Chapter Twelve:

Maglen traveled a lonely journey back into the stars.

When she detected asteroids to her one side, she measured them and their distance to her. If they were of a size and of a distance within her parameters, she’d repel them, preferably into the path of other debris. Slowly, she began to turn the debris field and destroy it, folding it in on itself.

She pressed on, her solar cells feeding her RF drive and her anti-grav moving more and more debris. Occasionally she encountered debris in her path and repulsed it to the other side, where it would have no chance of striking the solar system she was protecting. Those pushes also kept Maglen as close as was safe to the debris field.

She’d do this for years or until she was destroyed. If she made it to a place where there was no debris, then she’d call out for directions, but she’d be an old, old ship by then.

Kharen didn’t like naming animals – no one really did. Naming them gave them personalities, and made it harder to do away with them if that was needed. Forming any connection to a lesser species like this just made the job harder.

However, it was easy to tell that these beings had names that they’d given each other, and that had to be done away with. Part of breaking their spirit would involve taking away their personalities, and then they had to be rid of their names.

She called the sub-adults One, Two and Three. The male was One. She pointed at them and made that point to them repeatedly. When they acknowledged it, they were rewarded and, when they used their own names, they were punished swiftly and severely. Very soon they were ‘One,’ ‘Two’ and ‘Three.’

The adults were another matter. She expected them to be more resistant. She learned quickly, though, that while the males would stand up to whatever abuse was laid on them, they would buckle quickly if the females were punished in their stead. At the same time, the females followed the example of the males. Once the males accepted their numbers, the females quickly did the same.

They were reunited, they were given clothes and were taught to clean themselves. They were taught the basics – feeding themselves, how to relieve themselves, how to clean their sub-compound.

The latter was a great day, because the stink of their leavings was oppressive. They at first balked at using toilet facilities, but Khalid actually demonstrated it himself, and this led them to want to imitate him.

That led to more training by imitation. All of the sub-adults were quick to please – the adults were more hesitant but seemed to reason that, if the Sariyans were doing something, then they should do it. Soon they were cleaning their own plates, their own spaces,

In three weeks, Efrain came to inspect her progress.

“They don’t stink anymore,” he commented. “That’s something.”

“They wash themselves,” Kharen informed him. “They clean, they prepare their meals now. These are the basics, they’re ready to start working with the tools they’ll need.”

“Are you sure?” Efrain asked. He watched Khalid working with the adults, who were stacking wooden bricks one-on-top-of-the-other. This was the type of basic exercise which would be their life from now on.

“Sure enough,” Kharen said. “They fear the batons, they are quick to please. I’m more confident of the sub-adults, but I’ve decided we’ll make an advisor class of them. When we’re ready to start them working, we’ll have a few who are more sophisticated, who will run the rest. The sub-adults are easier to train and quicker to learn.

“As well,” she said, “when they are managing themselves, we can extend the numbers we can use. If there is a revolt or resistance of some kind, then they turn on each other and we aren’t in danger.”

Efrain nodded. “Excellent thinking,” he commented. “We’ve picked out another group we want to collect. When will you be ready to add to their numbers?”

“Any time,” Kharen told him. “I want to see how new ones will react to the trained ones. If we can’t extend the training that way, then this isn’t going to work.”

Efrain nodded. “I’ll order it right away.”

The new band of hominids came in like the second: dirty, naked and mostly female, with a couple more males and three more sub-adults.

This time they separated the sub-adults immediately, and placed the females in one separate container, with the males in the one that had belonged to the children. The hominids that had been trained already were curious about the new ones, peering in at them through the glass windows and chattering in their native language.

The new comers were every bit as ferocious as the originals at first. They clawed at the glass and they tried to climb out of the enclosure. The females wept in their solitude, probably at the loss of their younglings or their males – it was impossible to say.

Their language was rudimentary and seemed to address mostly the things they saw and the things they needed. There would be no speculation about the origins of things, of math and of philosophy, among these. Such thoughts were for the people who had good confidence that they would be alive tomorrow.

The sub-adults were more promising, and the new batch contained two females and a male who was barely more than a toddler. The females mothered him and protected him from One, Two and Three. One, being the dominant male among them, immediately tried to show them the new things they’d learned: how to bathe, how to clean up after themselves, a few words in the Sariyan language. The originals winced when the newcomers spoke in their native languages and touched their mouths, warning them to stop.

Soon Kharen had them all in one group, calling them Four, Five and, the youngest, Six. She placed the numbers on their smocks to make it easier to remember which was which .

When cleaned, One was clearly attracted to a member of the new group, Five. Kharen noted her budding breasts and the beginnings of pubic hair. She resisted him at first, but with a lack of others to mate with it wasn’t long before she was imitating him and sleeping next to him at night.

“So like us,” Khalid noted, “but so different as well.”

Kharen was watching them sleep, after a difficult day when they seemed to resist everything she tried to teach them and insisted in speaking in their native language, no matter how many times they were shocked. She was considering putting Six in his own compartment where they could see but not touch him, as she had with the adults.

“Not too different,” she noted. In Punku, in the control room that had been set aside for the members of this project, they watched the different groups resting. Tomorrow they would release the females into the main group and see how that went. She’d noted that two of the three of them were imitating the main group, stacking imaginary blocks and fitting them together. The males seemed unwilling to cooperate and simply ate and waited.

