“Riiight,” Rene pursed his lips, convinced now that the Commodore had lost what remained of his colored marbles, “So let me get this straight. You’re planning to take on the Vitalus—the living embodiment of Nature itself—with a goddamned choo-choo train?”

The Commodore began kneading his withered temples with his fingers as if he’d caught a sudden migraine.

“Oh spinning centrifuge,” he groaned, “Grant me strength. Just how ignorant are you palookas, anyway? Have your people even managed to figure out Lorentz’s law, or are you still rubbing twigs together and rain dancing your way to oblivion?”

Feeling that the honor of his entire civilization had been slighted, Rene at once leapt into an impassioned speech in which he described all the latest scientific breakthroughs achieved by the Fleet. From the yeast cultures that allowed of the fermentation of sugar cane into liquid canefuel¸ to the experiments proving the theoretical possibility of heavier-than-air flying machines (the practical possibilities at the moment mostly involved pilots ploughing nosefirst into the nearest mountainside or undergoing spontaneous combustion on the runway, but he thought it prudent not to mention that part), Rene proudly defended his people’s intellectual potential.

The Commodore listened closely as this spiel ran on, only interrupting once or twice to ask Rene brief technical questions. At the end of it all he offered this unflattering summary:

“Despite mastering basic telegraphy your Fleet lacks access to radio comms and most of the EM spectrum. Your combustion engines run on biodiesel and your idea of an air force is to fill up a bunch of bladders with flatulence. Artillery still mostly relies on direct line of sight. Gunsmiths have just figured out metal cartridges and are on the verge of mass-producing repeating rifles. In short, your Fleet has barely crawled into the 2nd stage of the Industrial Revolution. Playing ruddy cowboys and Indians down there,” the Commodore fumed, “This is going to be a lot harder than I thought it would be…”

Lost in thought, the Commodore absently drifted back into the room he’d been waiting in, muttering curses under his breath. Rene stole in after him and entered a glowing amphitheatre whose walls were covered in crystalline displays just like the ones in the shuttle. These presented dataflows hundreds of times greater in volume, spools of raw information scrawling by too fast for the mortal eye to comprehend. An enamelled jade podium beside the Commodore cast ghostly grid patterns across the ceiling.

“Hmmm,” the Commodore tugged at his salt-and-pepper beard, “Computer, prepare Warsim Alpha v1.2.2. Assume catapult strike packages destroy 75-80% of REDFOR’s ground concentrations. Account for culture shock resulting in incompatible native assembly lines until at least Turn 4. Meanwhile, BLUFOR adopts nonstandard build order type Bien Phu, supported by limited nuclear area denial. Run simulation.”

Each lens in the Commodore’s goggles swivelled to watch a different screen. Rene gave a start as a green globe materialized above the jade podium, familiar continents wheeling as it spun slowly on its axis.

Arachnea.

The dataflow on the screens became a raging torrent. Rene watched as the three-dimensional representation of the planet suddenly shrank in scale until it included the entire solar system, highlighting all the planets and their major satellites.

On the far left were the twin suns, Sang and Daisang, the latter a red dwarf clinging to the skirts of her main sequence sibling. After them came Abog the ever-burning, a terrestrial planet a quarter of the size of Arachnea wrapped in a blanket of volatile gases.

Arachnea herself retained the central position in the orrery, separated from the ringed gas giant Brahe by many meters of empty space and a sparse band of dust motes he took to be the asteroid belt. A blinking blue marble spinning rapidly around Brahe’s ring indicated Po Chai and the lunar base.

“Despite appearances, the car you took getting here wasn’t a train, but the bucket of a mass catapult,” the Commodore explained, “In the early stages of the Exodian rapid terraformation project, cosmonaut communes under their employ carved out huge blocks of frozen water from this moon’s surface and loaded them onto the buckets. These payloads were then lobbed at Arachnea to alter atmospheric content and fill her basins with oceans. Like so.”

The Commodore poked a finger at Po Chai, where scores of tiny white triangles departed from the moon’s surface and traced elegant parabolas on their way towards Arachnea.

“So the catapult back there was a tool meant for delivering ice?”

“Tool, weapon—it’s all subjective when you can accelerate metric tons of payload to just under four kilometres per second,” the Commodore said, “The Exodians used it to bring rain and squeeze life out of the bare stone of Arachnea. Our use of the catapult will be decidedly more…bombastic. Each fully loaded freight car we launch will deliver the energy equivalent of around 200 megatons.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“You’re going to load explosives onto them?” Rene asked, struggling to keep up.

“Unnecessary. Just an arseload of rocks covered in heat shield panels and stealth composites. Enough to flatten the neurocilial nodes and do a fair bit of continental-scale landscaping. My personal gift to the mushroom with the overgrown messianic complex.”

