Hibernal

I was no stranger to spending long stretches of time in enclosed spaces. Not that I enjoyed being cooped up like this, but I was at least used to putting up with it. These circumstances were a bit different though. All the other times, I hadn’t had so much company.

This ‘ending storm’ was pretty novel too, because a better word for it would have been hurricane.

For the first two hours, I’d been confused why we were keeping the door to the hallway shut so insistently. There were at least two more doors between it and the elements. But apparently that was no guarantee.

The storm had seemed pretty violent from what I’d seen, but I hadn’t at all been prepared for just how intense it would turn out to be.

At some point, in addition to tornado-like winds and unending ice and snow, thunder exploded somewhere overhead and…it just didn’t stop.

Not even half a minute would pass without hearing bolts of thunder shake the sky, one after the other.

“What exactly are we in for when this all wraps up?” I asked.

Letrin, one of the Casti I’d worked with today, said, “Well, if we’re lucky the garrison won’t have too much damage. It depends on how fast the ice and snow comes down. It could act like a shield and protect from the wind, or it could act like a sail and just give the wind more surface area to push on.”

“So the building is either going to be encased in ice, or it’s just going to be torn off us?”

“That’s about it,” he confirmed. “It’s been a few years since we had one this big. Last year, we just reinforced the windows, and we were fine.”

I nodded thoughtfully. There was going to be a lot of work in either scenario.

Nemuleki interrupted with a tap on my elbow, “Caleb, what’s another game you can play with these?”

She’d convinced me to share the deck of cards I had in my backpack after watching me play solitaire, so I’d taught her and a few others the basic rules of what was essentially Uno. I’d just pretended the face cards were the special cards from Uno…and it only now occurred to me that there was certainly some original game that Uno was surely based on.

“Well, I don’t remember the rules to that many, but I could teach you guys [Spades] or [Bridge],” I said. “How about you, Letrin? You game?”

“That’s…ah, not a verb, Caleb,” he said. I grinned. Tasser had, or had gained, a linguistic flexibility that just wasn’t common among Casti. Letrin grasped my meaning anyway. “But I’ll play.”

“Alright, the players have to come toward me though. I’m stuck near the power socket unless I put my mask back on.”

Nemuleki pulled the other three players over and they each dragged the various crates and improvised seating into position. I saw both Serral and Nai looking at our huddle from different spots of the room.

“[Okay], pick between a team game or individual.”

“Team,” Nemuleki and another Casti said. No one else seemed to have a preference.

“Keep in mind,” I said, “the rules for [Spades] are easier than [Bridge]. And I know them better.”

Letrin spoke up, “If you know the one game’s rules more than the other’s, do you really know the other’s rules then?”

“That was very uncalled for,” I said.

This time he stared at me shrewdly for a few seconds before hesitating to say, “…I think you’re joking…”

“Clap for him,” I told the others. “I let him think I was serious earlier. It was very mean and hilarious.”

“Seriously though, let’s do the game you know better,” Letrin said.

Nemuleki and the other two nodded in agreement.

Everyone’s hand needed to be the same, so I pulled a pair of twos from the deck and dealt the rest to the four Casti sitting with me.

“I already know Nemuleki and Letrin’s names, so would you two introduce yourselves?” I asked.

“Adden,” said the first.

“Grami,” said the other.

I mentally added their names to my growing list. I’d have to start organizing it differently soon.

“Okay, Grami and Adden,” I said, “let’s play [Spades].”

·····

Card games were never my preferred fun, but when the occasion did come up, I wound up with a preference for the trick-taking games.

Points for Spades didn’t just come from how many hands you won, but how well you could predict or read your hand’s capacity to win. Depending on what variant ruleset you might be playing, it could be worth far more points to only win one or two hands so long as your bid matched. I loved that feeling of correctly having read the field.

But today, it would elude me. I thought the Casti would be confused by the game, at least at first. They quickly disabused me of the notion. We hadn’t even finished the first hand before they mostly stopped asking questions about how to play.

