Chapter 1 - Violet and Verdigris

Dirt and Dust!

The flash of a superheated railgun round mere meters from her hull left nearly as scalding a wake as her self-condemnation. What, was she starting to curse like them now, too? Come on, Cass. Oh Hell, or Son of a bitch, or even just holy cow, any of those would have worked just as well. Dirt and Dust? She’d been watching too many of their programs.

Two more tungsten slugs joined the twinkling stars ahead of her, and Cassiopeia decided that she could scold herself when she wasn’t being shot at. Besides, she might as well start getting used to it, she conceded. Soon, she imagined, she would hardly be using anything so vulgar.

An alarm screamed somewhere off to her left, dull and distant in the low-pressure cockpit. Far more vivid was the tactile warning in the control stick, a stinging electric slap followed by a tug on her palm. Cass forced the left stick hard forward, causing her ship to strafe suddenly and violently downwards. The ship’s shuddering translation thrusters shook her deeply enough that her parents would probably need a massage, but it proved worth it as the incoming missile failed to pick her out from the chaff she left behind.

“Too close,” Cassiopeia breathed out, and as she glanced down to the dwindling number on her countermeasure stockpiles, punctuated it. “And too expensive.” She’d hardly had a choice, with no active decoys remaining, and not a hint of doppler noise in near-open space to lose the missile in. Still. I could have done better.

The radar line swept another update across the dated display to her right, and Cass had to stop herself from muttering another plant-inspired curse. Five of them, now - three in close formation, about two hundred klicks behind, and another pair racing to catch up at eight hundred. Every breath tilted the odds a little bit further against her survival. No, she corrected herself. If they catch up to me, then survival is the worst-case scenario.

Cass’s eyes danced across the scopes again. Nothing, save for the looming masses of the system’s outer planets, and the five blips closing on her with all the lazy tenacity of a 23rd-century slasher movie villain. No cover, no salvation. No hope, save for the medium-starved chime of a jury-rigged display at her side.

I can help.

Her face softened. Chestnut hair bobbed from side to side as she shook her head. “I don’t think you can, sorry to say, even if we had weapons. Which, to be clear, we don’t.”

Let me fly, the dull green characters demanded in near-instantaneous response.

Cass frowned, feigned offense, tried to keep some humor in her voice. “And give up the story I’ll get when we get out of this alive? No thank you.” A smile reached her lips, a truly pointless gesture, not that it was reflected in her eyes. She didn’t try to fake it - nobody was watching her to judge. With a sweep of her hand, she folded the display back, tucking it and its tangled nest of cables behind her seat, alongside the hatch to which they all led. “I’ve got this.”

Another alarm - a shorter tone, and a more gentle buzz in her hand. The lead ship had launched another missile, but its seeking radar didn’t have a firm lock on her yet. If she was lucky, the still-dispersing chaff cloud from her last evasion would prove a more appetizing target to it. Then, when today have I been lucky?

Never a better time for that to turn than the present. She keyed the copper-lit transmit button on the comms panel, the tangible click of it passing the detent informing her that her words were now transmitting on all frequencies she could configure the ship to permit. Certainly, her pursuers would hear them, but they’d already made up their minds on her fate. Fate itself, though, might not yet have been certain.

“CQD, CQD, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Vessel Stand and Deliver, registration Terran Accord. Message follows: My name is Cassiopeia Kirst, of the Free Terran Navy. I have taken command of this vessel, and am being pursued by elements of my former comrades. My vessel and I are in immediate danger. To anyone receiving this, I am requesting asylum within the Affini Compact. Repeat, I am requesting asylum in the Affini Compact. If you’re hearing this, please. I don’t have long.”

Cass watched helplessly as the words echoed out through infinite space. Unencrypted, unobfuscated, they would travel on for millennia, a beacon of her shame that only after eons would disperse amongst the cosmic dust and detritus. Anyone who cared to listen, now or a lifetime after, would know that she had betrayed her species. Stars above, she hoped it was worth it.

Another railgun slug shot past, and a spray of sparks marked the demise of her secondary communications mast. Those words would be her last, then, she supposed. Stars, she hoped it was worth anything.

A tick updated the radar display. A hundred and fifty kilometers, and five hundred for the furthest. Cass had hoped for longer. Her heart went out to the ship around her, to the wires running into the panel behind her, to the people in pursuit who had thought her nothing but a friend and would now remember her as a rapidly-expanding cloud of starstuff.

