The Sea is Full of Stars

An eerie, terrible clicking sound now began all around the Gate, echoing back and magnifying itself as it hit the walls and bounced back again and again. There were still some explosions, and some fire, but it was slowly coming to a halt.

The clicking grew even louder, more rhythmic, coming from the great beetlelike troops of the Jerminians. A cheer of sorts, made with stiff flightless wings and hard mandibles, a terrible, mechanistic cheer…

There was some fighting, apparently fierce fighting, still going on in the room-to-room conquest of the two great buildings on the inside walls, but for the most part it was over.

The forces of the New Empire held the center, and the only escape route, of the Ochoan nation.

At that news, one of the Jerminian officers left his position at the rear and moved quickly up and toward the Well Gate. “We want a basic report from all the units in immediate engagement here,” he told his aides. “As soon as possible, bring in the main supplies and fortify both this area and the four points on the crater rim. Any dead bodies nobody wants to eat, our or theirs, should be thrown into the Gate. Dead, they won’t be transported, they will simply be returned to energy. Move! I want you, Captain, to go through the Gate and report as quickly as possible to our ambassadors, who will be waiting there eagerly for your report.”

“At once, Excellency!” the officer responded, and junior officers were suddenly on all fours, at great speed trying to reach the key battle points.

It took about an hour just to compile the handwritten preliminaries, but the results were quite good. Even so, the losses were far above expectation.

“These creatures fought extremely well and with much bravery,” the General heard over and over. “Not a one surrendered. Some of the ones in the buildings used underground escape routes, and the last detachment here at the Well Gate got some of its survivors back into Zone, but that’s about it. Our casualties, though, were over thirty percent. Much higher, and against what appears to be far lower numbers than we anticipated.”

“That just means they sent off brigades to reinforce the castles under siege as we planned,” the General reassured them. “Even so, I agree. When we completely subdue this place, the survivors—and there will be a surrender sooner or later if only to save the race from extinction—will make up the nucleus of what we’ve lacked up to now—a flying division.” He looked over the reports, initialed them with his own distinctive digestive spit, then handed them back to the Captain. “Go now. Others will be sent as progress reports come in from elsewhere. I’d say that this is probably sufficient, though, to have one of our ambassadors serve a formal demand for unconditional surrender at the Ochoan Embassy.”

The Captain gave a salute with six of its eight limbs, men walked with the dispatches toward the Well Gate, past the ruins of the last gun emplacements. It made him feel proud to see this, the absolute, total victory after only a few hours’ hard fight! He was certain that the whole of his hive would also be proud, and that Her Majesty would have great rewards for the officers, perhaps even taking them into the consort, since only she could bear young. It would be an honor to consummate and then be eaten by the queen; such a one would be reincarnated as a potential queen itself!

Without hesitation, the Captain walked into the Well Gate, passed through the sensation of falling and arrival, and walked out, still going, yelling excitedly for any and all to hear, “The Imperial Army and Navy have won a great victory at O—” He suddenly slowed, looking first to one side of the corridor, then to the other. “—choa,” he completed, the last almost dying in his thorax.

The corridor was lined with Ochoan soldiers looking very healthy and fully armed. They flanked both sides of the corridor and had closed in behind him, and now they seemed to stretch on and on…

He had no choice. Besides, he was on neutral ground, by treaty and by right. He reached the end of the corridor and turned toward the Jerminian Embassy, wishing it were a lot closer, and found his way blocked by, of all things, a Kalindan in some kind of wheelchair. He did not know it was a Kalindan, but he recognized it as a water creature.

“Come ahead, Captain,” the Kalindan said. “Please, go on. We all want to hear your report.”

Ochoan Embassy, South Zone

Nakitti’s heart was breaking as she tended to her Baron, unconscious and still occasionally screaming in his nightmares in the aftermath of being operated on by the Imperial Surgeon herself. She almost had a heart attack just seeing him with all that horrible blood. It turned out that most of it wasn’t his, but he had several serious tears in both wings, a chunk out of his left leg—which might have to be amputated—and a serious wound in his side that had punctured a lung. With the kind of technology and research available at Zone, the Imperial Surgeon had been able to do things they could not have done back in Ochoa, but he’d lost a lot of blood and suffered a lot of damage.

Still, if he survived, a male with wounds like those, the Baron would have more power than any male in Ochoan history and a hell of a lot more than his uncle the King.

Curiously, Nakitti realized it didn’t matter to her how much power he’d gain. He’d been so handsome; now there were nicks on that gorgeous head from ricochets, he might never walk again, and he also might never fly, if he even got the chance, since he could die from loss of blood or infection. If she could take on those injuries and leave him whole, she would gladly surrender her position, go back to that hole in the wall and live out her life in obscurity with some low slob.

The feeling, the honest devotion, surprised, even shocked, her, and would certainly have shocked and surprised anyone who knew her. Hell, maybe it was becoming female or something, she thought; but it was the Ochoan women who did the fighting, and they seemed far less sentimental than the men, and the Ghoman women were all back-stabbing cheats even worse than their men. No, it wasn’t that she was female or Ochoan.

Who’d have thought it, though? That she would find something she cared more about than her own life and fortune. It was utterly incredible.

What happened even back in Ochoa was of little concern to her right now. She was going to be right here for him no matter what, and, to hell with social rank and convention, she would never leave his side again.

Ochoa, at the Zone Gate

“Where are those supply troops, the diggers, and the reinforcements?” the General grumbled. “And what are so many of the zi’iaphods doing coming back empty and landing over there? We need to get set up here and we need to do it now!”

“Sir, we’ve just come from the empty ones returning here,” a colonel replied, “and things are bad. We know where most of the missing Ochoan troops were now. While we fought it out here, waves of them fell upon our ships, which had little air cover, shooting those damned rockets and dropping some kind of containers that exploded into the kind of flames that could not be put out, some kind of chemical fire. They took out our supply ships and troop ships, and ignored the battle cruisers and frigates entirely. We got a lot of them with gunfire, but, sir, they took out more than half our supplies and over ten thousand troops— and now the zi’iaphod pilots have nowhere to land except back here on the ground. They tried putting down inland, in areas with a fair amount of vegetation and food, with the idea of feeding and watering the zi’iaphods and perhaps gathering supplies to bring here, but every time they came down, Ochoans seemed to pop up as if out of the ground and throw fragmentation grenades and shoot mortars that rained down. The only secure place for them in any numbers was back here.”

“I don’t like this at all,” the General mumbled. “If they could do that, then they not only knew we were coming, they had to know our precise plan of battle. There’s treason in the air here! Treason! And these little bastards die like great warriors even though they have no tradition of it, and they just don’t quit! I don’t like it. I want everyone drawn in closer to the Gate here. Leave sentries all over the top, but bring all the forces here. I smell something very nasty here, and if we are in some kind of trap, the Gate may be our only way of escape. Move!