I’d been dealt the ace of spades, which guaranteed a win in at least one trick. So I’d bid on the high side, but after going through all ten tricks, I’d only won two. Only Letrin scored lower than me, and I had a sneaking suspicion it might have been on purpose.

“Okay, spill,” I said. “You guys already have a game like this, don’t you? You’ve all taken to this too well.”

“We do,” Grami confirmed. “It uses a different number of cards and ‘suits,’ but it’s still similar.”

“I’m a little surprised you have card games at all,” I confessed. “I’ve been here so long, but I still haven’t seen much of what Casti do for fun.”

“This is a military base, Caleb,” Nemuleki chided. “How much recreation time do you think we have?”

“I figured plenty,” I said honestly. “Back on Earth lots of soldiers describe war as ninety-percent boredom and ten-percent terror.”

“The kid has a point, Raho . A lot of our duty shifts are just empty patrols and maintenance checks...” Letrin told Nemuleki. She gave a conciliatory nod before Letrin leaned over and quietly asked me, “You are a kid, right?”

“Yes,” I confirmed, “but I’m just about as old as I could be before people start calling me an adult.”

“Adolescent,” Adden said, “…that’s the word.” He seemed to be a Casti of few words, but he did have the right word.

“Thank you,” I said, inclining my head.

“I’m a little surprised you didn’t already know that one,” Nemuleki said. “How long is that list in your head again?”

“Very long,” I defended, “and for your information, I did already have that word. But just because I have it doesn’t mean I’m ready to use it at any moment.”

“Talking with you, I wouldn’t know it,” Letrin told me. “You’ve picked up the language shockingly fast.”

“All thanks to Tasser,” I said. “Where do you think he’s been disappearing to most days?”

“He wasn’t playing games like these with you?” Grami asked, nodding toward the pile of cards in the middle of us.

I glanced at him, trying to discern if that was supposed to be a dig at me or Tasser. It didn’t seem like it.

“No, but we did adapt a few word games for practice.”

“We have some games that are played with cards,” Letrin said. He picked up the pile and carefully tapped it back into a neat deck, before looking at two of the cards. “You called them [suits], the red and black cards, right?”

I nodded.

“The colors are a funny coincidence,” he told me.

“The Naxoi wear black”—he put down the jack of spades—“while the Red Sails are occupying our planet.” He tossed down the queen of diamonds.

“You know there’s four [suits], not just the two colors, right?” I asked.

“Wait, really?” Latrin asked, inspecting the cards.

Hah, maybe he hadn’t been sandbagging.

Nemuleki laughed, “Look at the symbols, there’s two black [suits] and two red. Do you need to get your eyes checked?”

“This is rank abuse…” Letrin grumbled.

I didn’t have a strong grasp of what the military ranks in the Naxoi were, but I’d picked up enough to recognize that Nemuleki was the only officer in our little game here. Thinking about it a bit further, it occurred to me that Serral, Nai, and Nemuleki were the only officers in this shelter.

They probably kept officers distributed across multiple shelters for events like this.

As if summoned by my thoughts, Ase Serralinitus made his way over and a hush fell over the Casti.

I’d been at Demon’s Pit for months now and had multiple conversations with Serral. But I couldn’t say I had a strong opinion of the Casti in any form. I didn’t know enough about him. From the day we’d stumbled into his garrison, he’d mostly kept our interactions minimal, content to let Tasser and Dyn take the lead.

So I mimicked his Casti soldiers in their silence.

“Oh stop that,” he said, exasperated. “None of us are even technically on duty.”

Nemuleki was the only one brave enough to dispute that, “You’ve been tabulating supplies for the last hour, Ase. That isn’t being on duty?”

“Keep pointing out regulations to me and I’ll have to promote you,” Serral said.

Except…no…

Threatened. The promotion had been a threat.

A small chuckle went through the other soldiers.