The packages hadn’t gotten very far when a swarm of red triangles rose from the planet’s surface, moving unmistakeably to meet the catapult’s payloads.

“Assuming that it spots our projectiles, the Vitalus will deploy some immediate countermeasures to deflect their trajectories. At the very least it will have biovessels with chemical rocket booster capability—the recent attempt to colonize Arachnea’s moon guarantees that.”

“You know about that, sir?”

Rene hadn’t thought it possible that the Commodore could observe the recolonization of Cloister from all the way out here.

“Affirmative. Watched it all unfold from this very room. If the True Kindreds had succeeded, they would probably be knocking on my door right this very instant. That civil war of theirs made for some very enjoyable footage, let me tell you,” he added with relish, “Even risked a few psyops just to nudge things along.”

A cruel smile twisted the corners of the Commodore’s mouth, yellow teeth flashing in the eerie light of the displays. With all his prehensile limbs waving about him, the man looked like a slimy octopus squatting atop a metal throne, vicariously revelling in the carnage happening worlds away. The image of him watching the men and women of the Fleet dying with that same smile on his lips made Rene nothing short of furious. Perhaps it was the drugs in his system or a newfound sense of respect for the Commodore’s power, but Rene tried his best to voice his next question with delicacy.

“If you’ve had the ability to sow devastation upon the Vitalus all this time, then why haven’t you?”

“Many reasons. The first of which is a general lack of intel. Too many variables,” the Commodore sighed, a very human sound that conveyed an epoch’s worth of pain and weariness, “I have a few tight-beam transceivers secretly installed on the old EXOCOM satellite constellations. They let me spy on planet’s surface, but as you well know, most of humanity lives deep underground inside Mounds. Contact with the satellites is intermittent due to their orbit—the relays were destroyed during the War of Creation and it’s too risky to set up one of my own that close to the enemy. So you see, I’m not entirely sure which Mounds are occupied by Amits and which ones have been taken over by the Fleet. A single stray shot on my part could cause hundreds of thousands of casualties, perhaps even annihilate your entire culture.”

The Commodore’s head sagged and he seemed shrink in on himself. His next words came out slurred and thick.

“There was…a temptation. You can’t imagine what it was like. Just sitting up here stewing in my uselessness, knowing that I had the means to avenge my…” the Commodore swallowed hard, his bony fists clenching tight, “…things got so bad that I started abusing the Fugue and sleeping every chance I got. Nowadays sleep is just about the only thing I enjoy doing anymore.”

Rene felt a lump in his throat, moved by the hurt in the man’s voice. For a man he was, and had remained throughout his long night vigil. Rene reached out to place a comforting hand on the Commodore’s shoulder, but withdrew when he realized that he couldn’t quite reach the Commodore even if he tiptoed. A cold dread ran down Rene’s spine at the realization that at any point during his short life, the Commodore could have snapped and pulled the trigger, bringing the sky crashing down around his ears.

The entire continued existence of the Fleet hinged upon the mental stability of one lonely, crippled man. Rene decided that from now on, he was going to tread carefully around the Commodore’s abrupt mood swings.

“How can I help?” he finally asked.

“Can you pinpoint all the Fleet’s occupied Mounds and surface settlements?”

Rene thought it over a moment. Then he started chuckling happily to himself.

“Back home my official rank is assistant navigator. Geography was always my favourite lesson at school. Always knew it would come in handy someday—just not like this. Give me a map of the continent and I can point out all the Mounds in alphabetical order. Backwards too, if you’d like.”

“Excellent,” the Commodore perked up at the good news, “Very good. Now what can you tell me about the nodes?”

Rene confessed his ignorance of the term, briefly repeating the story of how he’d met Zildiz. To the best of his knowledge, the incident represented the first time the Fleet had ever encountered the Vitalus and the cosmophages.

“That’s going to be a problem,” the Commodore concluded, “If this operation is going to succeed, we need the guaranteed destruction of the most important nodes in the region. By eavesdropping on the Vitalus’ high-power transmissions, I’ve triangulated three hundred and ten major neurocilial nodes to date. There are more down there, shielded by vegetation or geographical features.”

“So just destroy them all to be sure,” the pathfinder suggested.

“We can’t. There’s a narrow window of opportunity between the first strikes and the enemy’s immediate reprisals. The coil capacitors are worn to shit and take precious hours to recharge, plus the rails can’t take that kind of repeated strain—you have no clue what I’m talking about right now, do you?”

Rene shrugged and spread his hands in apology.

“It’s okay. It’s not your fault,” the Commodore said with uncharacteristic gentleness, “All in good time. Suffice it to say, I need to know which targets to prioritize.”

“I don’t know anything about those structures, Commodore. Don’t even know what they look like,” Rene said, leaping at the opportunity which had presented itself, “Far as I know, there are only two people in the universe who could possibly fill us in on the details. And they’re both slurping borscht exactly where we left them.”