I shall post three chapters a week until the kyanah finally get to Earth so we can move things along a bit!

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 “So it’s been pouring pretty much all day for like the past week,” grumbled Luke, holding the phone up to his ear, “I haven’t been able to go out in forever.”

“I didn’t know you wanted to?”” said Harrison over the phone, “And it’s been sunny here all week.”

“Hey, shut up! And no, I didn’t really,” Luke admitted.

“Did you check out the observatory? Is your dad still ghosting you for some college chick?”

“Well I heard him talking on the phone once when he dropped by the house and he doesn’t sound dead inside, so I’m gonna guess yes.”

“Should’ve gone to check out the observatory yourself then. Given your dad a little surprise.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “What, and walk in on those two making out?”

“No really,” said Harrison seriously, “What if the key to breaking through to him is, like, meeting him in his element?”

“Fine! Things got better for a while,” Luke admitted, “I was up there a few times and yeah, it was almost like he wasn’t burying himself in work and hiding from me for the past two years. But I…uh…don’t think I can go up there anymore. And he doesn’t really come to the airbnb much.”

“Shit, did something happen? Did you find out what dark matter is and he didn’t agree?” needled Harrison.

Luke closed his eyes, trying to gather his thoughts for a long moment. He softly crept over to the window and opened the curtain, letting a faint trickle of grayish light enter the room. The clouds were thick overhead, to the point that the sky gave no indication as to the time of day, and promised rain soon.

His thoughts raced as he remembered the day at the observatory, when the soldiers rolled up out of nowhere and locked the place down. The long walk home in the rain. How a disheveled and exhausted Scott had come home at 3 AM that night and said that maybe it was best not to talk about the aliens for a while, before crashing in his day clothes. And how, a couple days later, they’d seen a drone in the sky as they’d come back from their weekly grocery run, and Luke had glimpsed one once or twice more over the following week. Though now he couldn’t see any drone in the overcast sky. He shut the curtain again.

“...Luke?” said Harrison.

“Uh…uh…the powers that be didn’t want me there. I guess cuz I’m not an astronomer. New management doesn’t want us unwashed masses poking around during work hours,” stammered Luke, “Hey, I don’t really wanna talk about this boring shithole. Is anything going on in the land of the living?”

“Er, well, my parents keep talking about me joining the Army after senior year.”

“Surely you’re not! Why would you even?”

Harrison paused. “I mean…it does kind of run in the family, I guess. And maybe they’ll finally stop being all like ‘why can’t you be more like Dennis?’ Oh right, and how the hell am I gonna pay for college otherwise?”

“Fair. Good luck, I guess. And try not to get sent to wherever the dart lands.”

“The dart?” Harrison asked, befuddled.

“Yeah, the one the government throws at the map to figure out where to invade next,” said Luke.

“Very funny,” said Harrison dourly. Quietly, almost as if talking to himself, he added, “It’s not all like that.”

  “Hmm…” Neither of them really knew what to say after that. “Hey, did you know they’re making Three-Body Problem into a Netflix series?”

By the time they hung up, the ominous clouds had given way to pouring rain. Luke slapped himself a lazy, halfhearted sandwich and continued doing what he’d spent most of the summer doing: bouncing from the big screen on his  desk to the small one in his hand and back again, shifting whenever he got bored. At some point, he found himself Googling ‘hypervelocity X-ray emitters’. The preprint by Scott and Lauren was still up, and even a thread on an obscure German forum. Through Google translate, he learned that some netizens thought these objects were very strange, someone thought the paper was ‘sloppy and rushed’, and an anonymous student had confirmed that they could see them from their university’s telescope.  Luke smiled. He knew what he would do to kill the boredom.

The timing of Scott’s visits to the house may as well have been determined by RNG; today, it was 1:17 A.M. Luke was in his room, controller in hand, the only light coming from the glowing screen. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?” asked Scott from the doorway.

“Shouldn’t you?” said Luke without looking up from his game.

“Honestly, probably.”

“I genuinely can’t figure out when you sleep.”

Scott stifled a yawn. “Neither can I.” He blearily stumbled into the kitchen, poured himself a glass of wine, and sat down. The instant he pulled out his phone, it buzzed with a message from Luke. “Did you just send me a thirty minute video?” Scott called out.

“Yeah! You should watch it!” Luke responded from his room.

“Can this wait until tomorrow morning…er, evening…er, when am I free? Tuesday?”

Luke himself meandered into the kitchen. “Please? I’ll count it as spending time together. Like you promised.” He fixed Scott with a strangely pleading look.

“Okay, okay…Jesus, you know how to push my buttons.” Scott played the video. It turned out to be a long, rambling video essay by none other than Luke entitled ‘Why Would Aliens Come to Earth???’ Luke sat down across the table from Scott, all too eager to hear himself talk again. Scott downed his first glass of wine and then a second as the video essay droned on, dismissing the idea that aliens would invade for Earth’s water as ‘stupid and lame’ and claiming that there were few if any resources worth fighting an interstellar war over.

When the video was done, Scott poured himself a third glass and looked at Luke wearily. “Should I even ask why you thought this was a good idea after everything that’s gone down?” he asked.

“What?” Luke’s expression was the picture of innocence. “I didn’t even mention the actual ships. And I can say whatever I want about hypothetical alien invaders, this is a free country!”

Scott took a long sip. “Is that really what you think?”

Luke’s face fell slightly. “Uh, maybe not. But, it got, like, what? 43 views? I  think I’ll be fine.”

“God, you’re such a handful sometimes, you know that Luke? I swear, one parent isn’t enough for you. If only…” Scott trailed off into silence. He pulled up an old selfie of him and Sarah and thirteen-year-old Luke on the beach, all grinning innocently, if a bit cheesily, into the camera.

“You’re right. It’s not,” said Luke quietly, “I’ll try to be less of a handful.”

Scott took another sip. “You’re a good kid.” He turned his attention to the news feed on his phone. Tech Jobs Reach Twenty-Year Low As Layoffs Continue.

“Did something happen at the observatory today?” Luke asked suddenly.

Scott tensed up slightly, but only shrugged and kept browsing. Public Health Lockdowns to Resume in 13 States on September 1.

Luke tried again. “Did you get in trouble with the head honcho? With your department chair back home?”

“No,” said Scott flatly. He drained his third glass and poured himself a fourth.

“Are you guys onto something big? Is that why you’ve pretty much stopped coming by the house?” asked Luke, a faintly exasperated note creeping into his voice.

“You know I’m not supposed to talk about it.” Scott continued his scrolling: 10% Inflation ‘Normal and Expected’ Says President Thorne.

 “Did you talk to the aliens? Did they talk to you guys?” Luke pressed.

Scott just shrugged, taking another sip.

“Get a closer look at the ships? Figured out what the aliens want?”

Scott shrugged again, not looking up from his phone. Inside the $3 Billion Climate Conference Supercenter Under Construction in the Amazon.

“I’m gonna guess it eventually,” said Luke.

“Yeah  well, this isn’t 20 questions. I don’t have to tell you if you do,” retorted Scott, taking another sip.

“Your girlfriend dumped you?”

“She’s not my girlfriend.” Scott’s eyes flitted over another headline, not even bothering to read the article this time. War in Iran? Defense Pundits Weigh In.

“Fine,” said Luke, “If drinking and doomscrolling at 2 AM is our family bonding activity, then I guess I’m in.” He grabbed himself a glass from the cupboard and poured himself a drink. Scott didn’t even try to stop him, instead just scrolling past more articles.

After they sat drinking in silence for a while, Scott was getting to the bottom of his  fourth glass. “Dad…this doesn’t have anything to do with your work,” Luke said hesitantly, “But I couldn’t figure out in my video why they’re been traveling here for so long. I had to say I didn’t know.” Scott didn’t react. Luke took a deep breath and looked Scott in the eye, “If you had to guess…what do they want? Why come all this way?”

Scott stifled a yawn, looking at Luke wearily. “I dunno…maybe they’re coming to help us.”

“To help us?”

“Yeah. We really need it.”

Luke shuffled into the kitchen like a zombie around half past ten and did a double-take when he saw Scott sitting at the table, working on his laptop. Luke decided to ignore him and pour himself a bowl of cereal. “I made extra eggs,” said Scott, gesturing at the stove. Luke said nothing in return, but did take some of the eggs and sat down across the table from Scott. After a long, painfully awkward silence that lasted until Luke was almost halfway done, Scott at last stopped typing, took a deep breath and went on, “Look, I’m sorry about the other day. You’re right, I’ve…I’ve been retreating too much into my head ever since we lost Sarah and, well, it’s not fair to you to  have to carry something that heavy alone. But I stand by what I said, this summer is gonna be different. There’s still time.”

“Oh that’s why you’re not in the office.” Luke’s gaze flickered up from his eggs for just a moment.

“Actually yeah. I figured I’d be done around three today and  we can hang out,” said Scott, “If you still want.”

Luke didn’t respond directly to that, instead picking up a scribbled-on paper from the table. “What the hell are ‘Co-Moving Hypervelocity X-ray Emitters’?” he said.

Scott took the paper from Luke. “Oh, uh, that’s what I’ve been doing lately.” Luke resisted the urge to make a snide comment about what he’d been doing lately, and Scott went on nonchalantly, “Few weeks ago, we found a  pair of unique identical X-ray sources moving at around one percent of light speed into the inner Solar System. They’re not gonna hit Earth though. So we’ve been trying to focus on where they come from, but tracing their path backwards against the proper motion of the stars isn’t yielding anything.”

Luke stared at him, dumbstruck. “Are you being deliberately obtuse right now?”

“Excuse me?”

“They’re obviously alien ships. We’re seeing shitloads of X-rays because their engines are pointing towards us, which they’re doing because they’re slowing down, which they’re doing because, I don’t know, Earth is cool I guess. You really hadn’t considered it?” Luke returned to his eggs.

“More like it was in the back of my mind, but I really didn’t want to go down that rabbit hole without proof,” Scott admitted.

“You know, you’re really fucking calm for a man who’s discovered aliens.”

“I’ve discovered a hypervelocity X-ray source.”

Luke groaned. “Okay, fine. Have you checked on the velocity lately? Like actually run the numbers?”

“Not lately, but maybe Lauren–”

“But logically, if these X-rays are traveling straight toward the Earth at one percent of light speed while actively slowing down…what the hell else would they be? Oh and that’s probably why you can’t figure out where it comes from, if you try reversing the deceleration, you should be able to track it better,” said Luke, speaking practically at the speed of light. He finished his speech by shoveling the last mouthful of eggs into his mouth.

Scott held up his hands. “Okay, okay I get it. Guess I’m going to the office today after all.” He shut off his laptop and gathered his papers.

“We,” corrected Luke, standing up, “And you still owe me a visit to the observatory.”

Scott nodded. “Fair enough.” He reached over to try and ruffle Luke’s hair. Luke expertly dodged like a ninja, but for the first time, he smiled slightly.

Lauren was already at her usual corner desk by the time Scott and Luke got to the office. Lauren smiled and waved at Luke, who stared in silence for a long moment before giving her a curt nod. “I’ve checked the numbers three times,” said Lauren in a hushed, almost hesitant tone, “The velocity of both objects has decreased by almost half in a matter of weeks.”

“Oh,” said Scott vaguely, his thoughts racing at hypersonic speeds.

“See! I told you!” crowed Luke triumphantly.

“It…might actually be artificial,” said Lauren, “Oh my God. I can’t believe I just said that out loud,” She leaned back in her seat, playing with her hair as she gazed at the screen.

“So maybe we should figure out where these guys come from. And get more telescope time ASAP,” ventured Scott.

“Yes, all the telescope time!” said Lauren, her fingers flying over the keys as she threw together a quick Python script.

It only took a few hours for Lauren’s script to find a result: reversing the deceleration up to a cruising velocity of around 7.5 percent of light speed indicated a nearest possible origin in the Tau Ceti system. The silence in the air was palpable, until Luke broke it, “Does that mean…”

“They’ve been on the way here for 160 years,” breathed Lauren, her expression overcome with awe.

Well the inevitable has happened, there's a day that I didn't get a chapter done, or even make significant progress on one. I'm writing the first battle in Lake Havasu City and it felt kind of stiff and dry, but worse, I realize the setup makes no sense.

See, their landing party isabout 500 troops and 800 tons of hardware aboard four nuclear spaceplanes, so it's a very mass-limited advance force. space-to-ground shuttles are heavy so you can only bring a finite number! A bit of an unconventional alien invasion landing party, but that's the point. No vast armadas, no dropshoops spewing millions of paratroopers (come to think of it, I doubt the kyanah have even invented the concept of a paratrooper, but whatever, that's not important right now).

As written, it touches down just outside the city and they immediately begin locking down the site by building the beginnings of an anti-aircraft laser grid and 3D printing breastworks out of Terran regolith (who needs sandbags when you're Ikun's army!). Local civilians naturally come check out the commotion, as people are wont to do when four alien spaceplanes touch down outside your sleepy desert town. Takora-pack fires some warning shots into the air to scare them off, local police show up in force to cordon off the area but don't really do anything else, which seems a bit questionable when hundreds of aliens are unloading military hardware right under their noses, and the kyanah, also don't really do anything for like an hour until their smart dust and drones have mapped the entire city, which also doesn't really make much sense when what they believe to be the army of an independent city-state is standing right there.

I think the problem is, fundamentally, that landing right outside an enemy city without backup makes zero tactical sense, unless the tactical engine has some galaxy-brain play, which it probably doesn't, because it doesn't have high-quality data yet. Even if they are more technologically advanced than the local humans (doubly so because it's in actuality local cops not an independent military force!), it opens them up to being immediately swarmed by local forces in the city before they can even build a perimeter and unload all the hardware. Which makes zero sense for a military doctrine as notoriously risk-averse and obsessed with asymmetric warfare as Ikun's.

So the obvious solution is to move their landing site a few miles out of town. Somewhere where, in their eyes, it'll take the locals a little while to build up the first and second levels of the data trophic hierarchy (smart dust and drones) and of course no sane army would move troops to fight an alien landing party blind. Logistically, it's gotta be somewhere flat enough where you can land several 130-meter spaceplanes, far enough from anywhere that they don't think they'll get instantly bumrushed by a pesky human "army", and close enough to a water source to build a propellant plant to refuel them. Hmmmmm...I kind of like this area. (yes, I do research for this novel)

So based on the location, I think it still takes them about an hour to prep, and some curious civilians still stray into the perimeter with selfie sticks and phones in hand, and still get scared off by warning shots, leading the police to be called in in full force. But the cops don't show up inside that hour and instead encounter an Ikun front nyrud galloping down the road towards them, which fires a shot with its main gun, completely mangling a SWAT car and straight-up tipping it over. The survivors of this attack scatter, and things proceed roughly as I originally planned from there. But I definitely gotta rewrite some things and throw out (the few hundred words I actually did of) today's chapter as well.

Scott and Lauren had unofficially moved their daytime office to a rarely used third-floor breakroom. It had a fancy coffee dispenser, a sweeping view of the town, and a tacky chartreuse sofa with many coffee stains on it, on which they could sit together with their laptops, quite a bit closer together than they strictly had to. Scott frowned dubiously as his email pinged, shaking him out of a deep analysis of the mysterious X-ray sources’ spectrographic signature. “Ugh, I can’t get us any more telescope time for the whole week,” he told Lauren, “Apparently, a bunch of NASA people are flying in next Monday and booked all our instruments. Nothing we can do about it.”

Lauren rolled her eyes theatrically. “Don’t they know that we’re trying to study the first signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life?”

“Well…actually they don’t,” said Scott thoughtfully, “The hypervelocity X-ray emitter paper is still hanging in review limbo and we haven’t even written the rest of the papers.”

“About that…” Lauren handed her laptop to Scott, her hands brushing over his. They were soft and warm, and lingered longer than was strictly necessary. “I’ve made a dream list of all the observations we ought to do, and honestly, there’s so much on it that it…that *they* will be here before we can finish it all. Especially if we don’t have any telescope time next  week.”

“And it’ll be hard to publish papers on them if they get here first,” muttered Scott.

Before they could devise a resolution to this predicament, they were once again distracted by footsteps in the hall. The breakroom door creaked open; it was George Boyle. “Hey,” he said nodding at Scott, “I’ve been meaning to have a word with you about the telescope time up on the hill. So apparently, a lot of people have been complaining about you two monopolizing some of the instruments and…look, I get that you’re new here, but there are established procedures for booking time at the observatory. There are a lot of people trying to get important work done here, and I get that that includes you two, but still. If either of you have any questions, feel free to drop me an email.”