“Besides,” Serral said, “it’s force of nature trying to build a frozen tomb over top of us. There’s only so much planning you can do before there’s nothing left to do but wait.”

“…and play strange alien card games with grunts?” Letrin asked hesitantly.

“That about sums it up, Loth,” Serral said.

“Well, we could keep playing [Spades], although we’d have to trim the hand sizes again to fit six players…”

“Are there any games more suited for six players?” Letrin asked.

“Sure, but I don’t know the rules of any…” I said, and a truly awful idea came into my head.

“But there is one game I know, but…no, it’s a terrible idea,” I said.

“Why?” Nemuleki asked.

“Because it’s not so much fun, as it is frustrating. It’s called [Mao], and it’s a game where the only rule I’m allowed to tell you is this one.”

“Ah,” Letrin, Adden, and Grami all made the same sound of recognition.

Nemuleki recognized the idea too, saying, “It’s a game about experimentation and gathering information then.”

Serral saw the look of surprised confusion on my face and clarified, “Intermediate military training has wargame exercises similar to what you’re talking about. Recruits are given limited reliable information and very little time to accomplish seemingly unrelated goals.”

“Actually, since you picked up Starspeak so fast, you’d enjoy hearing about mine,” Nemuleki said. “They gave our team a mission in a language none of our team spoke. So we had to capture an opponent to even translate our instructions.”

“What was the mission?” I asked.

“Capture at least one member of every team,” Serral quoted. “I wrote that one. I’m surprised they used it.”

Nemuleki gaped at her commander for a moment, and everyone laughed.

“Many of our games were derived from warfare,” the Ase said absently. “But I don’t think any of the games consider how the wars start. They all just...assume it has…”

And just like that, I forgot about Mao or Spades. I asked one question and the card game was over.

“How did this war start?”

I asked the question with a guess already in mind. I couldn’t stop a reflexive glance toward Nai. She’d heard me, and understood what I was asking.

“That…is a very complicated question,” Serral said. He gave a glance to Letrin and Nemuleki, implicitly asking if they had anything to share.

“It depends on who you ask,” Nemuleki volunteered, “but a lot of it goes back to colonies and homeworlds. Pretend for a second, humans are trying to colonize planets in other stars, who makes the rules and laws for those colonies?”

“It’s not the colonies themselves?” I asked.

“Sorry, I wasn’t clear,” she said. “I mean who, ultimately, is in charge of the colony? The founders? The homeworld that made it? The specific nations that contributed to it?”

I was beginning to see how complicated this could get.

“When skipping was first discovered, the homeworlds were fractious, still are in many ways,” Serral said. “Colonies were first made by nations, but it was a disaster. Colonies being subordinate to nations on completely different planets? Things exploded after only a few years. On some of the first Casti colonies, settlements were made to fight other settlements on behalf of their founding nations back home. It happened on Vorak colonies too.”

I noticed he didn’t mention the Farnata. “Was this before, or after…?” I asked quietly.

Serral gave Nai a look and beckoned her closer with a jut of his head. She complied, if tensely.

“Before,” the Adept answered. “This was more than a hundred years ago.”

And her homeworld had only died after she was born.

“Did Farnata colonies avoid the violence?”

Nai gave a slow and steady breath before she continued, “They weren’t Farnata colonies then. It was before the Razing; they were Kiraeni colonies, but there also just weren’t many of them. We didn’t break out of our star system much. We couldn’t.”

“But they were still affected, right?” Letrin asked, checking with Nai.

She nodded, “We were at the table.”

“Three homeworlds and a dozen different colonies came together and founded a representative body to govern and intercede between worlds,” Nemuleki said. “It went through some rough drafts, but what came out on the other side was the Congressional Assembly.”

I was almost certainly translating that wrong, but it captured the spirit of what they were talking about: a Federal Interstellar Body.

“Planets and colonies would vote on who represented them in the Assembly?” I asked.

Everyone nodded.

And so I was beginning to get a clearer picture of what I’d landed in the middle of.

