a hassle.”

    “Makes sense.”

    “Get around to the other side and hold it tight to keep the cargo from floating off. I’ll start cutting this side. You have a knife?”

    “Yep.” She hooked her fingers into a rib in the hull, clambered her way around to the other side, and retrieved her knife from her belt. “Ready when you are.”

    Half an hour later, the net had been folded down and stuffed into Keeleeticktick’s pack, and they were unfolding a new one to replace it.

    “So.” She spoke up. “What kind of world do your people come from?”

    “Hmm?”

    “I guess you didn’t come from the surface of a planet, so where did you come from?”

    “Oh… Yes…” He paused for a moment, as his mind sifted back through memories of stories and stories of memories. “It was a very large planet.” He related. “Orange and yellow, with storms and clouds of gas always swirling over its surface… I don’t think it had a surface though, I think it was just gas all the way down. But it was surrounded by small moons, and in a great many rings of rock and ice. We lived on the rings.”

    “Huh.”

    “It orbits that star there.” He pointed toward the heavens off their aft-starboard, and there was no possible way she could have been able to tell which of the points of light he was indicating. “The rings were green and blue, and filled with all manner of life. There were creatures with thrusters, others that drifted, others that lived their whole lives clinging to and burrowing in the rocks… The vapor their thrusters sprayed was absorbed by plants in the shapes of sheets, each one invisibly thin, and the width of a moon. The plants made it back into ice, that they used to shell their eggs and spores and organs, and other creatures fished for the spores again, to use for thrust again, which the plants absorbed again… I heard there was enough vapor floating about the rings that it looked like an atmosphere in places. And so cluttered with rocks and ice and soil and life and things that if you set off in a straight line, you would find something in not more than a night, and sometimes things could even be hidden.”

    “Wow.” She hadn’t understood half of the words in his description, but got the gist that it was a complicated, exciting, and varied place. Similar in composition, perhaps, to the rings of Saturn or Uranus, but as different from those lifeless wastes as the Earth was from Mars. “But… You’ve never seen it?” She clarified.

    “No… No. That was a long time ago, and only the start. Only the place where we began. We’ve been to so many other places now… That one. That one. That one.” He pointed out other stars, all across the sky. She could never tell which he was pointing to, but he obviously knew their names, could tell their distance, had them mapped in his mind’s eye. “I think I heard that our tribe’s heritage goes back about eight or nine homeworlds. All unique. All of a different feel. All around different stars… All of them abandoned when they got too crowded, or when more violent tribes appeared, or when the life we brought along became too wild and strange. My grandfather’s generation was the one that selected this star.” He pointed ahead of them, toward the brightest star in the sky, whose system they were now entering. “He and his sons spent a lifetime constructing the heavy ion engines needed to move the tribe, and then they set out.” He nodded toward the massive ion thruster glowing on the bow of the tribe’s largest ship, alongside which all the others were being towed by silk. “And it’ll be my generation that finally arrives there, and my son’s that will civilize it… And then maybe his grandchildren will leave it again. Who knows?”

    “You were born on the way?”

    “Yes.”

    “How long do your people live? The length of a life?”

    “Hmm… I think by your measure, it would be around 700 years. So, not very long.”

    “It sounds like a long time to me.”

    “My father said it doesn’t feel very long.”

    “…Does it ever get boring?”

    “We can sleep for years. We often do.”

    “Ah.”

    “So yes.” He twisted up his tentacles as a human would fold his arms, and stared out at the distant, intangible starscape. “Yes. It gets boring. It really… Really does. Nothing to do most of the time except… You know. Chart stars, tell stories, try to stay warm, and replace perfectly good nets.”

    “Huh.”

    “Your world sounds exciting though. Everything close. Everything hidden. Everything dense and different. I bet they had a lot of good stories there.”

    “Yeah…” If she recalled correctly, her ship’s database had backed up all its files to the escape pods during the attack. “Yeah, my pod might have a few. I’ll take a look around.”

    “That’d be nice.” He agreed. “We could always use more stories.”

    “Yeah.” She was about to leave when one more question surfaced in her mind. “Hey wait, your grandad’s generation, did you say they built multiple ion engines? I only see one.”

    “Yes, there are many… This isn’t all the tribe. There’s others.” He pointed off into the blackness in a few different directions. “Here. There. All around. We’re all traveling together.”

    “Really?” She squinted around, feeling very blind indeed. “I can’t even see any of them.”

    “Not all of them are far off. See? There’s the Likokisis family convoy.” He pointed to a bright speck off to port that looked to her like nothing but another star. “HEY! HEY TIFOKOTO LOOK OVER HERE! HEY!” He waved his arms. “TIFOKOTO! I’M TALKING TO YOU! See, he heard me! He’s waving back, see? He’s my best friend.”

    His eyeballs were the size of grapefruits and hers the size of grapes, and she couldn’t see anything no matter how she squinted. For something as large as their own convoy to be so faint, it must have been hundreds of miles away at least. And if one additional ‘nearby’ convoy had escaped her notice so completely, how many were there around here? “…How many ships… How many people are in this ‘tribe’?” She asked, and wondered if she’d been mistranslating the word; perhaps what she’d been taking as ‘tribe’ meant something more like ‘nation’ or ‘army’…?

    “I…” Keeleeticktick hesitated. “I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell you that.”

    “You’re not sure what?”

    “Well…! Look Missus Fikes, you’re my friend, but you’re the first alien we’ve ever met. There are many who don’t trust you. Many who don’t want you to know the strength, size, location of our people…”

    “You think I’m gonna hurt you guys?”

    “No.”

    “Man!” She sassed. “If I wanted to hurt you, you’d be hurt! You’ve seen how strong I am! Your cells are just filled with gas, I’m-”

    A sniper round pierced a hole in the net, with such infinite precision that it grazed the tip of the finger of her glove but didn’t puncture it. A warning.

