When Trish shook her awake in the dead, cold hours of the early morning, Cass Hope was dreaming of the end of the world. She could feel the puddlejumper’s controls rocking angrily in her hands as she fought to maintain control, could see the horizon bleaching under whiter light than she’d ever seen before, could hear the shriek of a dozen alarms filling the cockpit with unholy clamor, the digital voice calmly demanding that she PULL UP, PULL UP, PULL UP. She remembered the last coherent thought she’d had in the instant before she somehow managed to safely bring the little aircraft in for a rough but survivable landing on a suitably flat patch of ground, the last thought she’d had in the instant before she knew she’d survived: “He who cuts off twenty years of life, cuts off so many years of fearing death.”

She had stared death in the face, triumphed against all odds, and all she’d had in her mind was Julius fucking Caesar. She’d laughed about it, later, but at the time, still squinting against the second sunrise, she’d briefly regretted the Shakespeare obsession that had devoured most of her fourth year on Solstice. She could have learned so much more, so much that would have been useful in the world to come after the Pillar of Fire. But the dream slipped away as the cold bit down on her senses, and thoughts of the Bard and could-have-beens quickly followed suit.

She came to wakefulness with a hand on her knife – old instincts died hard – but stayed the reflex as her eyes fixed on Trish’s lean, sharp-edged face. Not that anyone carried much extra fat on them these days. Her cheeks and nose were red from the chill in the air.

“Radar return,” Trish said quietly, not wanting to wake the others sleeping just a few feet away on cots of their own. Communal sleeping kept body heat in one room rather than spreading it out throughout the bunker, which made it possible to forego heating, which meant more power could be reserved for operating the radar array and other essentials. The solar array wasn't as efficient as it could be, with all the dust still drifting in the upper atmosphere, and the less fuel they burned to power the generators, the longer that fuel would last. “Blaine says it’s definitely not a meteor this time, it’s maneuvering.”

“Wonderful,” Cass grunted as she swung her legs out from under the too-thin blanket. She tested her knees for a moment before she stood, holding back the wince as her left knee complained. She had no idea when she’d injured it, but now it ached in cold weather – which meant it ached a minimum of nine months out of the year. Maybe it wasn’t an injury, but just age catching up with her. She’d been fortunate to land a safe job in the Archives and hold it for twenty years, but time was time, and she was well into her forties already. At this point, age or injury made little difference – her knee just hurt. “What time is it?”

“About 0430,” Trish replied, and Cass felt the weight on her shoulders spread throughout her body like ink in water. She’d been asleep for about three hours, tops – she’d been up well after her theoretical rack-out time helping Nell balance the consumables stockpile, helping Simon with generator maintenance, and teaching several of the young new grunts transferred into Bulwark the finer points of why keeping one’s rifle clean was not a sometimes job.

Could others have done it? Probably. Could they do it as well as her? Possibly. Did it matter? Not particularly – she was the Captain. All that, and being woken up at 0430 besides, was what she’d volunteered for. She was cold, tired, and miserable, and given the opportunity she’d make the same choice every time. “Okay,” she said, “wake up Niko and Nell, then go unlock the armory and start getting kits ready. If they hit the ground running, we need to be ready for them.” Trish nodded and slipped off into the shadows.

Three years, eight months, and sixteen days. That was the last time the Accord had shown their face in-system, when they killed half of Solstice’s population with a single shot. For good measure, they’d taken out the meager satellite network in orbit before they fled back into the void. Now, all the survivors had left to spot an approach was a peripheral radar installation, one of the few remaining pieces of flight-control infrastructure that had survived the Pillar of Fire. Still, it was placed well enough to survey the coastline and the open sea, meaning it had enough range to give warning. Now, at long last, it had served its purpose.

Tucking her long, black hair under a knit cap, Cass marched, ignoring the pain every other step, as she ascended the metal stairs up to the observation tower – the battered upper story of the bunker, where the repeater displays were set up along with a commanding view in all directions. The moons cast little enough light, but the room was dark and the displays dimmed to conserve power, and Cass’s eyes were already accustomed to the night from sleep. She could see the bay below, the mountains following the coastline in the distance to where Landfall had once stood. Dead trees, their branches reaching up in the night sky as if pleading for mercy from uncaring gods, were limned in snow that caught what little light there was. It made them look even more like bones than they did in the daylight.