“And so this war started…” I guessed, trying to put the pieces together, “when someone tried to leave the Assembly altogether.”

More nods.

“Who?”

“The Farnata,” Nai said. Her voice was cold, but unlike last time it didn’t feel directed at me.

I didn’t miss her meaning, she meant after her planet’s Razing.

“How much did Tasser tell you?” she asked.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

“Enough…not enough,” I said, “No details, but he told me.”

She gave a slight nod, and I couldn’t tell if she was angry, or if my answer had been the expected one.

Nai continued, “It wasn’t an accident. It was an attack. And after three in four people on our homeworld died, we weren’t in any condition to find out who was responsible, much less make them suffer.”

“So the Assembly stepped up,” I guessed, “… or didn’t,” I then immediately realized.

She nodded. “A month after the attack, while all of us were cramming ourselves into the lunar complexes, a Vorak supremacy fringe group claimed responsibility. They thought they could play the moment and lead every Rak to glorious dominant victory over the lesser alien species…”

Her voice was dripping with poison.

She choked up and subtly waved for someone to speak instead. Nemuleki did.

“Instead of rallying behind the supremacists though,” Nemuleki said, “every Vorak alive practically tore them to shreds. Civilian militias formed overnight and hunted down the ones claiming responsibility. The leaders ended up surrendering to authorities, trying to recant, but the Vorak still extradited them to the Farnata for investigation and prosecution.”

“The ships carrying them exploded before they left the Vorak star,” Serral said grimly.

Nai recovered some of her composure and continued, “The Assembly investigated for years and years, and found nothing conclusive. To this day, we still don’t know who killed the Kiraeni. Not for sure.”

“The Farnata homeworld itself withdrew from the Assembly practically by default,” Nemuleki said quietly. “But their few colonies stayed in for a short span, until they were pressured for resources.”

“They withdrew, vocally,” Serral said, like he remembered it. “Then several Casti colonies followed them in solidarity.”

“There are Casti colonies still in the Assembly?” I asked.

He nodded, “Often as it might seem otherwise, the war isn’t precisely between Casti and Vorak. There are Casti fighting for the Assembly. And while no Vorak colonies joined the Naxoi, one of the largest and oldest Vorak colonies never signed the original Assembly charter and still remain independent and neutral.”

“Did they have to fight a war to get that way?”

“Not quite, but like I said, this is a complicated topic.”

“So how did the Assembly react to the colonies withdrawing?”

“Badly. They commissioned three new fleets before anything was even declared. The war itself broke out after Nakrumum withdrew too,” Letrin said. “A Casti freight vessel was detained and boarded when it refused to recognize an Assembly checkpoint. A firefight broke out on board, and the Naxoi pulled itself together a few weeks later.”

“We’re skipping over a lot of the details,” Serral admitted. “But I wouldn’t consider us the most…reliable source. We are, after all, quite invested.”

“I actually thought you guys were pretty evenhanded,” I admitted.

“Most of us are here fighting because the Assembly started invading whole systems where even one colony tried to withdraw,” Letrin said. “Only Paris’s lunar colonies declared, and in response the Assembly sent its finest Rak fleets to secure the inner planets.”

“Fleets?” I asked, “As in multiple?”

Serral gave a small, horrified shudder, “Logistically, the Assembly is a mess, although that doesn’t mean the forces they commissioned are. Still, instead of treating the Naxoi as one strategic enemy, they instead commissioned more than a dozen fleets to enter almost a dozen systems and bring all the colonies back to the fold.”

“They want to fight a dozen small wars in one spot each, rather than fight one large war in a dozen different spots,” Nai clarified.

“That sounds like a distinction without a difference,” I frowned.

“That’s the Assembly,” Serral agreed.

Letrin gave a laugh, “Nakrumum basically runs on formality, decorum, and procedure. But even our homeworld decided it was time to do away with the great Congressional Assembly.”

“So what Vorak are you guys actually fighting?”

