The next day, TFS Proxima, the SCIF.Fleet Admiral Bianchi had decided to gather a debriefing question list, considering Joon-ho was incapable of remaining in a mana void for any length of time, lest he risk collapse and death. Laifu had explained his situation the night before during their conversation before returning control of Ayaka’s body to her. It had been quite a surreal experience for the admiral, and he was still contemplating the ramifications of Ayaka’s new mana attunement. It wasn’t every day that you met one of the beings that governed all of existence, after all.“As you were,” he said to the rest of the people in the room, who had stood to attention as he’d entered. “Since Warrant Officer Lee is... otherwise occupied, my chief of staff will be collecting the questions your sections have for him.”Everyone at the table was silent.“None of you have any questions?” he asked.“No. We simply don’t know enough to know what we don’t know, Admiral,” Dr. Standing Bear finally
Ayaka and Joon-ho looked over their orders, which were incredibly broad. Normally, military orders would provide detail after detail, along with multiple contingencies at every escalation step up to and including planetary destruction.Thanks to training in the simulation, they even knew what a planet looked like after being hit by one of the spinal-mounted planetkiller coilguns mounted on some of the TFS ships. And they also knew what would happen if even a TES exploration cruiser were to continuously bombard a planet with their spinal-mounted coilguns.It only took the two a few minutes before Ayaka began asking questions. “Who is going to be assigned to our task force, Admiral?” she asked.“Whoever you need, Captain. You have full authority and first priority to pick whomever you think you’ll need on your team.”“What about materiel, Sir? It simply says here that we’ll have ‘full access to any and all necessary resources.’”“Full access means full access. You even have first priori
The wildly corkscrewing lander entered the atmosphere at combat speed, echoing sonic booms and contrails of moisture in its wake, tinted black and gray by the fireball of superheated air surrounding the craft itself. Soon, though, the smoke, fire, and vapor dissipated as the pilot brought the lander to a sudden halt just a meter above the ground, then smoothly drifted down the rest of the way until the deployed landing skids took up the weight of the craft without a single jostle or bump.The indicator light in the passenger cabin switched from red back to a warm amber as the pilot’s voice came over the intercom. “We’re on the ground,” the pilot announced to the diplomats. Luckily it was also transmitted directly to their implants, because none of the five members of the diplomatic mission could actually hear the announcement over the sound of their own retching.“Thank god,” Ayaka sighed, then closed her eyes and focused on what she was feeling in her toes to take her mind off her st
“We are... pleased to meet you, Commander—excuse me, Captain—Takahashi, plenipotentiary representative of the Terran Empire,” Birch said, extending her hand to shake Ayaka’s. She paid no attention to the marine guard contingent standing like statues, weapons in hand—albeit politely pointed toward the ground—and rendered anonymous by their unmarked SLEEK suits. “I am Birch, and through me you may speak to Oak, Crabapple, Mangrove, and Cypress as well.”“Thank you for seeing us on such short notice, Lady Birch, and the others as well,” Ayaka said, taking Birch’s hand and politely shaking it. Her other hand signaled the rest of the diplomats, then she broke the environment seal on her SLEEK suit and removed her helmet, followed by the three remaining diplomats. “These are my colleagues: George Stefanopolous, an expert in contractual and treaty law—”“Pleasure, Lady Birch,” George said with a slight bow of his head.“Dr. Leigh Ayers-MacDougall, a xenobotanist expert and the scientific adv
Ayaka took a moment to compose herself, then squared her shoulders and faced Birch. “But right now we have more pressing matters to consider. We’ll take you up on your gracious offer of a memorial in the future, but we need to know more about your children, and the children of your compatriots,” she said. “How mature, mentally and emotionally speaking, will they be when they’re... born?”“That is an excellent question, Captain. We discussed it among ourselves and decided that it wouldn’t be cost-effective, in terms of mana expenditure, to raise them to the maturity level of Joon-ho when they’re first born. But that was only a contributing factor to the eventual decision.... What was more important was that we learned from him that individuals that aren’t part of a collective, as we are, are shaped and formed by their experiences.“So if we were to artificially implant Joon-ho’s experiences into our children, they would be born with the same inspirations, hopes, and plans that he has w
Hours passed as George and Birch negotiated, seated at a table she had grown for the specific purpose.“What do you mean ‘provisional’ citizenship, Lady Birch?”“We cannot promise full and lasting entry into the empire as an auxiliary society without first meeting the very emperor we would be swearing our allegiance to, can we, Mr. Stefanopolous?”“Well, if you put it that way... no, that’s an unreasonable request.” George pondered for a moment, then continued, “Very well, I can accept that in our tentative agreement.”“How will you meet the emperor?” Ayaka asked. She agreed that the meeting would be of pivotal importance to both societies, but the logistics of facilitating such a meeting would be an absolute nightmare. Even at their ships’ fastest speed, it would require the emperor of humanity to be absent from Earth for a full year. And that didn’t take into account the length of time he would need to spend on Proxima Centauri b.“We have no idea,” Birch answered. “But until we per
TFS Proxima, the SCIF.“That’s everything we discussed, Sir,” Ayaka said, ending her report to the fleet admiral.He took a moment to consider the information; the meeting had gone in a direction he couldn’t possibly have expected. Initially, he’d expected the worst, given the early hostilities between the trees and humans, and had thought there would be some misunderstandings or ideological differences between the species. But though there were indeed misunderstandings and ideological differences, the misunderstandings had been cleared up and the ideological differences resolved through the brilliant policy of “it doesn’t matter”. Joon-ho’s experiences with them had already indicated that the trees were a tolerant, forgiving, and compassionate species, but as a lifelong military man, Fleet Admiral Bianchi had a decided pessimistic bent to his thought process. And now that he had heard Ayaka’s report, his skepticism was beginning to wane and he was feeling rather... optimistic, a sta
A month after the initial diplomatic contact, the frantic period of activity in the protostellar forge finally came to an end. Ten billion VR pods had been rolled off the production lines in the space of four short weeks; the fleet engineers had truly lived up to their motto—the impossible had been accomplished, it had just taken a short time.Birch and the other treefolk had been invaluable to the herculean task, delaying the birth of their children and ensuring their safe transfer to the pods may have been easy for them, but without their aid, the entire effort would have failed.As the pods were filled with occupants, they were activated on stasis mode, waiting for the quantum superclusters to come online to generate a VR environment conducive to raising and educating them. And during the wait, the researchers of the task force were practically driven insane by the wealth of data generated by their scans. After the initial building and transplantation efforts, it fell to the scient