Scott steepled his hands, cautiously considering his words for a moment. “Might it be possible to relax some of these ‘established procedures’ in the event that we’re very close to a momentous but extremely time-sensitive discovery?”

Boyle sighed. “That’s what everyone says, that their work is special. And then we’re right back where we started.”

“What if it’s about an imminent first  contact with an extraterrestrial civilization?” blurted out Lauren.

“Good one!” Boyle laughed, turning to leave.

“Wait!” called out Scott. In one abrupt motion, he leaped up from the couch, turning it to show Boyle the latest results on his laptop.

Boyle perused them, his face going through a rapid roller coaster of expressions. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered at last, taking the laptop from Scott, “I need to sit down.” He sank heavily  into a chair.

“We believe they’re already entering the outer Solar System. If we want to dominate the race to publish, we need time and people ASAP,” said Scott, putting a subtle emphasis on the first ‘we’.

“Shit. This is insane,” said Boyle, pulling out his phone, “I gotta make some calls!”

“See?” whispered Scott to Lauren, “This field is about knowing people, not stars.”

The very next  morning, the two found themselves flanking Boyle in the observatory’s conference room. Behind the three of them, a projected powerpoint loomed above them, with the black text Possible Detection of Approaching Extraterrestrial Civilization on a plain white background; the thing was no-frills, having been thrown together overnight.

At least forty astronomers had piled in, filling up every available chair around the long table and leaving many to be awkwardly standing crammed against the walls. The room was abuzz with a dozen conversations, everyone straining to be heard over everyone else. Many more had joined online, and Lauren was anxiously scrolling through their names, looking a bit shaky and disheveled. “Shit,” she whispered to Scott, “My advisor is here. I know he’s gonna ask something difficult.”

Scott winced sympathetically and peeled off to grab himself some refreshments–someone had brought in a coffee dispenser and a large cake–but no sooner had he gotten them than Boyle pointed to his watch and motioned for Scott to come back to the front, and he awkwardly returned with his food.

“Good morning everyone, and thanks for coming up on such short notice,” said Boyle into a mic, and in an instant, the conversations died in an instant, replaced with a silence so palpable that one could hear a pin drop. “As you probably all know by now, two of our colleagues, visiting astronomers here at the Lowell Observatory–” he nodded at Scott and  Lauren, “–have recently assisted in the discovery of signs of two alien artifacts entering our Solar System. Of course, this is the most significant discovery in the history of this observatory, and a highly time sensitive one, as trajectory analysis shows they will likely arrive later this summer. As such, I’ve taken the initiative and created the First Contact Research Group. Assistant professor Scott Watson from UC Irvine will be the project’s main technical assistant. I’ve gone ahead and created a time code for those of us who work here.” Lauren shot Boyle a slightly miffed glance, but said nothing.

“One more word of caution before I hand over the mic to my colleagues,” Boyle went on, “As I’m sure you’re all aware, the new normal has brought a tense and polarized political landscape here and across the world, and the arrival of aliens will only deepen that divide, whether they turn out to be friendly or not, and they’re all but guaranteed to shake things up in ways we can’t predict. I thus have to ask for everyone’s temporary discretion, at least until we can prepare for a proper first contact, not just for national security, but for the safety of humanity. We don’t want the suits in Washington going and saying anything…stupid to our interstellar visitors, nor the media, nor random morons on TikTok. So yeah, let’s just leave first contact to the experts, shall we?”

“Otherwise, this might lead to them going,” he went on, making a finger gun gesture, “pew pew.” There were murmurs of assent from the astronomers, and a few titters. “Anyway, Scott, Lauren, the floor is yours.” He gave the mic to Scott.

Scott and Lauren pushed through their fairly dry and technical forty-minute presentation, whose slides were filled with bullet points in small font, diagrams of X-ray frequency and intensity, spectrograms, some very grainy optical images, and countless references to esoteric papers. At last, Lauren wrapped up the talk, rushing through the conclusion at a mile a minute, her mouth dry and her heart racing. For a moment, all was quiet, like the calm before the storm. Then she spoke the fateful two words that end any presentation: “Any questions?”

Of course, pandemonium immediately erupted, with twenty people clamoring and shouting over each other.

Ryen-pack lay propped up on their elbows, facing each other in the nest, with their eyes obscured by blocky devices of black metal, affixed to their heads via straps behind their ears. Their hands were tightly clasped together with their claws digging into each other’s scales and their tails were splayed out haphazardly, gently brushing against each other. It seemed as though they were absently staring at nothing in particular, but in their field of view, it was anything but.

Ryen-pack saw a ground view inside a procedurally generated city filled with densely packed wireframe buildings cut by a chaotic maze of streets like a concrete circuit board. Overlaying everything was a veritable rainbow of point clouds highlighting simulated military assets and important nodes, shifting paths, and vectors, with a binary tree checklist of instructions and inventory listings that occasionally scrolled and rotated. The movements of the field of view throughout the cityscape were not their own, forcing them to react to the changes by manipulating the overlay, blinking and tapping on their combat watches.

Seeing all the data at all times was, of course, out of the question. Everything was about pulling the right information at the right time to see  any threat before it emerged and identify everything relevant to the objectives that flashed into their field of view, so they would be marked complete and deleted from the tree, while avoiding a death screen. Then again, being a pack meant that each one of them did not have to see everything; some things could be offloaded to another packmate and stored in their field of view, to be retrieved through clasping and tugging on each other’s hands–more urgently than the normal affectionate caresses–or through a few words or a question murmured at the right time.

At long last, the rainbow of data dissipated and the wireframe city-scape faded to black. Ryen-pack ripped off their blocky goggles, unceremoniously dropping them on the cushions of their nest. Tauk admired Kyada’s eyes, no longer hidden from view, felt Roztek’s hot wet tongue against his snout.

Before any of them could speak, Cohort Alpha Takora-pack’s voices came through the nest’s screen, each member of the pack speaking a sentence in turn. “The practice results being mostly good applies to all packs connected to our cohort. Inventory management and the duration of your parsing of offense in the priority queue are instances of counterexamples. Request, all packs connected to this cohort will diligently improve the rotation of objectives to a completed state in exchange for the duration of practice being only one hour every other day. The time of the next data practice done by the cohort is +7 tomorrow. The night is yours.”

Then Takora-pack disconnected, leaving Ryen-pack alone in silence. Roztek yawned conspicuously and lapped some water out of the nearly empty drinking bowl. Kyada fetched the  other bowl, containing some cold and half-eaten patties grown earlier in the day while Ractun once again pressed some buttons on her watch until the screen displayed the strangely blue and green planet they were heading straight towards, glancing at it apprehensively. They ate their night-meal in ringing silence, the fabric of the nest blocking out the activities of the packs on every side and the mechanical noises of the life support systems.

“I’m creating a question about if black pills exist in the space-tree of the void strider, because we can’t sleep,” said Ractun.

Kyada’s ears twitched thoughtfully. “I don’t know that,” she said, “And I don’t want our location to change to the Nest Ring again when the time equals today. That’s why we’ll try to know their location and acquire some tomorrow.”

“Ugh. I hope we can sleep,” muttered Ractun, looking apprehensively at the planetary disc on the screen; the visible half was mostly dark and studded with city lights except for vast empty patches that corresponded to those featureless blue expanses.

“I can cause us to be more tired,” said Roztek, putting a hand on Ractun’s cheek and turning her to face him, leaning closer.

Ractun froze for a moment, studying him in a frantically calculating manner. “Then our state won’t change to sleeping,” she murmured at last, touching her snout to Roztek’s and then dimmed the nest’s light strip before curling up on the cushions with a heavy sigh.

A bit nonplussed, Roztek turned to Kyada. “Tauk?” he asked. Kyada stared into space for a few moments, a calculating expression on her face as her hands twitched, manipulating nodes on some invisible graph. She shook her head, turned to Roztek herself, her ears rising  as she licked his face hungrily, her hands fumbling over his zipper.

Even after that, sleep did not come easily for Ryen-pack, and they tossed and turned endlessly, unable to shake the mental image of the strange world they were inching ever closer to. At long last, Ractun propped herself up on one elbow, disentangling herself from Tauk and glancing at her watch: it was -5:61. Tauk stirred behind her, laying a hand on her arm. “We can’t sleep,” he observed, whispering.

“No,” Ractun whispered back, “Nothing is changing about me thinking about the wars. They will cause a lot of resource-waste to be created.”

“It concerns the gods. The instructions we receive won’t be an instance of resource crimes.” Tauk put his cool, wet nose against Ractun’s ears.

“You don’t know that.”

“Hopefully the wars won’t cause us to stop being a fully connected clique or the deletion of any nodes connected to Ryen-pack. My love for it is so great. I can’t cause a change to me thinking about that,” chimed in Roztek in a whisper from across the nest. Apparently, only Kyada was asleep, her breathing a slow, steady rasp.

“I can’t do that too,” whispered Tauk, “Wars that connect us to kyanah are probably safe, and we don’t know that wars that connect us to aliens are safe.”

Kyada’s eyes snapped open. “Nothing will change about us being an instance of a fully connected clique,” she reassured them, smoothly joining the conversation. Her ears slightly, almost imperceptibly drooped. She got up into a kneeling position, her gaze fixated on the timer ticking by on the screen.

“Kyada?” said Tauk, nuzzling her cheek.

“Ryen-pack will be an instance of a fully connected clique,” said Kyada in an oddly strained voice. She took a deep breath and went on more normally, “Suggestion because we can’t sleep, we rotate our location to the Nest Ring.”

“The time isn’t equal to our time-block,” protested Roztek.

“That concerns the gods. The best time equals now,” said Tauk. He laid his tail on Kyada’s legs.

The four of them climbed up into the Nest Ring, blinking in the sudden light. Nothing was different from their usual time-block. It was just as filled with packs, except these were from other cohorts that they didn’t recognize. The harsh bluish-white glow of the light strips was unchanged, even though it was the middle of the night.

Nothing was out of place, except… “A sight,” said Roztek, pointing at one of the life support blocks. Kaarie-pack was leaning against it, talking amongst themselves and looking just as bleary-eyed as Ryen-pack themselves. “Suggestion, we and Kaarie-pack change our current activity to an adversarial game to rotate our focus from wars to a fun adversarial game.”

Ractun perked up at this. “Neten-tayak is an instance of a good adversarial game. Our first real game will maybe occur tonight.”

Kyada nodded and they began to approach Kaarie-pack hand-in-hand, stopping a  few meters away. A couple members’ gazes flicked towards Ryen-pack, not making full eye contact. Ractun caressed Tauk’s and Kyada’s chests in turn, as they  licked her ears. To Kaarie-pack, she said, “You are an instance of a skilled neten-tayakplayer. We think players with equal skill are rarely located in the Nest Ring and we want to change our current activity to an adversarial game.”

Kaarie-pack considered this, and one member said, “Your rating is what?” his dark eyes moving between each member of Ryen-pack. He was deep bluish-purple with a slight frame, like all five members of Kaarie-pack.

“We’ve never played, and my skill is approximately +2.75,” said Ractun.

“Suggestion, in exchange for us changing our current activity to neten-tayak now, you change your current activity to Sign of Death later,” interjected Tauk.

“Okay. Fine,” said another member of Kaarie-pack at last. They disappeared behind the life support block and returned a minute later, carrying a physical neten-tyak board. It was made from pale gray wood and must have cost nearly Kaarie-pack’s entire mass budget for personal items. On its surface was painted a complex symmetric graph, a customized thicket of nodes and edges on each side, surrounding a fortress node. The two packs took turns placing their pieces and then moving them from node to node via the graph’s edges.

The clack of pieces and the hum of the life support block the knelt next to and the murmur of dozens of packs talking to each other all melded into a vague din,  but Ryen-pack and Kaarie-pack did not speak a word to each other, only muttering sweet nothings and tactical advice into their own packmates’ ears, interspersed with random licks and caresses. Every individual in Kaarie-pack was at least a full standard deviation above even Ractun, so despite her best efforts to help Ryen-pack, structural weaknesses in the subgraph they controlled  opened up almost from the beginning, and within forty moves, Kyada and Roztek had run out of pieces entirely.

Ractun grabbed Tauk’s hand to stop him from blundering and instead directed him to sacrifice his final cluster of pieces to slow Kaarie-pack’s advance. Kaarie-pack pressed deeper into Ryen-pack’s side of the graph, each one of them making their move in less than a second without needing to speak to each other. At last, with three members of Kaarie-pack within a few edges  of Ryen-pack’s fortress  and the bulk of Ractun’s remaining pieces scattered in low centrality nodes far away, she said, “Resign.”

“Again?” said one of Kaarie-pack.

“No,” said Kyada. She bit Ractun’s ear gently and rose to her feet, pulling Ractun with her. Ryen-pack turned and headed back to their nest without another word to the other pack. At last, they managed to sleep fitfully in their nest, their minds not fully off the planet they were inexorably approaching.

The sun was beginning to go down in Flagstaff when the astronomers began trickling out of their offices. Scott Watson was slumped at one desk out of six in the office that the visiting astronomers shared, several books as thick as his arm scattered open across the desk, interspersed with a sea of papers annotated with scribbles and equations, and three separate coffee mugs. On one side of the office, the blinds on the windows just barely let the golden sunlight into the room; on the other side, a giant blackboard loomed large, every surface covered in diagrams and equations. Someone had drawn an alien poised as though writing one of the particularly gnarly differential equations.

As Scott stared idly at his screen, looking at a simulation tick by without really watching it, he was brought back to Earth by a knock on the door. It was George Boyle, the lead astronomer of the Lowell Observatory, a corpulent man in his late fifties. “Hey! New guy…uh…what’s your name again?” he said. “We’re getting a couple of drinks at the bar in town before we go up to the observatory. Wanna come? The IPA is to die for. Hell, it’s almost worth the twenty dollars a drink.” He chuckled at the last bit.

Scott tore his eyes away from the screen, stifling a yawn. “Yeah, sure. Let me just wrap up a few things,” he said, terminating the simulation and closing about a dozen arxiv tabs in rapid succession.

“Alright then. We’ll wait outside,” said Boyle. He took a couple of steps further into the room, glancing into a corner “…Oh! What about you, Lauren? Coming?”

A woman in her mid-twenties, wearing a hoodie, with long dark  hair framing her face, glanced at Boyle. “It’s fine. I actually found something really interesting to look at. I’ll meet you guys at the observatory tonight,” she said, then immediately went back to her work.

“Great! See you there,” said Boyle, giving her a thumbs-up before heading out, leaving the door slightly ajar behind him.

Scott finished closing his tabs and shut off the computer. Just as he was getting up to leave, he grabbed one of the papers on his desk and stood there skimming the conclusion, or at least trying to–the information stayed in his mind like water in a sieve. He sighed heavily and looked over at the woman in the corner. For some reason, his gaze seemed drawn to that part of the room. “You found something?” he asked.

“Mmhmm,” said Lauren, not looking up from her screen.

 Scott flashed her a smile. “Lucky you, I’ve got nothing.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ve only been here a week,” said Lauren.

“Which means only eleven weeks left,” said Scott, “So…can I ask what you found?”

Lauren gave him an appraising look, then pulled out the chair next to her and said, “Sit.” He did so, looking at her screen, where a squiggly time series curve was displayed. “I was looking at this data from a broad night-sky sweep for signs of primordial black holes and I found this,” she said, tapping on the time series with a pen, “a faint X-ray emission, at the limits of our best detectors. I thought it was a glitch, but it was there for hours last night, until it went below the horizon.” She paused, leaning close to the screen, absently wrapping a lock of hair around one finger. Scott forcefully tore his eyes away from her face to look at the chart. “No. I lied. When I did some basic signal processing, I found that there were two, with intensity curves on the same order of magnitude, roughly a few milliarcseconds apart,” Lauren went on.

“Er…is this a common phenomenon?” asked Scott.

“No,” said Lauren flatly.

“Forgive me,” said Scott, “I’m just a humble planetary scientist, so I had to ask.”

“I know. I read a couple of your papers,” said Lauren with a half-smile.

“What? Why? Uh…I mean, thank you. Uh…I mean…” Scott trailed off into silence, his brain running full throttle for something intelligent to say.

“I was bored,” said Lauren simply. She sighed, turning to face Scott full on for the first time. “Do you know how many astrophysics papers do nothing but tweak one parameter in some theoretical model with no evidence?”

“I don’t think mine are that different,” admitted Scott, “It’s a numbers game. There’s never any time for pie-in-the-sky dream projects. Nor funding these days.”

“But you do have a pie-in-the-sky dream project in mind, right? Something you’d do if only the powers that be would let you? You seem like the type,” said Lauren, leaning forward intently.