Come on, Cass. She knew better than to give in to despair, and even as her lamentations crowded the front of her mind, the part of her that had carefully learned this ship inside and out was already plotting a new course. There was always another option. Always something more to try. She wouldn’t give up until all was truly lost, even if it came down to climbing out of the cockpit and flapping her arms like she could swim.

As far as desperate measures went, this course was a notch below that, but not much further. She’d been coming up on the failed brown dwarf that made the system’s fourth planet for the better part of an hour now, letting the titanic planet loom ever larger in her no-longer-magnified viewscreens. With a hundred-and-eighty thousand kilometer diameter, and a six and a half hour rotational period, she could steal a truly magnificent amount of energy off of it via a slingshot. The fighters pursuing her could do the same, of course, but they were short-range interceptors - if they chose to follow, they wouldn’t have enough fuel left to drop below the star’s escape velocity. Trapped on a ballistic trajectory, they’d tumble out eternally into the interstellar void, where not even the plants would find them. They’d be doomed.

Then again, if nobody heard her calls, so would she.

Another glance to the scopes, a brief touch of the sealed metal panel behind her seat. Cass sighed, muttered a prayer to all the gods she believed in - followed by a few she didn’t, for good measure - and keyed in the course change.

No gods could help her now; just the fucking plants. And aren’t they close enough?

Paint wove across canvas in serpentine trails, dancing among the hues of a warm summer evening, and broken up only by the billowing outlines of thousand-kilometer cloud caps. Against that background, the iridescent paint was laid down in single brushstrokes, all the delicate blending done before it ever met cloth so as to ensure the nature of its subjects was truly and wholly captured.

Aculiata Caphyllae, Fourth Bloom, tried to admire the lovingly-crafted, rainbow-stricken pigment she’d just woven into life. She really did. Certainly, it captured its subject’s likeness well - a quick glance out the gently curved glass promontory around her confirmed that the filament-beings dancing among the clouds shone with the same prismatic light as her paints. And yet, where was the satisfaction? Another day, another painting, and each had begun to feel the same as the last.

It wasn’t her subjects’ fault. Aculiata would never lay blame on such lovely little things, living such beautiful, simplistic lives. Peering past the canvas, she took a moment to admire them without further intent, almost an apology to them for her loss in interest. They deserved to be admired, at the very least.

Not that they would notice, one way or another. The filaments lacked a distinct neural structure, and while the Compact had found a scarce couple of sophont species who shared that trait, the more biology-minded among the crew had assured the ship these weren’t. No, these beings danced passively in the howling oxygen winds, occasionally drifting to the edge of the hydrogen layer above not by any intent, but by the thermal currents around them. There, they would drink in the distant starlight, letting it filter through their bodies to supplement the wind-brought sustenance. There they would linger, without need for a higher purpose, devoid of ambition and longing alike, until the winds saw fit to settle them onto a lower layer for rest.

Aculiata wondered if perhaps she should envy them.

Several brushstrokes and nothing that felt like progress later, and Aculiata surrendered to more base desires. Roots, this is getting me nowhere! She allowed herself to fume, and knocked the painting forcefully from its easel. A stray tendril caught it with only a fragment of her attention, of course, and set it gently aside. The rest of her, meanwhile, was focused on carefully packing up the paints, which she was at that moment making plans to donate to the ship’s art stores alongside the artifacts of as many other hobbies as she could name. Perhaps someone’s floret would find amusement in playing with the marvels of engineering that she’d so carelessly slathered on canvas.

Several minutes later, every supply was delicately stored, every spatter of paint on the floor diligently cleaned, and each of the adorable filaments outside had received a quiet thanks from her for being such wonderful, precious subjects. Now she just needed to… To what? Again, she swept her senses across the observation chamber, and managed to dispense with another four and a half minutes tidying a corner in which some small amount of pollen had managed to accumulate. To her disappointment, their cleaning systems were quite meticulous, and not a single other spot in the room required even the slightest attention.

Now what?

Painting had kept her attention for almost a tenth of her current bloom, and perhaps sometime next bloom she’d pick it up again. Most of her hobbies, she cycled back to eventually. Now, though, she felt that weight, that wall erecting itself around the interest that told her that she wasn’t going to find fulfillment in it again for a good long while. It was time to find something else to do.

