Something had gone wrong at some point, that much was certain, Nikolai knew. The operation had gotten off to a smashing success at first — they’d geared up, kludged together a few heavy-duty sprayers with the leaf blowers, figured out a harness to carry extra herbicide canisters, and had lain in wait for the ship to land, and land it did. So far so good.

Maybe splitting up was where it all started — but then, if they hadn’t, Keeler would have kept bitching and maybe balked at the whole thing. Nikolai still felt it was beyond stupid to try to take the mine and the ship at once, but whatever — a rear guard wasn’t the worst idea in the world if all the weeds were down there. Keeler went forward to the mine, Harriman with him. Maybe that was the mistake — it left Nikolai with McCloskey, and it was when he panicked in the ship’s loading bay as they made their first big push that shit started going south.

Now, in fairness to the man, he’d been was staring down a twelve foot tall plant monster that sang at them as it advanced, bristling with vines and thorns and who knew what else lurking under its leaves, but nevertheless, his panic set off the other two, and they rushed back for the exit even as Nikolai made a controlled retreat, hosing down the plant monster (and McCloskey, by then trapped in the thing’s vines) as he did so.

One down, he’d thought. The herbicide might take a minute or two to work, so a tactical retreat wasn’t such a bad thing, as long as they could keep the ship on the ground. Sound strategy, that. But it wasn’t just the one weed on the ship — more had started coming out of the woodwork (and who the hell put wood on a spaceship, anyway?!), and even though Nikolai filled the air with herbicide as he backed off down the ramp, he had to admit that things were not proceeding entirely as he’d envisioned.

Still. No plan of battle survives contact with the enemy, right? That was another Cass-ism he’d picked up. “Get to the mine!” he’d shouted to the others. “They’ll funnel in and we’ll get ’em!”

But that hadn’t worked either — Harriman and Keeler were already down somehow, less than fifty meters into the mine’s entrance, right at the junction where it split off into several tunnels. A handful of the monsters stood over them, dripping herbicide from every leaf. At least they’re dead, he’d thought, but the shit was taking too long to kill the weeds! Only now did he consider that maybe hitting up a forestry station to try to find some chainsaws might have been a good idea.

He shouted something as he bolted past them — it might have been a “Come on!” to his fellows, or it might have been an expletive or two hurled at the weeds, he really couldn’t remember — and hustled off down one of the narrower corridors. He knew he had to find something to slow them down long enough for the weedkiller to work. Some explosives maybe, that had worked on the one on the road! They’d let him into the armory, now that the weeds were here, wouldn’t they?

Now there was a new problem, though: the protective suits and masks were not intended for running, and Nikolai was carting around a couple dozen kilos of extra weight beyond that in the form of herbicide tanks and the leaf-blower. He was starting to sweat already, and he could barely breathe. Fuck it. He pulled the mask back, the cool air of the mine a relief, though there was a funny smell to it, sickly sweet and distant.

”sLoW dOwN, LiTtLe tErRaN~” The booming, uncanny voice of the echoed down the corridor, making it hard to tell which direction it was coming from. Nikolai spun around and sprayed herbicide in all directions, coughing and nearly tripping over his own feet. Shit, where was he? Had he gotten turned around somewhere? Every wall in the damned place looked fucking identical and–

Oh. Fuck.

When he tried to sit up, his body jerked but wouldn’t comply. The soft white ceiling above curved down to become the greenery-saturated walls, and he could see a sliding door at the end of what seemed like an unnecessarily large (but incredibly comfortable bed). Was he tied down?

”aH, gOoD, yOu’Re cOnScIoUs aGaIn.” An enormous shape seemed to detach itself from the wall, looming over him, its eyes half-hidden behind a curtain of vines, creepers, and moss. “yOu rEaLlY DiD a nUmBeR oN yOuR LiTtLe lUnGs, bUdDy.”

There was no way around it, no way to deny it — Nikolai was terrified. He’d been terrified before, the kind of spine-seizing icy fear that made it feel like your heart had stopped dead. The time he’d been captured during the prisoner revolt, and he was sure they were going to put a bullet in him right there in the breakroom, for example. This was worse, though. Those had been humans (prisoners, sure, definitely a lower order of life, but still ultimately human). This thing, with its snake-like vines drifting through the air above him, barely even looked as human as the other weeds tried to, more like a lump of walking swamp matter than anything.