    “GEEZ! WHAT!” She jerked her hand back with a start.

    “CALM DOWN SIKTICKSIS YOU THICK-HEADED WAR-MONGERING IDIOT!” Keeleeticktick yelled in the direction of another invisibly distant convoy. “YOU KNOW FULL WELL THAT HE WAS JUST JOKING, RIGHT?!?” He glanced back at her. Right? He spoke in sign language.

    Right. She hurriedly signed back.

    Good. He replied. I know. He amended.

    They continued to work on the net for the next hour or so, but it was dreadful. An uneasy silence hung over their conversation, and the other nomads besides Keeleeticktick kept their distance from her, and a strange mix of anger and fear and vague, aching sorrow followed after her.

    As she lay down in her fragile pod that night, she realized that she’d learned an important lesson: that strength and power and raw capability were no real cause for pride and were no real virtue in the eyes of the universe, for they can be so easily supplanted and surpassed by greater powers, they can so easily lose their power when separated from their element, and there were many greater powers in the universe.

    “Missus Fikes.” She whispered to herself, and she spoke in the nomad’s language, for it was becoming her own. “I think you are a very, very long way from home.”



    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



    “MASS HO!” Came the call.

    In her haste to get outside, she accidentally pumped the airlock and buckled her helmet in the wrong order, and was gasping for air a few seconds as she stepped out onto the hull. She managed to find Keeleeticktick amid the ruckus. “What’s up? What happened?”

    “Radar picked up an asteroid in our path, closing fast. Deep scanning shows a composition of ice, ore, and carbon.”

    “Is it going to hit us?”

    “Not literally in our path, I mean it’s close enough to catch!” She could hear in his voice the annoyance at how new she still was to everything. “Ice means fuel, so it’s sure to be worth the maneuver. The ores and other elements are a nice bonus too. But we don’t have much time before we pass. An hour.”

    “Uh… Alright then, let’s rock!”

    “Rock?”

    “I mean let’s go! How do we do this?”

    “You want to make yourself useful, you can volunteer.”

    “Volunteer for what?”

    “ALL RIGHT!” The family elder thrusted up onto the bridge, and raised high a curled tentacle in the air with an excited cry. “WHO’S WANTS TO GO FISHING?”

    “I do!” Her hand shot up, along with basically every other tentacle in the crowd.

    “READY THE SHIPS!” He waved them all onward and outward. “LINE AND NETS! WINCHES AND FUEL! YOU KNOW THE WAY!”

    “What can I do?” She called to Keeleeticktick above the excited shouting of the others.

    “You won’t get action following me, I’m a helmsman!” He turned and hurried away. “Stick with Thilykto; He’s done this before!”

    The boy rushed past, slapping her helmet as he did. “Let’s rock, Missus Fikes!” It was a phrase he’d learned 15 seconds ago, from her.

    “What can I do?” She repeated.

    “I don’t know, follow those guys and score us some line! I’m going to get some weights!”

    “Some what? Alright!” She followed a group of nomads to an open cargo sphere, pushed and shoved along with them to get a long roll of silken thread, and then kicked off again in the direction she’d seen Thilykto heading. He met her going the other way.

    “Where are you going?” He demanded.

    “I was following you, where are you going?”

    “To the ships!”

    The family’s convoy was composed of some 30 vessels, all tied to each other in a loose formation about half a mile across, rotating just enough to keep the structure rigid. The ship at the center contained the main ion engine, and it towed all the rest. Other ships were cargo vessels, their surfaces crowded with packs of equipment and supplies. Some cargo ships carried nothing but ice, others nothing but ore, one had nothing but a single enormous cannister. Some smaller ships were more enclosed, and served as homes for smaller groups. Others were packed with telescopes and imaging equipment, others carried mining augers and refineries and a manufacturing facilities, one was just a straight-up gymnasium, one of them had her own human-made pod tied to the side.

    But there was a last type of ship, of which there were five, that she’d never seen used and had never asked about, and it was to these ships that the nomads were now flocking.

    They shared the same basic design and layout as all the others; 8 spherical fuel cells, and 8 main engines in 4 clusters, and a crows nest and comm center on top; all tied together by metal lattice, silk, and foil plates of alien wood. But these five ships had no cargo space. Instead, they had a mining talon on the bottom with spikes for gripping into rocks. And between the talon and crows nest, they sported a trio of long cannons. And all around the ships’ circumference, like a pair of semicircular wings, were hung two massive trusses whose purpose she couldn’t guess.

    She found Thilykto just underneath the crows nest, bouncing around excitedly and saying something she didn’t make out. Some of the other nomads untied the ship from the convoy, and the hull shuddered beneath her hand as they began to drift away. A group of engineers got the engines primed up, and with a flash, they sparked alive into smooth blue flame.

    In her helmet radio, she was overhearing chatter from the helmsmen coordinating. It sounded pretty routine until one of the other ships sounded out. “Aim good, receiving good, powder and ignitor good! Hold onto something and shield your eyes!” And, (catching that last bit a second late) she turned just in time to see its largest cannon fire.

    It was an enormous jet of flame and smoke, uncooled and undampened by air, which spiked from the barrel and discharged through every direction of space before the white of the blast faded to red. As she blinked to clear the spot from her eyes, she thought she could see the projectile cresting the tip of the jet, hurtling off into space. Except it wasn’t one projectile, she saw it was many. And each of them was trailing a silk line behind it…

    “Missus Fikes, you got that silk, right?” Thilykto was at her elbow. “Got to hurry now, not much time!”

    “Yeah, yep!” She pulled it out. “I didn’t know how much we’d need, so I grabbed a whole roll.”