“They want to continue to live,” Kharen continued. “They want to further their species. I think they’re realizing that they aren’t starving to death here, so they’re changing.

“There could have been a time when we weren’t so different. We were simply never faced with a superior species coming in and taking over for them.”

Khalid shook his head. “I think we would have fought,” he said. “I think our ancestors would have resisted for more than two weeks.”

“Then our ancestors would have died,” she said. “And we wouldn’t be here.”

The next day, the females were introduced to the existing males. They approached timidly, looking for food and water and wary of how they’d be received. In their environment with limited resources, Kharen could imagine that new arrivals were rarely welcome.

The established females addressed them first. They brought them to the main group but away from the males, and showed them how to get down on their knees.

When they did, Kharen brought in food. When the new females stood to lunge for it, it was withdrawn and the established females chattered at them and pushed them back down, turning their faces back to the crewmen with the food, kneeling back down.

The new females complied, and the food returned. It took three more attempts before they waited patiently on their knees for the food.

While they ate, the males still in their cage threw themselves at the glass and howled at their females. The females glanced in their direction but ignored them, their stomachs taking over for their conscience, it seemed.

When they were done eating, the females showed them how to clean up, how to wash themselves, how to put on the smocks they wore. They participated in the day’s lessons while their males fumed in their compartment, forgotten.

Reglan watched this with Efrain and Kharen as Khalid worked them and their lessons. In another compartment, the sub-adults were learning to direct each other through simple tasks, as they’d be doing when the group of them were released to build the power station Reglan wanted.

“I can’t imagine what those males are going to do when we add them to the group,” Efrain said.

“We’ve studied their bands,” Reglan said. “Always more females than males – we’re assuming that they fight each other for resources. I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t do that now.”

“That could set us back,” Efrain said. “We might just want to put the new males down. We don’t need them, really – they’re stronger, but we’re going to breed them. We just need a few males for the next generation.”

Kharen shook her head. “That gets us through one generation, but it’s going to lead to trouble when we start to breed bothers and sisters. Too much chance for breeding in a recessive gene with problems attached to it.”

Reglan nodded. “So gelding them is out as well,” he said.

Kharen had thought of that, too, and discarded it for the same reason.

“I think I’ll just bring in one male, the Beta, and then the Alpha,” she said. “If it goes well, then the Beta will join the group, and when we bring in the Alpha, he’ll be pretty isolated. If he doesn’t cooperate, then the others will take care of him.”

Efrain nodded. “Try it,” he said. “If this works, I think we’ll move this facility to the other continent and expand it. We’ll bring the tribes in, in larger numbers, and I’ll give you a bigger staff. In a short time we’ll have your leadership group ready to step in and do the training, and then begin building right after.”

They all nodded.

When Kharen introduced the Beta male from the second group, the other two males beat him. She was about to intervene until they stopped, then they made him get on his knees in front of them.

She hadn’t expected that sort of imitative behavior, but it made sense in retrospect. They saw something, they learned its meaning, they made it part of their social norms.

Next the two established males tried to breed the new females in front of the new Beta. That was totally unexpected, but she didn’t stop it. The idea was to make him submissive and it worked. He got on his knees with the rest of the group when fed, and he did his tasks, cleaned up, bathed – everything that they wanted from him.

Two days later they introduced the Alpha, and it was no different. He tried to fight back, but against the two healthy new-comers and his own, former tribe member, he had no chance. He was on his knees soon and obeying like the rest.

As a new compound was built on the far continent, testing showed that all of the females were pregnant, one of them by the new Alpha. They’d found their way into the group. In the sub-adult group, One had a harem composed of most of the other females with the exception of one from his original group. He was too young to breed them, but bounced on their hips or buttocks, probably like he’d seen members of his tribe do in the past.

In another month, they had a new, much larger facility ready on the continent, and a good number of the predators in the area cleared out. Messages from Maglen indicated that the ship was still alive and functioning, while bombardment of the planet Ta in this solar system was slowing turning the planet red.

Among themselves, many of the women were reporting that they were pregnant by the men they’d paired with, and their crops were starting to emerge from the soil in what was the latter part of their summer. The soil was so rich that it seemed anything would grow.

Efrain credited himself for all of it, and transmitted joyous messages back to Syriahs. The colony had taken hold with precious little resistance and unexpected success, especially considering the dark aspects of their arrival.

The day after sending that message, they received their first message back from Syriahs – a veteran of the debris field which had somehow penetrated it and survived. It was garbled and distorted, however Reglan and Ghegee leapt on it and built a predictive AI to interpret the missing pieces.

Finally, they had something:

We are Intrepid II.

Emergency! We have dropped out of greater than light speed after a catastrophic collision with a large, unforeseen asteroid.

Damage to the primary and the secondary hull. Crew casualties. Losing oxygen. There appears to be a debris field between target and Syriahs.

Can’t imagine how Maglen could have survived. Attempting repairs. We will try to return to Syriahs.

There were no follow up transmissions. Roo sat gravely with the rest of those of name, and Kharen, whose pairing with Reglan was currently being discussed.