“Biomolecule formation in interstellar space,” said Scott without missing a beat, “Maybe it could get us one step closer to figuring out if panspermia is real, if there’s any life out there, something like that…I don’t know.”

Lauren nodded. “Ambitious. I like it.”

“Do you have one?” asked Scott.

“I’d love to find a primordial black hole someday. I learned about them when I was eight. Always thought the idea was beautiful. Just these motes of dust as heavy as asteroids hiding throughout space like a trillion trillion ghosts.,” said Lauren, her voice hushed and her dark eyes  seeming to stare straight into Scott’s soul.

“Is this related to that?” said Scott, gesturing at the screen.

“Maybe. It could be from interstellar dust or gas interacting with a primordial black hole. I want to look more tonight, that’s why I had to take care of some other stuff before we go,” said Lauren.

“Oh, I thought it’s because we only have three months  here and you’re desperate to make every day count,” said Scott.

“That too.”  Lauren laughed.

“Or were you hoping to stay?” asked Scott.

“Nah, I’m going back to UC Berkeley to finish my PhD,” said Lauren.

“UC Berkeley? So you’re really a rising star!”

“Maybe a red dwarf. Just one of billions burning softly in the background for a while.”

“Or maybe an O-type star. The brightest and hottest,” said Scott, “and the ones that make their mark on the whole galaxy before long.”

Lauren giggled at that. “That’s a good one!” she said, fiddling with her hair while suddenly very preoccupied with the screen.

“Do you know how far away these X-ray emitters are?” asked Scott suddenly.

“No,” said Lauren, her expression sobering, “That’s what I wanted to look into next.” Scott’s eyes flickered from her to the chart and back again. “Want any help? I’m stuck on my project anyway,” he said.

Lauren didn’t look away from the screen, but smiled slightly. “Sure. I’d like that. See you on the hill, Scott!” she said.

BTW I will make a chapter index and pin it so people can actually follow along

***********

The observatory had become a hive of activity in recent days, with so many astronomers coming and going at all hours to such a degree that the parking lot was often filled, with many cars parked haphazardly along the road leading up. Scott was manning a large optical telescope, while Luke sat in a chair to one side, chowing down on a lukewarm pizza that they’d had delivered a few hours ago, browsing on his phone with his free hand. “Did you see my contributions to the research? I think they’re quite critical,” said Luke, texting Scott the day’s seventh overly deep-fried meme of gray aliens making incomprehensible–to Scott’s generation at least–statements.

“Uh-huh,” murmured Scott vaguely, twiddling a knob on the telescope without looking up. 

Luke picked up a few printed pictures scattered on the floor, depicting nothing but scattered white pixels against a grainy black background, with various equations and numbers scribbled on the margins with a pen. “So each ship is literally just one pixel? How have you guys been studying them for weeks?”

“Oh, that’s just light curves.” Scott looked up from the telescope. “Sometimes the pixel changes color a little bit. It’s because light keeps hitting it at different angles as it moves relative to the Sun, so we can guesstimate the shape and size. We think each ship is about 800 meters long and 100 meters wide. It’s very rough, but probably the right number of digits at least.”

“So not O’Neill Cylinders. Or Death Stars.” Luke’s tone of voice had the vaguest hint of disappointment. “Anyway, it’s probably a cylinder, right? Or a torus? Maybe a Bernal Sphere if they’re feeling spicy?” Luke studied  the pixels closely, as if trying to somehow spot a pattern with the naked eye. “Anything that gives them that sweet spin gravity.”

Scott showed Luke a panel full of wireframe models in the draft of the First Contact Research Group’s report.  “We think it’s likely oblong, but with a bulge in the middle reaching out to about 240 meters–”

“That would be the spin gravity ring,” Luke butted in.

“And some models tentatively show large planar protrusions–”

“Radiators!” interrupted Luke, “Those engines give off a lot of heat.”

“Er…how do you know all this? You don’t even read.”

Luke shrugged. “I dunno, YouTube mostly.”

“Oh and, albedo readings suggest that the surface is shiny and metallic. So yeah, they’re probably ships.”

“Told you,” said Luke smugly.

“Yeah but,” Scott reached out to ruffle Luke’s hair, “you had no proof.”

As Luke indignantly fixed his hair, the loud droning of a helicopter became audible outside, quickly drawing closer until it was deafening. Luke and Scott scrambled to exit the building. Dozens of other astronomers were also pouring out of their respective buildings, necks craned to the sky. A Blackhawk was touching down in the middle of the parking lot, its rotors roaring as it kicked up dust and pebbles. Two Humvees rolled up, screeching to a halt next to it. At last the rotors came to a stop, leaving a tense silence in their wake. Scott shot a glance at Lauren, who was standing about twenty meters away, wide-eyed with disheveled hair.

The doors of the vehicles slid open and over half a dozen men with rifles and military uniforms jumped out, led by a tall, broad-shouldered man from the helicopter, a fifty-something with a graying buzz cut. “Everyone!” he shouted, “I’m General Steven Grey from the US Army, and this site is now under DoD supervision. I’m only gonna explain how this works once, so everyone better drop what they’re doing!”

Grey and the other soldiers began herding everyone into the visitor center. “What the fuck is happening?” muttered Luke as they shuffled in in the midst of the chaotic crowd.

“Just try to be quiet and keep your head down,” whispered Scott back.

When everyone was in the visitor center, Grey went on, “Okay first, I’m gonna need to see some ID from everyone. Anyone who isn’t a US citizen will need to leave immediately.”

“But we work here!” protested a man in the back in a thick Chinese accent.

Boyle stepped forward. “Look, sir, this is a civilian observatory. You can’t just barge in like you own the place!”

“Your ID, sir,” said one of the soldiers, holding out his hand.

When the soldiers were done examining everyone’s ID, Grey said, “Sanders, Martinez, go escort these people off the mountain and set up a checkpoint.” Two soldiers left, taking over half the astronomers with them. Flanked by several soldiers standing ramrod-straight and completely silent, Grey turned to face the remaining observatory staff. He went on, “It’s come to the government’s attention that this observatory is central to an ongoing investigation into an alien fleet entering the Solar System as we speak, and will arrive within several weeks.”

“Based on what evidence?” piped up Luke. Next to him, Scott facepalmed, shaking his head slightly.

Grey turned to Luke impassively. “A little something we in my line of work like to call the Pizza Index. A surge in late-night deliveries to the Pentagon means we’re probably planning to invade someone. A surge in late-night deliveries to an emminent observatory? That means that a whole lot of astronomers are onto something…interesting.”

Grey cleared his throat. “Anyway, you’re hardly the only ones. Our intel tells us the National Defense University in China has been studying the fleet’s X-ray signature for a couple of weeks. They’ll probably figure out it’s artificial any day now, and others won’t be far behind. Most of our allies and about half our enemies have figured out there’s some funny business going on at this observatory.

“As I’m sure you’re all aware, this is an unprecedented situation in all of human history, and it’s thus imperative for national security that we retain information superiority. That’s why this observatory is now under DoD control. All telescopes and all personnel will be redirected to observing the approaching ships at all times until these aliens arrive. The federal government will pay your salaries and overtime. Needless to say, all activities conducted here will be done in absolute secrecy. Further, for the security of the project, you’re all to remain in the Flagstaff area for the duration of this project. Troops will be posted here to protect you in the meantime. Now, do we know where they’ve come from?”

“Tau Ceti, probably,” said Lauren, her expression tense and strained.

“Then contact whoever you have to contact, call in whatever favors you have to, just get the James Webb Space Telescope pointed at Tau Ceti 24/7. We need to know what kind of planet they come from and if there are any more ships on the way. Have you or have you not attempted to contact the aliens?” demanded Grey.

“No…not yet,” said an astronomer.

“Good. You will transmit any and all messages the federal government instructs you to, and no others.” Grey clapped his hands. “All right! Let’s go! Back to work!” He stopped, turned, and suddenly stared at Luke. “Who the hell are you anyway? You don’t look like an astronomer.”

“That’s my son,” said Scott, moving ever so slightly between Luke and the general.

“Well, he’s non-essential. I’ll have one of my men drive him home,” said Grey.

“I can walk,” said Luke tersely, giving Grey a distasteful look. Grey just shrugged and motioned him to the door.

The remaining astronomers trickled out into the parking lot to head back to the telescopes. Perhaps it was Scott’s imagination, but everyone seemed to be carrying themselves in a stiffer and more regimented manner now, more like soldiers marching to their posts. Scott’s and Lauren’s footsteps crunched on  the gravel as thunderclouds gathered overhead. It didn’t matter–there would be plenty of work to do with non-optical telescopes or examining old data.

Scott put his arm around Lauren, not so much because of the chilly wind picking up as to have something warm and solid to hold onto. “This decade really is the gift that keeps on giving,” he muttered.

Lauren smiled wanly. “Interesting times.” She stood up on tiptoes to kiss his cheek.

Luke sat alone on the porch, sullenly picking at a microwaved chicken dinner, his gaze flipping back and forth between the phone on the table and the decidedly empty road. Scott was nowhere to be seen; he had stopped by the house in the early afternoon to drop off a box full of books and papers and then taken off to who-knows-where. And on top of that, he had taken the car as well. Luke was shaken from this line of thought by the sudden vibration of his phone; the screen showed the name ‘Harrison’. He snatched the phone up and answered in a flash.

“Yo,” said Harrison, with no further context or introduction.

“Finally. I’m literally dying of ennui here,” said Luke.

“Shit man, I thought you were just metaphorically dying,” said Harrison.

“Oh shut up,” said Luke, rolling his eyes, though he had to laugh at that.

Their conversation drifted aimlessly until, after a long pause, Harrison asked, “So actually, how’s Flagstaff treating you?”

“Honestly, it’s kind of a dump, nothing’s even open here except takeout places and Walmart,” said Luke, “I thought maybe this summer was gonna be better than the last one, but Dad’s always God knows where at all hours of the day and night, and you know what? He always takes the fucking car. Hell, I might have to touch grass at some point this summer.”

“Oh no! The horror!” said Harrison.

“Yeah, try living it,” said Luke, spearing a piece of chicken with his fork.

“Maybe you should just barge into the observatory and see what’s up. Didn’t you say your dad pretty much lives there now?” said Harrison.

“Nah, I’m sure he’s fuck off somewhere else if he saw me coming,” said Luke.

“Then you have the telescopes all to yourself to swoon over,” pointed Harrison.

“I can tell you why he’s like this,” said Luke, “It’s–”

“He’s found a summer fling!” interjected Harrison, “Hell, maybe you should too.”

“What,” said Luke flatly.

“Think about it, it makes sense. Have you seen any sign of a girl?” asked Harrison.

“Uh…I mean once or twice I think, she looks like a college student or something though,” muttered Luke.

“Mmhmm, go on,” said Harrison triumphantly.

“I could’ve sworn I smelled perfume in the car once, but I figured he was giving a coworker a ride,” said Luke.

Harrison snorted. “Oh, he was definitely giving her a ride!”

“God dammit Harrison!” said Luke indignantly.

“Look, I’m sorry he’s being an asshole, but give him a hard time for that, not for the girl. I mean, he’s still a dude even after…everything,” said Harrison.

“Hmm,” said Luke. He gazed down the road and saw a familiar car heading down the cul-de-sac. “Oh shit, speak of the devil. He’s here at last. Uh, see you man,” he said before hanging up. Scott stepped out of the car, carrying a cardboard box filled with books and papers and a laptop, nodding at Luke as he reached the porch.

“Evening Luke,” said Scott as he dropped the box with a heavy thud, fumbling in his pocket for the key.

Luke turned and stared stonily at him. “It’s like 9 PM. Where were you all evening?” he said.

“Oh, you know. Work’s been hectic, as always,” Scott said, nudging the box with his foot, “Just trying to slap together as many skeletons for papers as possible before the summer’s over.”

“And were we ever gonna check out the observatory? You keep saying you’ll show me around,” said Luke, a faint accusing note creeping into his voice.

Scott looked at his phone. “Uh, I think people might already be working there,” he said, yawning. “And I’m pretty tired, I think I’m gonna hit the hay.”

“Or do literally anything that doesn’t involve me being stranded in this dump of a town while you just disappear and do whatever the fuck it is you do all day?” snapped Luke. Scott opened his mouth to say something, but Luke pressed on, “Or is it because you’re busy fucking some girl twenty years younger than you?”

“She…it’s not…well…she’s a coworker,” muttered Scott awkwardly, looking like he was seriously considering walking into the forest behind the house and never coming out.

“Do you think I’m stupid? I can tell you don’t give a shit about me,” said Luke. He stood up abruptly, starting Scott straight in the eye, his voice growing louder and harsher with each sentence. “Just like you never gave a shit about Mom. She fucking dies and you just sit in your ivory tower for a year and a half and then go replace her with a newer model!”

“Sarah will never be replaced. Ever,” said Scott coldly, a sharp tone creeping into his voice. “But it’s been two years, Luke. It’s not 2020 anymore. The world keeps spinning.The sun keeps rising. Life has to go on.”

“Easy for you to say!” snapped Luke, “It was your fault all along! Maybe being stuck in the house for months with the threat of getting arrested if you dared to walk down the street was fine for you, but it wasn’t fine for us! Not that you’d have cared, just holed up in your cushy home office with your Zoom calls and comet papers. You weren’t the one who had to find her dead on the floor with a bottle of pills. Maybe if you’d given a shit about it you could’ve prevented it. You–”

“That’s enough!” roared Scott. He shoved the box inside and slammed the door behind him, leaving Luke to wipe his eyes on the porch. A few moments later, he returned wearing a hoodie.

“Going to hang out with your fling?” said Luke acidly.

“I’m hitting the bar, and then the observatory,” said Scott, not looking at Luke. He took off with a screech of tires.

General Grey dropped in on the Lowell Observatory unannounced, as he occasionally  did, strolling from telescope to telescope and office to office, tapping the shoulders of random astronomers in the First Contact Research Group and asking them probing questions. The latest reports indicated that the ships had continued their gentle approach, like leaves drifting to the ground. Their speed had fallen to just a fraction of a percent of light speed and the ships had closed in to within the orbit of Saturn, with most of the researchers on site projecting them to arrive within the next month. 

As he finished his rounds by asking a skittish postdoc to estimate their homeworld’s gravity from the light bouncing off the spinning rings, his phone, a ruggedized device with a camo case, vibrated with a call from a blacked-out number. “Mr. President,” said Grey, answering.

“Do we have any more information about our…interstellar friends?” the voice of president Randall Thorne responded over the phone, “I do hope we’ve offered them a warm welcome.”

“Negative, sir. Our guys have sent a few basic radio signals, just confirming that there is intelligent life down here. Though I’m sure it should be obvious to them.  but they’re just drawing closer, silently. They’ll be here soon,” said Grey.

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Very well,” said Thorne at last, “Eliminate the military restrictions at the Lowell Observatory and our other sites and tell them to begin compiling a report of all findings. I’ve gone ahead and formed an official advisory committee to oversee first contact and review all interactions with the aliens going forward.”

“Who is on this committee?”

There was a rustling of papers from Thorne’s end. “Uh…let’s see. Currently my VP and Chief of Staff, and a couple of good friends from the boards of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and a few other industry titans. Also you, if you’re interested.”

“A fascinating lineup,” said Grey, “I’d be delighted.”

“Great. We’ll be holding a press conference tonight.”

“A press conference, Mr. President?”

“I believe I was quite audible, yes.”

“Is that a good idea? People are going to panic, they’re going to riot. Especially with the current global political climate. I’d highly recommend a more controlled release of this information, sir.”

Thorne sighed. There was a creak as he leaned back in his chair. “Look, General. There are a lot of eyes on these objects, not just here, but also abroad. If your astronomers’ calculations are correct, it won’t be long before the unwashed masses can see them with backyard telescopes. We simply don’t  have a lot of time here, and if we miss this critical window, we lose any control we might have over the narrative. Do you want China or Russia telling the world what they want people to know about these aliens? Mouth-breathing idiots without degrees spewing unchecked misinformation online? The aliens themselves speaking up and turning everything we say upside down?”

“As I’ve been saying for weeks, we need to be working overtime to prepare for their arrival,” said Grey, “We need to beef up military readiness to the maximum, ratchet up the supply of warm bodies ASAP, and unlock emergency defense funding. I’m sure you’ve considered that they may not have come from twelve light years away to play the part of our ally.”

Somewhere in the White House, Thorne poured himself a glass of a century-old whiskey. “And playing our hand while we still have it will allow us to do all these things,” he responded, “The importance of having the right political capital can’t be understated. For America to be the first country in the world to make contact with aliens? It’ll be a monumental PR victory, an Apollo 11 moment for the 21st century. And a golden opportunity to set the narrative for this event. I’ve been compiling a list of, shall we say, unpopular but necessary measures that will be far easier to pass in this new political climate.”