“What do we have?” she said, leaning over the skinny boy’s shoulder. Boy was the wrong word, he was getting into his mid-20s now, but when Cass looked at him she couldn’t help but see the terrified 18 year old he’d been when he’d arrived. Solstice would have chewed him up and spat him out in months if she hadn’t taken him under her wing, like she’d done so for many others.

He looked back over his shoulder. Red hair poked out from under his toque cap, and all the heavy coats he wore couldn’t hide the shiver. Sitting up, sitting still – it let the cold in. “I think it’s a shuttle. Just the one, ma’am,” he said.

Part of her wanted to remind the kid that they weren’t doing that regressive yes-sir-no-sir bullshit and they hadn’t been for years, but it wasn’t the time. “Just the one? That’s awfully cocky of them.” If they were sending down a single shuttle, they were probably offering the carrot before they showed the stick. We lost a lot of good people in the war, they’d say, and we need you. Pardons would be offered, deals would be signed, smiles all around – and then back into the meat grinder they’d go again, all promises forgotten. She knew better than to trust the Accord, and so did her people, she hoped.

“It’s an odd return, though,” Blaine went on. “It doesn’t match any of the signatures we have on file from traffic control.”

“Maybe it’s something new,” Cass replied as she reached for the binoculars sitting on the console and held them to her eyes, scanning the sky. It was a clear night, and visibility was good. “Or something old they dug out of mothballs for the war. Maybe it’s private, and they’re trying to claimjump. Who knows, maybe O-C sold the rights to this shithole. Ah! Found them. Orbital contact, ten o’clock high.” She’d picked out the little moving star as it drifted toward the horizon, the hull of the ship catching the sidereal light of a dawn yet to come. Funny – to be that bright, it would have to be in a fairly low orbit, but it was moving too slow for that. Maybe it was still decelerating, and she was seeing fusion engine wash – had the shuttle launched before they’d made orbit, and made a hard reentry over the horizon?

“You think there’s going to be fighting?”

The shiver in his voice wasn’t just from the cold. Cass had been around people long enough to work out the sounds they made when they were uneasy, or upset, or afraid. Blaine’s eyes, when she gave them a quick glance, said afraid. Fear wasn’t the worst thing in the world, so long as it was kept in check with confidence. She lifted a hand and set it down on his shoulder. To him, as it would be to most, it’d be a comfort. “There might be. If there is, just stick close to me, alright?”

“Okay,” he said. There, he didn’t sound as bad. Still sounded cold, though.

“Go tell Nell and Niko to wake everyone up, then help Trish out in the armory. I’ll take watch here for now.”

“Yes, ma’am!” he said, getting shakily to his feet and clumping down the stairs, sending metallic twangs through the night air. She sat in his place (there went the knee, again), and began trading glances between the repeaters and the sky. Only a few hundred kilometers now. Lazy flying, she thought. If they wanted, they could be here by now. Why a hard reentry if you’re going to fly like that?

“And bring me up a carbine!” she shouted after Blaine. Damned if she was going to meet the enemy unarmed. This was the nightmare scenario she’d been living with ever since the Pillar of Fire. She didn’t want to think that she’d fought so hard to keep so many alive only for them to die in a hopeless fight, but they were too cold, too hungry, too tired to hold off the Cosmic Navy for long. Even that assumed they’d make a ground slog out of it instead of simply wiping them out from orbit, they way they’d tried before. It wouldn’t be much of a fight either way.

But fight she would. She’d die before she saw a single one of her people forced back into that hellish machine again.

“Look at that crater!” Pisca said as she pressed her eyes to the viewport and pointed at the shattered ring of isles below. They’d clearly been part of a peninsula not too long ago – even through the snow, the sharp edges and harsh rifts where the crater met land were in clear evidence. Something had hit this planet very, very hard, and recently. “How old do you think it is?”

“No more than a couple of years,” Tsuga said. Their eyes stayed on the display in front of them, and their vines on the controls – the weather was poor enough, and the environment inhospitable enough, that they wanted to be ready in the extremely unlikely event that the autonavigation systems failed. “High velocity, high angle of impact.”