“They didn’t understand that we created the debris field,” he said.

“Then they turned back into their own,” Efrain said. “There’s no reason to think that they wouldn’t have the same effect on space that we did.”

“But we saw the debris field,” Rebert Thine said.

“But we weren’t severely damaged,” Reglan said. “Who knows what ship’s functions they still had. Most of their radar and light-based detection is on the outside of the ship, and sonar would have only shown what was in their proximity. We were a light-year ahead of our debris field.”

“What this tells us,” Livven said, “is that our people have probably considered us dead for years.”

“We’ll do what we can do to determine when this was sent,” Ghegee said. “The time-stamp was lost and we couldn’t rebuild it. We’ll have to estimate based on when we received it, but we’re going to have a lot of possibilities.”

“This makes building the power plant an even bigger priority,” Efrain said.

He looked around the room. “Right now, with at least two missions lost, our people are going to consider this a failure, and they’re going to set their sights on something else.”

“Wouldn’t they have intercepted one of our messages?” Hames insisted. Livven was already shaking her head.

“No, not at light speed,” she said. She was sitting on a padded platform which had been popular on Syriahs when they’d left. It was manufactured from wood from trees that grew to the north, and the hides of some of the animals they slaughtered.

“They’d have flown through it and not known the difference between it and any other EM pulse.”

“By now, though,” Reglan said, “Syriahs should have received the transmissions that we sent when we stopped and first discovered the debris field. Unfortunately, Intrepid II would have already been destroyed or turned back by then.”

“They might assume –“ Hames said, but Efrain shook his head.

“There’s no knowing,” he said. “In around nine years, they’ll know that we made it here, and then start to receive the updates we’re sending regularly. They might have abandoned the program, they might have gone in another direction.”

“There were other solar systems farther away,” Reglan said. “We considered side-by-side exploration of them, but it was determined that having one successful expedition first was worth the wait.”

“Then what could have happened?” Rebert Thine demanded. He slapped his hand down on his own padded platform. “They barely waited a year before this second ship left. Was there even such a ship in production?”

Heads turned to Regnal – if there were such a ship, his family would by definition have known of it. They controlled almost all of the technology required to make one.

He sighed and leaned back on the couch he’d had made for him and Kharen. She sat next to him without touching him, as was proper for an unpaired couple.

“There could have been,” he said. “Intrepid was a critical disappointment to many people. There was real fear that this expedition was going to fail, as well. The largest concern was that we’d do exactly what Intrepid II did – fly into something at light speed that was too big to avoid.

“Because of that, we’ve been sending probes out in different directions, and those probes are in almost constant communication with Syriahs, mapping space, mapping things in motion, adding to a database that we’ll use one day when we travel at even faster speeds.”

“So if the Vinikers wanted to build another craft,” Livven said, and left the question hanging.

“If we did,” Regnal said, “then it would have been easy, seeing as we were already putting things in space. We’ve never wanted for volunteers for the programs, either.”

“But why in this direction?” Hames asserted. “That makes no sense. If you’re going to send another expedition, then you send it in another direction. You increase your odds of a success.”

They all agreed.

“If there is a reason,” Efrain said, “and it was sent to us, then it may well be lost in the debris field that’s following us. The interference of all of that iron moving at high speed – and they wouldn’t know it’s there…”

It turned out to be a very dismal meeting, and it was decided not to share it with the commons. As far as they needed to know, they were heroes being celebrated on their home world, not victims being mourned.

Moving the hominids to the new facility wasn’t difficult – they were drugged, shipped and roused when they’d arrived.

Making a new compound from existing, quarried rock was as easy here as it had been on the other continent, with ample sources of limestone on the plateau where they were going to live, and a harder, more resilient granite 500 miles down the great river that they planned to use to power their pumping station. Skilled workers, having completed Punku already, had the smaller compound habitable in just a few days.

Although the new compound was similar to the old, the hominids realized immediately that they were in a new place. The established Alpha male explored the entire place while the rest waited in the center, then when he decided it was safe, they spread out, looking at and using the toilet facilities, waiting by the food table to be fed.

That night another two tribes were added, the males and the females mixed together in separate compartments, but separated from the main group.

The females stayed to opposite corners, the males immediately engaged each other in an effort to establish dominance. A male was lost in the process, and was removed before the others could devour him.

Kharen wasn’t sure whether or not they would, however she didn’t want to find out.

As for the crewmember living quarters, two establishments were built, one temporary for the 10 persons who would be running the facility, and another for Reglan and Kharen. The two were almost officially paired – there would soon be a ceremony, however Kharen was as a critical phase of her experiments with the hominids, and Reglan, though having become more interested since the bad news on Intrepid II, was willing to see this part through.

The process went as it had before, and the new hominids were introduced to the group. Their sub-adults were actually welcomed by the existing group and slid into the training without incident.

“This is going to be easier than we thought,” Kharen informed Reglan, in the living section of their new abode. It had been built within a wall, unlike the compound on the other continent, which was left to the open air. It drew water from the one, main river by which they meant to build their power plant.

The animals that roamed here could be dangerous, as were the hominids. Part of the staff’s duties were to walk the wall at night, and a system of video monitors extending for miles would warn them of anything approaching them.