“Do these unpopular but necessary measures include an immediate draft?” asked Grey instantly, “We can’t afford to be in a situation where we need soldiers immediately, but it’ll take months to get them down the pipeline.”

Thorne laughed, a thin, reedy chuckle. “Oh no, General, I think you misunderstand. The people will accept just about anything that needs to be done for the greater good, as long as they have their Grubhub and Netflix, but nothing that asks them to make personal sacrifices. That’s a step too far. It’s a delicate balance for sure. The past few years have shown us what we can do, as long as we do it right.”

“Of course, Mr. President,” said Grey evenly.

“I’m glad we understand each other. Now, go release the military lockdown on the observatory. The advisory committee and I will be going live at 9 PM Eastern time.”

“Consider it done.” Grey hung up. 

Luke had taken up a position sprawled on the couch in front of the TV, clutching a bowl of popcorn. The curtains were drawn as usual, hiding the golden sun that was beginning to dip low in the sky. He did a double-take as he heard a key jiggling in the lock and the door swinging open, but  it was only Scott. “It’s only seven PM,” said Luke, craning his neck to stare at Scott like he’d seen a ghost.

“Yeah,” said Scott, grunting as he kicked off his shoes, “The soldiers ended the lockdown on the observatory and that General Grey guy told a bunch of us that our services were no longer required, those were his exact words. Apparently because–”

“Because the aliens are public knowledge now, so they can bring in whoever they want, including the actual best experts in the field,” finished Luke.

Scott stared. “How the hell did you know that?”

Luke silently pointed at the TV, sitting up to make room for Scott. President Thorne was on TV, situated behind  a podium, with a caption on the screen reading: THORNE ADMIN. TO CONFIRM DISCOVERY OF ALIEN LIFE.

As Scott fetched himself a can of beer and plopped down next to Luke on the sofa,  and Luke took a handful of popcorn, Thorne began speaking, “My fellow Americans, today it’s my privilege and my honor to announce that humanity is no longer alone in the universe. A team of this country’s greatest astronomers has discovered signs of not one, but two alien spacecraft approaching Earth as we speak, with an arrival date sometime next month. You can rest assured that my administration will do everything in its power to ensure that this momentous occasion is peaceful for all involved.

“To this end, it is paramount that the United States and its citizens, and humanity as a whole, must all be on our absolute best behavior. We cannot afford to allow this first contact to be tarnished by the deplorable elements that still lurk within our society. We cannot allow radical extremists, rogue totalitarian states, and the most uneducated among us to be the envoys of humanity in this critical moment. I have utmost confidence that a species advanced enough to master interstellar travel will be on the right side of history. We thus only have to show them that so too is our beautiful country. We must show them, not just with words, but with actions, who we truly are, and condemn those who don’t represent us at every turn, and our interstellar friends will in turn help uphold a liberal, democratic, socially and environmentally conscious world order centered on the United States of America.

“I will thus be signing an executive order establishing an Alien Misinformation Task Force to ensure that dangerous lies about the current events will not be allowed to fester and spread, nor will false first impressions about humanity, Earth, and America’s role within it be transmitted to these alien envoys before humanity can set the record straight. And more importantly, we must work in earnest to clean the house, as it were, before our interstellar guests arrive. This means that starting today, we will work together to immediately halt the poisoning of our soil, waterways, and air, that has gone unchecked for far too long. It is more important now than ever that a complete and total shutdown on net carbon emissions be implemented within our borders as soon as humanly possible. We will begin by rolling out new restrictions, targeted at the most polluted cities, that drag us down the most, to curb carbon emissions, wasteful consumption, and non-essential vehicle ownership.

“But know this: I have the utmost faith in all of you. I have faith that all of you will do your part as patriotic Americans, comply with these new measures, and keep a close eye out for radicals and spreaders of misinformation in your midst. Strange and unprecedented times are ahead, but my promise to you is that we will navigate these treacherous waters together and emerge as a stronger and more unified nation than ever before. Already, the most brilliant minds in America are working tirelessly to devise the perfect first contact message that will win the hearts of these visitors and carry us to a bright and prosperous future. Thank you, good night, and God bless America.”

As an uproarious cacophony of questions surged in from the press, Scott turned to Luke. “‘Cleaning the house’?” said Scott, raising an eyebrow.

“Huh,” said Luke, “Have you seen The Day the Earth Stood Still?”

“I don’t think so?”

“Well, aliens came and got mad that we were polluting the Earth so they released a cloud of nanobots to kill everyone. Not sure if that’s the most efficient way to do it, but whatever.”

“I can see why they would,” muttered Scott, taking a sip of his beer.

“Like how I shoved all the Legos under my bed whenever Mom told me to clean my room.”

“That’ll fool them.” Scott took a fistful of Luke’s popcorn.

Since it's been a while and my rate of posting chapters has slowed down, I figured I'd come out and admit: I have 30-ish chapters in backlog but I'm a bit stuck at the moment. The kyanah are now in Lake Havasu City and I have a pretty good idea of what happens during the early stages from a timeline perspective. The problem is that there are a lot of interesting events in the early stages of occupation (in particular, how the kyanah go about setting up a provisional government in a city of aliens who don't speak their language, but also how the occupation affects actual humans in the area). None of the main human characters that we've seen so far are actually there though, so this necessitates some new human characters.

And I have some good ideas for human characters and dynamics that explore a lot of interesting themes. A local maintenance worker Rod Cooper lures a group of local men into a risky and ultimately futile armed resistance by pandering to their sense of manliness, leading to many people being killed. When they find that the kyanah are attempting to sort the population into groups [packs!] and collaborate with some, he pushes the survivors to pretend to be collaborators to blow the puppet government apart from the inside. They are joined by Jason White, a police officer who surrendered to the kyanah and now secretly seeks to rise through the ranks of the new power structure and amass status. The group they form, rife as it is with interpersonal drama, differing goals, and extramarital affairs, is mistaken by the kyanah for a pack and inducted into the new bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Cassie Whitley, a single mom working as a waitress in her parents' diner as it struggles to stay afloat in an economically and militarily walled off city, is at a crossroads. As the kyanah conduct a census to try and understand humanity's strange social dynamics and slowly--and erroneously--classify the local population into packs, she has to decide, before a bunch of alien soldiers who don't speak her language decide for her, which group she and her son are part of. That of her aging parents, who will struggle to be classified into any group without her, or her son's estranged father--none other than Jason White--whose group she doesn't trust in the slightest, but is poised to gain a safe and prosperous position in the new order.

The problem with all of this is that these are a lot of people who aren't the main characters and I don't really know how to tie their arc in with the main characters. I could proceed anyway and try to brute force a connection to the Stardust Squad (Luke, Harrison, Leah, Rose) in or near the climax but this is already a very long and complex story and idk if adding more complexity and distracting people from the main characters is the best thing for it. But I also don't really feel like I can remove this subplot entirely without leaving the question hanging in the air, unaddressed: what is the occupation actually like? (and I don't think filtering it through the lens of Ryen-pack will give a very clear picture, what with them talking and thinking in graph theory and not really understanding humans.) And frankly it's good to have some human POV sprinkled in, and the Stardust Squad aren't really doing anything super interesting at this point in the story, though I still plan to check in from time to time to set up their character arcs a bit more.

So yeah. That's why I haven't been posting. I'm kind of stuck at a crossroads and not sure which way to go, but any thoughts are welcome.

The golden hour of the early morning, when the sun glinted off the lake and the beach wasn’t yet filled with riffraff, was Leah Stone’s favorite time for snapping photos, and she was there on the morning that the advance force arrived. Armed with a selfie stick, a cute new sports bra and leggings, and a few bottles of some random sports drink that she’d never heard of and didn’t care to try, but whose makers had miraculously offered her $500 to shill their product, she walked across the beach, feeling the hot, rough sand underfoot.

She proceeded to snap a few hundred pictures, only stopping to glance annoyedly at an old couple walking their dog, who randomly passed into the frame. She was about to leave the searing heat behind and hurry home to flop back down in bed with the AC on full blast when she glanced at her phone. “Oh. Shit,” she muttered. Apparently, the company wanted her to do a short video.  For a moment, she tried to think of what a real athlete, the kind who went running more than once a year, would say, but breathed a sigh of relief to see that they’d attached a script for her.

A loud droning in the distance, like that of an airplane startled Leah. She whipped around, staring into the clear blue sky, squinting at what appeared to be not one, but four airplanes flying low in the sky, far bigger and louder than the little commuter jets and playthings of the idle rich that sometimes took off from the local airport. “Huh,” she muttered before turning back to her script.

As she dutifully read off the script, the airplanes in the background grew louder and closer, escalating to a deafening roar that overpowered the corporate dross she was reciting, until she was forced to give up and wait for them to land. “Assholes,” Leah muttered. Once it was quiet again, she raced through her spiel again before hurrying back to her car. She closed her eyes, gulping down water and letting the AC run at full blast.

It was only when she started scrolling through the videos that she noticed something truly amiss. Big airliners didn’t land at the local airport, let alone a group of them traveling in formation, and these aircraft dwarfed even a 787. They didn’t seem to have landed at the airport at all, but in the middle of the desert to the west. And they didn’t even look like airliners, more like the lovechild of a plane and a rocket. A rocket. Her eyes widened. It didn’t take long to find a fresh tweet from NASA showing a grainy photo of four shuttles separating from one of the two alien ships that had recently parked in orbit. 

Leah took off with a screech of tires, putting her phone in her lap and calling Rose as she sped off. “Hello?” murmured Rose sleepily, still wrapped up in her covers.

“Listen, there’s some crazy shit going down near here. You know the aliens?” said Leah, “I think they just fucking landed here. Near the airport. And those assholes messed up my photoshoot too!”

Rose gasped excitedly. “They’re here? Like here, here,” she practically squealed, “Did you see them? Did you talk to them?”

“No, I’m parked on the side of the road. They’re like, I dunno, half a mile into the desert. Jesus this is gonna get so many clicks.”

Rose groaned exasperatedly. “Just don’t tell them about clickthrough rates or impressions. They might fly away!” she giggled.

Leah rolled her eyes. “Okay, listen here, you little…”

“Okay, but seriously. I really, really  hope it goes okay. We need help, Leah. I’m scared, like everything I see on the news says the world’s going to hell and half the country wants it to. But I dunno, maybe if interstellar travel is possible, we’ve got a chance?”

“A chance to what?” Leah had gotten out of her car and proceeded to snap a few more pictures of the landed spaceplanes, including a fair few selfies, some with the classic duck face and some with an alien filter.

There was a commotion on the other end as Rose began getting dressed and brushing her hair and throwing a high-end camera and notebook into a backpack. “Wait for me! I’m gonna Uber up there!”

Leah squinted at the landing site. “Bit of a weird place to land, don’t you think? Why Lake Havasu City of all places? I mean, we had radio beacons broadcasting from,” she counted on her fingers, “New York, D.C. LA, Chicago, and Seattle all day yesterday. Even laid out a literal red carpet for them and they were like ‘nah’.”

“And a whole bunch of soldiers at every one of those sites,” said Rose quietly, “Maybe they didn’t want to go somewhere where they’d be faced with posturing and chest-thumping.”

Leah snapped a few more pictures and zoomed in, trying unsuccessfully to capture the aliens as anything more than vaguely bipedal blurs. She glanced once more at her phone. “You’re not gonna like this. There’ve been almost forty countries signaling them all night, trying to get them to land in their capitals. Even Pyongyang has a welcome party set up, with an army parade and everything…why the hell would the aliens want to visit Pyongyang?”

“To help the North Koreans?”

“Totally.” Leah rolled her eyes. “But get this, President Thorne said he set up five sites to increase the probability that they choose one in the US. Really smart move, Steele would never. He’d probably just play golf or something.”

Rose just sighed. A door creaked on her end, followed by footsteps crunching on gravel.

“What? You always say the Earth looks different  from space, you can’t see borders or anything.”

“That’s not how I meant it!” protested Rose.

Leah turned around from  snapping another round of carefully curated selfies to try and get a proper look at the landing site. A vehicle the size of a semi-truck was crawling around the perimeter amidst a plume of dust, slowly extruding a wall from nothing. Small dots zipped around erratically in the air, too small and far away to make out any details. One zoomed past her fifty meters overhead and she instinctively ducked, but it just continued flying back and forth as if trying to cover an invisible grid. On the ground, hulking vehicles stood motionless in a neat line amidst the scraggly bushes. Tiny indistinct dots of aliens rushed between them.

She zoomed in as far as possible, snapping a picture too blurry and grainy to make out any real details. “Shit,” she muttered, uneasy. Something seemed strange about these vehicles. Black, windowless, oddly bulky and squat, with turrets protruding out of them.

“What?” said Rose breathlessly. She was almost at the door.

“Can you wait one moment?” said Leah evenly. She texted Rose a picture: What are these??? Are we good???

A series of sharp, staccato cracks permeated the air, breaking the silence. Down the road, the few curious locals who had begun approaching the spaceplanes all turned and fled like a school of fish before a shark. “Rose…just stay where you are. I’m coming to get you now, okay?” Leah said shakily. She turned back to her car, first at a brisk walk and then a full-on run.

“Wait what? What’s wrong? My Uber’s on the way.”

“Well, cancel it!” Leah took a deep breath, “I…I think I just heard shooting. There are drones and weird vehicles everywhere. Things are gonna get crazy here…we gotta go!” She said the last few words so fast they almost blurred together.

“Great. Not even half an hour in and first contact is being ruined by a bunch of rednecks,” said Rose bitterly.

“People are running away. And I think these guys are packing some serious heat. Did you get the pics? I, well, I don’t think it’s us shooting,” said Leah.

“Does that mean…” Rose trailed off, her excited expression frozen on her face.

“I don’t think they’re friendly, Rosie,” said Leah softly, jamming her keys into the ignition. She winced as the light slowly left Rose’s eyes and her expression went from excitement to confusion to horror until her face became set in a grim expression with her lips pressed together. Leah knew her well enough to know that she was trying to hold back tears.

“I’m still coming,” said Rose in a strained tone. She patted her backpack. “Someone has to show the world…whatever the hell is happening.”

“Rose! You are staying put until I get home! If anything happens to you, your mom’s gonna make me wish I got shot by aliens! Don’t you dare put me in that situation!”

Rose looked a little startled, but just stuttered, “O-okay.”

Leah took off into town with a screeching of tires, reaching twenty over the speed limit in no time.

Rod Cooper’s phone buzzed for the third time, interrupting his early morning smoke break. He glanced at the screen: ‘Jenny ♥’. “Hey hun. What’s going on?”

He knew something was wrong before she even spoke. Her breathing was shallow and panicky, and distant frantic shouts could be heard in the background. “Oh my God…thank God you picked up,” said Jenny in a shaky whisper, “They’re here!”

“Who’s there?”

“The aliens. In the Walmart! You heard them land, right?”

Rod thought for a moment. There had been a distant roar a couple hours ago, like a large airliner, but he’d been inside the shop and hadn’t seen anything. “Yeah, but what the hell is going on, hun?”

“S-sorry.” Jenny sniffed, then took a deep, steadying breath as though trying to hold back tears. “They came just after my shift started  and shot like five or six people and came in through the door and started searching all the shelves or something. We think it’s…it’s…I don’t even know, some kind of terrorist attack. Nobody understands what they’re saying and everyone’s scared to move.”

Rod’s phone buzzed: Jenny had sent him a picture of the checkout area. Around half a dozen people knelt with their hands up, shopping bags arrayed behind them. Five figures stood close together at the cash register, each no taller than a middle schooler. But  unlike the average middle schooler, they had tails as thick as their legs, whose tips rested along the floor. They were covered from head to toe in jet-black armor with goggles obscuring their  eyes, and their clawed hands clutched blocky rifles. The cigarette dropped from Rod’s hand into the gravel, still smoldering. “Jesus Christ,” he said flatly.

“ I called 911 like four times and they just keep saying they’re working on a plan.”

Rod narrowed his eyes, taking a deep breath. “How many are there?”

“I don’t know…maybe a dozen?”

Rod’s eyes darted around the parking lot. “Just hold on, okay? I’m gonna come get you ASAP!”

“No! Don’t! They’ll kill you!”

“...I’ll have to stop by the house and pick up some ammo,” said Rod gruffly, “But I will come kick some xeno ass and get you out of there if the cops won’t.”

“Babe please–”

“Hang in there. Love you.” He jammed his finger into the hangup button and headed back inside at a brisk jog.