    “Perfect! Let’s thread it into one of these winches.” He led the way out onto one of the ship’s wings, where other nomads were busy bolting down motors and spools. He helped her tie the end of her silk into the drum of the nearest one, and they spun the winch backwards to wind it up. When they were done the winch must have had about a mile and a half of silk in it, and the roll in her hands was barely depleted. Now Thilykto cut the silk short, and tied the end around a small metal weight. “There we go. Onto the next one.”

    “What are these for?”

    “Once we get the ship spinning, the weights will fan them all straight out. Then you’ll see.”

    “What’s…? I…? What’s even going on? What was that other ship using its… Its weapons for? What were they shooting at?”

    “It was shooting at the Likokisis family.” He pointed off into the blackness.

    “WHAT?”

    “And the Likokisis family shot at the Waskleskiki family, who shot at us. These are to catch the Waskleskiki’s lines.” He slapped the winch. “And the Likokisis will catch our lines, and the Waskleskikis will catch theirs. We’ll get all three families tied together into a huge triangle. That’s step one.”

    “Oh…”

    “We’ve gotta hurry though! The Waskleskikis already fired! The lines are on their way!”

    “Right! Right…”

    They managed to get three winches threaded up before the helmsman sounded the alarm that they were beginning their spin. By that point other people had already gotten the other winches prepped, so all that was left to do was climb back to an enclosed space behind the cannons, and wait and watch.

    The ship’s maneuvering engines fired, and it began to rotate. The winches all unlocked and reeled out, and the weights stretched the silk out in every direction, like the spokes of a wheel.

    Then, contact! The many projectiles from the Waskleskikis gun sailed past, each trailing a line straight in between their own whirling threads. The two sets wrapped around each other, the weights all swung around and tangled themselves up in knots, and the winches reversed.

    The nomads all rushed back onto the wings now, to cut through the sudden tangle and collect the Waskleskikis’ threads. She was right there among them, cutters in hand, trimming and sorting and untangling, and have a great deal of fun at it, even if she wasn’t quite as practiced or precise. Thilykto was among those collecting the scraps and discarded pieces for recycling. Others were unloading the ends of enormous nets, or something like nets, from the ship’s storage locker.

    The ship which had fired on the Likokisis was now approaching right off their starboard, and people were flying back and forth between them, exchanging lines, sorting and rearranging and tying and re-tying knots.

    A few more minutes of confusion and untangling, and things were starting to make a sort of sense. Some of the Waskleskikis’ threads were tied down securely, others were tied to the ends of their nets, and others were attached into winches. The Waskleskikis seemed to know which these were, and began to reel in the ones on the nets, and give slack to the ones in the winches. They themselves began to reel in certain threads from the Likokisis, and let out certain others. The smaller winches from earlier had been taken down, and the winches that replaced them were quite a bit larger, and spun at enormous speed. Cables in each direction were taken in and let out, the nets followed the ones that went out, thrusters flashed to keep it tight, and before she knew it, the nets all disappeared into the distance.

    Half an hour longer, and the winches finally stopped spinning. The silk was all spliced strongly together, and bolted directly to the wings. She helped stow the winches, and then there was nothing to do but wait. Most of the nomads hooked a tentacle or two into the wings, and sat back to relax in exhaustion.

    “How long are these lines?” She asked Thilykto. She was feeling less exhausted.

    He pointed to the left. “From us to the Likokisis is about… Eighty Tikakikos?” He pointed to the right. “And it’s about seventy to the Wasklekikis.”

    “Tikakikos… Which is…?”

    “One hundred thousand Tikaki. Which is about this far.” He held his tentacles up to a width of about eight feet.

    She did some brief math and some gross rounding in her head, and arrived at a figure of about a thousand miles or so.

    A thousand miles.

    In the course of less than an hour, the tribe had spun a spider web a thousand miles wide. And they’d used nothing but silk, a few brief bursts of fuel, and three shells of gunpowder.

    And she thought that was just plain impressive.

    “You did really good. Missus Fikes.”

    “Oh yeah? Well you did great too, man! Gimme five!”

    He held up a tentacle and slapped it against her glove. It pushed them away from each other and they had to grip the hull again to keep from drifting off.

    “Yeah.” He agreed. “You have a lot of energy. Are you even tired?”

    “No, not really. This is easy work.”

    “Huh.” He laughed. “Once we get further into the system, and start mining and building and fishing in earnest, you could have your own woman in no time.”

    “I what?”

    “Oh, uh, ha ha, nothing. I mean ship.” He slapped the hull. “Have your own ship in no time. A fishing ship. Like this one.”

    “No, you used another word, what was the word you used? I’m still learning this language, you know.”

    “Oh, geez. Ha ha. Ugh. It was just a dump joke. Calling a ship a woman. Like you become captain of a ship, it’s like you get a woman. I dunno, ask my dad. And don’t tell him you got it from me.”

    “But what does that word mean? I kid you not, I have never heard it. Is it a cuss or what?”

    “Did you not have women on your planet?”

    “Well I don’t very well know if you don’t give me a hint or something!” She scoffed. “Describe it! I have no clue-”

    “I’m not gonna describe a woman! Go ask my dad!”

    “Oh come on, kid.” Somebody slapped Thilykto over the head with a teasing laugh. “Stop before you embarrass yourself.”

    “I think I’m well past that point by now!” She swatted the tentacle away. “And quit laughing! You describe a woman then, smart guy!”

    “Maybe I will!”

    “What is the joke?” She was laughing as well now, despite herself. “It is a cuss, isn’t it??”

    “Ask my dad! Like I told you!”

    “Okay, you little snot.” She waggled a finger at him with a smile. “But I’m signing your name to the question.”

    He broke down laughing at his own expense before he could find a retort. She shook her head and took a sip of water from her suit’s bladder.

    And ten minutes later, the asteroid hit.

    Whatever this silk material was, it was able to stretch a phenomenal distance, especially so over 500 miles of net in every direction, so they in the fishing vessel felt it as less of a shock and more as a gradual sort of pull. A strain gauge they’d clipped to the line began to climb.