At forty feet high, the wall alone would likely be enough, however with help hours away, there was no point in taking chances.

They’d been there for a month before it proved to be a good idea.

They were collecting new hominid bands at roughly one per week, which was as quickly as they could be integrated. After they’d collected more than fifty, it went a lot faster because the existing group became too large for the males to challenge. Now the males that came in so easily were more likely to digress and to build confidence to challenge the leader. Eventually three tried to overthrow the one and there was a huge brawl after hours, when they were supposed to be asleep.

They lost another male – not the Alpha but one of the instigators – and the trainers put the whole group on their knees and made them watch as the women were beaten, and one from the same group as the instigators was put to death.

It was a brutal way to control them, but it worked. There was no more trouble given to the Alpha, who was injured and who had to be treated. One of the crewmen was a medic and treated the Alpha with an antibiotic in front of the others.

They were the givers of healing and harm. Their word was law, their whim – terror. In this way, training progressed, and they became over-confident.

It was the middle of the night when alarms rang out throughout the new compound. Video surveillance showed five groups of hominids – large ones, all males – were approaching their walls from all sides, less than a mile away.

“How did they get so close?” Reglan demanded.

The crewman at the video console looked down sheepishly. Another answered for him, “He was asleep. He only woke because he fell out of his chair.”

Reglan almost snarled. “Unbelievable!” he said.

“No, just bored,” Kharen said. He looked sideways at her. “We can’t go back in time, so we can’t undo what he did.”

She slapped him on the shoulder. “Get a weapon, go to the wall,” she ordered him, and she replaced him and put a headset on.

“I’ll coordinate with Reglan Viniker,” she continued. The crewman nodded and ran to the armory. They had weapons for many more people than lived here, however that wasn’t their worry.

“What are they doing?” Reglan asked, leaning over Kharen’s shoulder.

She studied the screen. She wished Efrain were here – he would recognize this, however she was a student of history and she was reasonably sure of what she saw.

“They’re planning to attack,” she said. “They’ve figured out that we’re taking hominids, they’ve figured out where. They’ve come to see why, or just to stop it.

“Either way, they’re coming here.”

“Weapons?” he asked.

She had one band squatting behind a natural dune, unaware that they were in the sight of a camera. She zoomed in.

Six males, armed with wooden sticks – spears – tips just charred ends.

They had fire, but might not be in the stone age yet. Tool users.

“The males are strong,” Kharen informed him. “We wouldn’t want to have to fight them hand-to-hand. I don’t know that they can climb our walls, though.”

“We won’t give them the chance,” he said. He picked up an ear piece and pressed it to the side of his ear. It would both pick up his speech and let him hear response.

“We’ve got as many as thirty,” he said. “Coming from all sides. Lay down fire on my command – we’ll see if we can just warn them off.”

“Just scare them and they’ll be back,” Kharen warned them.

Reglan shook his head. “We’ll find these and put them all down,” he said. “On our terms, from flivers. These are aggressive – I wouldn’t want them in the training program.”

“Agreed,” Kharen said.

Their weapons were based on the anti-grav technology that they used for propulsion. A tube that would take almost any object, even a simple stone. Load a projectile into the tube, point it, depress a button and the internal battery energized the grav unit and repulsed it. The object would go hypersonic almost immediately and deliver a fatal blow to almost anything alive.

Weapons hadn’t even existed on Syriahs for generations. At one time they had used ingenious ways to kill each other, even biological weapons.

This was simpler, cleaner and, in a pinch, made use of anything around the bearer.

The range could be miles, but it was hard to hit what you couldn’t see.

“They’re at half a mile,” Reglan told them. “Light it up.”

From all four walls, they launched incendiary cans which would burn and throw light. They arched out and caught fire as the air rushed past them, hit the ground and formed bright, smoking piles.

One struck a hominid by luck. He exploded screaming in fire, running in circles and waving his arms. The other hominids ran from him, some toward the compound and some away. On the other sides the same happened – some of the hominids continued the attack, others broke ranks and ran.

A series of stone projectiles flew out from the walls – chippings from the final shaping of the bricks. Another two hominids fell, flying back in their tracks.

The hominids hesitated, and another volley killed another. They had superior weapons but were woefully inaccurate. They’d need to spend time learning to aim these.

They wouldn’t tonight. The rest broke. Kharen and Reglan watched them go, farther and farther away, out of reach of the cameras.

They’d survived this night – almost by accident. They’d been lucky, but luck fails.

Reglan vowed right then to do better.

Normally, hominids were obtained by finding them in remote locations, drugging them and then collecting them, all from a fliver.

It didn’t take long for Reglan to realize that they’d been flying over the more open, larger groups, and that this was how they’d been traced back to their compound. The hominids were less sophisticated than Sariyans, they weren’t stupid. At the height they tended to fly, a person on the ground could follow them for miles, and they usually took the quickest path back, to ensure that the hominids didn’t wake up on the way.

They changed from feeding the hominids to gassing them. With the abundance of raw vegetation on the planet, concocting an anesthetic gas was just a matter of chemistry mixed with botany. This time they picked the largest of the tribes both to disrupt it and to prove their superiority ot the other tribes. As the fliver approached, the hominids scattered in every direction, probably as immediate families, although there was no way to tell.