“You must have seen one or two like it before, then? To be able to say that so readily, with just a glance at it, I mean.” Polyphylla said, peering past Pisca.

“One or two, yes,” Tsuga said, keeping their voice even. They did not want to talk about what had most likely caused the crater, and wanted even less to think about why they were able to recognize it so readily. With luck, they could guide the shuttle down to the frostbitten little sophonts below, gather them up, and retreat into the sky. They could provide details on what the humans needed, where all their settlements were (and not just the ones that showed up well on infrared, or who were broadcasting EM radiation at them). These sophonts would be taken care of, as they deserved to be, and as their former masters had utterly failed to do. Then, Tsuga could go back to their studies, all without having to explain the crater’s provenance to her colleagues.

And they would never have to look at this horrible, horrible scar on the world’s surface again.

“Twenty klicks,” Cass announced. Zodiacal light was casting a strange sheen on the snow, and at altitude the shuttle reflected the dawn’s first rays quite brightly. If the Accord was trying to make some kind of sneaky dawn raid happen, they were doing a pisspoor job of it. “Remember, no shooting. Not until we have a reason to, anyway,” she added. This was their first opportunity for any kind of intel in years, and even if it came from the mouths of capital’s running dogs, the Cosmic Navy, truth might yet be gleaned even from baldfaced lies.

And yet, as the shuttle drew closer, becoming more than a point of light in her binoculars, something began to bother Cass. It took a long moment for her to realize what, squinting at the resolving shape and trying to figure out what odd orientation the shuttle was flying at, until at last the image snapped into crystal clarity and she realized what she was looking at.

That isn’t an Accord shuttle, she thought. She had obsessively read through all the catalogues when she’d worked the Archives at O-C Admin, virtually every kind of starship and shuttle all the way back to the first tin cans humans had shot into space 500 years ago. She knew far too much about all of them, useless information she’d never need but that felt utterly delicious in the learning. This shuttle wasn’t like any of those. This was not a nimble Egret-class, nor was it a heavily-armored Valley Forge, nor was it even a strange art-deco antique like the Chevalier.

That can’t be a Terran shuttle at all, she thought, as ridiculous as the thought felt. Nor was it Rinan – it was far too streamlined, far too safe-looking, to be anything a Rinan built – which left the last option still on the table.

This was a shuttle belonging to the third xenos, the ones that the Accord had gone to war with – not genocide and unopposed conquest like with the Rinans, but actual war. That war had given the prisoners on Solstice the opportunity that Cass had been waiting half her life for. When the Cosmic Navy’s watchfleet had left, O-C was left without backup and orbital weaponry, and the prisoners finally, blessedly fought back, organized and ready. They’d torn down the suits and the screws in a few short months. What became of the war after that, they knew nothing – when, their loss inevitable, the O-C higher-ups had fled, they’d spiked the hypermetric relay antenna, cutting Solstice off from the rest of the galaxy. All they really knew about the xenos was that, unlike the Rinans, they were more than able to defend themselves.

And now they were here. The silvery, oblate disc swept down almost noiselessly, its underside glowing an uncanny blue-violet, its landing struts emerging seemingly from nowhere as it settled to the snow-covered tarmac. The snow itself began to melt away almost immediately, revealing the blacktop, and even from fifty meters Cass thought she could feel heat pouring from the thing.

The door that opened in the side, and the gangway that extended down, looked disappointingly normal next to the alien lines of the shuttle’s exterior. That disappointment faded when the xeno emerged shortly thereafter, an incongruous shape that seemed to flow out of the hatch and take on the shape of a biped taking step by careful step down to the tarmac. In the early morning light, it was more silhouette than anything, long of limb, its edges strangely fuzzy. Only its eyes stood out, like two glittering pieces of metal that caught the light at every angle.

It stood there for a moment, just looking out at the humans clustered around the makeshift barricades around the bunker, and then it began to move again. As it came closer, details resolved themselves – the xeno was made of wood, or vines, or maybe both, with foliage interwoven between it all and creeping up its head like some strange parody of hair. Each step it took was deliberate, long and steady, speaking to the power bound up in the creature’s alien but oddly feminine form.