It wasn’t as if she was lacking for options. Cylina’s Mantle was scheduled to linger within the clouds of this almost-brown-dwarf for another few weeks, providing ample time for artists, biologists, and fashion enthusiasts alike to study the filaments. She could always try one of the other two, though clothing design hadn’t quite cycled back into the rotation of her interests, yet, and she doubted she’d discover anything that the more dedicated biologists hadn’t already figured out. Certainly not when this was the fourth such species that the Mantle had discovered. While none of them shared a common evolutionary link, all four had been nearly identical in terms of anatomy and behavior, and Aculiata imagined that the Compact’s databases held records of hundreds or even thousands more.

So, art was a bust, biology felt pointless, nothing new to clean, nothing new to see, and she’d already walked every corridor of this ship in the restless hours of her current bloom. What was an Affini to do to while away the hours?

She hummed, a few strands vibrating the opening notes to a Rinan concerto that had been stuck in her head since she heard it a week ago. Perhaps zero-gravity baking? She’d heard of some delightful ways to prepare pastries when freed from the constraints of directional force. Oh! Wasn’t there that one pair of second blooms on the third corolla who’d been working on restoring vintage electronic entertainment systems? Something new, that could be exciting. So, certainly not lacking for options, and a few even hinted at promises of motivation.

Aculiata had begun to search the ship directory for the pair and their pinnates, when a chime across the shipwide intercom arrested her momentum. After a three-second break for everyone’s attention to shift, their captain’s voice sang out across every cavernous hallway and chamber of the Cylina’s Mantle.

“Hello, lovelies! Please wrap up any delicate activities within the next couple moments, and prepare for vector change. We’re going to be briefly poking up above the clouds, and will try to be back in place before this spool scatters, so if you have any observations underway, please put them on hold!” The transmission cut, before the same voice eclipsed the chime of her no-doubt hurriedly pressing the button again. “Oh, and could the welcoming committee please make your way to Bay 40? Thank youuu!”

The final note came with the same orchestral notes of the concerto Aculiata had just been humming. That sweet Rinan floret must have been so proud of it. Maybe she would look into Rinan or Terran music, she thought, as she abandoned the observation deck for a now-suddenly-bustling avenue.

“Culi! Were you hiding in there all day?”

The voice that called out across the avenue flowed like nectar, not the saccharine spoils of a fruit-bearing plant, but rather the smooth, soothing taste of lavender. Aculiata suppressed the pang of envy she felt every time that she heard it, and turned to warmly greet its source.

“Lysanthae!” She danced between already-moving Affini and a couple dozen florets besides, moving to entangle a spare two tendrils with those of her friend. “I thought you were off doing, ah… bookbinding, today! What are you doing up here?”

The rustle of Lysanthae’s leaves and petals was a most joyous laugh, and she guided Aculiata into a pace matching hers, heading towards a forward corolla. “That was my morning, yes! And Sinae did this wonderful thing with painting on the page edges, it came out so, so shiny! But then, that announcement, it was so sudden that I barely had time to get myself presentable!”

As if. In the two blooms and some they’d known one another, Aculiata had only twice seen Lysanthae seem properly discomposed, and one of those had been after she’d spent a week excavating herself from a collapsed Myrmex tunnel. Today, she was done up in trellises to an extent doubtless above and beyond the rest of the welcoming committee. Tendrils wrapped in organic yet precise patterns around delicately-placed support structures, as each individual strand wound tightly into the visage of a bipedal being, capped in flowers cascading down from where vines overflowed off the trellises like locks of living hair.

“You look beautiful, Lysa,” Aculiata assured her, letting herself mingle ever so slightly closer with her. “We’re expecting humans, then?”

Lysa accepted the closeness, encouraged it, allowing a few more vines to unwind from their trellises and join with Culi’s. “Oh, absolutely, and even better than that: exciting humans!” She maneuvered a tendril still intertwined with Aculiata to tap the interface of her tablet, and the voice of a human crackled out across the recording of a degraded transmission.

Aculiata listened quietly, erecting a facade of patience even as curiosity buzzed like affectionate pollinators in the back of her mind. In a couple places, the message broke up - it seemed they hadn’t even had time to send it off to one of their myriad of audio enthusiasts yet to clean up. This was delightfully urgent, wasn’t it?

“...Repeat, I am requesting asylum in the Affini Compact. If you’re hearing this, please. I don’t have long.”

Again, Lysa’s tendrils tightened, and again she sang in that lavender-nectar voice. “A rebel defector! What do you think it will be?” She coiled closer, whispering conspiratorially at a volume that anyone who cared to listen could hear. “A cargo ship that never arrived? A galactic conspiracy?” Lysa feigned a gasp - at least, Aculiata assumed it was feigned. “Maybe a first date gone wrong!”