“We have two of the bigger fleets here. You’ve already met one of them: the Red Sails. They’re the ones controlling Korbanok Station and occupying the interior planets.”

“Dark green uniforms, red triangular patch?” I asked.

Letrin nodded.

“[Christmas] colors…” I mused. “What’s the other fleet called?”

“Their name is a little harder to translate, but they usually get called the Deep Coils. They’re focused on the outer planets.”

“You know, ‘deep,’ ‘sails’... are all the fleets named for ocean-related things?” I asked.

“Well, Kraknor is the most aquatic planet known. It’s surface is almost seven parts in eight liquid.”

“[Wait,] wait,” I said, “the Vorak homeworld is called ‘Kraknor?’ ”

“Yes, does that mean something in your language?”

“No, I mean it’s close to an old sea myth, but I just think the name sounds great,” I told him. “Kraknor, I mean just listen to it. What a great word.”

“You understand we’re at war with them, right?” Nemuleki asked.

“Sure,” I said, “but are you at war with the name of their planet?”

“No,” she conceded, “but you don’t have to sound so pleased with it. Kraknor supports the Assembly.”

“The way you talk about how divided their war effort is: are the Naxoi relatively unified?”

“Relatively,” Nai said. “We’re still fighting a divided war like they are, just along a different division. The Naxoi forces are divided between void battles and planetary ones. Most of our planetary forces wind up being local, while our void forces are borrowed from other systems. Demonstrating the point…” She gestured to herself.

“Naxoi…” I said. “It’s doesn’t use a Starspeak root. What does it mean?”

Nai spoke up once again, and I was surprised how much she was willing to engage, “It’s from one of the larger native Casti languages. It means a group that came together to accomplish something specific…somewhat anticipating that the group wouldn’t stay assembled beyond accomplishing the goal.”

It didn’t quite mean ‘task force,’ but the idea was similar. Only applied to much larger groups. Not, I thought, dissimilar to how the world wars were fought…

A Coalition then.

·····

I learned more about interstellar history sheltering from a storm for three hours than I had the past three months.

Both the card game and the foray into alien geopolitics petered out after a while though (was it still ‘geo’ politics, if it was in space?). Serral received a radio transmission from one of the other shelters, and Nemuleki opted to help him out.

The other Casti soldiers drifted away once my Earth card games overstayed their welcome.

And somehow Nai and I were the only ones still in this corner of the makeshift shelter.

I’d had a day or so to stew since she’d…well, I wasn’t sure exactly how she’d attacked me. A punch, a shove, whatever she’d done, it had been a blur.

And my head still hurt.

At first I couldn’t figure out why she’d stuck around after Serral had brought her over.

In her hand, she held the black mask similar to mine she wore. Mine had to snugly hug my face or else it didn’t work properly. After so many hours, it got irritating, but I had no choice about it for months.

Wear an irritating mask or suffocate.

It wasn’t even a choice.

But Nai and Tasser had fixed up the machine Byr had given me. It wasn’t mobile, and it took a few minutes to build up the bubble of increased oxygen, but it let me breathe without my mask so long as I stayed more or less in one spot.

And I realized it was why Nai was sticking around.

Her mask couldn’t be any more comfortable than mine.

I was angry for a heartbeat when it clicked. She hadn’t even asked. But at the same time, I didn’t feel like I could pretend she needed to. The only reason to consider not sharing the air was because she’d assaulted me.

Which was a pretty compelling reason. But not enough.

“If you want space, I can go bother Nemuleki and Serral some more,” I said. Nai probably wasn’t eager to be around me any more than I was her, and I didn’t mind wearing my mask for a bit.

But Nai gave a tiny shake of her head.

“I don’t understand you,” she said, keeping her voice low.

I nodded, “I don’t either.”

She clenched a hand. “Do you mean you don’t understand me, or yourself?”

“Both,” I said honestly. “But for this conversation, I mean you more than myself.”

She gave a humorless laugh. “I don’t think I’ve hidden any of my opinions about you, human.”