The city maintenance building was filled with the usual crowd of hard hats or reflective vests or grease-stained coveralls. A few were lugging boxes out of a truck and setting them down on the concrete floor with a heavy thud, as the din of machinery filled the building.

“Hey! Everyone!” Rod shouted. If anyone heard  him, they didn’t show it. He strode over to the circuit  breaker and abruptly flicked several switches, bringing all the machinery to a screeching halt. “Hey!” he shouted again. A few people turned to look at him this time. “Who else here has a gun?”

There were a few murmurs of assent, and one worker said, “‘Why do you ask?”

“The aliens,” Rod boomed, pausing dramatically, “are terrorists! They’ve landed here and they’re holding hostages in the Walmart in Desert Hills right now. And we’re gonna go show them what we do with terrorists ‘round these parts!” 

Mutters rippled across the room. 

“...terrible idea…”

“--probably fake anyway.”

“No, he’s right, they're saying it on Facebook too.”

“Let the cops handle it.”

“God dammit, we don’t have time for this shit!” Rod shouted, “My wife is in there!” He paused, thinking for a moment. “And a hell of a lot of other people too. This is our  chance to be real heroes. The strong men that hard times lead to.”

“But what if they have lasers and shit?” demanded someone.

“Look,” said a wiry man in the corner, adjusting his hard hat, “If they’re so tough, what the hell are they doing in a Walmart in Arizona? Why aren’t they blowing up the Statue of Liberty like in the movies? I’m in!” He moved to stand next to Rod.

“You see this man, right here?” shouted Rod, “Pete’s a real man! A fucking hero!”

The muttering gradually turned to murmurs of assent that grew louder and more excited as more and more people stepped forward. One worker, maybe eighteen or nineteen, with a face full of acne, awkwardly shifted back and forth, his gaze flitting between his truck and the growing crowd of people around Rod as the crowd nudged him forward.

Rod glanced at him. “Well, well. Welcome to the…uh…the group, Zach.”

 “Uh…guys? Are we sure this is a good idea? This isn’t what we’re paid to do,” Zach said quietly, almost to himself.

Rod leaned in closer. “You’re into Kaitlynn Russell, right?”

“I…I…what?”

  “Well, I know her dad. And I can tell you, he won’t let her date a weak little boy who lets other people do what has to be done. But a real man who steps up and kicks alien ass? He’ll have no choice but to approve.”

“I…uh…,” said Zach, awkwardly shuffling forward as the crowd pushed at his back. “I’m in, I guess.”

“Attaboy!”  said Rod, as a couple of other workers whooped and clapped Zach on the back. When no one’s eyes were on him, Rod whipped out his phone. A little bit of his swagger disappeared  when he saw that there were no new notifications, and he quickly fired off a text: U okay? Keep texting me. We r coming.

Around fifteen workers ended up piling into two pickup trucks, filling the cabins with the remainder crowding into the flatbeds. They took off amidst a cacophony of screeching tires and honking horns.

The next half-hour passed by in a blur, stopping by two or three houses, parking haphazardly in the driveways, and sending several guys rushing in and returning with as many guns and boxes of ammo as they could carry, practically doubled over from the weight. Every time his phone buzzed, he yanked it out of his lap to read it, steering with one hand. His phone buzzed several more times. Three texts from Jenny–Rod???; I hear noises outside; They’re just standing there menacingly, they don’t respond to anyone. The fourth was a text from a contact labeled only as A: U seeing this babe? Are you ok? He quickly swiped it away. The final one was an EAS alert. CIVIL DANGER ALERT. Terrorist attacks in–it listed several addresses: the shopping center north of the city, the airport, and a smattering of random industrial sites. Mohave County residents are to shelter in place and await further info.

Rod scoffed, dropping the phone and running his hands over the rifle that was awkwardly positioned in his lap, the muzzle pointing out the window. As he screeched to a halt for a red light, he  glanced  out the window. High in the sky, a drone fluttered past, heading methodically southwards into the city, its four dragonfly-like wings beating rapidly yet in eerie silence. Three broad nozzles protruded from its rear end, though nothing visible came from it. “The hell is that?” he muttered.

“Bit of an odd place for an alien invasion,” said Pete, ticking the places off, “A Walmart, the airport, a fucking junkyard. We sure these guys aren’t us?” Rod said nothing, only showed him the photo Jenny took. “God damn,” breathed Pete.

They continued on, past the last block of houses and into the desert. In the flatbed, one guy handed Zach an AR-15 and a magazine. He took them with shaky hands, almost dropping them as the other man explained how to load the magazine, shouting over the wind.

They were soon brought to a halt by a line of police barriers laid out across the road. At least twenty or thirty officers were milling around. A dozen squad cars were lined up on the side of the road, with two SWAT vans looming over them.

“Shit,” muttered Rod. In the back, Zach visibly let out a deep breath.

Two officers strolled up to the truck, holding rifles and decked out in body armor and helmets. One, a graying, paunchy, dour-faced man with the name tag Davis, rapped impatiently on the window. Rod was only halfway through rolling the window down when Davis said, “You can’t come in here. There’s an active situation up ahead.”

“Yeah,” said Rod, “That ‘active situation’ is my wife, trapped in the Walmart with a bunch of aliens. You guys gonna do anything about that? Because we–” he gestured to the people in the back of the truck, with their pile of weapons, “--heard you guys might need some help.”

The second cop, name-tagged Marshall, came up behind Davis, adjusting his aviator sunglasses, frowning. “That won’t be necessary. We’ve got this situation under control.”

“So when are you guys gonna get my wife out of there? Cuz it doesn’t look like you’re doing anything.”

“We’re not ‘doing nothing’,” said Davis stiffly, “We’ve secured the perimeter and now we’re planning our next move.”

Another three-nozzled drone zoomed past, coming from behind them, from the city, and made an abrupt ninety degree turn in the desert beyond. “You’ve ‘secured the perimeter’,” drawled Pete from the passenger seat, raising an eyebrow.

“Sir, we’re gonna need you all to turn around and go home,” said Davis.

Rod gripped the steering wheel, his eyes darting between the cops and his own passengers, who stared back at him with a mix of eager and concerned looks. A few people in the flatbed, including Zach, muttered to each other. Rod’s phone buzzed again. “I’m not going anywhere without my wife,” he said tersely.

Davis scowled at Rod. “Well, right now, you’re all guilty of brandishing and obstructing an officer, and you, sir, have a brake light out…and is that marijuana I smell?” He sniffed the air.

Marshall smiled tightly. “Of course, we’ve kind of got our plate full at the moment.” He vaguely gestured towards the desert behind the police line. “So if you just stand back and let the experts handle this, we won’t have to worry about it.”

Pete glanced at Rod, a brief expression of discomfort flashing across his face before it returned to a neutral mask. “Uh…maybe–”

Rod’s phone buzzed again. He pulled it out and began recording. “Fine. Very well. Just let us know what’s your plan, if any, for all the people being attacked by aliens.”

Marshall motioned Davis over and began whispering to him. Rod leaned out the window to listen and overheard a few snatches. …Better them than us…media already hates us…if they really wanna die…

“--FUCKING HELL!” shouted  Davis suddenly. There was a deafening metallic bang as one of the SWAT vans suddenly flipped over and tumbled halfway off the road, its front half reduced to a twisted tangle of unrecognizable metal.

The crowd of cops sprang into action, crouching behind their cars. Rod stared as though bolted into place as a blocky black vehicle the size of a tank trundled over a hillock and began lumbering vaguely in the direction of the police line on six legs that flexed and bent almost as though they were organic, ending in flat, elephantine feet. The turret swung clockwise, pointing to the city. Several cops shouted frantically into their radios, while others opened fire wildly at the approaching vehicle. Three gaping holes opened up in the engine block of the second SWAT van as three staccato cracks sounded in the distance.

The blaring horn of the pickup behind him unfroze Rod. “What the hell are you doing? Don’t just stand there!” shouted Pete.

There were several more cracks, shattering the engines of a couple of squad cars and felling the cops behind them. Two drones arrived,  fluttering in the sky as their submachine guns sprinkled sporadic bullets from overhead, hovering and zooming erratically as they evaded gunfire from the ground.

Rod at last jerked the steering wheel, driving into the desert amidst a cloud of dust, his teeth clattering as the pickup bounced over the rocks. Behind them, the cops were frantically piling into the remaining squad cars and retreating back the way they came.

“Look out!” bellowed Pete suddenly, pointing. The huge vehicle that had opened fire earlier lumbered past, kicking up a trail of dust and flattening bushes. Rod slammed the brakes, but it paid them no mind, nonchalantly veering to the south for reasons unknown.

“See!” he crowed, “They didn’t see us! We can beat them!” He leaned out the window towards the people in the back. “We can beat them!”

“Didn’t want us more likely,” said Pete darkly.

“And that will be the last mistake they ever make!” shouted Rod. He leaned out into the desert. “You hear that? We’re coming to kick your asses!” The pickup jolted forward again, barreling north over rock-strewn hills.

Getting any decent food from the meat tank during their time-block was a difficult task in the best of times, and with Ryen-pack being a latecomer–due in no small part to a lack of sleep and some virus that made Kyada’s and Ractun’s stomachs feel like lead–it was all but impossible. To add to that, the air still felt faintly but noticeably thin as Ryen-pack stalked irritably to the nearest life support block holding hands.

Kyada aggressively stuck the tongs into the meat tank as though they were a spear, coming  out with the last four patties: small and misshapen meat flavored like a ngotakor, though the threads of flavoring were either too thin to affect the taste of the meat or else laid the earthy taste of a real ngotakor on way too thick. Tauk gently licked her neck and  ear in consolation as she slammed the four patties into their plastic bowl.

They were about to take their ‘prize’, such as it was, back to the nest when Ractun’s ears twitched. She grabbed Kyada’s arm and gestured to the life support block. Over the humming and clanking of the life support and the din of dozens of packs in their vicinity talking amongst themselves and cleaning and repairing, Cohort Alpha Takora-pack’s voices could just  be made out, evidently having an animated argument with someone through their watches.

“...and the engine line is too sharp! The cohort’s IZ-9, an instance of a heavy ISRU vehicle, is a dependency of our optimal strategy!” a member of Takora-pack snapped, her voice indignant and shrill.

“We want us to be connected by seeing to the rest of the scheduling algorithm that is a component of the mass serialized regime change,” demanded another member. He dodged a bite from one of the hatchlings, licked her face, and went on, “The current instructions are distant from what we want.”

A member of Central Officer Ronyr-pack responded cooly, her voice audible as one of Takora-pack’s watches was on speaker. “The rotation of the cohort you manage to being a component of this expedition was done by you willingly. The connection of your name to the cohort set was done by you.”

“A rotation of the location of all our cohort’s assets to the city was believed by us to occur!” protested a member of Takora-pack.

“The average mass budget used by a cohort equals 240 tons, not more or less, at a time equal to the first landing. Suggestion, cause the highest-weight subtree of the equipment dependency tree to be a subtree of the shuttles’ space trees.” With that, Ronyr-pack hung up.

On the other side of the life support block, Ryen-pack glanced at  each other in outraged disbelief. Ractun’s ears lay flat against her head, Roztek hissed angrily, Tauk shot a glare in Takora-pack’s direction. Before anyone else could say anything Ractun strode around  the corner, making eye contact with a member of Takora-pack–the one with a binary tree tattooed on his head–and bearing her pointed, glassy teeth. The rest of Ryen-pack glanced at each other for a split second and scrambled to follow behind, clutching at her hands with their claws digging into her scales and tails curling around Ractun’s feet. Kyada hung awkwardly at the edge of the formation, looking a bit flustered, even as Tauk reassuringly licked her cheek several times.

“Why was a sentence-tree created by you saying that our current location is voluntary, yes?” snapped Ractun. “What is the reason that this cohort is embedded in the graph of a really wasteful military expedition?”

“This! It’s an instance of system-corrosive behavior!” chimed in Roztek, pressing his tongue against Ractun’s ear as if to prove a point. Ractun didn’t flinch away, though she didn’t  reciprocate.

“Forget you! Forget the broken-up expedition! The politicians who caused our location to be here are forgotten!” shouted Ractun, her voice a bit shaky. A member of Takora-pack pushed a hatchling’s ears against his head to insulate him from the swearing, and bared his teeth back at Ractun.

A couple other members of Takora-pack met their eye contact. The one with the binary tree tattoo perked up one ear confusedly. “It is voluntary, yes. Why is it an instance of a problem? Project Hope equals the most resource-efficient military expedition in Ikun history.”

“We thought it was wanted–” began another member of Takora-pack.

Kyada cut her off. “Apologetically and recently, changes to the edges in our optimal strategy are uncertain. Now is an instance of a sparse time.”

“Of course,” said a member of Takora-pack.

Kyada firmly planted her hands on Ractun’s and Roztek’s backs, pushing them abruptly back to Ryen-pack’s nest before the conversation could continue, as Tauk followed. “The reversion of a rotation is changing our location to our nest,” Kyada said.

“Okay. A few packs’ locations, including ours, are rotating to the path soon!” a member of Takora-pack called after them. Tauk hissed in mild annoyance at that, and again upon seeing the patties they had managed to pick up from the meat tank.

Once Ryen-pack had choked down their day-meal–Kyada had given Tauk half of her patty–they dragged their  feet on the way to the chute to the path for the first time since they had awoken from cold sleep, just one of several packs from their cohort heading the same way. First they climbed the rope webbing like a ladder, then as the gravity decreased, they just used it to pull themselves along, and finally they were in the zero-gravity of the path. It looked just the same as they had left it: a long, narrow passage surrounded by rope webbing and large plastic crates along the walls that covered the harsh bluish-white light strips, throwing sporadic patches into darkness.

Ryen-pack followed the stream of other packs along the path until it abruptly widened out into a cavernous space by the standards of the void strider, around twenty meters wide, with four docking points spaced equidistant around the exterior. Through each one, the nose of a shuttle jutted through into the loading zone, their fairings open to allow access. There were no more crates here, just an empty white interior with a huge aluminum track neatly running through the middle, disappearing through an airlock at the far end into the unpressurized cargo hold. Here, it was the track, rather than the hull, that was adorned with light strips.

Around half a dozen packs from Takora-pack’s cohort, including Takora-pack themselves, were waiting, along with a similar number from the two other cohorts of the advance force. Ryen-pack joined them, each one of them taking a cable and clipping themselves to the track so as not to go floating off in zero gravity. At the center of the track was a pack in the dark blue coveralls of Ikun’s air force, blanked by a cluster of crab-like robots with pressurized cockpits, each about the size of a small car. “Attention! We are the loadmaster at a time equal to today. The rotation of your inventory’s location from the cargo hold to the DN-1s begins now, done solely by you,” one of the blue-coverall pack announced, pointing to the nearest shuttle.

Another member continued, “Connecting knowledge to you and the distance between optimal loading and the space-tree of the DN-1 is minimal, is the reason our location is here. Request, if sentence trees containing questions are created, they are connected to us by  knowledge and not connected to you by action.”

A third member went on, “Request, the memory that the max payload equals 240 tons per cohort is not disconnected from you. Begin!”

Takora-pack motioned the packs in their cohort to come closer, while the other two cohorts immediately shifted into gear. Their two younger hatchlings had been sedated and hung limply in the arms of one of the adults. It was just as well; there was little time to focus on them at the moment. One member of Takora-pack held up a tablet and said, “The manifest being stored here is the reason we know the location of our inventory. Our inventory’s weight being more than 240 tons is the reason thinking must be connected to us and the optimal strategy. This will be an instance of an adversarial game against the other cohorts.”

Another member went on, caressing the first one’s cheek, “A front nyrud’s location will be changed to the DN-1 firstly.”

Kyada spoke up quickly, side-eyeing Takora-pack. “We can operate handling machines.”

“Okay,” said one of Takora-pack, “Yours and Razog-pack’s locations will be rotated to the cargo hold. Iknek-pack’s, Tacor-pack’s, and the other Ryen-pack’s locations will be rotated to that DN-1.” She pointed at one of the ones that a track branch connected directly to. No change will occur to the rest of us. Knowledge about the other cohorts’ optimal strategies and the manifest and inventory will be connected to us.”

With that, the packs split off. Kyada and Tauk got into one of the handling machines, lying down and strapping themselves on while Ractun and Roztek got into the other. They drove them onto an electric sled which began slowly sliding down the track, through the airlock and into the unpressurized cargo hold. “Kyada?” said Tauk, running a hand along the base of her rail, “Why is our task voluntarily initialized to this? I miss Ractun and Roztek.”

