The Long Shot Pt. 14

"Calm down! Calm down!"

Silence came.

"...I have...some bad news."

Tulon listened and heard the bad news. But as she heard the bad news, she heard in it a promise of something new and better. She had been shown a map of the galaxy -- and as timetables and outlines were put forward, she saw in that map of the galaxy a shift, a change. A change that would bring her world something that she had never imagined...and bring her something she had wanted for what felt like her entire life now. Ever since Gyre had incinerated the ship underneath her, she had wanted this. Whole lifetimes had passed since that moment, marked by her change of view.

And now, at last, she saw the change, the shape of the future before almost anyone else.

The bad news was very bad news.

The countermeasure was not...an off switch.

It was not a program.

If it had been an off switch, if it had been a program, then the people who had built the Voidbringers, that had unleashed the Abomination, would have simply flipped that switch, wouldn't they? Even Tulon could understand that, as Roxi put her head in her hands and cried quietly, even as Gyre punched the wall and cracked stone in his frustration and fury.

The countermeasure was castle.

Or a canon.

Or a siege work.

Something vast and complicated and requiring the labor of years to build.

By the time the Andromedians had known of how to make the countermeasure, their galaxy had already been consumed. Even Tulon could understand that it was impossible to build a castle after your town had been sacked. But now? They had the blueprints.

And Tulon had seen that galactic map.

She had seen the many light years, the decades of time that even a terrible, godlike monster, would take to cross that vast gulf of space to come to her home.

The time needed to build a fort.

The time to take that long shot.

It would be found here, on her home. And with it would come the magic -- the technology -- needed to bring her people a brighter future.

And, at last.

To bring her husband back.

***

EPILOGUE

The ship and the sailor sat on the sand and looked at the sun overhead. The faint banding of the Sword could just, barely, be seen. What was more visible was the boreal flashes that swept up and down from the sun, spearing into space and fading away slowly over time, like smears on the eyes.

The ship could look right at the sun, but the sailor needed a pair of intelligent goggles, which shifted their hue faintly.

"That's another one," the sailor said, her voice soft.

"Yup," the ship said, his voice stronger than the sailor's. "Think they'll be sending us out to check the area?"

"You, maybe..." The sailor said. Her wrinkled hands laced behind her neck as she very slowly laid herself back into the warm...warm sand. The sailor had gone, many many times, as the Sword had been built. There had been so many battles that had needed her. It turned out, the ability to fight underwater translated a great deal to fighting in a different kind of killing environment. A mind suited to three dimensional aquatic motion could learn the many dimension of interstellar motion better than most.

The sailor had been there...

She had been there at Draxi VI, where five hundred million people had been plucked from the jaws of destruction by her and her comrades with x-beams and grazers and the new E-cutters blazing. She had been there at Gorash, where the entire front had been stabilized by the right application of gravitational force using a crusher bomb, strapped to the hull of an autopiloted shuttle. She had been there...she had been there at Firen and Brisgo Gap (famous now, for the second battle there, not the first) and even at the Siege of Arlenlaylen.

So many battles.

All of them purely to buy time.

"Are you really going to turn them down?" the ship asked, then stood, smiling as he put his hands on his hips. "Even after all these years?"

"I'm a sailor," the sailor said, her eyes half closed. "And I've sailed enough, I think."

The ship sighed. Despite his smile, despite his jaunty attitude, the shadows that cast along his face only accentuated his concern.

"My love-"

"I'm going to enjoy the beach a bit more. You go on ahead."

The sailor remained there as the ship stepped away. He glanced back, and listened to a voice inside of his head. That voice had known the sailor even longer -- and knew that she had only become more stubborn in her old age.

The sailor opened her eyes to slits.

The Sword fired again -- another boreal slash. The energies released were still barely understood...but where they swept, the enemy didn't simply die. They ceased to be. Vast swaths of hydrogen replaced them, creating visible clouds of nebular gasses. Hypothesis abounded that the irregular smear of the galaxy would become bright and shining with new stars, possibly within the lifetime of some people.

But not in the Sailor's.

She had sailed seas.

She had sailed stars.

And she had sailed enough.

She closed one eyes, and heard the waves of her home crashing on the shore.

She lifted her arm.

Sighted along her finger -- a gesture alien to a youth of spearfishing -- and aimed at the smear of space where stars did not shine, where the enemy lurked and did not understand what was killing them. Because, at the end of the day, the enemy had always been profoundly stupid.

"Bang," she said.

And closed her eyes.

THE END