Things I preferred not to think about as a full fleet admiral of advancing age: if I had been married for 19 years, then it had been almost 20 years since I had led the evacuation of the Voracir system because Devorandum Aqua's gem-jellies had colonized all the other Voracir worlds and had been happily eating everything there down to the soil.
Human resettlement had been banned for 20 years, but that time was almost up.
Of course, the mature gem-jellies had not made their return journey to their homeworld and oceans, so everyone knew the time for resettlement of the Voracir worlds for the next 500 years was not yet at hand. That was just good science.
People don't give two dead files on any world about good science when they have been sitting around mad because they had to leave their dreams behind, and in the 23rd century, 20 years is not that long in terms of human lifespan as it was in previous centuries.
I am a quarter-Vulcan, so 20 years is not as long for me as it would be for a fully human woman.
But I had already put in 41 years with Devorandum Aqua, having studied it as a science officer ranking then as a lieutenant commander. My recommendation, looking from the view of the hundreds of millions of humans and humanoids in danger from the gem-jellies' 500-year cycle of turning their whole system into a magnification of the horror of constant devouring that Devorandum Aqua's tranquil-seeming yellow seas are, was just to blow the planet up and leave a gravity buoy in its place.
Further research determined that the Voracir worlds might depend on the eat-down for their own renewal, so, 22 years later, with gem-jellies and their natural predators the Thuttons flying around, I led the evacuation process of all 250 million settlers of the Voracir worlds.
Life had gone on: I married at age 55 to Capt. Marcus Aurelius Kirk Jr., and we had five children as I slowly went from already semi-retired – that's life for a full fleet admiral anyhow – to more like three-quarters retired. My proteges over the years were doing wonderful work in the fleet on the scientific side, and rarely did anything require me to put together a full fleet.
But in the back of my mind, after 41 years of experience, I knew people were just not going to leave Devorandum Aqua alone. People had kept sneaking in and trying to export products from there, and the danger of something from Devorandum Aqua's ravenous seas becoming invasive in other worlds' oceans was clear and present. Still, it had been controlled for 19 years, as far as I knew.
There was also the possibility that Devorandum Aqua also still had space-going lifeforms as well, and there was a team that reported directly to me that worked on that question. Different personnel came and went on that team – 19 years is not a short time – but the general consensus was that it was possible. My own research had not discovered the trigger for the gem-jellies to decide when to return home, and, there was also mounting evidence that while the gem-jellies themselves worked on a 500-year cycle and the Thuttons who hunted them in some cycles worked in a 1,500-year cycle, there was at least one longer cycle to account for that overlapped with the largest Thutton cycles.
Something was missing – we simply did not have enough observation to discover what it was until it arrived.
Web ticks – that's probably the best way to describe the creatures that came up from Devorandum Aqua in the 19th year after the gem-jellies departed. One might also have thought of them as communal space spiders as up they came and webbed up the entire planet's atmosphere while feasting on its ozone.
In other words, Devorandum Aqua had spawned something that theoretically could destroy all of its life – light and heat levels were dropping fast, and the ozone layer being stripped and letting more star energy through was not going to be a happy balance.
My first concern was to make absolutely sure Devorandum Aqua died alone – never mind all its gem-jellies being stranded on all the other Voracir worlds and eventually starving. Those web ticks grabbed onto passing vessels that wanted too close of a look, and they could colonize any M-class ionosphere. They reproduced with ridiculous speed once established, so decontamination processes had to be set up for all ships going to and from the Voracir system to observe.
Meanwhile, the lack of heat and light on Devorandum Aqua was producing changes not seen in thousands of years … something else was about to hatch, and from even initial readings we knew that it was going to be bigger and more energetic than the web ticks webbing up the entire planet.
Admiral E.W. Lee, my old friend, had admirably handled all things up to that point, but made the call.
“Madame Admiral, I think you had better get out here in person.”
Admiral Lee's fleet would become a wing of mine, and, I called on my protege Admiral Amarirenas to lead the other wing while I commanded from my favorite flagship – the Odabella,19 years after my leading my first fleet to the Voracir system, was still in service.
Meanwhile, something else was heading in that direction – a massive comet. I had accounted for that 41 years earlier. It was not a surprise, but a further mystery, because no comet had ever completed an orbit although its flight path said that each should be able to.
All comets in the Voracir system, interestingly, came very close to the eleventh planet in the system – Devorandum Aqua.
“No, Vlarian, no, that can't be possible,” my old friend had said to me when we were both still lieutenant commanders 41 years earlier. “I mean, don't even think about it – too much learning will make you mad.”
41 years later, when I arrived, he simply said, “I could have been wrong, Admiral – look at these readings.”
Admiral Amanirenas and I both looked, and then looked at each other.
“Well,” I said, “if Devorandum Aqua has not shown us the unthinkable before, we certainly are going to see it now.”
One shocking pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09, the sibling of the Ruffle King!
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