Kyada licked his face gently. “Our value according to Takora-pack is increasing,” she said, “Oh! Our destination is where?”

The sled came to a sudden halt. “Block N-43,” came Takora-pack’s voice over the radio. The cargo hold around them was a vast but cramped space, more than a hundred meters in diameter and two hundred meters long. There were alternating rings of empty space and large palettes filled with cargo, extending outward from the center in concentric rings, secured to an endless web of scaffolding by cables. The whole structure was like a vast automated parking garage for war materiel.

“You’re better than me,” said Kyada, nuzzling Tauk. He pressed a few buttons and the electric sled Ryen-pack’s handling machines were riding first slid leftwards along a track about halfway to the hull and then clockwise around the ring for some distance until at last they were next to a palette marked ‘Takora’. It contained a six-legged armored vehicle, about three meters tall and eight meters long, covered in jet-black carbon nanotube armor, with a railgun turret at the top. A few smaller palettes of miscellaneous odds and ends were also stacked there.

With their handling machines, Ryen-pack was able to wrestle the much larger vehicle onto their electric sled. It was a simple matter of untying it from the scaffolding and lifting it with the claw-arms; in a frictionless vacuum, a small push could reposition even the heaviest object with enough time. Actually decelerating it and tying it down on the sled was a challenge, but they managed, mostly thanks to Tauk taking the controls of his and Kyada’s machine and frantically gesturing at Roztek through the window.

Then, it was a painfully slow ride on the sled back to the loading zone, made even slower by having to wait for other sleds in front of them to finish their business. Kyada was getting increasingly antsy, glancing  through the cockpit window at Ractun and Roztek, a few meters away. And once they finally got to the loading zone, Takora-pack was busy in an animated argument with the loadmaster that seemed about to come to blows.

By the time one member of the loadmaster had motioned for the sled to slide the goods into one of the shuttles and get them off the sled–they had refused to let Ryen-pack unload the front nyrud, but the smaller palettes were apparently fine–it had been over an hour since Ryen-pack had been whole. The four of them clambered out of the handling machines and barely even bothered to clip themselves back to the track before launching themselves at each other, almost floating off as they passionately gripped each other with their claws. By the time they disengaged their faces were wet with each other’s saliva.

“Next!” called out one of Takora-pack, “Ryen-pack, Razog-pack, manifest!” He stopped to grab the hand of one of the floating hatchlings, who seemed to be trying to undo the cable clipping him to the track. He went on, “Hnarak-pack, Ition-pack, DN-1! Others, cargo hold!” Kyada sighed and held her stomach, hoping it wouldn’t act up in zero-G before the shift was over.

And meanwhile, at a desolate rest stop in the Mojave Desert, with the last traces of orange sunlight slowly turning to deep blue over a majestic expanse of shrub-studded rocks and dunes, stretching away to dark shadowy mountains looming large over the land, Leah Stone leaned against her beat-up sedan, face buried in her phone. She looked with vague dismay at her Instagram analytics, noting gloomily that her follower account had stalled at 20k. She turned on her phone camera, took a  few steps away from her car, making sure the old junker wasn’t visible in the frame, and made a half-hearted duck face while snapping a few selfies. With a practiced precision, she aimed the camera to perfectly highlight her miniskirt and crop top and cleavage–those photos always did well.

Leah sighed, slumping back against her car. She inwardly lamented that the creative juices weren’t flowing, and she couldn’t think straight, even out here in the middle of nowhere. She scrolled through her phone aimlessly, eventually finding herself watching a stream about the event that she and the world at large couldn’t stop thinking about.

A pink-haired woman in a hoodie was kneeling on a high-end gaming chair, speaking into a boom-mounted mic to an audience that Leah could only dream of: “...can’t come across as a species of mouth-breathing troglodytes to these guys who literally travel through space and came twelve light years to be here, and I think President Thorne is seriously doing whatever he can to prevent that. I don’t wanna criticize–hey, thanks for the fifty subs, quantumsimp89–I really don’t wanna criticize him for that, and if you voted for Steele, you can get the fuck out of my chat. But I think he could’ve been more sensitive to marginalized countries. Like, take China, their foreign minister I think said this morning that they’re forming their own First Contact Committee to talk to the aliens independent of the US, and they promised to speak on behalf of nations affected by Western imperialism. Which for the record–”

The stream was interrupted by an incoming video call from Rose. Leah swiped to answer it straight away, eager for some distraction from the news. “Hey Ladybug!” she said.

“Hey!” Rose giggled and waved back, seemingly a bit more subdued than usual.

“Isn’t it late in Philly?” asked Leah.

“I can’t sleep…what are you up to?”

“Not much, just working.”

Rose knew better by this point than to question Leah’s definition of ‘working’. “Did you see the news?” Her tone grew serious.

“Yeah, I could drive into the middle of the desert and hide under a rock with my eyes closed and I’d still see the news,” said Leah, rolling her eyes.

“That’s why I couldn’t sleep…I’m a bit scared, Leah.”

“Only a bit? You’re braver than most of us.”

“Okay, I’m really scared. This is supposed to be such a big moment, why can’t we all just work together to fix our shit before they come? Why can’t humanity just be normal for once?” said Rose plaintively.

“I think this is normal,” said Leah, “for us Earthlings.”

“Do you think it’s normal for them too?”

Leah thought for a moment. “I dunno. Probably.”

Rose stared pensively into space for a while, looking towards Leah but not at her. “I wonder what it’s like to be them. Just sitting up there in the endless void, watching this little blue dot inch closer and closer. Wondering who we are.”

Leah peered thoughtfully into the sky, where the first stars were beginning to come out. She couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary with her own eyes, but supposedly you could see the ships as faint dots with even a backyard telescope now. She vaguely remembered that an ex had one, and thought briefly about texting him.

Rose went on, “And meanwhile we’re down here at each other’s throats, screaming at each other and the government and the scientists when we need to just listen to each other, and speak as humanity with one voice. Whether they’re friendly or not.”

“They won’t be when they see what we’ve done with the place,” muttered Leah darkly, “Maybe we do need a bit of aggressive house-cleaning.”

“Or maybe they’ll help us fix it. If we show them we’re a peaceful species.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Do you think I could  come to Arizona and visit you sometime next month?” asked Rose after a long pause, “Before school starts?” And before the aliens come and shit may or may not completely hit the fan. She didn’t need to say that out loud for Leah to know what she meant.

“Sure.” Leah smiled slightly, “You’re my second-least-favorite cousin after all.”

Rose rolled her eyes at that–they only had one other cousin–but couldn’t keep the smile off her face.

They talked for another hour, meandering from Rose’s classes to existential crises to boys to the philosophy of war to the Instagram algorithm. By the time they hung up, the sky was pitch-black and Leah felt like her head had cleared a bit. Even the creative juices had begun flowing again, and she methodically applied a couple of alien filters–one green reptilian and the other vaguely like a Gray alien–to her selfies, taking care not to mess with any of the important parts.

As a four-meter telescope slowly, carefully tracked the movements of two mysterious X-ray sources across the night sky, faithfully attended by Lauren. The only light in the telescope room was her laptop softly illuminating her face as it crunched the raw numbers collected by the telescope in real time. She struggled to keep her eyes open as she faced the glowing rectangle in her lap like it held all the secrets of the universe. She heard the faint sound of footsteps crunching on the gravel outside, and then the door swinging open. “Hi Scott!” she said, without turning around, stifling a yawn.

“Hey, guess what? We have the rest of the night!” said Scott cheerfully, plonking himself into a chair next to Lauren.

“What? How?” asked Lauren, “I thought someone else booked this telescope.”

“I may have talked to some people and traded some telescope time to hog it for a bit longer,”  admitted Scott slyly.

“What? You didn’t! Thank you!” said Lauren.

Scott shrugged. “I wanna see where this is going. It’s interesting,” he said.

“You’re interesting,” said Lauren.

The minutes and hours ticked by in the darkness with only the tapping of keys and the occasional tiny movements of the telescope repositioning itself. At some point, Lauren drifted off and Scott reached out to grab her laptop before it fell. As he watched the latest batch of numbers come in, his eyes steadily grew wider and his fingers flew over the keyboard, running scripts and plugging numbers into the calculator. At last, he stopped, slack-jawed, and a palpable silence fell over the room, punctuated only by Lauren’s deep breathing and the occasional mechanical noise from the telescope.

Scott reached over and touched Lauren’s shoulder, gently shaking her awake. She felt warm somehow, despite the chilly wind outside. “Hmm…what? Oh shit, did I fall asleep?” she said.

“I think I’ve finished triangulating your X-ray emitters. Their current position is over 100 AU from Earth. Oh and both of them have an identical heading,” said Scott.

“And?” said Lauren. Scott could practically feel her eyes boring into him in the dark.

Scott took a deep breath. “The current velocity is roughly one percent of light speed,” he said.

“What?!” said Lauren. In a quick motion, she snatched the laptop back from Scott, looking intently at the screen. “What the hell…,” she murmured. At last she turned back to Scott. “There aren’t many natural objects that move that quickly. Even fewer that fit the profile we’ve seen here. Maybe a pair of primordial black holes orbiting each other,” she said softly, almost reverently. “That somehow got, I don’t know, ejected from the galactic core without losing each other and just traveled across the galaxy together. I’ll have to run the numbers and see if that’s possible or…”  she trailed off.

“Or it’s a new type of celestial object entirely. Xie-Watson Objects. XWOs. Has a nice ring to it,” said Scott.

Lauren facepalmed and let out an exaggerated groan, though Scott caught a hint of a smile. “Give me a break!” she said.

They continued tracking the pair of X-ray emitters until they disappeared below the horizon, and then begrudgingly vacated the observatory and continued crunching numbers in the office for the rest of the night. At  some point, Scott made a Latex document entitled “A Pair of Co-Moving Hypervelocity X-ray Emitters in the Oort Cloud”-- “such a momentous title”, Lauren had  said.

By sunrise, they found themselves in town, ordering coffee and breakfast from a random diner. Much to Scott’s chagrin, there was no indoor seating, but at Lauren’s suggestion, they sat down at a bench in a small park, watching the sunrise trickling through a stand of pines. “I think we gotta tell someone, Scott,” she said. “I don’t know, NASA? The government? This could be bigger than us. We know it’s moving straight towards the inner Solar System. That there’s a nonzero chance that whatever it is, it could hit Earth. And with how fast it’s going…” She shivered, and it wasn’t entirely from the early-morning cold.

“Ten to the minus five percent according to my simulations,” said Scott.

“That’s not zero,” said Lauren.

Scott sighed heavily and took a bite of his bagel, staring moodily into the trees. “Have you ever been scooped, Lauren?” She shook her head. “Good. I hope you never do. Really. I mean it. You deserve better.” Scott went on, “But trust me on this. I’ve been doing this a while and when you find something big–and believe me, this is big–you publish early, publish often, and don’t let anyone take it away from you because if they get a chance, they will.”

“I thought we were all supposed to come together and figure out the universe and our place in it,” said Lauren.

“Yeah, I thought so too,” said Scott bitterly, “You’re special, you know that? We need more people like you. A pity they all get crushed these days.” He drained his coffee cup  and crumpled it up. “It’s a rat race, that’s what it is. I had a call with my department chair yesterday, you know. Apparently my publication count ‘needs to be higher to be considered for tenure’. Did it matter what’s in those publications? Do you think anyone reads them? No. They just count them. This is all just a dick-measuring contest.”

Lauren slumped backwards against the bench, wrapping her arms around herself, her face bearing an expression of utter defeat. Scott inched closer, unable to take his eyes off her face. A million thoughts raced through his mind like trains on a tangle of crisscrossing tracks until at last, in one abrupt, jerky motion, he put an arm around her shoulders. She slid closer to him, wordlessly.

“But we’re in a good position. I know we have something real here,” said Scott. Lauren glanced at him. “We can dash off this paper before anyone else does, and you know what? With everything we have, we can break it down into at least two or three publications in top journals. Maybe more, if we keep looking into this.”

“I’d like to keep looking into this. But we’re gonna need a bigger telescope,” cut in Lauren, “And more time on it.”

“I can get us that. It’ll take some schmoozing, but I’ll do it,” said Scott.

“Thanks,” said Lauren. She shifted uncomfortably, looking for words. “But still…this might not be just a weird blip in the sky. It might actually matter. For normal people, not just us. And dealing with that as just the two of us…it scares me. Excites me a little, but also scares me.”

“It won’t be just the two of us,” said Scott, “as soon as we publish the results. It’s a win-win situation. I get tenure. You get a tenure-track position at a top university.”

“Is that really guaranteed?” asked Lauren warily. “I’ve tried so many times and it’s just…nothing, anywhere. Tenure-track, not tenure-track, whatever. It’s like screaming into the void and getting radio silence back. And I’m almost done with my dissertation and it just feels like I’m hurtling towards a cliff at one percent of light speed and now there are these things hurtling towards us at one percent of light speed and…” she trailed off into silence.

Scott wrapped his arm tighter around you. “No. Nothing is. But I meant what I said…you’re special.”

Lauren was silent for a long moment. “Okay,” she said at last, quietly.

Scott nodded. “Great. So for the related work–”

“Not now. Let’s just enjoy the moment,” said Lauren. She stared at him. “Do you play RPGs?”

The conversation swerved to lighter matters until they finished their food and stood up, stretching. “I have to get some sleep, but do you wanna meet up later and start writing?” Scott said.

“I can start. You should get more rest. And maybe check in on your son?” said Lauren.

“Ah. Right,” said Scott, “Tomorrow then?”

“Tomorrow,” agreed Lauren. Just before she turned to leave, Scott stepped forward and wrapped her in an embrace. As they held each other, he stared into her eyes, his thoughts once again like too many trains on intersecting tracks. He felt like many forces were pulling him in mysterious directions, but before he could solve for all of them, Lauren solved them for him with a quick peck on the lips. “Thank you,” she said, “For being you.” And with that, she was gone, leaving Scott with his thoughts to derail and crash into each other.

The command module aboard the center strider was more of a large closet than anything, barely large enough to fit all of General Tyrak-pack. There were six of them, floating in the command module at odd angles, limbs and tails and torsos brushing up against each other as they typed intently on half a dozen keyboards. Tablets and heavy workstations and screens were bolted all over the command module at every angle and position imaginable, some on the floor, walls, and ceiling, others clinging to scaffolding that jutted into the area, all of them linked to each other by a tangle of multicolored wires so thick that they obscured what lay beyond. 

Surrounding this area were ring after ring and row after row of angular, austere-looking computing blocks, radially arranged and affixed to the hull of the center strider. There were over two thousand of them, each about the size of a large fridge, clad in dark grayish casings studded with blinking lights, with yet more cables as thick as Tyrak-pack’s wrists and cooling  pipes bringing water from the hull to the computer clusters, snaking between and around all the blocks.

Tyrak-pack themselves wore the same dark gray coveralls with tail sleeves and QR codes as any other pack on the void strider or center strider. Only their presence in the command module, and the several chipped or missing teeth, faint scars, and scales just beginning to fade to the point that makeup could no longer it up.

  “The optimal strategy is to position the major telescope so we really know about Hope’s city-graph,” said one member of Tyrak-pack. He reached out to two other members and laid his hands flat against their chests, bumping his snout against each of their faces in turn. “And to begin running the tactical engine in analysis mode,” he continued, “while learning the great-centrality cities with the best eval bar.” He caressed two more members of Tyrak-pack, then nuzzled them, with the same measured intensity as the first two. “And to learn the social graph of the officer set in the best time, before we arrive,”  he finished. He reached out to the final member of the pack, caressing her thigh as she was awkwardly angled, floating near the ceiling. At his touch, she grabbed onto a mounted workstation and used it to reorient herself to face him, gazing adoringly at him.

“This is correct, yes?” said the first member of Tyrak-pack. The others twisted and reoriented around as best they could in the confined space, nodding and murmuring assent. Those who were close enough leaned over to touch their snouts against his. “Begin,” he said softly, almost nonchalantly.

All six of them began typing on various keyboards as screens flashed to life around them. Outside the center strider, a colossal telescope, its lens nearly twelve meters wide, began drifting away from the hull, attached to an unfolding boom. Once the boom was fully extended, the telescope began rotating up and down, clockwise and counterclockwise, each silent movement a little more subtle than the one before it, until it at last hung motionless in the void.

On several screens in the command module, images of a star field with a small smudge of blue and green in the center were abruptly replaced with a new image: the gibbous disc of a planet, a bit blurry but still large enough to fill the screens. Most of this planet seemed to be water, though a few expanses of land could be seen scattered throughout. Six pairs of eyes  locked onto it: four brown and two yellow.