The fliver pitched to one side and laid down a heavy dose of their tranquilizing gas in front of the largest of the retreating groups. They fell almost as one. The fliver continued the circle and used the same tactic in front of another retreating group.

“Leave some,” Reglan ordered the crewman driving the fliver. He’d been on many of these excursions.

Without looking away from his target, strapped to a padded seat which would keep him in place no matter how the fliver pitched and rolled, he gripped a guide-stick that controlled which of the anti-grav units exerted the most force, thus controlling the roll of the fliver.

“Why?” he asked. “That’s not efficient, and it might be cruel.”

Reglan shook his head. “They’ll flee to other tribes, and they’ll spread the word of the consequences of their actions. Fear of us will do more than just killing them ever will.”

The pilot nodded. “Got it,” he said.

Reglan frowned. Rather terse for a common. The people here were far too familiar with the people of name, he thought. Spending time together had removed the mystique.

They gassed two more groups. What was left now were confused individuals who hadn’t run with a group, wondering what direction to run in, expecting the worst.

Another fliver came up behind them to pick up the unconscious hominids.

“That’s enough,” he said. “Let’s find another group.”

They did – the pilot knew where the larger ones were, because he’d overflown them so many times. Mostly they were by the river or a smaller tributary. They usually surrounded themselves with some kind of low wall that kept the predators out, meaning they were easy to trap. What kept others out hindered their escape.

They sought out the three next largest tribes, leaving the remnants of the largest - mostly women, children and older adults - to fend for themselves. They were not to be found. Either they’d fled in terror after their failed assault on the Sariyans, or their game had migrated, and them with it. In the next few days they watched the members of the largest tribe scatter to other, much smaller tribes, as predicted. Some died along the way – eaten by predators mostly. Some of them were simply too old for the journey, others just too young. Reglan saw a child just fall down under a rock and tremble. The next day the trembling had stopped, and two days later, there were three things that looked like mutated wolves fighting over its remains.

Some assumed that when the larger tribes saw their flivers, they didn’t look curiously to the sky anymore, they scattered. One of the medium-sized tribes seemed to be digging out a cellar in the center of their own compound, which was filled mostly with huts of sod, brush and sticks. Reglan could imagine that they were trying to build themselves a place where the gas wouldn’t go.

It would actually work in reverse, but how could they know that? He marked the place on their maps in the event that they wanted to try collecting more aggressive hominids.

Back in their own compound, Kharen was beginning to introduce the younger, leadership class of hominids with the larger, older worker class. In small groups and starting with One, they took hominids outside of the compound to clean up the remains of their attackers.

There was a fear that the hominids would simply see freedom and bolt, so they were outfitted both with hobbles that would limit how fast they could go, and the hobbles with an electro-static device which would shock and numb their ankles. The hominid One had a chain around his neck that was meant to signify his leadership over the rest, but it would also shock him the same way.

They brought five hominids – that was a good number for one of the leaders to manage. He directed them to dig a trench for burying the bodies, then he brought them back inside without incident. Next the hominid Two brought five more, to direct five more hominids to drag some of the bodies to the trench.

This continued for several days. A few of the hominids did try to run, but the shock/hobble stopped them almost immediately. These hominids were punished by the rest – beaten with sticks until the bled and whimpered. The purpose here was to shame them for running and to increase the pain involved, both physical and emotional, for disobedience.

By the end, predators had been at the bodies and they were foul to move. Some of the hominids had to be threatened to get their work done, however they did it. Kharen decided that the leaders should have something similar to the crewmen’s batons which they could use to coerce their groups when necessary.

Later, in their personal abode, Reglan and Kharen communicated with Efrain and Livven.

“This is all good news,” Efrain said. “We have a lot of uses for these beings once they’re trained. How many are you up to?”

“Over one hundred,” Kharen reported. “We’ll have double the number in another month. We’re going to start them on something more like moving rocks and doing more building. We’d like a few out-stations here and we might want to build ourselves some obelisks to experiment with.”

“Are they breeding?” Livven asked.

“We’re sure of it,” Reglan said. “Usually across the groups that we brought in. It seems to be a big honor for a male to take a female from another tribe.”

“Do they pair like we do?” Livven asked.

“I honestly hadn’t noticed,” Reglan said. “We can monitor for that if you’re interested. I suppose that, if they mate in committed pairs, that would make it easier to discipline them.”

“We should keep family units together,” Kharen interjected.

Efrain knitted his brow.

“As much as possible,” she added. “As a reward for good behavior.”

Livven nodded. “I can see that,” she said.

There were other questions about how the crewmen were doing – did any want to transfer back, were there any pairings to plan for?

And, of course, what about their plans?

“I think we should make it official,” Reglan said. He turned to Kharen. “Would you like to be a Viniker?”

So romantic, Kharen couldn’t help thinking. Men usually tried to propose in more memorable ways. She’d dreamt of flowers, romantic destinations, long kisses and longer promises. This was a simple transaction.

She knew that this was often how it went among those of name. Those pairings were often to improve the status or the holdings of one or both. Someone of name might see that name dying out and need to replenish it. In those cases, a person who was of name in a large family might take the name of the other in order to have a more distinct career.

