More weeds were landing. It creeped Nikolai out every time he saw one of the gigantic shuttles descending noiselessly out of the sky – it felt like the things should just drop and flatten everything. Maybe there was some way to do that, to interfere with whatever xeno tech let them do that. That’s how it worked in the movies, anyway, and yeah, those were movies, but still, it was an idea.

Stars-dammit, I wish we could just fight these fucking things, he thought as he ducked back into the bunker. Instead of these coward-ass communist run-away-and-hide tactics. He had to admit, the coward-ass communist run-away-and-hide tactics had worked for the communists when they’d overthrown Osborne-Clark, but that was different – the Terran Cosmic Navy had abandoned them to go fight the weeds, and they mostly only had crowd-control tools and small arms, not the kind of weapons you needed to put down a mass uprising.

The main room looked empty – but that was mostly down to the weeds having come in and scrubbed the place clean. It had been annoying and demeaning, but it had paid off. The cleaner room looked so bare it was easier to hide that they were stripping anything useful and loading it up in the getaway tunnel below. Several runs had already gone out under cover of night to start distribution of emergency supplies via dead-drops. No one was sure what kind of orbital infrastructure the weeds had set up, but the going assumption was Too Much, so everyone proceded under maximum paranoia. Now that there was an evacuation order, there was time for one more big load, and it had to cover everyone who hadn’t already left. Some would go out on foot; others would ride along with the supplies. There was an old puddle-jumper stashed a kilometer or so away, but no one was willing to risk using something that visible, not against the weeds.

Nell was in the radio room, which was pretty much a glorified closet with an old terminal wired to a digital audio recorder. “Good, you’re here,” she said, glancing up from a little spacer’s notebook she was flipping through. “How are we looking up top?”

“Getting dark, and the big bastard is right on schedule,” Nikolai said, flashing a thumbs-up at her. “They ought to be good and distracted for the next bit.”

“Well…no time like the present, then.” She tapped a few commands into the terminal, then held up the mic, reading from the notebook. “This is Bulwark calling all stations. Bulwark calling all stations. Tools down, I repeat, tools down.” She paused, squinting. “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote,” she went on, rolling her eyes. “One, one, three, five, one, seven, seven, six. Four, four, three, five, nine. Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. One, three, eight, nine, one. Eight, six, five, five, zero. It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little about it. Six, one, four, two, zero. Seven, one, six, five, five, one.” She went on, reading out weird proverbs followed by a series of numbers, for almost a minute before she turned off the recorder. “Fucking Cass,” she muttered. “Has to make everything a stars-damned lecture about literature or something.”

“Mmmm. That explains all the weird frou-frou bullshit,” Nikolai said, nodding. Honestly shocked it wasn’t even more impenetrable if she wrote it, he thought.

“Well, if it confuses us, it’ll confuse the plants even more.” She tore the page from the spacer’s notebook, the flimsy half-transparent paper giving way easily, and tucked it into her mouth. She chewed for a moment before spitting a wad of slimy pulp out, and gave it a good grind under her heel for good measure, smearing it across the floor. “Let’s see them reconstruct that – and even if they can, it won’t do them much good to have half of a one-time pad.” She tapped in a few more commands on the terminal, then turned to face Nikolai. “Alright, the timer’s set. Let’s get out of here before the broadcast starts and the plants come to ask questions.”

“Don’t gotta tell me twice,” Nikolai muttered. “The sooner we get away from those creepy things, the better.” He followed her down the maintenance access passage, a cement shaft that echoed with the metallic twang of boots on steps, to the musty old garage and tunnel that led to the mountain road. The garage was already full of people, some working on loading, others guarding a confused-looking bunch. Plantfuckers. Nikolai felt his stomach clench.

“Hey, Nell, what’s going on?” one of them called out as they entered. “How come everyone’s armed?”

“Yeah,” another said, “and why are we having a meeting in the garage?”