    “We’re hitting 240 over here.” The family elder read of the gauge. “HOW ABOUT YOU?”

    “430.” The Likokisis elder reported.

    “510.” Wasklekikis’s elder called.

    “It’s getting too dangerous.” He assessed. “Detach yours before it peaks. We’ll wrap it up tight so you can re-catch it when it comes back around.”

    “Aye.”

    “Aye, but you owe us.”

    The other two families severed their lines, and the elasticity of the silk sprung their ends inward, and wrapped them tightly around the asteroid, engulfing it completely in thread. Meanwhile, their target remained tethered to the last remaining ship, and they began to swing around each other in a pair of enormous arcs.

    “Hold on to something Missus Fikes.”

    “What’s happening?”

    “We’re slinging the asteroid around, while the other ships make a new net to slow it down the rest of the way. It’ll put our ship adrift for a little while, but that’s okay. This has to happen sometimes, when we catch more mass than we anticipate, or when the asteroid is denser than it looks.”

    “Adri- wait.” She glanced back at the convoy, which they were accelerating away from faster and faster. “WAIT! Oh crap, I can’t live inside this suit for more than a night!”

    “Oh no! Missus Fikes, you have to jump!”

    “I can’t make it! I don’t have thrusters!”

    “You have to jump now! Before we’re too far or too fast!”

    “You’ll have to toss me!”

    They tossed her.

    “But I still don’t have thrusters!”

    “Take my squirt gun!”

    They tossed her a rocket with a handle on top.

    “Oh you have got to be kidding me.” She stared back at them, and saw they were all laughing.

    “Don’t worry Missus Fikes, it’s easy to use, just point it and squirt!” They were sailing away from her, faster and faster.

    “You’ll be fine! You can get back to the convoy!”

    “The gun has eight hundred tikaki per second of delta-v! You can make it back easy!”

    “If I die out here, it’s you guys’ fault!”

    “No, no, you’ll be fine, Missus Fikes, don’t worry!

    “I know you can do it!”

    “Oh, go get a woman, you lunatics!” She cussed at them, with still no clue what the word meant. They all burst into the loudest, most contagious laughter she’d ever heard, because they too could tell she didn’t.

    It took an hour or so, but she got back to the convoy just fine. It wasn’t too hard.

    She was surprised by how comfortable and reassuring the silk net felt beneath her hands when she finally made it. And when she clipped the safety tether on her belt into a truss, she trusted the hull of that alien craft just as intimately as she would’ve trusted the concrete foundation of her own home. Perhaps that’s because it was her home now, and she hadn’t yet realized how much she’d forgotten.

    She’d almost made it back to her pod when she heard the call. “Missus Fikes?”

    She glanced over her shoulder at the fading dot of the fishing vessel. “What’s up?”

    “We finally got the asteroid on telescope and… It’s not an asteroid.”

    “…What is it then?”

    “It’s a piece of your ship.”

    “What… But? My ship was completely aluminum. I… I thought you said… Said… I thought you said the asteroid had ice and carbon…”

    “It does.”

    “…Oh.” She got it.

    “They’re all dead.”

    “…Yeah. I know.”

    “I’m sorry, Missus Fikes.”

    “It’s okay… I know.”

    “If I had my way, Missus Fikes.” Came Thilykto’s voice. “You and I would go out together, lure that leviathan in, and kill her. I don’t care how long it takes, we would FIND her and KILL her!”

    “My lifespan is too short to spend on monster hunts, Thilykto.” She sighed. “And you shouldn’t be hasty to spend yours either… I’m going to sleep now. I’m tired.”

    She closed the door behind her.

Description

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4

    “So how do these even work?” She poked at one of Keeleeticktick’s thrusters.

    “Hey, don’t touch that!” He laughed, and slapped her hand away. “Your glove could be dirty. You’ll tarnish it.”

    “Oh! Yeah. Sorry.” She pushed away from him to a slightly further handhold. “You asked about legs last week, so tonight I was curious about you.”

    “Of course, of course…” He’d been in the middle of some task on the hull, and now put away his tools, and turned one eye around to regard his own propulsion. “…There aren’t any creatures on your world that move with thrusters, are there?”

    “Nope. Legs to the last.”

    “Huh.” He considered that. “Well… Sure, take a look, I guess.” He lifted his silk dress forward, so she could see his thrusters in full.

    He had about twenty of them, in 4 clusters. Four were larger booster types, pointed all backwards, and with longer bells to improve efficiency. The others were smaller, more flexible, and were clustered around the bases of the larger. The roots of his 8 tentacles were set in the gaps between clusters, and in front of each cluster was a pair of large bulbous organs. It was a strange, radially symmetric arrangement, that called to mind the designs of jellyfish or a squid, or perhaps even that of a human spacecraft.

    The dress (his only clothing besides his tool belt and pack) looked a little strange and silly to her, but it was about the only type of garment that could cover such a shape. It had a hole on the front for his ‘head’ to stick out, sleeves for his tentacles, and was open at the back, so that his thrusters could safely fire.

    As for the engines themselves, each one was a fleshy, translucent bell with a shiny liquid film on the inside surface. At the base of the bell, where artificial human rockets had their fuel mixer and combustion chamber, there was some hard structure resembling a snail shell, which, aside from his beak, appeared to be the only bone in his body.

    “Does the fuel burn inside these things?” She pointed to one of the shells.

    His eyestalk stretched to see where she was pointing. “Yes. Those are the combustion cores.”

    “And what are these, are these fuel tanks?” She pointed to the bulbous organs.

    “Yes. Oxygen in these ones, hydrogen in those… Or maybe it’s the other way around, I can’t remember. The hearts pump it into the thrusters.” He pointed to a great number of muscular tubes joining each of the fuel bladders with each of its thrusters. “Four hearts for every thruster.”

    “Could you show me one firing?”

