Because I am a fleet admiral, I am at the highest field level of command in the interstellar fleet I serve, but at the lowest level of distribution of resources. Above me there is a set of official bureaucrats, below me a set of fleet captains and commodores (although commodores and rear admirals and vice admirals and full fleet admirals pretty much run together in an overstretched fleet) who don't have to deal with the people of our same official rank that control things we need to do what the political officials above all of us have decided should be done.
I get to sit in on meetings with all of these “above” people, and this was actually the most stressful thing about being a full fleet admiral who came up by the science track. It is harder when you know people are talking nonsense, and people had been talking nonsense about the Voracir System and its most infamous planet – Devorandum Aqua – for more than 20 years.
The powers that be had allowed themselves to be manipulated into declaring Devorandum Aqua a Unique Planet in spite of all the science against doing that, against the clear and present danger that existed to all of the Voracir worlds that were being settled by sentient beings for the first time. The officials had put all those people into the path of a disaster the fleet would be powerless to stop – all beings on Devorandum Aqua had protected status and could not be eradicated.
I watched Devorandum Aqua's gem-jellies fly by every day, and it was a special source of anguish to me because I had known they were coming 22 years earlier. I was the science officer who had put forth the alarm that had been muffled and then buried.
Now, I was the admiral who had to attend these meetings and the arguments about what to do while the the things kept flying by and the commodores and captains with me who were setting up deterrent systems around the 19 Voracir worlds could scarcely avoid getting their ships nibbled out of service – even with an iron fluoride protective coat, they were hacked at, because gem-jelly babies didn't know what they couldn't eat until they tasted it.
And even that was halted the second month of the work, along with the one lethal method we had: once the babies landed on another Voracir world, they were invasive, and we could destroy them individually by letting them gorge themselves on food they could not digest – but even that was stopped, three weeks in, because there was a new argument: the entire life cycle of the system just might depend on every world being eaten up every 500 years and regenerating. The native creatures of the Voracir worlds were adapted to this, and the offspring of both flora and fauna on all worlds was presently burrowing into the soil.
Now the argument was whether the sentient inhabitants of the Voracir system should just get out of the way of the “resetting of the ecological cycle” over the course of the next year.
I was at the meeting every day to merely say, “Field conditions dictate that we cannot even speak of evacuation in the middle of the hatching unless we have everything prepared in advance – private citizens are not equipped to get themselves out of the system safely, and since the fleet is not allowed to fire on the gem-jellies, we cannot adequately protect them should they decide to evacuate themselves.”
There was not enough iron fluoride in a thousand light-years to electroplate every private vessel that would need that level of protection to survive traveling the Voracir system at that moment in time. My fleet was already protected, but we would need ten times as many fleet ships to handle the evacuation ourselves. Long before we could get there, panic would spread to the point that people wouldn't wait – and they would die by the thousands as, in essence, the entire system had become an extension of the horror that was Devorandum Aqua.
And then – as the science had suggested might occur every third hatching – a creature from another system came to join the fray.
Not all hatchings of gem-jellies from Devorandum Aqua had been created equal – every so often, the Thuttons from the nearby Thutmose System would come and chomp down, literally, and cut the numbers of the surviving gem-jellies way down.
When a Thutton “speaks,” people listen – it used a massive energy wave to stun its favorite prey, and that wave hit solid objects with a sound like an immense bass voice saying “THUT-TON!”
Even the sturdy Odabella, my favorite flagship, was pushed backwards a few kilometers when accidentally flying too near one of those waves at just a quarter-impulse.
The Thuttons stunned dozens of gem-jellies at a time and then went in and had their way, making the Voracir system a true extension of Devorandum Aqua indeed – the eaters were being eaten!
I found myself weeping for joy as I described the early scenes to my fiance, freighter captain M.A. Kirk Jr. of Kirk and Dixon Shipping. He smiled.
“My business partner, Captain Rufus Dixon, always says that 'We just have to get up every day and do what the Lord has for us to do, because He never goes to bed and is always doing what He means to do – including rescuing stressed-out admirals and soon-to-panic humans and humanoids by feeding a 1,500-year hatching of Thuttons!”
Now, all the people who were talking about “the natural process of the ecological reset needs to be allowed to happen” were screaming, wanting the fleet to wipe out the Thuttons.
I said no on the basis of the fact that it couldn't been done without harming the protected species that were in too near a proximity, and my superiors declined to contradict me.
I said no on the basis of the fact that the Thuttons were a part of the reset, as much of the natural cycle as the gem-jellies, and my superiors declined to contradict me.
I said no on the basis of the fact that now that the gem-jellies had to adapt their behavior to avoid being eaten themselves, we might in another month have the best chance possible to evacuate all the Voracir worlds without great loss if that was the decision. My superiors declined to contradict me.
Some of the sweetest music I ever heard in life was the bass ensemble from the Thutmose System, singing as they came to eat gem-jellies in the Voracir System. Turns out they did harmonize as they hunted, and when the spreading of those waves contacted our fleet ships even at distance, we could hear the chords as they rung the resonances of the metals in our ships. I slept well as well as I ever would in the Voracir System because of the constant serenade:
“THUT-TON! THUT-TON! THUT-TON!”
*This is an earlier rendering of the same fractal as "The Stellar Sailors" in Apophysis ... this particular fractal on this particular palette yielded a great deal to me, and I may not be quite done yet... *