“Because we’re leaving,” Nell said. “So shut up and get in the truck.” There was an uncomfortable silence, and a few exchanged glaces. “Don’t make me tell you again. Get in the fucking truck.”

“But the Affini are–”

“Shut up and get in the fucking truck!” Nell shouted. “This is a military situation, you are receiving military orders, get in the truck. I’m not leaving anyone behind to spill their guts to the weeds after they shove–” Her voice caught, and she squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t want to hear any arguing, I don’t want to hear anyone bitching, I don’t want to hear any but-I wanna-stays,” she finally went on, finishing in a mocking tone. “I’m not leaving any of you behind,” she repeated, “so you will either get in that truck, or you will be put in the truck!”

After another short silence, the plantfuckers got moving. They were hesitant at first, but there were few at Bulwark, and none among the plantfuckers, who could stand up to the sheer weight of Nell’s glare. Their compliance gave Nikolai a chance to ponder at what Nell had just said. What did she mean by but-I-wanna-stay? I mean, sure, one of them probably would have brought that up, but I know that tone. She’s mad at someone.

Maybe someone had said something to her over the last day, or she heard someone say something. Maybe it was something else. Nell had been acting a little weird ever since she got back from the xeno ship, and, granted, Nell had always been a little weird – she was a fucking communist, for one thing – but this wasn’t the usual Nell weirdness. He shook his head. Shit’s above my pay grade, that’s for sure. Then again, so was everything that had happened since he’d agreed to work-release after the uprising. Shit is absolutely fucked.

He settled in behind the wheel of the truck, began warming it up. The soft whine of the engine’s capacitors as they spun up gradually faded, and he took the time to check the night-vision specs resting on the dash. Good, he thought. Fully charged. No one fucked off and forgot after the last run. He slid them on and let them rest on his forehead. When Nell finally got into the passenger seat, he was ready.

“All set?” She nodded. “Okay. Where to?”

“We’re going to Twin Creeks Station, then over the mountain pass to Elysium. Figure we can get to the hideaway at False Oaks before sunup.”

“Mmmm. It’ll be tight. Best not waste time. Everyone set back there?” When she nodded, he stepped on the gas. As the light from the garage faded behind them, he pulled the specs down and switched them on, bathing the world in front of him in a brilliant pale-green composite pulled from passive IR and optical light amplification. The sun was already a fading memory, a strange brilliant stain to the southwest that made the rearview mirrors shine a little too bright in his peripheral vision as the specs’ gating system tried to step the image down.

Nell’s watch chirped. “Well, there goes the broadcast,” she said, sighing. “We’re committed to Case Dandelion, now.”

“The fuck did we call it that for?” Nikolai said.

“Because when we came up with it, we obviously didn’t think we’d be fighting fucking plant xenos,” Nell grumbled. “Stars, I wish they’d never showed up. Just finished off the Accord and let us be. Things were getting better. We were going to have a decent summer this year. Maybe snowmelt above the lowlands, even.”

“Yeah,” Nikolai muttered, slowing to take a sharp corner as the road switchbacked up the mountain.

“I mean, imagine it, Niko – we could have built a world without blah blah blah bourgeoisie, blah blah materialism, blah blah blah proletariat.” She was going into one of her communism rants again, but at this point, tuning it out was instinctive for Nikolai. All he had to do was nod, maybe say a word or two, and she’d run out of steam eventually and they could talk about something normal. “Blah blah historical inevitability!”

“Tell me about it,” he said. The sun dipped further below the horizon, and he could actually see out the rearview mirrors properly now. Bulwark wasn’t visible, but the massive bulk of the weed transport shuttle was. Probably unloading by now, he thought. Looking for terrans to hand out their little goodies to. They’d tried to bribe him, but he’d turned the thing down flat. Just the memory of the way it moved, the way its mouth was full of little needle-like thorns, the way it played at looking human, made his stomach want to tie itself in a knot. Creepy fucking things.