“sHhHh, dOn’T sCrEaM,” it said, one of the vines slipping in and stabbing him in the neck. Something ice-cold seemed to spread out from there, and — wait, he hadn’t been screaming, had he? Even if he hadn’t, he couldn’t now that he tried. ”yOuR lUnGs aRe dOiNg bEtTeR bUt yOuR tHrOat sTiLl hAs sOmE hEaLiNg tO dO. i’M aRvEnSe tElMaTeI, FiFtH bLoOm, hE/hIm, aNd i’M gOinG tO bE tAkIng cArE oF yOu uNtIL yOu’Re wElL eNoUgH fOr dOmEsTiCaTiOn.”

Domestication?! The fuck does that mean?! Nikolai stared up at the monster, shivering and trying to shout, but only really succeeding in breathing out particularly forcefully.

“i CaN sEe yOu’Re aN eNerGeTiC oNe,” it said, letting out a noise that might have been a chuckle if it didn’t come from a twelve foot tall wall of dripping wet swamp slime. “yOu’Ll bE oUt oF hErE aNd iN tHe ViNeS oF yOuR nEw oWnEr iN nO tImE.”

He had to get out of here. He had to get out, he had to get out, he had to get out, but every time Nikolai tried to escape something held him down. Was it fear? Had he been drugged? Was he just tied down? He had to get out of here, he had to get out.

“LeT’s sEe iF wE cAn’T bRiGhTeN yOuR mOoD a LiTtlE iN tHe mEaNtImE,” it went on, lifting its hand. The needle of a nightmarish-looking syringe glistened dangerously. “i aLWaYs sAy, lAuGhTeR iS tHe bEsT mEdiCine~”

It had been an incredible evening, Cass remembered, and it had drifted slowly into an incredibly restful night. She hadn’t felt so relaxed, so at ease, so safe, so loved in years, maybe decades, maybe ever. Even now, the morning after, a bath and meal and a kilometer and a half of walking later, it was a touchstone for her, comfort following her through the day, tickling at the back of her mind as the memory of Tsuga’s touch and the million little ripples they set off echoed back and forth.

She could never let it happen again. It was too good, too powerful, and she knew that if she let it become a habit she would never be able to stop — she’d spend the rest of her life blissed out, unable to stick two thoughts together, unable to help her people rebuild in the aftermath of the Affini invasion, unable to find a way to liberate them from their (admittedly well-meaning) captors. That was going to be a long, slow, subtle fight, she knew. Risking that was a luxury she couldn’t afford.

“It may be attached to my body,” Tsuga had said earlier, before they left her hab, “but it’s your flower, and you can have it whenever you want.” The temptation to simply reach out and grab it as it had dangled there had almost won out, and that terrified Cass. She had to be stronger, or she was never going to escape this, let alone get her people out. The Captain’s request to come down to Arvense’s clinic had been a welcome distraction at the time, but Cass had still been stewing over things for the entire walk there. Not even the Tillandia’s open, airy interior, with the sunline shining warmly above and the curving greenery reaching up to become the sky, could keep her mind off of the problem that she would probably be struggling with in perpetuity going forward.

How do I get her to stop offering without being a complete asshole to her? That was the key problem — the flower was, in a vacuum, a wonderful gift, and one she very much appreciated, and Tsuga had always been kind to her, always respected her, had actively fought to keep her independent. There was the purely utilitarian angle of not wanting to burn the only bridge she really had here, but beyond that she simply didn’t want to hurt Tsuga. There had to be a way to thread the needle. She would just have to think long and hard about the problem, and the solution would reveal itself in time. Until then, she would just have to resist temptation.

But she ultimately didn’t spend very long thinking about it. Cass was not even slightly prepared for what she saw when she and Tsuga walked into Arvense’s clinic: Arvense, naturally, was there, and so was Andoa — the Captain had been the one who had asked her to come down to the clinic, no shock that e was there. What stopped Cass in her steps and made her stare was the woman next to Andoa, leaning into eir leg with a bright green collar around her neck.

“Nell?” Her head jerked up suddenly, and for a brief moment she met Cass’s eyes before she looked away, her face turning a brilliant red.

“Ah, good, you’re here,” Andoa said, grinning down at Cass. “I hope I’m not imposing, asking you down here?”

“No,” Cass said, unable to take her eyes away from Nell. She was wearing some kind of lightweight bodysuit, pale, diaphanous, woven from something like cotton, not quite skin-tight but still leaving little to the imagination.

“…ah,” e said, glancing down at Nell. “I see. Why don’t we let you two catch up before we take you in, hmm?”

“I think that might be a good idea,” Tsuga said. “If nothing else, I do have good news about the aerosolized prokimatiesthezine compound.”

“Oh, marvelous!” Arvense said cheerfully. “Do tell, do tell!”