    “Sure.” He gripped his tentacles onto the hull, and ignited one of the smaller thrusters. The fleshy bell inflated to its full shape, the hearts contracted violently, and a tiny spark inside the combustion shell grew into a cloud of dim blue flame that flared up through the bell, and pushed him forward slightly. The hearts throbbed again, and the thruster flashed again, as cyclic and as steady as a heartbeat.

    “That’s so cool…” She held out a glove behind the jet, and felt the hot gases thump against her palm.

    “Don’t do that!” As soon as he noticed her sticking her hand in, he spun it away from her. The hearts stopped beating and the bell curled up. “You’ll burn yourself!”

    “It didn’t feel very hot.” She shrugged. “…I didn’t feel much of anything.”

    “Really…?” His eyestalks shifted up and down, which she’d gathered to be equivalent to a frown. “…Those must be pretty thick gloves, then.”

    “I guess so…”

    “Hmm… Uh… Well. I’d better be getting back to work, then.”

    He straightened his dress and turned away.

    “Anything I can do to help?”

    “You want to help?”

    “Sure. I’m sick of being a passenger, I can work. What’re you doing?”

    “Just… Inspecting the nets.” He gestured to the woven sheets of silk which were keeping the cargo in place. “If you want to help, feel your way around the edge of that one, and tell me if you see any damage. It will be very small, some fraying around the ends at the junctions where it joins. Use this.” He handed her a marker.

    “Got it.”

    Twenty minutes later, she finished the inspection, and was happy to report no frays or damage whatsoever.

    He made her do it a second time, because there had to be some tears, and besides, the inspection was supposed to take about an hour. She gathered she just wasn’t looking closely enough.

    Two hours later she straightened back up, blinked her sore eyes, and replaced the cap on the marker. “Okay, 49 frayed ends!” She reported back. “All marked in red… And there were 32 more that I wasn’t quite sure about, and I marked those a little higher up.”

    “Alright, very good job.” He nodded with approval. The lenses of his eyes extended and narrowed as he peered down at one of the ends she’d marked. “Excellent job. Yes, we’ll have to replace this whole net.”

    “Couldn’t we repair it?”

    “…I guess. But repairing is a lot of time and work. And replacement is easy, and we recycle the silk anyway, so no point in having a hassle.”

    “Makes sense.”

    “Get around to the other side and hold it tight to keep the cargo from floating off. I’ll start cutting this side. You have a knife?”

    “Yep.” She hooked her fingers into a rib in the hull, clambered her way around to the other side, and retrieved her knife from her belt. “Ready when you are.”

    Half an hour later, the net had been folded down and stuffed into Keeleeticktick’s pack, and they were unfolding a new one to replace it.

    “So.” She spoke up. “What kind of world do your people come from?”

    “Hmm?”

    “I guess you didn’t come from the surface of a planet, so where did you come from?”

    “Oh… Yes…” He paused for a moment, as his mind sifted back through memories of stories and stories of memories. “It was a very large planet.” He related. “Orange and yellow, with storms and clouds of gas always swirling over its surface… I don’t think it had a surface though, I think it was just gas all the way down. But it was surrounded by small moons, and in a great many rings of rock and ice. We lived on the rings.”

    “Huh.”

    “It orbits that star there.” He pointed toward the heavens off their aft-starboard, and there was no possible way she could have been able to tell which of the points of light he was indicating. “The rings were green and blue, and filled with all manner of life. There were creatures with thrusters, others that drifted, others that lived their whole lives clinging to and burrowing in the rocks… The vapor their thrusters sprayed was absorbed by plants in the shapes of sheets, each one invisibly thin, and the width of a moon. The plants made it back into ice, that they used to shell their eggs and spores and organs, and other creatures fished for the spores again, to use for thrust again, which the plants absorbed again… I heard there was enough vapor floating about the rings that it looked like an atmosphere in places. And so cluttered with rocks and ice and soil and life and things that if you set off in a straight line, you would find something in not more than a night, and sometimes things could even be hidden.”

    “Wow.” She hadn’t understood half of the words in his description, but got the gist that it was a complicated, exciting, and varied place. Similar in composition, perhaps, to the rings of Saturn or Uranus, but as different from those lifeless wastes as the Earth was from Mars. “But… You’ve never seen it?” She clarified.

    “No… No. That was a long time ago, and only the start. Only the place where we began. We’ve been to so many other places now… That one. That one. That one.” He pointed out other stars, all across the sky. She could never tell which he was pointing to, but he obviously knew their names, could tell their distance, had them mapped in his mind’s eye. “I think I heard that our tribe’s heritage goes back about eight or nine homeworlds. All unique. All of a different feel. All around different stars… All of them abandoned when they got too crowded, or when more violent tribes appeared, or when the life we brought along became too wild and strange. My grandfather’s generation was the one that selected this star.” He pointed ahead of them, toward the brightest star in the sky, whose system they were now entering. “He and his sons spent a lifetime constructing the heavy ion engines needed to move the tribe, and then they set out.” He nodded toward the massive ion thruster glowing on the bow of the tribe’s largest ship, alongside which all the others were being towed by silk. “And it’ll be my generation that finally arrives there, and my son’s that will civilize it… And then maybe his grandchildren will leave it again. Who knows?”

    “You were born on the way?”

    “Yes.”

    “How long do your people live? The length of a life?”

    “Hmm… I think by your measure, it would be around 700 years. So, not very long.”

    “It sounds like a long time to me.”

    “My father said it doesn’t feel very long.”

    “…Does it ever get boring?”

    “We can sleep for years. We often do.”

    “Ah.”

    “So yes.” He twisted up his tentacles as a human would fold his arms, and stared out at the distant, intangible starscape. “Yes. It gets boring. It really… Really does. Nothing to do most of the time except… You know. Chart stars, tell stories, try to stay warm, and replace perfectly good nets.”