And then it passed by the long-empty fuel tank by the side of the landing pad, and the scale of the thing slammed into Cass’s mind like a blow to the gut. Stars, she thought, that thing must be three-and-a half meters tall, easy! She could feel the tension rising all around her, and with a quick glance back at her people she saw everything she needed to, long years of studying others giving her an early warning someone else might have missed. One by one, they looked to her for guidance, as they always seemed to. Terror would sweep through them soon. Someone would do something stupid, if she didn’t give them a reason to believe she could handle this. This wasn’t something she’d planned for – she figured it’d be the Accord invading – and she felt tightness in her shoulders as she fought against the familiar frustration of not having a plan. Still, it wasn’t that different, she told herself. First, a joke, to break the tension. She rifled through the deep troves of her memory and found the perfect one in record time.

“Well,” she said, putting a measure of mirth into her voice as she slung her carbine onto her shoulder and stood up. “I guess we finally know where the Ent-wives went.”

Silence, save for the alien’s footballs on snow and blacktop. No one laughed. “What the fuck is an entwive?” Nell stage-whispered. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the alien, which was still approaching, undaunted.

“Ent. Wife. From Lord of the– Never mind, I’ll tell you later. Stay here. I’m going to go talk to it.” Her cheeks burned as she stepped forward. She’d meet the xeno, if not halfway, at least a fair way ahead of her comrades. Yes, make a joke about an obscure 500 year old early Aerospace Era novel that no one on the planet but you has read, she thought to herself. That was a great idea. More like that in the future.

Still, perhaps it was for the best. Now that she’d gotten it started, her brain was trawling up even more asinine Old-World media references, but her mouth was paralyzed by the mortifying knowledge that no one had got her joke, so she didn’t say anything before the alien came to a halt in front of her, just a little too close. She had to crane her neck upward just to look her in the strange, metallic eyes.

(We came in peace for all mankind? No, no, they’re the ones coming here, that doesn’t work.)

Something shifted in the alien’s face. Cass didn’t recognize the gesture at first, but when the alien spoke, its– no, her gentle voice laden with strange, almost musical undertones, it clicked: the xeno was smiling at her.

“Hello there, little one,” the xeno said. The intonation wasn’t quite right, and the cadence was all over the map, like she was singing along to a beat only she could hear, but she was entirely understandable.

(To go where no one has gone before? Same problem. Try again!)

“My name is Tsuga Sequi, Eighth Bloom, and my–” She paused, and muttered something in an even more lyrical language. “Well, we’ll worry about the pronouns later,” she continued. “I still haven’t fully internalized your species’ schema. Anything will do for now.”

(Klaatu barada nikto? No, she’s not even a robot. You know what? Just stop trying. You’re not helping.)

“…are you alright?” Tsuga said, leaning down to peer at Cass and lifting one of her massive hands. “Perhaps you ought to give me that weapon. You seem a bit out of sorts.”

That, if nothing else, shocked Cass out of her thought loop. The eyes had been drawing her in, like the colors rippling across their surface possessed a gravity all their own. “No. No, I’ll keep it, thanks.”

“It really isn’t necessary,” Tsuga went on. “And I worry you’re going to hurt yourself.”

“It’s slung, the safety’s on, and to be perfectly honest I forgot to chamber a round before I came out here,” Cass said, closing her eyes and focusing on her own thoughts. Why did you tell her that? Ugh! You’re flustered. Breathe in. Breathe out. Everyone’s counting on you, so be the you they know. Now more than ever, they need you to be that Cass. And so she squared her shoulders, opened her eyes, and ignoring the tightening feeling in her chest as she thrust out an open hand. “Cassandra Hope. Call me Cass. You’re clearly here to talk, so let’s talk.”

The alien hesitated for a brief moment before delicately taking Cass’s hand in her own. The fingers easily enclosed her entire hand and half of her forearm. Despite the strength Cass could feel beneath the lightly textured vines, the grip was feather-light, gentle. “Very nice to meet you, Cass. And I would very much like to speak with you, and all your packmates. Might we do so indoors? I should think it would be warmer there, and you wouldn’t have to shiver so.” She still hadn’t let go of Cass’ hand.