“Go on, sweetie, go see your friend,” Andoa added as e stepped away, giving Nell a gentle push towards Cass with one enormous mossy hand, Nell resisted, but only a little, and soon she and Cass were standing alone as the three Affini had an extended conversation in their own language on the other side of the room. Nell still couldn’t meet Cass’s gaze.

“So…this is new,” Cass finally said. “You lost?”

Nell shook her head and hugged herself. “I won. I beat the timer. But…it turns out that wasn’t the game after all.”

“Well, what was? Why the hell are you wearing that? The last time I saw you, you were talking up your big plans to leverage the Captain, so why the hell are you following em around with a collar on?”

“Because…” Nell bit her lip and let out a sigh. “Because I’m eir floret,” she said quietly. “E, uhm… e let me go, like e said e would. And I tried to leave, I really, really did! But…I couldn’t.” She rubbed at her eyes and let out a mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

“… no,” Cass said, stepping forward and hugging Nell. “You fight as long as you can, and if you hit your limit, know it and say it. That’s always been the rule.” She kept her face as still as she could, but she felt her heart sinking. I failed her too, she thought. It’s all I’m good at. The best she could do now was ease Nell’s guilt. She was more than used to feeling guilt, and taking on Nell’s and adding it to her own wouldn’t change things much.

“…stars, I should apologize to McCracken,” she mumbled into Cass’s shoulder.

“She’s too high to appreciate it right now, so you might have to wait.”

“…she?” Nell looked up and laughed softly. “Wow, I am out of the loop. Fuck. I’m sorry, I just…she figured it out long before I did, you know?”

“…that you want this?” Cass raised an eyebrow, fixed her gaze just above Nell’s eyebrows. She could feel Nell’s stare in her peripheral vision, like a gravitational well she had to fight against.

“I know how it sounds, but yes. I mean, think about it, Cass — they’re the perfect vanguard. They’re the end of capital not just for us but for everyone, everywhere! It may not perfectly line up with with the dialectic, but shit, even Einstein didn’t figure out strange matter physics, did he?”

“And you’re just…okay with being a pet?”

“If I’m eir pet, yeah.” There wasn’t a trace of doubt in her voice, in the aura of her eyes, in her posture. If anything, she seemed to gain a paradoxical strength from confirming her submission. Cass couldn’t understand it, couldn’t get her head around how Nell, one of the most fiery and animated fighters she’d ever known, who could be relied upon to argue literally everything into the ground if it deviated even slightly from Marxist dogma, could just give in like this.

But she had. And there was nothing she could do about it. “Okay,” she said. “It’s your decision.”

Nell snorted and smiled up at Cass. “Anarchist bullshit. But seriously…thank you for understanding.”

“I don’t understand it,” Cass said firmly, “but it’s not my decision. I just– I want to make sure it’s yours, that’s all. With them, it can be hard to tell.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, my Captain prides emself on not doing it that way,” Nell said, grinning, “so yeah. It’s all me. I’m apparently the perverted plantfucker your parents warned you about.”

“…right.” She never had talked about her past with Nell. It wasn’t some kind of jab, just an unfortunate turn of phrase. “So why are we here?” That wasn’t the only reason she changed the subject: Cass did not want to get into the details of Nell’s relationship with the Captain. She was having enough trouble keeping her mind off of the details concerning herself and Tsuga, and more details would probably not be helpful.

“Oh, that. They brought Nikolai in a couple of days ago,” Nell said, sighing and shaking her head. “Cass, that fuckwit screwed everything up, and I’m sorry I covered for his ass for so long.”

“Don’t worry about it. I take it he’s here?” She nodded towards the back of Arvense’s clinic.

Nell nodded. “Surprise, surprise, he’s not adjusting well, and Arvense asked the Captain to bring me to help calm him down, and…look, I just don’t want to go in there alone. Especially not after the way we left things off. I may have dumped his ass in a really public way.”

“I heard a little about that from Raeburn. Who’s doing much better, by the way.”

“Yeah?” Her eyes brightened a little. “Good. I’m glad to hear that. People are adjusting to the ship?”

“They’re trying to put together a centralized government-in-exile and it’s all the two of us can do to dig in our heels to keep you statists from ruining everything,” she said in a lighthearted tone, giving Nell a smile that she didn’t really feel.

“Fucking anarchist bullshit.” She grinned and gave Cass a clap on the shoulder, and for once Cass was grateful for the shivering, uncomfortable feeling it caused — it was like a bucket of cold water to the face, a reminder that she could endure that kind of touch without xenodrugs in her system. “Come on, let’s go and get this over with.”