    “Huh.”

    “Your world sounds exciting though. Everything close. Everything hidden. Everything dense and different. I bet they had a lot of good stories there.”

    “Yeah…” If she recalled correctly, her ship’s database had backed up all its files to the escape pods during the attack. “Yeah, my pod might have a few. I’ll take a look around.”

    “That’d be nice.” He agreed. “We could always use more stories.”

    “Yeah.” She was about to leave when one more question surfaced in her mind. “Hey wait, your grandad’s generation, did you say they built multiple ion engines? I only see one.”

    “Yes, there are many… This isn’t all the tribe. There’s others.” He pointed off into the blackness in a few different directions. “Here. There. All around. We’re all traveling together.”

    “Really?” She squinted around, feeling very blind indeed. “I can’t even see any of them.”

    “Not all of them are far off. See? There’s the Likokisis family convoy.” He pointed to a bright speck off to port that looked to her like nothing but another star. “HEY! HEY TIFOKOTO LOOK OVER HERE! HEY!” He waved his arms. “TIFOKOTO! I’M TALKING TO YOU! See, he heard me! He’s waving back, see? He’s my best friend.”

    His eyeballs were the size of grapefruits and hers the size of grapes, and she couldn’t see anything no matter how she squinted. For something as large as their own convoy to be so faint, it must have been hundreds of miles away at least. And if one additional ‘nearby’ convoy had escaped her notice so completely, how many were there around here? “…How many ships… How many people are in this ‘tribe’?” She asked, and wondered if she’d been mistranslating the word; perhaps what she’d been taking as ‘tribe’ meant something more like ‘nation’ or ‘army’…?

    “I…” Keeleeticktick hesitated. “I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell you that.”

    “You’re not sure what?”

    “Well…! Look Missus Fikes, you’re my friend, but you’re the first alien we’ve ever met. There are many who don’t trust you. Many who don’t want you to know the strength, size, location of our people…”

    “You think I’m gonna hurt you guys?”

    “No.”

    “Man!” She sassed. “If I wanted to hurt you, you’d be hurt! You’ve seen how strong I am! Your cells are just filled with gas, I’m-”

    A sniper round pierced a hole in the net, with such infinite precision that it grazed the tip of the finger of her glove but didn’t puncture it. A warning.

    “GEEZ! WHAT!” She jerked her hand back with a start.

    “CALM DOWN SIKTICKSIS YOU THICK-HEADED WAR-MONGERING IDIOT!” Keeleeticktick yelled in the direction of another invisibly distant convoy. “YOU KNOW FULL WELL THAT HE WAS JUST JOKING, RIGHT?!?” He glanced back at her. Right? He spoke in sign language.

    Right. She hurriedly signed back.

    Good. He replied. I know. He amended.

    They continued to work on the net for the next hour or so, but it was dreadful. An uneasy silence hung over their conversation, and the other nomads besides Keeleeticktick kept their distance from her, and a strange mix of anger and fear and vague, aching sorrow followed after her.

    As she lay down in her fragile pod that night, she realized that she’d learned an important lesson: that strength and power and raw capability were no real cause for pride and were no real virtue in the eyes of the universe, for they can be so easily supplanted and surpassed by greater powers, they can so easily lose their power when separated from their element, and there were many greater powers in the universe.

    “Missus Fikes.” She whispered to herself, and she spoke in the nomad’s language, for it was becoming her own. “I think you are a very, very long way from home.”



    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



    “MASS HO!” Came the call.

    In her haste to get outside, she accidentally pumped the airlock and buckled her helmet in the wrong order, and was gasping for air a few seconds as she stepped out onto the hull. She managed to find Keeleeticktick amid the ruckus. “What’s up? What happened?”

    “Radar picked up an asteroid in our path, closing fast. Deep scanning shows a composition of ice, ore, and carbon.”

    “Is it going to hit us?”

    “Not literally in our path, I mean it’s close enough to catch!” She could hear in his voice the annoyance at how new she still was to everything. “Ice means fuel, so it’s sure to be worth the maneuver. The ores and other elements are a nice bonus too. But we don’t have much time before we pass. An hour.”

    “Uh… Alright then, let’s rock!”

    “Rock?”

    “I mean let’s go! How do we do this?”

    “You want to make yourself useful, you can volunteer.”

    “Volunteer for what?”

    “ALL RIGHT!” The family elder thrusted up onto the bridge, and raised high a curled tentacle in the air with an excited cry. “WHO’S WANTS TO GO FISHING?”

    “I do!” Her hand shot up, along with basically every other tentacle in the crowd.

    “READY THE SHIPS!” He waved them all onward and outward. “LINE AND NETS! WINCHES AND FUEL! YOU KNOW THE WAY!”

    “What can I do?” She called to Keeleeticktick above the excited shouting of the others.

    “You won’t get action following me, I’m a helmsman!” He turned and hurried away. “Stick with Thilykto; He’s done this before!”

    The boy rushed past, slapping her helmet as he did. “Let’s rock, Missus Fikes!” It was a phrase he’d learned 15 seconds ago, from her.

    “What can I do?” She repeated.

    “I don’t know, follow those guys and score us some line! I’m going to get some weights!”

    “Some what? Alright!” She followed a group of nomads to an open cargo sphere, pushed and shoved along with them to get a long roll of silken thread, and then kicked off again in the direction she’d seen Thilykto heading. He met her going the other way.

    “Where are you going?” He demanded.

    “I was following you, where are you going?”

    “To the ships!”

    The family’s convoy was composed of some 30 vessels, all tied to each other in a loose formation about half a mile across, rotating just enough to keep the structure rigid. The ship at the center contained the main ion engine, and it towed all the rest. Other ships were cargo vessels, their surfaces crowded with packs of equipment and supplies. Some cargo ships carried nothing but ice, others nothing but ore, one had nothing but a single enormous cannister. Some smaller ships were more enclosed, and served as homes for smaller groups. Others were packed with telescopes and imaging equipment, others carried mining augers and refineries and a manufacturing facilities, one was just a straight-up gymnasium, one of them had her own human-made pod tied to the side.