I shook my head, “Nope, but you are not only your opinions. And I know so little about you that you threw me through a wall.”

She winced, but I only shrugged. “I understand why I don’t understand you,” I said. “Do you understand why you don’t understand me?”

“Yes,” she said. “It’s because when I consider how you act, I don’t trust what you’ve said.”

I nodded. We’d tread this ground before. But if I really thought about the sequence of events, her attack on me was unrelated to that first argument.

“I told you then, I can’t control how you react to me.”

“I have run out of people to explain the disagreement I find in you. Even now…”

My eyebrow rose.

“Even now…?” I prompted.

“When you act forgiving, when you aren’t even angry after I…hit you, I don’t know how else to respond but with suspicion. It doesn’t make sense and I’m stricken with the overwhelming sense that you’re hiding something from us. That you’re trying to manipulate me somehow.”

It was haunting to hear the difference in her tone of voice between now and the last time we’d interacted directly. Taken at just her wording, it was an accusation. But the way she spoke it made it sound more like a confession, like she’d run out of ideas on how else to approach her problem.

“I might be calm, but that doesn’t mean I’m not angry,” I told her. “You could have killed me.”

She didn’t deny it.

“I…aim to find a way to correct my mistake,” she said. “But I don’t know what to do. You didn’t even object to finding out I was in this shelter, or when I sat here. I don’t understand why you forgave me.”

“I haven’t forgiven you,” I corrected her. She looked surprised to learn that, and I understood what she’d meant when we’d first argued.

She was surprised to find I seemed to be holding the grudge, and I was surprised that she was surprised. I’d interacted too much with only Tasser and Dyn. I had a strong read on their reactions and demeanor, but they were not a perfect sampling of aliens.

I didn’t know how everyone might interpret my actions.

And what I didn’t know would hurt me.

It had. She had.

“I haven’t,” I repeated. “But I think I should.”

That surprised her even more.

“Why?!” she said, almost hissing it.

“I don’t know how much you remember, but I told you I had an experience fighting in self-defense?”

She nodded.

“It was after I was abducted,” I said.

“You said the other twenty-three abductees are dead.”

“They are,” I confirmed. “But only twenty-two of them died in the first few hours. There was another survivor with me on that stupid ship. His name was Daniel.”

“‘We’...” she breathed, “in some of your first cogent debriefs, you said ‘we,’ not ‘I’…Serralinitus thought it was just poor grammar.”

I shook my head. “He and I tried to figure out what was happening to us, but after a few days this… shock went through the ship, everything went white, and he passed out for I don’t really know how many days.”

To my surprise, Nai nodded like she knew what I was talking about, “You skipped; when ships skip between stars there’s an intense reaction.”

“He didn’t wake up, and I started hearing things that weren’t there. I nearly lost my mind. And somehow, when Daniel woke back up, things got worse, not better. He was hallucinating too, and he started materializing razors from the walls. I had no idea what Adepts were then. I thought I had lost my mind. Him too.”

Nai was quiet while I spoke, gazing intently at the floor. But I didn’t doubt for a second if she was listening.

“We fought. He died. I didn’t. I passed out and the next thing I knew, I was in a Vorak cell.”

“…I don’t understand how any of this makes you think you should forgive me,” she said.

“It’s because he was in that cell with me,” I said. “Daniel. When I woke up, some part of him was in my head. Letrin, that soldier from earlier, he talked to me about how the first creation an Adept makes is usually significant somehow: indicative.”

Nai nodded, making a small teal spark.

“I told Letrin the first thing I made was just some specks, but that was just the first solid thing. I didn’t realize it then, but Daniel made solid things. But I didn’t. I made something in my own mind, something psionic, something I don’t understand. What I made…it tore his consciousness right out of his own mind. We fought because we were going crazy, and I got to live long enough to figure out that I’m the reason he went crazy.”

I could practically see Nai want to repeat her last question.