“I…think we can manage that,” Cass said. “You might be a little uncomfortable, though, the ceilings are– well, you’re really tall.”

“Are you sure you aren’t just very short?” Tsuga replied. There came that smile again, with a soft chuckle hiding behind it. “I take your meaning – the structure is built for your needs, not mine. But don’t worry about me, little one. I’m very flexible, as are my associates.”

“…right.” She glanced at her hand, still held firmly but ever-so-gently in Tsuga’s fingers. “This is, uhm, usually the part of the handshake where you let go.”

“If it’ll get you all inside before you get hypothermic, I suppose it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make,” Tsuga said, her fingers slowly uncoiling and releasing Cass’s hand. “Please, lead the way. My colleagues will be right behind me.” She turned, and made a languid and all-too-human beckoning gesture towards the shuttle. Two more of the aliens emerged. One looked much like Tsuga, but smaller, with sharp-edged fronds and needles coiling around its limbs – it moved with a spring in its step, an almost innocent glee. The other scarcely resembled the other two at all, a knot of ever-shifting vines and leaves that shuffled along, clutching at something glowing a warm shade of orange-red at the mass’s center.

It took Cass a moment to stop staring – something about the other two seemed to draw her in, like Tsuga’s eyes had before. “Right,” she said, turning and raising her voice. “Okay, everyone back inside, on the double! Get the secondary generator started, I want lighting and heating up in five. Let everyone know we’ve got xenos coming in, to talk. I don’t want to hear any gunshots. And get some tea on!” When no one moved, she added, “What are you waiting for? Let’s go, folks!”

Most of them listened this time, standing up shivering from behind the barricades, slinging their weapons over their shoulder, and filing back into the bunker. Nell and Nikolai, though, stayed standing, and Nikolai hadn’t even stowed his rifle.

Cass quashed the sigh – it’d be visible, and she didn’t need to make things worse. “Give me a moment, I need to discuss some logistical things with my people. You go ahead in.”

“Don’t dawdle too long out here, little one,” Tsuga said, patting Cass affectionately on the shoulder as she passed. It took every ounce of willpower Cass had not to recoil from the sudden touch, but she still clenched her teeth as the unwelcome sensation rolled across her shoulders and up her neck. In a few long strides, Tsuga reached the door and seemed to fold in on herself, bending in ways that’d snap a human’s back and pulling herself in one long limb at a time. The sprightly one followed not long thereafter, needing only to duck a little to pass through the door. The shivering mass of plant matter took a little longer to shuffle over to the entrance, and passed through it like fluid vanishing down a drain.

Nell didn’t bother waiting for Cass to ask her what was wrong. “You’re just letting them in?” For all she was a tiny, pale slip of a woman, Nell had more fire in her belly than most people Cass had ever met, and she wasn’t shy about letting it show. The two of them butted heads regularly, and not just over questions of ideology. On the other hand, she was spectacularly competent at her work – without her as quartermaster, they’d probably have all starved long ago.

“I don’t think they like the cold any more than we do,” Cass said, shrugging. “Besides, what are we going to do, shoot them? Do you know where they keep the heart, or brain, or whatever plant version of those things they have? And what do we get even if we do kill them? A shuttle none of us know how to fly?”

“We keep them out of Bulwark!” Nell spat. “You’re compromising our entire security setup!”

“They’re here to talk, not invade,” Cass said, keeping her voice measured, calm. “And diplomatic contact and negotiation is part of our commission, too. Besides, they’re aligned against the Accord, right? I’d rather not alienate potential allies by shooting on sight.”

“Alien is the right word,” Nikolai grumbled, watching the entrance to the bunker with obvious unease. He was practically Nell’s opposite, about as tall as Cass – though she’d quit testosterone when she was even younger than he was, and even malnutrition hadn’t slimmed down his shoulders. “Right before you all took over, I starting hearing things,” he went on. “I didn’t spread it around after the revolt, we all had enough problems to worry about without rumors running wild. But now they’re here.” He tugged his scarf down and scratched at this thick, dark beard. “Starting to think maybe I should have said something.”