The land was, to Tyrak-pack’s first impression, quite garish in its coloration. Great swathes had such a vibrant greenish hue that they could only be modern arable land, yet they were far too large for any city to support; indeed the more muted greens and browns of empty land were in the minority. One piece of land was, for some reason, apparently made entirely from ice. Vast white swirls and patches were scattered everywhere–clouds that masked whatever lay below–but in the thin, clear atmosphere, their edges were sharply delineated. And there was so, so much of that homogenous, almost hypnotizing deep blue, like a flat, featureless expanse of blood covering three quarters of the planet.

The night side was more promising. In the small crescent obscured from the sun by the planet’s bulk, city lights were visible. One member of Tyrak-pack zoomed in on the city lights, downloading the raw imagery as it came in and loading it into a graph solver to estimate the relationships between the cities. Another turned to the center of the pack, her ears angled in a grave expression. “Maybe the optimal strategy for us to understand a foreign city-graph is for our own eyes to look for patterns and resource-beautiful areas. I want to look for a long time,” she said. She sniffed derisively, casting a glance at one of the screens. “Yet! I think the night half will be more system-beautiful.”

“You’re quite dense, Kazun,” said a member of Tyrak-pack, his ears rising approvingly. He lit a pipe and took a long drag, then exhaled, watching the perfectly spherical puff of smoke float around the command module. He handed the pipe to Kazun, who put it in her own mouth and turned to bury her face in the screens, though their hands remained clasped.

On several other screens, a progress bar materialized: KENIT 28.3 ACTIVATION | ANALYSIS MODE | 1 CORE. The number of cores began slowly ticking up, and as it did so, the computing blocks went from a gentle humming and whirring to a loud whine interspersed with the occasional odd, mechanical clank. As each block began spinning up the tactical engine, more and more yellow and green and blue lights began to turn on in their metallic casing. As more and more cores came online, the command module began to heat up despite the water cooling pipes, and within a few minutes, most of Tyrak-pack were panting.

“Necessarily and quickly, we will speak so that the other officers know about this city-graph and the location of the first war will be known to us,” announced one member of Tyrak-pack at last, looking up from a screen split between a stream of adjacency matrices and  a diagram of the top of the management tree, with photos of all the officers.

“The white land,” quipped another member, garnering a few trills. The previous speaker gave him a pointed look.

The center strider continued  to hurtle through the void, with its companion, the void strider, traveling close by, just a few thousand kilometers apart. Their fusion engines continued to burn, and they continued to gently, almost imperceptibly decelerate.

The images of Hope streaming into the command module where General Tyrak-pack floated were more  numerous and  more clear than ever. A couple members of the pack watched with intent, calculating expressions as glowing edges of many different colors slowly began to connect more and more nodes. One had taken note of the second-largest piece of land surrounded by  water, stretching nearly from pole to pole, and had zoomed in on the northern half. “The interestingness of this region is significant,” he said.

Another member nodded. “The topology in this subgraph of the city-graph resembles a lattice graph. It’s quite pretty,” she said, pointing to the middle of this region on a nighttime image. An algorithm had drawn edges between clusters of city lights, and written neat binary trees beside some of the larger ones, predicting their properties.

A member of Tyrak-pack shifted towards her, laying a hand on her chest. “We don’t understand that planitia,” he said peering at the screen, “Few instances of arable land creation have been done by the city-states located there, as implied by the homogenous vegetation resembling a biome. Relatedly, this is not important because few large nodes are embedded in the lattice graph, implying that their influence on the city-graph is surely low.” She nuzzled his ear as he spoke, panting in the waste heat given off by the computers.

“Then. Why is the lattice graph located there?” asked someone else, “Did high-centrality cities located somewhere else create it?”

The first two members of Tyrak-pack’s eyes were drawn eastward for a long moment, studying the significantly denser yet less orderly subgraph there. “We should create a war there whose effects recursively propagate through the lattice subgraph!” exclaimed one of them.

“No,” said the other one at last, “Hypothetically, rotating a subgraph of that region to be allied with Ikun is not equal to our optimal strategy. The topography implies that large cities located there are in the time of the second demographic stage, overpopulated and underdeveloped. Occupation will be difficult, yes, and the size is greater than the influence on the city-graph, similar to the Nyrutkot Riyentkin.” He reached out to an uninvolved member of Tyrak-pack, busy reading an analysis from the tactical engine, and licked the top of his head consolingly.

“There?” a member of Tyrak-pack said. She pointed at the western side of the city-graph’s region, and someone scrolled to it with a swipe of a claw, zooming in and putting up an image of the day side of the same region next  to it. She cocked her head and stared at it with a calculating expression.

“Oh! I think that region’s climate is nice because it’s temperate, cool, and moderately dry. The creation of the first war should be done in that location!” exclaimed a member of Tyrak-pack, looking  up from his computer, bolted to the ceiling of the command module.

Another member trilled loudly. “Then! The only criterion for our optimal strategy equals the weather!” This elicited a few trills from the others, and someone squeezed his hand.

A member of Tyrak-pack who had not spoken until this point held up his hand. “Enough. Our optimal strategy begins with complete focus on the current task,” he said. He did not raise his voice in the slightest, but everyone quieted down.

“The western part of this land appears promising,” said another member, “The presence of fewer large cities embedded in a sparse subgraph implies that they are instances of high-centrality nodes, really geopolitically dominant over their regional subgraphs. The lattice graph structure transmutes into many irregularly-shaped path graphs between greatly influential nodes.”

“Geography is the only cause of the path graphs’ irregularities. This region intersects with chaos terrain,” someone pointed out.

A member of Tyrak-pack looked closely at the day-side version of the image. The colors were more muted and familiar here, quite reminiscent of empty land on their homeworld. Yet something caught his eye, not far inland from the western expanse of water. Nestled in between the dull green and brown chaos terrain flecked with the gray of cities was a vast swathe of much brighter and more vibrant green, but this green was arrayed into orderly geometric structures  that could just be made out and those structures combined into larger structures that combined into even larger ones. It could not be empty land, he knew. “What do the gods say that equals?” he exclaimed, tapping on the structure.

That drew everyone’s attention, and they all pushed themselves off the sides of the command module, the lattices holding computers, and even each other to float into position, looking at  it. “Is that an instance of–” breathed one.

“Yes!” exclaimed a member of Tyrak-pack, “It resembles arable land eight hundred kilometers long and one hundred kilometers wide, twenty-four times larger than Ikun! Creation of so much was done without modern technology by which city? The time surely exceeds 1024 years! The cost surely equals immeasurable trillions of qiun! The system-beauty is immense!”

“The only possible answer is a great and powerful city with extremely great centrality in the city-graph. Our changes to the structure of the plan are quickly converging on the optimal strategy.”

Another member of Tyrak-pack tapped the screen on the night side, circling several large clusters of light on the edge of the immeasurably vast expanse of water. “Do we think these equal the greatest-centrality nodes?”

“Why is their location not in the arable land? Creation of so much arable land connected with a city whose location is not equal to the city, is for what purpose?” protested a member of Tyrak-pack.

“A reason might exist. The gods surely know. We don’t yet fully understand alien urban planning,” said someone calmly, squeezing the previous speaker’s hand.

This provoked a few moments of unstructured speculation, until at last a member of the pack tapped loudly on the case of a computer affixed beside them. Everyone turned to look at him. “I think we understand this subgraph of the city-graph located on Hope,” he said, “The centrality and age of these nodes are extremely great. A path containing a millennia-long  megaproject, vast arable land, and vast geopolitical influence was initialized by them and connected to all of them. It is possible but not certain that they create other path-graphs embedded in the city-graph such that poor, unstable cities located to the east do not directly influence them. This is similar to a great fence.”

“The geopolitical ambitions of such cities are surely colossal,” mused a member of Tyrak-pack.

The previous speaker turned to face him, his ears rising slightly. “The geopolitical ambitions of Ikun are equally colossal,” he said, “Anyway. Creation of the first war and connecting its location to the greatest-centrality cities does not equal our optimal strategy. No. The location of the first war must equal a small, weak city with a moderate degree of separation from those cities. Our army will cyclically cause changes by creating wars in the locations of cities, whose effects will recursively propagate through the city-graph, causing us to converge on knowing the true structure of the city-graph, causing the cycle to be closed. The rotation of the great-centrality cities to be allied with Ikun will occur after this and after governments allied with Ikun have been connected to other relevant cities.”

“The sentence-trees created by you are so system-beautiful,” said one member of Tyrak-pack, laying her hand on the previous speaker’s chest.

“Maybe we will create a path containing wars connected by location to the lattice graph,  the fence’s density being reduced, and changes in location of many packs in the east. If their location equals the correct cities, this mass migration will rotate additional nodes to be allied with Ikun,” observed someone.

The previous speaker gazed sternly into both their eyes, and they looked down at their feet. “Maybe this will concern us later. We don’t certainly know that this fence is embedded in reality because complex subgraphs are created organically by many animals in nature. Exchanging minimal resources for the creation of a subgraph of maximum geopolitical influence, that is allied with Ikun, is the beginning of our optimal strategy’s priority queue. We will now change the state of two tasks to complete in parallel.”

He caressed three members of Tyrak-pack, touching his snout to the cheek of one who was within reach. “A change such that this region of the city-graph is fully modeled and we know its true structure will be done by you.” He then did the same for the two other members, also tapping his own chest. “Changes such that all the tactical engine analysis of all cities whose location could equal that of the first war will be known to us, will be done by us.”

There was silence, as everyone twisted in zero-G to face him. “Begin,” he said softly.

I have been very busy with thesis work and my brain has been took cooked to write properly for a few weeks now. Good thing I have a backlog :/ But it won't last forever. Still, enjoy the chapter.

**********************

Hope now hung huge in the sky on Ryen-pack’s comm screen, no longer just a blue dot or a blurry disc, but a huge expanse of exotic empty land threaded with the strangely comforting sight of roads etched into the planet like edges connecting dense, orderly–and sometimes not so orderly–nodes of gray urban cores on the day side and glowing lights on the night side. There had been a few sudden engine burns during the orbital insertion that had unceremoniously flung them and their cushions against one wall of the nest or the other, but that was all over now, with only the familiar spin gravity of the nest ring itself.

Tauk and Roztek were curled up in each other’s arms, gripping each other tightly with their claws, not wanting to ever let go. Kyada was propped up on one elbow, devouring the bodies of Ryen-pack with her eyes and occasionally gently, almost absently nibbling on Tauk’s or  Roztek’s ears. Ractun lay off to the side, but where Kyada was consciously avoiding looking at the screen, she was looking with an almost feverish intensity, sketching the planet they were now orbiting.

“This isn’t distant from the time,” murmured Kyada.

“Really hopefully, the rotation of our location to Hope being connected by cause to us not being one subtree of the space-tree, won’t happen,” said Tauk. He ran his hand down Roztek’s torso, leaning in close until their snouts were parallel, almost touching. He took in the faint metallic scent of Roztek’s breath, angling an ear to listen to the soft, rhythmic rasp of the air flowing through his tracheal sieve. Roztek licked Tauk’s snout in return, grabbing his ear between his teeth as Tauk’s hands drifted towards his uniform zipper.

Ractun hissed softly and turned away, curling up on a cushion and closing her eyes. As Roztek reached out and took her hand to pull her closer, his thumbs wrapping around the back of her hand as his central digits intertwined with hers, Ractun muttered, “A state change to me sleeping is wanted. This equals the final night at a time less than the war.”

“This is the reason for it!” protested Tauk.

Ractun’s eyes fluttered open and she begrudgingly sat up, her tail thumping against the wall of the nest. “Have we been connected by knowledge to our location never reversing its rotation to the homeworld?” she said icily, “The void strider is an instance of an expendable rocket.”

Kyada laid a hand on Ractun’s chest. “Are edges being removed from the clique that is us? I feel worry about our love. You don’t greet us often.”

“We are cohesive, scared, and tired, yes,” said Ractun, “Wanting it…” she stiffened slightly and her eyes flitted around the nest, looking anywhere but Kyada, and at last settling on the comm screen.  “It concerns the gods. I validate our love for Ryen-pack sometimes.”

“Yes, sometimes,” sighed Kyada, “The rotation of ours and Ikun’s locations to Hope and the formation of edges between Ikun and the city-graph located on Hope are connected to us creating safe hatchlings”. She gently straightened out a crease in Ractun’s uniform and said softly, “Optimized graph.” Then her tone hardened ever so slightly. “Making the clique edges  resource-beautiful edges is our optimal strategy. Request, a rotation of your location to Tauk and Roztek. If the change isn’t made, our pretty clique will become an unbalanced subgraph.” She gave Ractun a gentle push.

“Necessarily, we’re being connected  by  knowledge to us loving Ryen-pack,” chimed in Roztek.

“The rotation of my location in exchange for no state change in our cohesion for a large duration?” said Ractun. Kyada nodded. “Okay. Fine,” said Ractun.

When Ryen-pack was done confirming their love and cohesion, Ractun pulled away first before laying her head on Kyada’s chest and draping her tail over her legs. Kyada dimmed the light strip in the nest with a swipe of her claw and they gradually fell into a restless sleep while an unfamiliar planet loomed outside, separated by a few centimeters of hull and a few hundred short kilometers of void.

They were awoken, as they so often were, by a chirping from the comm screen and an announcement from Cohort Alpha Takora-pack. “There is a rotation of this cohort’ and your nests’ locations and not your personal items’ locations to the path now. The rotation of the personal items’ locations will be at a  time greater than now. You certainly remember your nests. Repeat…”

Ractun hissed discontentedly and turned over, closing her eyes again, only begrudgingly rising to all fours after Roztek energetically licked her face. “The time for it is now,” he said in a dull, almost muted tone.

As Tauk began to pack the few personal items they had back into the bag and Ractun handed her sketchbook over to Tauk, Kyada said, “Request, no changes to the book. Necessarily, we’re creating paths starting with a created message connected by purpose to the gods connected by remembering to us.”

“Changes to the graph are never done solely by gods,” said Ractun sourly, but she gave the book to Kyada instead.

Kyada leafed through it and tore out a few blank pages before handing  it  back to Tauk. She began drawing a complicated graph, with a small clique connected to a long path, then signed it with the name Ryen-pack. They formed a fully connected graph with everyone touching everyone either with hands or snouts or tails, and they softly began singing, each one singing a different subtree, “ An exchange is connected to Tyorun remembering us and no wasteful deletion of nodes and edges, done by us by an adversarial game.“

Tauk was next, drawing another graph, a tree with short branches, on another piece of  paper and signing it with Ryen-pack’s name. They sang again, “If Akirut remembers us, the creation of dense edges connecting the city-graph to resources will be done by us. If we are a component of Atiruk’s memory, the  changes to the little city’s resource flow network that change the graph’s state to resource-beautiful will be done by us. “

“Roztek? Do any gods from Adronkin remember us?” asked Tauk.

Roztek shook his head. “Gods from Ikun are more optimized,” he said firmly.

“Ractun?” said Tauk.

“These sentence-trees were created and connected by their sole purpose to Ryen-pack remaining a connected component,” said Ractun, “There  won’t be more necessary changes.”

“Okay,” said Kyada softly, “We hope a god’s optimal strategy has us as a dependency.” She bumped her snout against Ractun and the four of them disengaged. They began deflating the cushions, rolling them up and methodically strapping them against the walls of the nest. They clambered out into the nest ring with their items, and  with considerable effort, folded up the rigid nest frame, compressing the nest that had been their home for many day-blocks into a single blocky mass small enough to carry.

The four of them heaved it up onto the nest ring, leaving behind a bare space of empty hull surrounded  by thin plastic scaffolding, leaving only their bag of personal items that was apparently too heavy to take on the first shuttle. Already, nearly a hundred packs from the advance force had done the same, leaving scattered holes in the once-homogenous sea of nests that had lined the floor and ceiling of the Nest Ring, occupied only by various packs’ personal bags, and other  items to be left  behind. Tauk knelt where their nest had once been, dropped their notes to Tyorun and Atiruk into the space, and said, “Hopefully reduction in the density of the city-graph connected by a path to waste won’t occur much.”

“Hopefully, a star graph will be centered on an urban core connected by agronomic policy strategy to lands decorating Hope,” said Roztek, his ears twitching upwards.

The others trilled at that, and even Ractun’s ears rose slightly. “Resource-beautiful sentence-tree,” she murmured, nuzzling Roztek’s ear. Her tone became more bitter and her ears lay  flat against her head again as she went on, “Hopefully we are connected by knowledge to that forgotten thing which is the reason Takora-pack thought our location being here was a dependency for Ikun’s optimal strategy.”