Why couldn’t it have been the Accord that showed up? He could have talked his way out of a prison sentence with them. Maybe even gotten Nell credit for good behavior – he could bullshit that, and if she was smart (which, despite the communism thing, she generally was) she’d play along. Shit, maybe she could even get paroled if they shacked up officially. And he had three years of back pay coming, didn’t he? He could have landed a trip back home, a hero’s welcome, vid tours of all the networks about how he’d survived against all odds during an illegal uprising. Book deals! Shit, maybe they’d make a movie about him.

How the fuck did these creepy weeds beat us? He’d been trying to wrap his head around it ever since Nell got back. She was scared of them now, not just wary like she’d been before. She’d always been a pessimist, though, and communists were cowards to begin with or they’d never fall for such obvious bullshit like no one should have to work to live. Where the hell would have that gotten humanity? Not the top of the evolutionary heap, that was for stars-damned sure. Well, maybe she’d see how ridiculous she’d been up to now, now she could see where it led. He’d help get her through this, they’d fight off the weeds, and then – what, rebuild? Work on liberating other terran worlds? It seemed like the next logical step. But the problem remained: how had they managed to steamroll the most advanced civilization in the history of the known cosmos?

I mean, they’re just fucking plants, and communist plants on top of it. How the hell could they beat the Cosmic Navy? It was the most efficient military machine ever created! Nikolai had seen vids of the kind of shit they carried: railguns that could fire a slug at practically the speed of light and put a pinhole in a credit chit from halfway across the system, projected energy weapons that could boil the plating right off an enemy ship from thousands of kilometers away, even theoretical mockups of bizarre hypermetric shit that was based on hearsay and rumor but that would pretty much obsolete any other kind of weapon imaginable sometime in the next ten years.

It had to be an inside job. That was the only explanation that made even a little sense. Somehow, the weeds had gotten their wormheads into positions of power, and they’d either sabotaged the war effort or just flat-out surrendered to the weeds the minute they rolled up. His knuckles went white on the wheel, and he was steering purely on autopilot now, his conscious mind consumed with righteous indignation at the idea of the greatest betrayal in all of terran history. When I get off this planet, he thought – and, for the moment, precisely how he’d do that was an admittedly open question – those weeds are gonna rue the day they fucked with us.

“How about this one?” The terran girl lifted her head, in part because she was being addressed and in part because the petting had stopped. The offending hand, Pisca’s right, was pointing at one name in a long list displayed on a tablet the size of a family vidscreen, which she held in her left hand.

“Uhm…Alecto? Hmmm.” She thought it over. “It’s fun to say, but what does it mean?” She reached up and tapped the name on the tablet, which brought up a small article pulled from one terran mainframe or another. “…oh, no, that’s not me at all,” she said.

“Oooh. You’re right, flower, that doesn’t fit you even a little bit” Pisca said, paging back to the list and scrolling down. “Well, plenty more names where that came from. Whoever these Greek terrans are, they certainly had an awful lot of heroes and deities and such to name. Oh, look, here’s Cassandra! Isn’t that Cass’s full name?”

“Y-yeah,” the girl said, her cheeks going as red as her hair. Don’t dig, please don’t dig, she pleaded silently – the last thing she wanted was to have to explain why she wanted a name from Greek mythology. That would get embarrassing incredibly quickly, even if Pisca would probably think it was absurdly cute. Pisca thought everything she did was cute. “So, can’t take that one,” she added, prompting Pisca to go on.

“No, I suppose not. Things could get very confusing with two cuties named Cassandra running around. Oooh! Daphne?”

She sat with that for a moment as well, crawling fully up into Pisca’s lap and leaning against her for a better view of the tablet. She could hear the gentle sounds from inside Pisca so much better here. “Hmmm. Maybe? Put that on the short list.”

“Put that on the short list….?” Pisca stroked the terran girl’s hair, sending shivers up her spine and prompting her to look up into those beautiful, impossibly deep eyes. Every time she did this, they seemed to take up more and more space in the world, in her mind, in her heart.