Despite herself, she couldn’t help but get caught up in Lysa’s enthusiasm. With a chamomile-gentle laugh, Aculiata tried to soothe her fantasies. “Most likely, they just got tired of starving and hurting. The poor dears all do, eventually.” Even now, with two years having passed since the surrender of the Terran Accord, so many of their poor, abused people were reluctant to accept help.

She was glad that so many of her kin were still working to help them, warships and envoys alike scattering across Terran space to find what sad remnants still insisted on suffering so that they could correct them. The Cylina’s Mantle, though, was certainly not one of them. Though they were indeed on the edge of Terran space, they’d had virtually no indication of rebel activity out in this region, much less the system, and the nearest proper warship was light-years away. Not that they were in danger, of course - the Mantle, science ship though she’d been designated, was entirely unthreatened by even the pinnacle of human engineering, a pinnacle which had long since been wrapped up in vines, point filed down, and laid lovingly into the same domestication as the species that had reached it. They could rely on Affini tech, now. There was no need for all that warstuff.

No, there was no danger. It simply meant, to the Cylina’s Mantle, that they were in for a bout of excitement that the crew hadn’t gotten to experience in some time.

Lysanthae tugged at Aculiata as she began to lag behind. “So, are you coming?” Despite the tone, Culi knew it was only a question in presentation, and the resolution had already been decided. Questions from Lysa tended to be like that.

Even so, she put up a token resistance. She couldn’t always let Lysa have her way - even if this time, she wanted to. “I’m not on the welcoming committee, Lysa. Wouldn’t I just get in the way?”

“Oh, you won’t be any problem at all!” Lysa assured her, with the slight edge to her voice that told Aculiata, One way or another, you’re agreeing with me on this. “Come along, it’ll be fun!”

The stiffness in Aculiata’s vines bled away, as she acquiesced to the inevitable. “Oh, very well. I suppose I was bored anyhow, so I’ll come along, if only to tease you when you inevitably end up with a human floret.”

Lysa wiggled exuberantly, her delight always seeming excessive for the occasion, and yet, utterly and hopelessly contagious. It seemed dichotomous to the sly voice that accompanied it, almost a true whisper, this time. “That’s a good girl. Right with me.”

“Of course, Lysa.” Aculiata’s response came slower, deeper, both auditory and locomotion strands slackening further. She knew what Lysa was doing, of course, but she didn’t find herself too inclined to dwell on it, nor did she feel any discontent for the manipulations that she was already succumbing to. Lavender rhythms pulsed in colors and currents through Lady Lysanthae’s tendrils, still deeply intertwined with Culi’s own, and as they flowed inwards and upwards, she couldn’t help but let her own internal song fall into the tempo that guided it. Her eyes shimmered, that same lavender pulsing in them to her conductor’s time.

Lady Lysanthae’s eyes brightened in delight, and the pulse crescendoed in response. “That’s right,” her Lady continued to whisper, “Doesn’t it feel nice to get out, once in a while? Doesn’t it feel right to come have some fun with me?”

The corridor felt distant, unreal, as if a projection painted onto the walls of a room that took an entirely different shape. The words, though, the words were clear, easy for Culi to understand. She knew how to listen. She knew how to follow. They’d practiced this together, so deeply, so frequently, that her response came more from instinct than from memory.

“Yes, Lady Lysanthae.” Every murmur in the hall dulled and sharpened to her Lady’s beat. Every slackening of her vines, every pulse of color in her eyes, danced to the same time as Lady Lysanthae.

Pulse. Peace. Pleasure. “That’s my good little bud.” Yes, Lady Lysanthae. “Following, floating, falling into me.” Somewhere distant, in a physical form that felt as faint as a memory to Culi, her Lady’s vines wrapped ever deeper into her. She didn’t try to fend them off, she didn’t want to. She didn’t want. No, she was her Lady’s rhythm, and her Lady’s rhythm defined her. This body, another, they all moved to the same lavender dance.

Words still hummed in time with the beat, winding their way in along those vines. If Culi’d had the capacity to think about it, she might have thought about just how right her Lady was. Culi really needed to get out with Her more. Culi really could use more social time. Culi didn’t need to offer such token resistances to a good-faith invitation. It was so much easier to just agree, wasn’t it? “That’s right,” the rhythm sang. So much better to agree.

“And don’t you agree that it’s nice to wake up for me?”