“I would love to be a Viniker,” she said, and she kissed him. He seemed surprised and Efrain and Livven smiled and looked away.

“We’re pairing as well,” Livven informed them when they broke the kiss. Kharen slid her arm around Reglan’s middle and he didn’t push it away.

“We should do both pairings at the same time, in a single ceremony,” Efrain said. The purpose of that was obvious.

Though the newest family of name, with just one generation, Viniker was the wealthiest of them all. Zane would derive exceptional notice by appearing allied to that name, and how better to do that?

“I would be honored,” Reglan said. “I’ll trust you to make plans that accommodate your schedule, as mine is freer.”

“We will,” Livven promised, and they broke the connection.

“He’s an opportunist,” Kharen noted.

“We all are,” Reglan said. He led her to a couch and they sat. “Persons of name, that is. Always looking to increase their status.”

“Even Vinikers?” Kharen asked, a smile on her face.

Reglan returned the smile. “Even us,” he agreed. “We’re new – the older families resent us, the less technical don’t understand us. Some of the more military families, like Zane, have been named and affluent so long that our success is actually a mystery to them.

“There is another issue I’ve been pondering,” he added, and he took her hands in his.

“The loss of Intrepid II could be devastating to my family, and to its prestige,” he said. “Especially if we launched it on our own. If that happened, despite our wealth, Viniker might not be a name for anyone to be allied with.”

She considered. “You wouldn’t revert to be a common?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Not with our wealth,” he said. “The flivers alone will keep our name for generations. But a name can die out when no one will pair with its members.”

She nodded. “Well, Reglan Viniker,” she said, “I plan to pair with you regularly, so don’t worry about that. I think, also, that what we do here will mean more than anything done over nine light years away.”

“My thoughts, as well,” he said.

He kissed her – the first time he’d actually made any sort of advance on her. She allowed herself to melt into it, to encourage him to more effort. She felt his hands on her body and she didn’t push them away.

In the back of her mind, she pushed back the dying hope that he might, in fact, have had to give up that last name.

They made good on their promise to double the number of hominids they had in training. By then some of the early females were clearly showing the signs of being pregnant.

They took one into their medical facility, under the direction of one of the female leaders whom they’d had good success with, named 12.

They had to strap her to an examination table, because the probe they meant to use terrified her. She didn’t like having to take her clothes off, and Twelve had to threaten her with her baton to make it happen.

Ultrasound showed that she was, indeed, expecting. Her eyes were wide with dread as the probe traveled over her abdomen.

She whimpered when they took a blood sample and she screamed when they put a needle in her abdomen to withdraw amniotic fluid. Twelve looked on with something like sympathy and didn’t attempt to discipline her.

“Sympathy?” the crewmember, a technician medic, asked Kharen.

Kharen nodded. “Even empathy,” she said. “We’ve seen it before, especially among the females. The males will fight or acquiesce when the females are threatened, the females are often willing to die to protect the sub-adults. They identify with their own.”

The medic injected the fluid into a spectrum analyzer. The device would display the genetic information and the microbial break down of the sample, record its information and then sterilize itself all in one action, making it simpler to use than old-style magnification devices.

“Hmph,” he said. “Well, canines are no different.”

“When will we be getting those?” Kharen asked.

He looked at her, then back at the device. “Soon, hopefully,” he said. “They’re too young to be useful right now, but I’m told that the trainer is very skilled and he’s got them doing guard work, hunting, and different sorts of detection – even water.”

Kharen nodded. That was good news. Canines were very useful and, in fact, she missed them from Sariyahs.

Her people didn’t keep pets of any kind. She knew that there was a time when that was different, but it had been decided generations ago that pets were a depletion of resources which didn’t pay for itself. Maintaining a sub-species as a parasite simply made life harder all around, and the practice was abandoned.

Her father had worked with searcher canines, though, and she had allowed herself the pleasure of scratching shaggy ears on more than one occasion.

“This female is healthy,” the medic said, straightening. “She’s going to have a male child.”

Twelve said something to her, and the female’s eyes widened. She said something back in their native language.

“You’re teaching them our language?” the medic asked.

Kharen shrugged. “Just the leadership group,” she said. “We can’t just point and grunt at them. Some of the things we want them to do require instruction.”

The medic nodded.

“She wants to know, how you know,” Twelve asked Kharen.

The leaders didn’t usually address their tenders without permission, and it was incredibly embarrassing to Kharen that Twelve had decided to do so now. She probably wanted to know herself, and was using this as an excuse to find out.

The girl hadn’t been taught the words that would have let Kharen explain, even if she wanted to. “We have eyes that see inside her belly,” she said, tersely.

Twelve looked down at the floor and didn’t relay the information back to the female, confirming what Kharen had suspected. This one would need to be disciplined and lose privileges for being so bold.

“She seems comfortable with you,” the medic noted.

He was also too familiar, Kharen couldn’t help thinking. But then, she wasn’t ‘of name’ yet.

“We’ll fix it in her training,” she responded, and ordered Twelve to take the female back to her group.

They inspected other females and determined that more were pregnant, but a few were simply putting on weight. They had a metabolism designed to survive famine – in a time of plenty, they were going to store calories for a later return to what they were used to. It made sense, but obesity would come with its own problems.