“Put that on the short list… please?” she said, swallowing heavily. Stars, she’s amazing.

“Good girl,” Pisca purred, tapping away at the tablet, and even thought she hadn’t thought it possible, the terran girl melted even further, as if her insides were turning into a warm, soupy, giggly mess. She closed her eyes and let her head loll against Pisca’s chest, running her fingers over the prickly needles one by one. The gentle rumblings welling up from within Pisca were like the world’s most comforting lullaby, and as she listened to Pisca read off name after name, she had to fight to keep herself from drifting off. The short list grew, name by name.

This is more work than I thought it’d be, she thought. I wish we’d had a working library terminal for more than a couple months after the Revolution. Then maybe I could have looked up good names before now. She had to laugh at herself. As long as I’m wishing, I might as well wish for the Revolution to have worked better. For Landfall to still be there, and all the medical treatment facilities, so I could have started this years ago. For the Affini to have gotten here before I got sent to Solstice.

But, no – if she’d never been sent to Solstice, she’d never have met Cass in the first place, might never have realized what the horrible, unscratchable itch in the back of her mind her whole life had been. Maybe the Affini would have known anyway. Pisca certainly seemed to see right through her, but then, Pisca was Pisca. She was basically perfect.

“… how do you even pronounce that?” Pisca said, leaning into look at one name. “P’to… no, not that one,” she added, scrolling away from it. “It’s very much not you.”

“Huh? Oh, right, definitely not me,” she agreed, having not even seen the name. And it all came out alright in the end, she reminded herself. They’re here now. They’ll help us. Pisca said so. The others were being so standoffish about it – even Cass, who she thought would have been much more reasonable than Nell – but hopefully they’d come around. Who cares about ideology when the Affini have already solved all the problems we’d ever encounter?

“Thelx-in-oh?” Pisca shook her head. “I think we’re into the hard-to-pronounce section,” she muttered as she continued to scroll down. “You know, none of this was in the primer they gave me when I was studying your species, petal. I’m starting to think I should write to the Office of Sophont Interaction & Acclimation and tell them they need to include an entire section about these Greek terrans and how you’re supposed to say these names.”

“If it helps, I don’t know how to pronounce most of these either,” the terran girl admitted.

“Well, we’re getting to the end. Shall we look over that short list, or try another source?”

“Maybe?” She straightened, reached out, and tried to tap the icon for the list Pisca had been making, but accidentally hit the button to scroll to the top of the document. “Ooops. Sorry! I was trying to–” She paused, suddenly transfixed. How had she missed that name the first time around? Had she been spacing out? She was certain she’d remember having seen it, because something in it seemed to call to her. She reached out and tapped the name “Aletheia.” Detail after detail spilled forth, and all of it felt so very right.

Aletheia. She took a deep breath, let her eyes fall closed. Am I Aletheia? Hi, I’m Aletheia. She felt something cool and comfortable break over her, like her whole body was a muscle that had been clenched and that suddenly relaxed. Oh, that fits. Hi, I’m Aletheia. Allie for short! She felt her face twist into an excited grin, her heart turning over and her face flushing.

“Oh,” Pisca said, looking down at her. “I think I know what that look means. Are you an Aletheia, little petal?”

The wave of joy left no doubts in her mind. Aletheia nodded, and turned to bury her face in Pisca’s chest before she could see how red it had gotten. “Allie for short,” she mumbled.

“Allie for short,” Pisca repeated, stroking Aletheia’s hair. “What a lovely name for a lovely girl. A lovely girl who, I think, deserves a treat for picking out a name for herself.”

“A treat?” She looked up at Pisca again. Her eyes seemed to swallow her, and it took effort to speak.”What, like ice cream?”