    But there was a last type of ship, of which there were five, that she’d never seen used and had never asked about, and it was to these ships that the nomads were now flocking.

    They shared the same basic design and layout as all the others; 8 spherical fuel cells, and 8 main engines in 4 clusters, and a crows nest and comm center on top; all tied together by metal lattice, silk, and foil plates of alien wood. But these five ships had no cargo space. Instead, they had a mining talon on the bottom with spikes for gripping into rocks. And between the talon and crows nest, they sported a trio of long cannons. And all around the ships’ circumference, like a pair of semicircular wings, were hung two massive trusses whose purpose she couldn’t guess.

    She found Thilykto just underneath the crows nest, bouncing around excitedly and saying something she didn’t make out. Some of the other nomads untied the ship from the convoy, and the hull shuddered beneath her hand as they began to drift away. A group of engineers got the engines primed up, and with a flash, they sparked alive into smooth blue flame.

    In her helmet radio, she was overhearing chatter from the helmsmen coordinating. It sounded pretty routine until one of the other ships sounded out. “Aim good, receiving good, powder and ignitor good! Hold onto something and shield your eyes!” And, (catching that last bit a second late) she turned just in time to see its largest cannon fire.

    It was an enormous jet of flame and smoke, uncooled and undampened by air, which spiked from the barrel and discharged through every direction of space before the white of the blast faded to red. As she blinked to clear the spot from her eyes, she thought she could see the projectile cresting the tip of the jet, hurtling off into space. Except it wasn’t one projectile, she saw it was many. And each of them was trailing a silk line behind it…

    “Missus Fikes, you got that silk, right?” Thilykto was at her elbow. “Got to hurry now, not much time!”

    “Yeah, yep!” She pulled it out. “I didn’t know how much we’d need, so I grabbed a whole roll.”

    “Perfect! Let’s thread it into one of these winches.” He led the way out onto one of the ship’s wings, where other nomads were busy bolting down motors and spools. He helped her tie the end of her silk into the drum of the nearest one, and they spun the winch backwards to wind it up. When they were done the winch must have had about a mile and a half of silk in it, and the roll in her hands was barely depleted. Now Thilykto cut the silk short, and tied the end around a small metal weight. “There we go. Onto the next one.”

    “What are these for?”

    “Once we get the ship spinning, the weights will fan them all straight out. Then you’ll see.”

    “What’s…? I…? What’s even going on? What was that other ship using its… Its weapons for? What were they shooting at?”

    “It was shooting at the Likokisis family.” He pointed off into the blackness.

    “WHAT?”

    “And the Likokisis family shot at the Waskleskiki family, who shot at us. These are to catch the Waskleskiki’s lines.” He slapped the winch. “And the Likokisis will catch our lines, and the Waskleskikis will catch theirs. We’ll get all three families tied together into a huge triangle. That’s step one.”

    “Oh…”

    “We’ve gotta hurry though! The Waskleskikis already fired! The lines are on their way!”

    “Right! Right…”

    They managed to get three winches threaded up before the helmsman sounded the alarm that they were beginning their spin. By that point other people had already gotten the other winches prepped, so all that was left to do was climb back to an enclosed space behind the cannons, and wait and watch.

    The ship’s maneuvering engines fired, and it began to rotate. The winches all unlocked and reeled out, and the weights stretched the silk out in every direction, like the spokes of a wheel.

    Then, contact! The many projectiles from the Waskleskikis gun sailed past, each trailing a line straight in between their own whirling threads. The two sets wrapped around each other, the weights all swung around and tangled themselves up in knots, and the winches reversed.

    The nomads all rushed back onto the wings now, to cut through the sudden tangle and collect the Waskleskikis’ threads. She was right there among them, cutters in hand, trimming and sorting and untangling, and have a great deal of fun at it, even if she wasn’t quite as practiced or precise. Thilykto was among those collecting the scraps and discarded pieces for recycling. Others were unloading the ends of enormous nets, or something like nets, from the ship’s storage locker.

    The ship which had fired on the Likokisis was now approaching right off their starboard, and people were flying back and forth between them, exchanging lines, sorting and rearranging and tying and re-tying knots.

    A few more minutes of confusion and untangling, and things were starting to make a sort of sense. Some of the Waskleskikis’ threads were tied down securely, others were tied to the ends of their nets, and others were attached into winches. The Waskleskikis seemed to know which these were, and began to reel in the ones on the nets, and give slack to the ones in the winches. They themselves began to reel in certain threads from the Likokisis, and let out certain others. The smaller winches from earlier had been taken down, and the winches that replaced them were quite a bit larger, and spun at enormous speed. Cables in each direction were taken in and let out, the nets followed the ones that went out, thrusters flashed to keep it tight, and before she knew it, the nets all disappeared into the distance.

    Half an hour longer, and the winches finally stopped spinning. The silk was all spliced strongly together, and bolted directly to the wings. She helped stow the winches, and then there was nothing to do but wait. Most of the nomads hooked a tentacle or two into the wings, and sat back to relax in exhaustion.

    “How long are these lines?” She asked Thilykto. She was feeling less exhausted.

    He pointed to the left. “From us to the Likokisis is about… Eighty Tikakikos?” He pointed to the right. “And it’s about seventy to the Wasklekikis.”

    “Tikakikos… Which is…?”

    “One hundred thousand Tikaki. Which is about this far.” He held his tentacles up to a width of about eight feet.

    She did some brief math and some gross rounding in her head, and arrived at a figure of about a thousand miles or so.

    A thousand miles.