“I fucking knew you were a wormhead.” Nikolai was pressed into the corner of the room, between the wall and the bed, glaring daggers at Nell. “Ever since Twin Creeks I fucking knew you were working for them!”

“One, fuck you, I still don’t have an implant,” Nell spat, her shoulders hunching in tightly coiled fury, “and two, don’t call florets wormheads, you fucking prick!”

“You sabotaged everything, we lost because of you!”

“Nikolai, shut up,” Cass said calmly. It was, on some level, impressive how rapidly Nell and Nikolai could turn literally anything into a screaming argument, but she wasn’t in the mood for it.

“You weren’t there, she–“

“Shut. Up.” She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and actually met his eye, giving him every ounce of Commanding Officer Stare she could muster, and it worked — he paused mid-syllable as if she’d grabbed him by the throat. “Better.”

“Fucking dipshit,” Nell growled, “I can’t believe you actually tried to–“

“You shut up too, Nell. Yelling isn’t going to accomplish anything,” Cass said, sighing and shaking her head. She’d had a front row seat to several of these fights before, and while they might not be a couple anymore they hadn’t missed a step in the long, interminable, angry dance yet. Hopefully, she could head it off here.

“At least I tried,” Nikolai grumbled. “Instead of just fucking running away like cowards!”

“I told her to do that,” Cass said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Fighting them is a meaningless and pointless gesture, Nikolai, they’re too advanced for simple tactics like that.”

“Bullshit, I got at least three or four of them before I went down!” he insisted, drawing himself up a few inches and puffing his chest out.

“Oh, with the herbicide?” Nell said, rolling her eyes. “You unbelievable fucking–“

“Nikolai,” Cass said, interrupting Nell, “herbicides are chemically tailored for specific applications.”

“Yeah, killing plants, I know, I’m not–“

“They kill specific plants,” Cass said. She could feel a headache beginning to form right behind her left eye, the Am-I-Seriously-Having-To-Do-This headache she was intimately familiar with. “If they killed plants indiscriminately, they would be defoliants, not herbicides, and spraying them on the crops we were trying to grow on Solstice would be a pretty bad idea, wouldn’t it?”

She watched the realization slowly come together in Nikolai’s eyes, uncomfortable though it was. “You mean…you don’t think that I–“ He seemed to deflate, all the bluster and ego leaking slowly out of him.

“I know for a fact you didn’t kill any of them, asshole,” Nell growled. “They were more worried about you, and the other people in the mine who didn’t have fucking respirators on when you pumped the air full of toxic fucking fumes! What the hell were you thinking? I told you back at Twin Creeks it wouldn’t fucking work. And what were you even going to do after you poisoned yourself and everyone else around you?”

“…w-well, we were gonna take the ship,” he muttered, looking away, at the wall, at the ground, anywhere but at Nell and Cass.

“Oh, you were going to take the ship. Great. Brilliant. With a couple barrels of herbicide and some leaf blowers, you were going to take a nine kilometer ship.”

“Well, you sure the fuck weren’t doing anything to help!” Nikolai retorted, trying to build up a bit of his lost confidence.

“If I thought that a plan like that would work,” Cass said evenly before Nell could butt back in, “don’t you think I’d have gone with it instead of what we tried? Or do you think I’m a coward?”

“Wh– I mean– no, but–“ He sputtered, lost for words. She could see the fear in his eyes. Good, she thought. Men like him were more predictable when they feared you.

“If there was even the slightest chance that fighting would do any good, that it might help us stay free, do you think I’d hesitate even for a second?” She gave him the Commanding Officer Stare again. “I declared war on the entire Accord when I was younger than you are now, Nikolai. I’m not afraid of doing what needs to be done. But I’m also not afraid to acknowledge when a tool no longer functions. We won’t win against them in a stand-up fight, not when the entire Cosmic Navy couldn’t stop them.”

“Bullshit!” he said, though the fear was curdling into doubt in his voice. “That’s just propaganda, the war can’t be over, we–“

“Nikolai, you are standing on a nine-kilometer starship. You can stand because the entire thing is spinning to create artificial gravity. This ship is so large it has parks, trees, forests. They move this ship without crumpling it, or shattering it into a million pieces. They can move it through hyperspace. Do you have any idea how much power that requires, the material engineering necessary to make that possible?”

“And this isn’t even one of their bigger ships,” Nell added. “It’s just a medium fleet tender. This whole ship is just where they put extra florets other ships don’t have room for during pacification campaigns!”