Aculiata nearly collapsed as the rhythm she’d been riding upon pulled out from beneath her. Startled, dazed, still seeking that guidance, she let her senses dance around the room, looking for something to latch onto. Motion, color, the rustling of a corridor’s bustle; in a handful of distinct revelations, awareness returned to her. Oh. When had she even started to…

One of Lysanthae’s tendrils disentangled itself from her vines, where it had been settled as a subtle support structure, and caressed across several of Aculiata’s more tender shoots. “With me again, Culi?” She teased, as Aculiata pieced together the last… how long had it been?

“Mostly,” she replied belatedly, “I think.” She straightened herself out, not daring to connect too closely with Lysanthae for support, lest she fall right back into that singular beat. “How long was I, ah…” She checked the time on her tablet before Lysa could answer the question, and near-immediately tensed to move. “Oh, dirt! Lysa, we need to hurry, the ship’s going to move at any moment!”

Lysa simply giggled, offering Aculiata one more tug through a doorway she hadn’t noticed that they’d stopped beside. “We’re already there, ditz. Didn’t you notice?” Lysa paused, only long enough to allow Aculiata to realize she was correct, and too short for her to actually formulate a response. “No,” she teased. “Of course you didn’t.”

With that, she disentangled fully, pulling away to anchor herself for vector change on a nearby set of hardpoints. Aculiata did the same, though not without a quick check from Lysa to ensure that she was, in her slightly-fuzzy state, actually secure. The weight of gravity’s downward force gave way to the acceleration of a burn, settling her gently against the wall, and outside, the great hydrogen-cloud masses began to fall away. Holding her excitement aside, she let herself dwell on Lysanthae’s words, and how good it had felt to be so easy for them.

Did she have to look so smug about it, though?

Of course they followed.

Cassiopeia screamed in both frustration and exertion as she forced the ship into a sudden starboard burn, overriding the g-safeties as she tried to outmaneuver the spray of uranium-core micropellets blooming across her display. The bulk of the cone passed her by, and those that made contact only scraped the paint and cast off a shower of sparks that the vacuum of space just as quickly extinguished. Not a perfect evasion, but not so unlucky as the first shotgun volley that had struck her dead on. She winced, reminded of the burning pain in her gut, and the warmth that slowly leached from her body onto the cold gray of her flight suit.

At least the g-forces seemed to be keeping her blood inside her, for now. She was nearing the point of closest approach, and already well into her slingshot burn. The point of no return had come and gone five minutes ago, and still the five interceptors dogged her. Fucking zealots! Don’t you want to live?!

She’d bet on the thought that most of them did. They’d been her friends, after all - certainly not so fanatical as to suffer certain death coming after her. This wasn’t like them!

Or maybe I just didn’t know them that well at all.

Guilt bit at Cassiopeia’s heels just as tenaciously as the fighters. Maybe they’d thought the same, that they knew her, that they could trust her. Maybe that’s why they were willing to die, to repay her cruel betrayal. And now, with her own fuel reserves dropping, countermeasures depleted, last hope of escape in a sub-light ship dashed against the clouds below, she’d get just what was coming to her.

In hindsight, she thought, I really could have planned this better.

A chime blipped on the display she’d stowed behind her seat, but Cass hardly had the time to check it. Her pursuers had lobbed another pulse missile at her, and if she let it within two hundred meters of her ship, she could say goodbye to any of the unshielded electrical systems. Fortunately, those only included all of the ones she needed to stay alive.

“Okay,” she muttered aloud, putting together the last-second maneuver in her head. “Five-G prograde burn at five hundred meters, and a hundred and fifty meter spike down.” If it went perfectly, the missile would lose her in her exhaust trail, detonate based on her perceived trajectory at eighty meters or so, and she’d skate by just beyond its effective range. If it went perfectly.

Given how her day had been going, she’d be lucky not to stumble onto a secret Free Terran battleship. She imagined knocking on a piece of wood, something obviously quite rare if people had once thought it could ward off poor fortune, before checking her scopes to see how far that misfortune extended. Five green chevrons behind her, and a sixth triangle, somewhat smaller, closing far more quickly. Thirty kilometers, twenty-nine, twenty-eight…

She rolled the horizontal stick further forward, and let Newton’s merciless forces push her further back in her seat. A bit more speed would widen her window, giving her maybe three-quarters of a second to react instead of half. Even so, her bones already ached, her heart was begging for mercy, her lungs felt heavier with every breath. Was it reasonable to hate a physicist? Certainly, he didn’t define the rules, but perhaps if he and every other physicist had just gone home and taken a day off from whatever tree they were thinking under, she could have had a nice, comfortable life as a farmer, milking horses or whatever people did on Earth before physicists and capitalists decided everyone needed to be a Zero-G welder or screw-factory sorter.