    In the course of less than an hour, the tribe had spun a spider web a thousand miles wide. And they’d used nothing but silk, a few brief bursts of fuel, and three shells of gunpowder.

    And she thought that was just plain impressive.

    “You did really good. Missus Fikes.”

    “Oh yeah? Well you did great too, man! Gimme five!”

    He held up a tentacle and slapped it against her glove. It pushed them away from each other and they had to grip the hull again to keep from drifting off.

    “Yeah.” He agreed. “You have a lot of energy. Are you even tired?”

    “No, not really. This is easy work.”

    “Huh.” He laughed. “Once we get further into the system, and start mining and building and fishing in earnest, you could have your own woman in no time.”

    “I what?”

    “Oh, uh, ha ha, nothing. I mean ship.” He slapped the hull. “Have your own ship in no time. A fishing ship. Like this one.”

    “No, you used another word, what was the word you used? I’m still learning this language, you know.”

    “Oh, geez. Ha ha. Ugh. It was just a dump joke. Calling a ship a woman. Like you become captain of a ship, it’s like you get a woman. I dunno, ask my dad. And don’t tell him you got it from me.”

    “But what does that word mean? I kid you not, I have never heard it. Is it a cuss or what?”

    “Did you not have women on your planet?”

    “Well I don’t very well know if you don’t give me a hint or something!” She scoffed. “Describe it! I have no clue-”

    “I’m not gonna describe a woman! Go ask my dad!”

    “Oh come on, kid.” Somebody slapped Thilykto over the head with a teasing laugh. “Stop before you embarrass yourself.”

    “I think I’m well past that point by now!” She swatted the tentacle away. “And quit laughing! You describe a woman then, smart guy!”

    “Maybe I will!”

    “What is the joke?” She was laughing as well now, despite herself. “It is a cuss, isn’t it??”

    “Ask my dad! Like I told you!”

    “Okay, you little snot.” She waggled a finger at him with a smile. “But I’m signing your name to the question.”

    He broke down laughing at his own expense before he could find a retort. She shook her head and took a sip of water from her suit’s bladder.

    And ten minutes later, the asteroid hit.

    Whatever this silk material was, it was able to stretch a phenomenal distance, especially so over 500 miles of net in every direction, so they in the fishing vessel felt it as less of a shock and more as a gradual sort of pull. A strain gauge they’d clipped to the line began to climb.

    “We’re hitting 240 over here.” The family elder read of the gauge. “HOW ABOUT YOU?”

    “430.” The Likokisis elder reported.

    “510.” Wasklekikis’s elder called.

    “It’s getting too dangerous.” He assessed. “Detach yours before it peaks. We’ll wrap it up tight so you can re-catch it when it comes back around.”

    “Aye.”

    “Aye, but you owe us.”

    The other two families severed their lines, and the elasticity of the silk sprung their ends inward, and wrapped them tightly around the asteroid, engulfing it completely in thread. Meanwhile, their target remained tethered to the last remaining ship, and they began to swing around each other in a pair of enormous arcs.

    “Hold on to something Missus Fikes.”

    “What’s happening?”

    “We’re slinging the asteroid around, while the other ships make a new net to slow it down the rest of the way. It’ll put our ship adrift for a little while, but that’s okay. This has to happen sometimes, when we catch more mass than we anticipate, or when the asteroid is denser than it looks.”

    “Adri- wait.” She glanced back at the convoy, which they were accelerating away from faster and faster. “WAIT! Oh crap, I can’t live inside this suit for more than a night!”

    “Oh no! Missus Fikes, you have to jump!”

    “I can’t make it! I don’t have thrusters!”

    “You have to jump now! Before we’re too far or too fast!”

    “You’ll have to toss me!”

    They tossed her.

    “But I still don’t have thrusters!”

    “Take my squirt gun!”

    They tossed her a rocket with a handle on top.

    “Oh you have got to be kidding me.” She stared back at them, and saw they were all laughing.

    “Don’t worry Missus Fikes, it’s easy to use, just point it and squirt!” They were sailing away from her, faster and faster.

    “You’ll be fine! You can get back to the convoy!”

    “The gun has eight hundred tikaki per second of delta-v! You can make it back easy!”

    “If I die out here, it’s you guys’ fault!”

    “No, no, you’ll be fine, Missus Fikes, don’t worry!

    “I know you can do it!”

    “Oh, go get a woman, you lunatics!” She cussed at them, with still no clue what the word meant. They all burst into the loudest, most contagious laughter she’d ever heard, because they too could tell she didn’t.

    It took an hour or so, but she got back to the convoy just fine. It wasn’t too hard.

    She was surprised by how comfortable and reassuring the silk net felt beneath her hands when she finally made it. And when she clipped the safety tether on her belt into a truss, she trusted the hull of that alien craft just as intimately as she would’ve trusted the concrete foundation of her own home. Perhaps that’s because it was her home now, and she hadn’t yet realized how much she’d forgotten.

    She’d almost made it back to her pod when she heard the call. “Missus Fikes?”

    She glanced over her shoulder at the fading dot of the fishing vessel. “What’s up?”

    “We finally got the asteroid on telescope and… It’s not an asteroid.”

    “…What is it then?”

    “It’s a piece of your ship.”

    “What… But? My ship was completely aluminum. I… I thought you said… Said… I thought you said the asteroid had ice and carbon…”

    “It does.”

    “…Oh.” She got it.

    “They’re all dead.”

    “…Yeah. I know.”

    “I’m sorry, Missus Fikes.”

    “It’s okay… I know.”

    “If I had my way, Missus Fikes.” Came Thilykto’s voice. “You and I would go out together, lure that leviathan in, and kill her. I don’t care how long it takes, we would FIND her and KILL her!”

    “My lifespan is too short to spend on monster hunts, Thilykto.” She sighed. “And you shouldn’t be hasty to spend yours either… I’m going to sleep now. I’m tired.”

    She closed the door behind her.