“We did ice cream yesterday,” Pisca said, one finger gently lifting Allie’s chin. “I was thinking something more like this.” A vine drifted into Allie’s field of view, at its tip a vibrantly orange flower with a needle-thin thorn at its heart, wet and shining. “I had this grafted just for you, little one – a fun little Class-A playtime, whenever I want.” She laughed, and it rolled through Allie’s soul like waves breaking on the shore.

“I don’t know, I’ve– I’ve never really done anything like that.” She’d tried to smoke cannabis once, but had coughed so hard and so long as the harsh smoke hit her throat that, if she felt any of the high, it was lost in the misery. Then again, all the people on the Orientation channel Pisca had showed her seemed to really love Class-As. Maybe this would be a better experience, and she could tell Pisca really wanted it – she could feel the want in her enormous, beautiful eyes that burned with a light that seemed to drive her fears away. “I’m willing to try, though,” she added, biting her lip and shivering just a little.

“Good girl,” Pisca said, stroking Allie’s hair and cuddling her tightly. Vines began to coil around her arms, her legs, her body. Somewhere in the midst of all that, there was a barely noticed pinch. “What a good girl you are,” she repeated, and now her voice was like her eyes too, warm and bright and deep enough to drown in. Allie’s breath caught in her throat as she realized how small she was before this incredible, numinous being – and then the xenodrugs hit.

It started as a warmth, spreading out from where the pinch had been, like a hot shower tracing out where Pisca’s vines gripped her. The warmth spread, penetrating her down to her core and rushing up to her head, and oh, she thought, now I get it. Her face seemed to draw itself into a smile all on its own, and her mind seemed to float just out of synch with her brain inside her skull. Every stroke of Pisca’s hand, every caress of her vines, was magnified in a way that Allie could never have been prepared for.

“How’s that, little one?” Pisca’s voice was like a breeze whipping around her, buffeting her like a falling leaf that never quite fell to earth. Allie forced her eyes to focus, and marveled at how Pisca only got more beautiful every time she looked up at her.

“G-good,” she managed to say, and that only after a tremendous effort. It wasn’t that her lips were heavy, or that she couldn’t feel them, but that something seemed to be between her and her body, and that mysterious something felt incredibly good whenever either encountered it. Every inch of her skin tingled, and every thought she had echoed in glorious, impromptu harmony with itself. “Like…this…”

“You like this?” Pisca laughed, and Allie was in no way prepared for it. It was as if she was a book having its pages riffled, or the sand pouring through an hourglass – there was movement, gentle but irresistible, that pulled her along. Her mouth fell open, and she tried to speak, but only a soft, needy whimper emerged. Do I sound like that? she thought, and the thought gave her such delight she feared, for just an instant, it might burn her like a fire.

Imagine, she thought – and now even that took effort – Imagine how I’ll sound after the Class Gs have had a chance to really work.

“My little Aletheia,” Pisca murmured, stroking her hair and cuddling her up close. She was warm and comfy, and the texture of her bark against Allie’s skin was pure heaven. The gentle thrumming inside Pisca now penetrated Allie’s body, a shaking that resolved into what felt like being gently rocked back and forth. She was bobbing on an ocean, the waves rolling under her. “Good Allie,” Pisca whispered. “Oh, I’m keeping you. There’s no question about it.” Allie’s eyes fluttered open – when had she closed them? – and she saw Pisca looming over her. “My Allie,” she thrummed, the pools of her eyes opening up to reveal endless depths within. “All mine.”

“Mmmm…” Aletheia could scarcely respond as Pisca’s voice swept through her. She’s keeping me, she thought, and what a comforting thought it was. Somewhere inside her she felt a mote of concern, a passing worry about what that meant, but then Pisca’s hand came down on her head again in a long, slow stroke that drove any doubt from her mind.

I want this. To call it a thought did it no justice: this was a bone-deep knowing, a fundamental truth Aletheia had discovered about herself as the Class-A stripped away all pretense, all self-deception. She could lie here, in Pisca’s lap, forever, and she’d never once regret it.

Pisca wouldn’t let her. What bliss, what comfort, it was to know that.