“We should sterilize the ones prone to being overweight,” Kharen argued with her staff, five crewmen including the medic, whom she was most comfortable working with.

Khalid was one of them. “It won’t work,” he said, simply. “Yes, it’s a genetic trait, but they all have it to some degree. We could do gene therapy, but it’s going to take away their ability to store food. We could actually have a problem where we couldn’t feed them enough and they’d all die.”

The other nodded. “We could simply give the fat ones more to do,” the medic said.

Kharen smiled to herself. Sometimes answers were too simple to see. Yes, teach the leaders to look for this, and the ones who were fat would be the first chosen to do any work. This would keep them from over-eating, as well.

“Another issue is that they’re exceeding our ability to manage their wastes,” another crewman said.

Kharen was aware of this. Their bodies weren’t good at storing water. Give them a day’s allotment all at the same time, and they’d pass it in a few hours and be thirsty. That had them taking smaller amounts throughout the day, and that meant they were almost constantly passing it.

For a people that lived in drought, this wasn’t expected. It was a drain on their ability to draw water from the river they were near, as well. They could lay more pipe and draw more from the river, however that meant breaching their walls and in light of the recent attack on them, no one wanted that.

“Can we train them relive themselves in different receptacles?” one of the crewmen asked.

“I don’t see why not,” Khalid said.

“Then we purify their urine, and they can consume it again,” he said. “They aren’t receiving nutritional value from it, they’re just staying hydrated.”

Kharen turned to Khalid. “Is that feasible?” she asked.

He smiled. “Well,” he said, “I wouldn’t drink it, but I don’t see why they can’t.”

Another problem solved.

As Ki moved farther from the sun, the planet went into its winter. In the southern hemisphere it wasn’t as bad, as the planet’s axis was tilted away from the sun. In the north, the planet froze and the ice caps increased in size. Because both compounds were next to the equator, the effects of the winter weren’t nearly as bad.

To the Sariyans, a five degree change in temperature was unheard of, and the drop had them scurrying for shelter. Suddenly they were making over-coats from the hides of the animals they’d harvested and complaining of the smell.

They’d brought equipment to make their own uniforms, and the clothes that the passengers would wear. They could also fashion the smocks for their hominids, mostly based on children’s clothing. They could also clean them.

Hides weren’t something that Sariyans wear, and then weren’t something that they could clean. Using the usual recycled water made them stiff and useless, and most chemicals stained them and wouldn’t wash out.

“We can travel past the speed of light and we can cut stone with sound,” Efrain complained, “and we can’t clean an overcoat without ruining it.”

Three crewmen had taken on the task of fashioning their overcoats, and now were stuck with maintaining them. They had to refit their machines with thicker needles and then with thicker thread, made from the same hides. It was a day-and-night process, but the group was quickly learning that they weren’t large enough to do everything they needed.

“Is this the sort of thing that we could move to your hominids?” Livven asked Kharen.

Reglan and Livven had actually returned to the main compound so that they could participate in the pairing ceremony. There were dozens of Sariyans who also planned to pair on that day, including Roo Amrain to a very pretty passenger who was a specialist in agriculture. House Amrain had marked off a large territory to the East where the soil was fertile, with plans to cultivate it when they could spare people to make it ready.

“They don’t make the type of clothing we would wear,” Kharen informed them, “but they sew using thread and bone. Yes, we could teach them this.”

“That would be useful,” Efrain said. “I was thinking that they could till fields as well. I wouldn’t put one of them in charge of an anti-grav tractor, mind you, but I could see them out with simple implements, harvesting and bundling food.”

Reglan nodded. “Everyone you take, though,” he said, “is one less to build the power station that we need.”

“Are we running out of hominids, suddenly?” Efrain asked.

In the commander’s private apartments, they reclined on his cushioned platform couches and ate from a tray of fried meat. They’d had to prepare it themselves- there were simply too few passengers and crewmen to assign any to be hand servants.

“No…” Kharen said. “But the training takes time, and retraining takes time.”

“A shame that none of them are here,” Livven said. “We could just harvest our own.”

“If you can train your own,” Kharen said, “then I can transfer you some new collections and a few experienced leaders. We already have the leaders participating in all levels of the training, and they speak our language in a rudimentary way.”

“That would be excellent,” Livven remarked, and picked another piece of meat from the plate.

“Just be careful of how much you feed them” Reglan said. “And they need to drink often, not once a day like we do. We recycle their urine and feed it back to them to keep them hydrated.”

Efrain made a face.

“Oh, no, it has other purposes, believe it or not,” Reglan said. “That coat you like, for example, was tanned with an agent made from it.”

Efrain’s eyes widened. “I’m wearing something that your hominids urinated on?”

Reglan smiled. “No,” he said, “something derived from a by-product they collect in their bodies and which is removed from their urine. It’s entirely wholesome – one of our techs, in examining the discard from our purifiers, noted a few things we could use, and now we collect it.”

“Really?” Livven looked skeptical.

“Cleaning agents, mostly,” Kharen said. “It’s rich in ammonia, not like ours. Some enzymes they excrete are useful – if we can derive use directly from it, why cast it away?”

Livven cocked an eyebrow at her. “I don’t envy you your position,” she said.