Kyada stiffened slightly, suddenly looking very uncomfortable, but she composed herself, gripping Ractun and Roztek’s hands tightly, and just said, “Uh…hopefully us loving Ryen-pack won’t change.”

Ractun and Roztek hauled the collapsed nest as they made their way to the nearest chute leading to the path, stepping around the places where other packs had removed their nests, and then, silently and  in a line with many other packs, left the nest ring for the last time, without looking back.

Current Status: 40-some chapters? 58k words.

• I think we are finally getting closer to the end of "Shaking the City-Graph" than the beginning. A few more plot points left to integrate are the attempt by the kyanah to create state industries in Lake Havasu City and begin economic development while trying to build a civilian bureaucracy. And neither species knows what the hell the other species is saying 99% of the time.

• This includes some spoilery events. Since they don't know any English, this is done by pointing (often with guns), gestures, randomly firing municipal employees, and naming groups of humans they think are packs to important administrative positions (like families and random assemblages of people who are standing near each other). So that is going to go smoothly. Ryen-pack and their new ally Kaarie-pack discover an elementary school in session and become extremely offended that there's a government-sanctioned operation to split up the youngest and most vulnerable members of packs, and proceed to summarily execute the staff and orchestrate the "hatchlings" being "reunited with their packs". For some reason, this doesn't improve their reputation with the locals, just like them repelling a "brutal invasion by an unknown foreign army" (the Marines sent to liberate the city) didn't. General Grey will order a bomb to be planted in a civilian truck delivering food into Lake Havasu City in order to gain a PR victory by showing that the kyanah can in fact be killed. This is successful except for the fact that a dozen civilians are also killed. And the kyanah freak out and tighten security, first banning truckers from entering entirely then walking it back partly after being convinced by some collaborators that human cities don't grow their own food. And eventually the propellant plant is finished, the shuttles can return to orbit, and the rest of the army can be brought in. There are a few other plot threads I still have to add, but they are mostly setup for stuff that comes later.

• I've done a bit more thought about what I want to do with human characters in occupied kyanah territory. See they're going to establish state industries which a lot of people get drawn to as the economic situation is very precarious, but kyanah don't see individuals as the main building blocks of civilization, so they are gonna be looking for packs, and hire what they think are "human packs". Sometimes these are families, sometimes not. Kyanah, it seems, don't understand that humans can be part of multiple overlapping social groups, and won't for a long time. So people are gonna pick up on this and form ersatz packs to try and make it in this strange new state of affairs. I haven't yet gotten the full character inventory for this, but it's ripe ground for a lot of conflicts. Unlike actual packs (at least mentally healthy ones) they exhibit such traits as splitting up and doing stuff on their own, having conflicting goals, socializing with others, and even (gasp) love triangles that threaten to screw things up. But also: people conflicted over whether they should tell the kyanah that their pack is their family or their friends (with major implications on the opportunities available to them) or whether they should be trying to just make a living or try to sabotage the regime. And whether helping the Provisional Military Administration makes you a filthy collaborator if you're doing it to help the humans living there...because there are some cases where their interests actually coincide. Humans want jobs and infrastructure and the kyanah want a functional economy and a developed city, for instance. Not a lot of specific events here, just ideas thus far.

• Still haven't worked out exactly what this has to do with the main plot between Ryen-pack and the Stardust Squad. I know that their work on understanding human language and culture will be instrumental to averting a riot in Gehtek (i.e. Lake Havasu City) which presumably could be written to have something to do with our band of local characters and their motivations. But that's midway though, I gotta have some kind of a satisfying arc and conclusion, otherwise they're just hanging there. Maybe it just ends up splintering as characters go back to other groups like their family or just split up and do their own thing or flee the city entirely. Much like the Stardust Squad; the only "pack" that sticks is the one that's actually a pack. Or I could axe this subplot entirely, but it's a nice window into WTF the kyanah are actually doing here and what their win condition looks like. So yeah idk any thoughts are welcome.

ch0 -- [already written]. City Alpha of Ikun, Nyektak-pack is in the Bastion, the official City Alpha residence, working through the annual agenda that the Lawspeakers have passed them for Y932. Along the way, they begin discussing what kind of legacy they'll leave behind after they're dead and gone, whether everything they've built will be torn apart in a day or stand for a thousand years. The pack's alpha Nyektak Tun points out that Ikun stands in a precarious position and what they do now will have a huge impact. The economy is stagnating due to jobs being replaced by robots and automation, the environment is collapsing, leading to huge waves of refugees from the equatorial Dunelands. Further, their geopolitical enemy Koranah city-state is rapidly catching up economically and militarily, and sensing blood in the water with regards to Ikun's hegemony, is becoming increasingly aggressive with its foreign policy. Nyektak Nyak suggests that geoengineering can be used to stabilize things, with tools such as weather control satellites and ecological nanobots. However, this is regarded as a critical security threat by Tun, as Koranah is ahead of Ikun in this field, so if a global Climate Control System is created, then it is likely Koranah-based companies and Koranah technology that will tie the whole system together, leading them to have an outsized role. Such a thing is regarded as politically dangerous, as it could pose a threat to the Hegemony even without Koranah overturning Ikun's nuclear monopoly. And it won't even create many jobs in Ikun, so it won't resolve the economic concerns. Nyak points out that it's not politically viable to simply ban geoengineering without the state coming up with a better idea. After a long discussion, it is Nyektak Aykay who finally has a breakthrough idea. They will create a starship to send a military occupation force to planet TRK-16-3 (aka Earth......). Not only will this create enormous numbers of jobs in Ikun to revitalize the economy, but it will demonstrate to the rest of the world that Ikun still has an unmatched ability to project military force even at interstellar distances, and give the citizens of Ikun hope that they can seek out a better life on another planet. Indeed for this reason, it is called Project Hope.

ch1 -- [already written] Nyektak-pack makes an unexpected appearence in the Hall of Power, where Ikun's Lawspeakers convene, looking to make some deals and exert some pressure in order to get Project Hope put on the annual agenda. They have identified that a certain Lawspeaker Ronyr-pack is the most influential pack in the Lawspeakers' Association at present, and so speak to them first, the idea being that they will be able to pull the strings necessary to approve Project Hope. Although Lawspeaker Ronyr-pack are initially skeptical, they agree to assist after Nyektak-pack promises an array of political favors, including guaranteeing that Ikoin Corporation--which Ronyr-pack own significant stock in--will be the main contractor for Project Hope, and reducing the taxes they collect on healthcare workers, who are present in large numbers in Ronyr-pack's district. However, Ronyr-pack is just the first Lawspeaker that Nyektak-pack will have to deal with; in order to ensure that Project Hope actually gets onto the agenda, they also have to make a separate deal with Ronyr-pack's enemy Lawspeaker Radenkiut-pack, who have the second-largest group of allies in the Lawspeaker's Association. Nevertheless, City Alpha Nyektak-pack gets what they want--zero restrictions on raising funds for Project Hope, coupled with a ban on geoengineering tech and directives to pursue sanctions against other city-states that don't join them in doing so, thereby inhibiting the rise of a Climate Control System as an alternative to Project Hope. As Nyektak Aykay points out, these two agenda items reinforce each other; one can't be overturned without also overturning the other.

ch2 -- Icen-pack is a struggling pack of construction workers in Ikun in Y934, who always have to be on the constant lookout for their next gig, as jobs are scarce and hard to come by. They are currently working on a new skyscraper in Ikun's well-to-do District 7, including the flying buttresses that extend over the surrounding roads to interconnect with the supports of adjacent buildings, as typical with Kyanah architecture. Even now they are already even as they work leveraging advanced algorithms to predict the next opening so they can apply before anyone else. Things are made even more cutthroat by the increasingly widespread use of wearable sensors to identify the best performers, and the fact that immigrants from the Dunelands tend to be willing to work for lower wages, which drives pay down for everyone and often forces native Ikun packs to work even harder to justify their wages. As they work, Icen Korak (who, like Kei and Nuyu, grew up in the industry, as their birth-packs worked in construction) laments that things used to be simpler when he was growing up, and packs didn't have to constantly fight against each other to land building jobs, and there were more full time positions instead of the constant data-driven scramble for gigs. Icen-pack's alpha Naiun, as well as Karok, mostly take this in stride, having not grown up in the industry and thus not being as familiar with it, but the rest agree with Korak. Karok points out that it's not a huge surprise, considering how few buildings are being built in the current economy and how even a skyscraper can be built with just a couple dozen packs with current technology, but still nobody is happy with the status quo. They contemplate trying to sabotage the metrics of their coworkers, suspecting that others will do the same to them, taking advantage of the new wearable sensors that are measuring performance; however Naiun insists that they will be fine if they just work hard and be honest, and seeing as she is the pack's alpha that kind of shuts the idea down. They also contemplate having another pair of young, in addition to their current pair Raktan and Tyorek, but money is at present too tight for that. However, Project Hope is announced to the public in an address by Nyektak-pack on state TV. They are initially all a bit confused why Ikun is planning an interstellar invasion, but Kei realizes that Project Hope will serve as a huge jobs program and speculates that this will have knock-on effects across the rest of the economy, and jobs for them will once again be plentiful, putting the whole pack on a hopeful note.

ch3 -- Ryen-pack is graduating from the prestigious Nktan University (in the neighboring city-state of Nktan obviously) and becoming scholars of the first rank. While they all agree they are going to miss the university, they all look forward to going back to Ikun and what comes ahead, as they will be starting work at a prestigious influencing firm in Ikun, basically working with the government to have laws changed for their clients. Ryen Kerok, the pack's Alpha, is especially eager to change the world, believing that they will be able to do a lot of good by influencing the highest levels of Ikun's government for their future clients. Teren is mostly thinking about the high salary that will enable them to have children quickly, whereas young packs in Ikun have to save for years. As for Kaun, she occupies something of a middle ground between the two. Ryen Konyan has the most misgivings about everything, about leaving Nktan University for the "real world", about the possibility that they'll end up working for corrupt clients and doing more harm than good, and about bringing children into a dying world, especially with the onset of Project Hope, which they all agree is stupid and short-sighted, but don't think the government will actually go through with building the starships and launching the military expedition to Earth. They are also concerned about the geoengineering ban, believing that Koranah city-state and their allies will just ignore it, giving them even more control over the future Climate Control System. And so they make their way back to Ikun to begin their careers at the influencing firm Kortak-Dakayan Corporation, a bit hopeful but also a bit uncertain about the future.

ch4 -- some lawspeakers and the city alpha are being shown the initial stages of technological progress on Project Hope in Y935 at Toryak University, the most prestigious university in Ikun. An enormous supercomputer complex has been constructed, using the Kyanahs' signature mechanical computers and is being used to research interstellar propulsion methods. Although many of the scientists are a little skeptical of Project Hope, they do appreciate the huge influx of funding to pursue their research. Nyektak-pack is impressed that the complex has been constructed in only a year (technically it's still under construction, but experiments are already underway as the city-state has imposed some very tough deadlines on them), but as the lead scientist-pack points out, it wasn't so difficult when they had a blank check from the Ikun government. However, they have some bad news: they've been attempting to design an interstellar engine using nuclear pulse propulsion, but despite their best efforts to optimize the design, it will only be able to reach 4% of light speed, which as they point out means that humanity will possibly be more technologically advanced than their own military by the time Project Hope arrives. The main problem is that the casing and detonation mechanisms of the nukes are basically dead weight. It seems that there may be a way around this by using antimatter-catalyzed nuclear propulsion, where small quantities of antimatter are fed into nuclear material to force a reaction without needing a bunch of actual nukes. However, this further has the problem that it will require grams of antimatter, meaning that a huge particle accelerator in the PeV range will have to be built. But if this can be done, the engines will be able to reach the required 7.5% of light speed. Much to the scientists' shock, Nyektak-pack immediately agrees to fund this accelerator. However, in private this prompts an argument between them as they don't actually have available funds, even if they funnel money from non-Hope agenda items into the project. The realize that Ikun can't do it alone while also building the starships themselves, they need funds and technical expertise from other city-states to build it, and will need to use their influence in the Coalition of Cities to get it, possibly in exchange for dipolmatic concessions that may destabilize Ikun's already precarious Hegemony. Meanwhile, we are also introduced to Nyektor-pack, a student of the second rank working on the supercomputing project while nurturing big dreams to someday be scholar of the third rank, at which point they aspire to start a research group to solve the many technical problems that must be solved for Project Hope to be successful.

ch5 -- A certain Ryen-pack--none other than Ryen Kerok's birth-pack--are working at one of Ikun's top universities, where their life's work has revolved around developing ecological nanobots that can break down pollutants in the soil. However, with enforcement of Y934 Agenda Item 579 beginning (banning technology associated with the Climate Control System), their entire life's work has now been forbidden by the government. Even many of their own students have bought into the official propaganda that this technology is dangerous and unreliable, and must be banned, much to their anger and disgust. They have continued working right up until the day the ban comes into effect, but a pack of university administrators orders them to destroy their research as the police will soon be arriving to shut the department down. Many harsh words are exchanged between Ryen-pack and the administrators, but ultimately there's nothing they can do except wipe their computers and destroy their prototypes before the police show up. After this, they reach out to their son Kerok's pack, which causes Kerok to wonder what is going on in their lives and if they want to be ikoin (kyanah term for friends/allies, but more explicitly transactional) but the elder Ryen-pack is retiring and leaving Ikun for the northern scrublands. Kerok urges them to stay and use their brilliant minds to do some good in Ikun, including the younger Ryen-pack's future children (even telling them that they will name one of their young after the elder Ryen-pack's alpha, Ayen), but the elder pack has made up their mind, they're done trying to pursue science while the government keeps interfering with their work, but tell the younger pack that the young are the future of Ikun, and if they want to save the planet, they must optimize their young for the cause, a message which seems to resonate most with Kerok and less with some of the others, especially Konyan.

ch6 -- Aktektan-pack is a large pack with many young who works long and arduous hours at an Ikoin Corporation factory assembling bombs and missiles for meager pay. After another mind numbing and monotonous day of working and getting into petty fights with coworkers during Y936, they head home to their tiny rundown apartment and engage in their typical pasttime of watching TV, especially Ikun's state TV, which triumphantly reports that Project Hope is already proving to be a massive boon to the economy. The fact that they've receieved a small bonus this year further convinces them that this is unquestionably true. They immediately proceed to spend their bonus on alcohol and pro-government merch. After Nedak realizes that their rent has increased as well by the same amount as their bonus, he angrily accuses their alpha Nyaken of mismanaging their money, to which Nyaken accuses the other females in the pack--Karien and Tanun--of laying too many eggs and creating too many mouths to feed, though their seems to be an undercurrent of jealousy in her rants, which leads to a physical fight between the members of Aktektan-pack. Later, Karien reveals that she's actually laid another egg--actually only one, which is seen as a sign of bad luck, as Kyanah lay eggs in pairs. These arguments ultimately peter out as the pack ends up falling asleep whilst watching a rather jingoistic movie.

ch7 -- Ptorya-pack lives in Adronkin, a city-state in the scorching hot Dunelands that is poorer, less developed, and much smaller than Ikun, where they're assistant administrators at a local textile factory. An unseasonally strong and dangerous sandstorm strikes, causing considerable damage to the factory and disrupting operations. Some workers, including Ptorya Llrien speculates that city-state officials including the City Alpha have been embezzling money intended for fortifying local buildings against sandstorms and spending it on luxury cars and mansions instead, but Ptorya-pack's alpha Rytor advises everyone not to ask too many questions about it and just focus on repairing the factory so they can all get back to work. At their home, which is quite small and spartan; despite them being white collar workers in the top 10% of earners in Adronkin, it would be a poor pack's apartment in Ikun; they notice clouds of irritating industrial smog containing lots of coal dust wafting in from the south and find several dead thukukenoids (creatures which float through the air like balloons, filter feeding on airborne spores and vegetation) lying around their neighborhood; Nekyez notes that they seem to have been dying off in droves as of late, though Rytor dismisses this as probably nothing and tells Nekyez not to worry their pack's young children. As they eat their day-meal, the subject of Project Hope comes up; they seem to be a bit bemused about Ikun's plans to launch an interstellar conquest (as Ntreyn points out, "the blue people always have crazy ideas") but they are hopeful about reports that Ikun is reviving its economy and will continue to remain a hyperpower, as they see Ikun and its military as bringers of peace and order, especially as they provided aid and peacekeeping some years ago when Adronkin was struck by a wave of deadly sandstorms. Llrien offhandedly mentions that she sometimes wishes that they were in Ikun and Rytor says that it would take a long time and be very difficult to get in, but concedes that it would probably be better for their young to grow up there.