“What do you know?” Cass trusted Nikolai well enough, even if he’d been one of O-M’s guards before the revolution, and even if his politics were at best flaccid and at worst atrocious, borderline fascist. He’d stayed behind (or been left behind – it wasn’t completely clear), and had been imprisoned as a potential counterrevolutionary element by the interim government. It was only after the Pillar of Fire, when they needed every able hand to work for survival, that the prisoners been set free. Not all of them had worked out – many presented ongoing problems for the communities they lived in – but Nikolai had, enough to be stationed at Bulwark, and he’d proven himself time and again. He was young enough to change his ways, and Cass had spent no small amount of time encouraging it over the last few years.

“I don’t know anything but what I heard, the last few days before the suits ran upwell,” he said. “They call themselves Affini, and they’re a slaver empire. Supposedly, they gather up other species, then turn them loose in batches on an undeveloped world to hunt them. The ones that live, they cut them open, put a worm in their brain to control their thoughts, breed them to start the cycle over again, and send them to work until they drop dead when they’re not good for that anymore. The ones that don’t live, well, waste not want not – they eat them.”

“That’s… a lot,” Cass said, staring off at a tree in the distance as she turned it all over in her mind. It sounded too ridiculous to possibly be true when it was said all at once – but then again, she had grown up in the belly of an economic engine that brutalized and starved its own people, and which saturated their minds with propaganda to make them feel like they were mentally ill or morally compromised (or both) if they expressed any dissent, all for the sake of further enriching a scarce few at the top of the economic pyramid who already possessed wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. And that was before she’d been convicted of crimes against capital and sentenced to transportation to Solstice on a fourteen-year indenture contract that was now over twenty years old. If someone described the Terran Accord to aliens in those terms before the Cosmic Navy showed up, the aliens probably wouldn’t find such monstrousness believable, either.

“Don’t forget the sleeper agents,” Nell said, elbowing Nikolai. Of course he’d told her – they were bizarrely inseparable for a Leninist and a liberal, though they fought even more than Nell and Cass did.

“Mmm. Some of the worm-heads, they send them out on Terran ships as sleeper agents,” he went on. “Undermine morale, sabotage, recruit others, that sort of thing.” He shrugged. “Didn’t see any Terrans with them, though, and it’s not like we get a lot of traffic these days.”

“They could have dropped them off somewhere out of our radar range,” Nell insisted. “We’re still finding isolated groups of survivors here and there – it’s not implausible for them to have sleepers already here at Bulwark!”

“Well, I don’t like that idea,” Cass admitted. It was unlikely, but still possible, and if it posed a security risk to her people…

“We should start doing neck-checks. Nikolai said it leaves a scar back there, when they put the worms in.”

“Good idea,” Nikolai agreed.

“Well, keep it subtle,” Cass said. “I don’t want us to have a panic on our hands. Ones and twos, quietly. We don’t know how much of that is true and how much of it is recycled nonsense from algorithmic horror movies.”

“I still think letting them in was a terrible idea,” Nell said. She was grinding her teeth, and her left hand was clenched into a tight fist. “If even half of it is true…”

“Hey!” Cass leaned in and forced herself to look Nell in the eye – it was one of the only reliable ways to stop her before she built up steam and went on a tear. Cass had been here before. What Nell needed now was structure and reassurance, so she repeated the gesture she’d used on Blaine before, a hand on the shoulder. It seemed to work. “Keep your head on straight, alright? Right now, we don’t even know what we don’t know. We need to learn. Know your enemy, know yourself, and you will not be imperiled in a thousand battles. Right?”

“… you and your fucking quotes, Cass,” she said, but the ghost of a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Alright. Put that thing up, Niko, and let’s go. We’ve left them in there too long already.” She and Nikolai walked away, and Cass made to follow them, but paused for a moment at the threshold as they descended. A bothersome feeling was rising in her gut, a childish and ridiculous one she shouldn’t be entertaining. She had more than ten years on Nell, twenty on Nikolai; she should know better than to let gossip get inside her head and start twisting up her thoughts so easily. Still, the feeling wouldn’t go away – not until she was sure. There was no one to see out here, anyway. She tugged her scarf loose, pulled the glove from her right hand, and began to feel around at the back of her neck.

Nothing new. Smooth, and unscarred.

Breathing a sigh of relief that formed a cloudbank around her face for a brief moment, she finally stepped inside and shut the door behind her.