Yeah, she decided, summoning what little spite she could manage. Fuck Newton, fuck Goddard, and fuck the Accord for getting us in this mess at all.

Again, the stowed display beckoned for her attention. Two chimes, this time. “Not now, Blue,” Cass grumbled, trying to force a lightheartedness she didn’t feel into her voice. “I’m busy trying to insult an entire discipline.”

Seven. Six. Five. Cass braced herself, preparing herself for the fractional-second maneuver that might buy her five more minutes to live. Two. One.

Another chime. Cass didn’t even notice it, as her wound burnt white-hot, her ship’s hull screamed in violent protest to the stress it was under, her vision dimmed, threatening to fade. The G-force indicator spun somewhere into the red, but turning her head to look at it would surely snap her neck. From the reaction bell of her vessel, a plume of hydrogen expanded, mixed with as many obfuscating supplements as she had left to pour in, and her rear-facing sensors went blind.

She held her breath. One second. Two. After three seconds, two and a half longer than she’d have needed to tell if it worked, she finally let off on the controls, and forced fresh air into her starved, aching lungs. She’d done it. As she diverted coolant and lubricant back to the now-starved mechanisms that demanded them, her thruster plume cleared, and she let her scopes update. Another missile defeated, on to the next.

But where was the next? Her scopes hadn’t changed. It still showed the five ships pursuing her, at the same distance as when she’d lost their signatures. The trail of the missile was still clearly marked, with no detonation radius etched a hair’s edge behind her flight path. Dammit, had it taken out her sensors after all?

She pressed her helmet to the cockpit display glass, hoping to get a look out at the edge of her sensor array, expecting to see it sparking and scorched. It took only a second for her to see that it was entirely unharmed, and a couple more to realize that it was now the least of her concerns.

The clouds of the gas giant below were vast, billowing, magnificent enough to make her feel insignificant even from this distance. But now? They had begun to blossom, a figure too colossal to be anything but a cloud rising in violets and verdigris from the stratocumulus hydrogen veil. Perhaps, she deluded herself, the missile had struck true, and somehow her displays had malfunctioned to show this artifact? Cass lacked enough faith in her imagination to suggest what else it might be.

Another sweep of the green radar line dispelled all those thoughts, as the titanic figure projected itself across her scopes. The not-to-scale diamond used to mark unidentified targets was entirely eclipsed by the registered shape of it, the radar’s computer flickering between classifying it as terrain and an outright error. Cass dismissed the radar alert. What could it tell her, that some part of her hadn’t already realized?

The last wisps of cloud fell away from the waking titan, and Cass abandoned what doubt her exhaustion-addled imagination had offered. A conical spire laid upon its side, stretching out for kilometer after kilometer - tens? A hundred? Five rings encompassed it, decreasing in size from back to front, each with what appeared to be a different shade of petals curling up upon them. Clearly, they were too massive to spin, certain to tear themselves apart under their own mass, and yet it was clear by their design that they would do so with all the elegance and grace of a ship a hundredth its size. Under acceleration, the petals had flared out, allowing the ship’s thrust to supplant their impossible spin gravity.

All that, and not a cable nor comms mast seemed out of place. Every curve of the hull, every woven tube fashioned like a vine encircling its sides, appeared as organic yet sculpted as a statue from some executive’s garden, and yet, somehow less false in its curation. Colors blended in welcoming hues, leaves rippled like canvas sails in the hydrogen wind, and even the point of the spire, which could have easily been the flower’s cruel thorn, instead tapered gently in the image of a delicate pistil.

So fixated was she on a ship that only gods could have made, that she didn’t even hear the first blip of an incoming transmission. Only after the blip elevated to a beep and then a buzz did she finally pull back from the faux windows, slump limply in her chair, and press the button that conceded to and quelled the alert.

“Hellooo!” sang a voice so sweet as to make Cassiopea’s teeth hurt. She hadn’t exactly expected menace from the Affini, but already this was a bit much. “Cassiopeia Kirst, this is Captain Ameminie, of Affini Compact vessel Cylina’s Mantle! We hear your transmission, and your request for asylum has been accepted!”

Right. That was it, then. Fuck. She’d made it.

About to dissociate into an exhausted stupor, Cass was only roused by a belated addition to the transmission, one that teased chills into her chest.

“Just hold on, cutie. We’ll see you soon.”