“You want to know why I should forgive you? It’s because that echo of my friend in my head, he forgave me. For killing him. Because, even when he’d already died, he didn’t hold it against me. He said that, knowing what it’s like inside my mind, he didn’t doubt for a second that I would have forgiven him if our positions were reversed.”

“So yes, I do forgive you. First, because I have zero confidence in my ability to react any better than you did. I think I would have tried to do worse. And second, because I want to pass it on. Daniel forgave me for killing him. It just feels…[hypocritical] to spite you.”

“But isn’t that critical to understanding what happened to you? Why wouldn’t you share that sooner? Why would you share that with me?!”

She was only a few feet away from me, and if she so chose, I could be dead in a heartbeat if she heard the wrong thing come out of my mouth.

But I was done being afraid of her. And it seemed like she might be done giving me reasons to be.

“Because I’m alone and afraid,” I confessed. “Because I’ve learned you and I both can’t go home.”

We sat in silence for several minutes while Nai…processed what I’d said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I blinked at her, confused. “What happened to my friend wasn’t your fault…” I said slowly.

She shook her head, “I never apologized: I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have attacked you. There is no excuse.”

“I accept your apology,” I said.

“I think you and I have not been treating each other as people,” Nai said. “We both are little more than just meat. We make mistakes and believe in false truths. In some hostile, suspicious way, I let myself think you were infallible, a perfect enemy.”

“Just meat,” I agreed, “and little more.”

“How do you do it?” she asked.

“Be more specific,” I told her.

“I don’t like it, but we are not dissimilar. But even I still have some other Farnata around me. I am less alone than you, but you endure it better than me. You’re positive and energetic, even cut off from your home and everything you’ve ever known.”

“It’s precisely because of what I’ve known,” I told her. “I might be young, but it doesn’t matter how old you are, getting abducted like I did is the worst thing that ever happened to me. The worst days of my life were on that ship, in that Vorak cell, and on the run until I got here. You want to know why I can be ‘happy’? It’s because I’m just glad I’m not still stuck in those days.”

“…I had not even considered the possibility that you were younger than I am.”

“Me neither,” I said, trying to joke. “But I think I still made the same mistake.”

“What?” she said, confused.

“I mean, I’ve been thinking of you as an adult. Which, you probably are. But, until hearing what you just said, I’m realizing you might not be in your early to mid-thirties like I thought.”

“I have lived…one-hundred-seventy-five thousand hours. About.”

She’d even spoken the number in base ten, for my benefit.

It put her at about twenty years old in Earth years.

“How long is that in Farnata years?”

“…Sixteen,” she said.

Hah.

“Then at what age would a Farnata be considered an adult?”

“…Sixteen,” she admitted.

The precise equivalents were probably significantly off, but probably not more than I had been already.

If she were a human, she would be around eighteen, or maybe twenty-one depending on how you looked at it. Still, only slightly older than me. Before now, I hadn’t given it much attention, but I wouldn’t have guessed she was anything below the Farnata equivalent of twenty-five. Maybe even thirty.

“In some of Earth’s history,” I told her, “there were wars where children a lot younger than me fought and died. So you weren’t wrong.”

“That is not enough to make me right,” she said.

What was expected of her? She was an officer who outranked Nemuleki, and she had a well-worn reputation. Even without thinking about her homeworld, what else had transpired in her life to see her in such a military position at such an age?

“It’s difficult, isn’t it?” I said. “To be the Torabin?”

She gave only the slightest, most imperceptible nod.

I was friends with Tasser. He was friends with Nai. I didn’t think either of us could simply ignore the friction between us in the past, but that was no reason to keep making the same mistakes.

“I said it before,” I told her, “we’re not friends. But we don’t have to be enemies. Make a deal with me.”

“A deal?”

“We’re not friends, and we can’t just avoid each other, so let’s make a deal. You help me when I’m missing critical details, and in exchange I’ll help you figure out better ways to... persevere .”

She looked at me, and I met her gaze unflinchingly.

“…Alright,” she whispered, “deal.”