Definitely beneath the position of a person ‘of name,’ Kharen thought. But she wasn’t ‘of name’ yet and, in fact, on this new world, why couldn’t that be rewritten?

There were many things that should change on Ki.

The wind was crisp and the sky clear and blue on the day that Reglan and Kharen were paired. Houses Zane and Esteve, and House Amrain stood up alongside of them, as well as dozens of the unnamed. There was a celebration after, a collection of almost all of the passengers and crew eating and enjoying music. They shared news and discoveries amongst each other, as well as a few stories of their adventures on Ki.

Poor Ta, the fourth planet and their original destination, had been certified a dead planet on the day before. She’d been so bombarded with the leading edge of their debris field, filtered by or combined with the asteroid belt, that’s she’d turned red with ferrite dust.

The cloud that rose from her surface, according to their probes stationed nearby, was a mile high and growing. All life had been choked out of existence, down to tiny insects, and her waterways fouled and buried.

“She’ll lose her atmosphere, or so much of it that what’s left won’t matter,” Hames Acuff said.

“And the Maglen?” Reglan asked.

“She’s continuing on,” Hames said. “Doing what she’s supposed to do. She made things a little worse for Ta, but as far as we’re concerned, what comes our way will burn up in our atmosphere. She’s not taken a hit from anything in the debris field, she’s not received any message from Syriahs.”

The latter was a last-minute concern before launching Maglen – when she was much farther out, would she receive a transmission from home that might not make it otherwise to Ki. If so, she’d amplify it and send it here. The more time passed, the more certain they were becoming that messages had been sent and lost in the debris field.

Kharen listened to them speak and wondered at the complete lack of concern for the species they’d wiped out on Ta. They moved forward in their plans with the single-mindedness that was characteristic of their people. The focus that had brought them from a species barely aware of an outside universe, to one that traveled it.

In her time with the hominids, she’d see them and their clear empathy for each other, even for the ones who deserved none. The males who had a hard time adjusting, the older ones who couldn’t work. The practice was that, if a hominid gassed as a part of a tribe was too old to benefit them, they left it to fend for itself. Most of these were reported dead later by the pilots – life for the hominids in the wild was not easy.

Some would make it into the compound. Either they didn’t look their age or, more commonly, were so filthy from the wild that the ones who captured it couldn’t tell. When these were discovered, if they could work, they lived and, if not, they were euthanized.

The other hominids quickly realized that the older ones were removed and not brought back, and had come to their own conclusions. They would do what they would to carry the weight of the older ones, working harder with no source of benefit, just an emotional connection to what should be a stranger or, more likely, a member of a rival tribe.

These beings did not domesticate animals – she was looking forward to see how they reacted to the ones she brought to them, to tend.

The celebration went on into the night. There were Viniker apartments in Punku, and they retired to them. There was a layer of dust on everything, revealing the months they’d spent away.

“They do need more workers,” Reglan noted.

Kharen agreed. “We can start a new type of education, I think. Domestics.”

Reglan nodded. It made sense. The people who used to do this now had more important jobs, but didn’t mean that the menial labor went away. They’d need more simple workers, and the hominids provided them.

“We’ll have to increase the numbers we capture,” he said.

There was nothing else for it.

In space, Maglen went along its lonely way. It slowly increased its speed, it pushed out at asteroids and other large debris that fit its search parameters.

It listened, and it reported. Mostly it just sent an “I still exist,” message. This was the entirety of its existence.

At one point, another ship made of steel approached it. It didn’t come from the debris field, it wasn’t on a collision course. It was ignored.

It pinged Maglen with sonar. This wasn’t in her response parameters, and was ignored.

It sent radio frequencies across a wide spectrum. These messages were not from Syriahs, they were not in the mission parameters. They were ignored.

The other ship made of steel began to push the debris field with Maglen. There was no reason to stop it. Together, they made a major gain in redirecting the field to where the target solar system used to be. At one point, they uncovered the particle field that had come from Syriahs.

Maglen moved into the field and charged what remained of its batteries. Very quickly it had a full charge, and moved out of the beam before it collided with the next wave of debris. She began to redirect those, as well.

The other ship made of steel began to put them back.

This was completely outside of mission parameters. Its AI analyzed the situation.

She moved a large asteroid. The other ship pushed it back.

There was no more to consider.

Maglen had been outfitted with projectile weapons to be used if something had too much momentum to be repulsed with anti-grav. It was a variation of the hand-held weapons that the crewmen used.

Deep in its code, there was an algorithm designed in the unlikely event that the ship were attacked by an outside force not from Syriahs. It engaged.

Maglen spun without warning and, calculating the approximate mass of the target, fired three exploding shells at the ship made of steel. The first rent the ship’s hull, the second entered through the rent hull and exploded within the ship, creating a concussive wave within the ship that tore through bulkheads and floors.

The third struck what seemed to be its propulsion system and destroyed it. The ship spun wildly into the debris field where it was struck my multiple asteroids before exploding.

It managed a single message before its destruction. That message wasn’t within its mission parameters. It transmitted as many of the radio frequencies it had received as well as images of the ship, and its actions, and transmitted all of this to Ki.

It then continued on its way, performing its mission as it had been programmed.