“But–“

“Do you remember how propaganda used to show the Rinans?” Cass said. “Or was that before your time? I haven’t watched vids for about twenty years, so I don’t know if they still show them, but I bet they do. The way they used to cast them as primitives who could scarcely govern themselves, who didn’t really understand the technology they were building, who needed us to run things for them?” Even decades later, the loathsome garbage was still seared into her mind, still made her gut churn. The things we did to those poor people…and the things the Accord did to my mother and so many others for daring to say it was wrong. “To the Affini, comparatively, we’re even less developed than that propaganda cast the Rinans as, and we could no more fight them off than the Rinans could protect themselves from us.”

Nikolai had no response to that. He only shivered and stared at Cass. She forced herself to hold his gaze, to make it entirely clear to him that she wasn’t bullshitting. “You mean…” His voice cracked, and he coughed, then started again. “You mean we never stood a chance?”

“I mean exactly that,” Cass said softly, almost apologetically.

“But…c’mon, I mean… we’re terrans,” he said. His face assumed the most pitiful expression Cass had ever seen. “We…we’re the most advanced…we’re supposed to…” He swallowed heavily as he wrestled with reality’s slow, relentless dawn.

“There’s nothing you could have done to change what’s happened,” she went on. “Except not fight back. There might be a way to get free after proving we can coexist, but that’s going to be a long way off if it’s even possible.” She shrugged. “I’m not certain there’s anything I can do to keep you out of their hands. I barely escaped domestication, and I never resorted to chemical warfare.”

“Oh, it’s not as bad as all that.” Arvense’s cheerful voice came from the entryway, where the enormous shaggy Affini was poking his trunk into the room, and the minute he spoke Nikolai went white as a sheet. “Sorry to interrupt, but this little guy needs a top-up.”

“You stay the fuck away from me!” Nikolai shrieked, cowering into the corner. “Do something!” he added, casting a desperate, fearful glance at Cass.

And she couldn’t ignore it. He might be an arrogant, self-deluding prick who had abused her good nature and willingness to forgive those who tried to make amends, but he was still one of her people. “Hold on, Arvense, what are you giving him?”

“Oh, nothing serious,” he said, coming around the bed, an elegantly tapering needle held in one hand. “Just a bit of Class-E, Class-D, and a few other subtle little goodies. It’s a little cocktail I’ve been working on specifically for your species, actually.”

“No! Fuck off! Not again!” Nikolai was desperately pressing himself against the wall, as if trying to push his way through it to escape, but Arvense’s vines were already around him, far too strong for Nikolai to escape from.

“He really doesn’t seem to want it,” Cass said. There wasn’t much beyond this she could do, she knew, but she owed Nikolai that much.

“He always says that until it’s in his system,” Arvense said, chuckling as he lifted Nikolai screaming off the ground. “I’m thinking of calling it The Arvense Special. Do you think that’s too egotistical? Now hold still, little guy.” He was in an out in a flash — Cass almost didn’t see the needle move — and Nikolai quieted down just as quickly.

“Ohhh shit no,” he murmured in a hazy voice as Arvense gently set him down on the bed.

“See? Not so bad, was it? He does this every time,” he added in an aside to Cass and Nell. “Especially the evening doses, for some reason. Even if he wasn’t being domesticated for being a feralist who poses a significant risk to himself and others, he’d have to be domesticated for resisting a rest!”

“Arvense, that’s terrible,” Cass said, but she couldn’t stop herself from grinning. Even Nikolai chuckled, a low noise that slowly grew until it was a laugh. He clutched at his sides, rocking back and forth as he laughed himself silly at Arvense’s pun.

“Well, he certainly seems to like it,” Arvense said, clearly pleased. “And he’s the patient. And what a laugh he’s got! I could listen to it for hours…”

“It’s definitely his best feature,” Nell said, her tone only a little acid.

“So it’s a sure thing, then? His being domesticated?” Cass knew the answer, but she couldn’t not push, not fight back.

“Very much so,” Arvense said, not taking his eyes from Nikolai as he lost himself in a fit of laughter.

“He’ll be alright,” Nell said quietly. “It’s not like they’re gonna scoop his brain out with a spoon or something. They’re just gonna make him be less of an asshole.”

“Yes, but–“ She paused, shook her head. “Alright. Just promise me you’ll take care of him,” Cass said to Arvense. “I know there’s no way for me to talk you down from it, but… make sure he’s okay.” Her shoulders tightened painfully. Is it cowardice or accepting that I’ve lost? “Be good to him. Make sure he’s happy, at least.”

“Cass, please,” Arvense said as he ruffled Nikolai’s hair. He was still laughing uncontrollably, rolling back and forth on the bed, his movements languid and carefree. He reminded Cass of Leah in no small way like this. It was comforting and disquieting all at once. “I’m an Affini. Surely by now you know that’s what we do best.”