D’armic reclined in the command cave of his Bureau of Frontier Resources cutter and watched the swarm of black dots approach. They were the legendary burgeron herds, and like so many things in the universe, their small appearance was a matter of perspective.
The mottled gray Lividite pointed two fingers at the view screen and spread them into a V. The image zoomed in on the swarm of tiny specks backlit by the Tekis Nebula’s primary star. From this direction, they appeared as little more than perfect disks, dark as the lava tubes where his ancestors had found shelter from an unsympathetic world. Lividites were the only known example of sentient life to develop at the bottom of the food chain. Quick wits were all that kept them out of the mouths of nearly everything else on the planet, including certain decorative plants. They had an old joke: “On Lividite home world, livestock domesticates you.” No one said it was a good joke.
The herd approached with impressive speed, each dot expanding like a drop of oil across the surface of a pond while the nebula’s clouds of ionized gas glowed in blues and greens behind them. For once, D’armic was not alone. A menagerie of vessels took up position in the space around the burgeron herd. Like him, they’d come to witness a spectacle decades in the making.
There were two other BFR cutters, a wildlife documentary crew, cruise ships filled with tourists, and a Turemok patrol cruiser to ensure no one tried to leave with a trophy. The whole scene felt like one huge, disorganized festival.
D’armic reflected on the crowds. Most of his time on the frontier was spent in isolation. His experiences had been solitary, excluded. Was that part of the problem? Other species held events that brought together thousands, even millions of individuals. Perhaps communal experiences amplified emotions like a resonating chamber. He would know soon, the burgeron were about to arrive.
They were the largest animals ever discovered, so immense they dimmed the star behind them. The herd elders were the size of continents, but most of their vast surface area was no thicker than D’armic’s eyelids. Sunlight both propelled and warmed them as they trawled the space between the twin stars of the Tekis system, feeding off whatever stray bits of organic matter from the nebula they filtered along the way. Pinpricks of light shone through small tears left in their skin from passing meteors.
Not only were they the largest but the fastest life-forms ever found. At the apogee of their circuit between suns, they were moving at many thousands of larims per cenbit, a feat D’armic’s own people didn’t surpass until building gravity-driven vessels. The herd moved as one titanic organism. But even at their colossal speeds, it took many years to make the crossing between the companion stars. Today was a rare event; today was apogee.
As D’armic and the fleet of ships from the half dozen member races of the Assembly of Sentient Species watched, the herd of burgeron distorted their disks in unison. How they achieved such precise synchrony was still a mystery, owed in no small part to the difficulty of collecting and dissecting a specimen several orders of magnitude larger than the ships used to study them.
The slight bending caused the burgeron to somersault through the vacuum. They compressed into ever-shrinking ovals until floating edge-on toward D’armic’s cutter. Then disappeared almost entirely. All that remained were thousands of straight lines, thin as the Lipelum Blades carried by the ancient warrior sect of his people.
The coms were abuzz with six different equivalents of “Oooh, ahhh.” Except for D’armic’s; he was still waiting for the emotional wave to hit.
The burgeron continued their flip, again growing in apparent size. Something was different, however. The side they presented now was not black but metallic. D’armic knew it came from an atom-thin coating of aluminum and chromium harvested from the nebula. It allowed them to achieve their amazing speeds, not to mention slow down again.
The herd completed their flip, and the assembled crowd learned firsthand why burgeron was Nelikish for “wandering galaxy.” Like an ocean filled with mirrors, the herd caught the reflection of the star ahead of them. Thousands of points of light shone brighter than the rest of the Tekis Nebula.
The com channels exploded with the sounds of elation and amazement. The documentary ship swooped in for a closer view. The Turemok patrol cruiser edged in even closer to enforce a minimum distance. Soon, every ship was bustling to get as near to the herd as possible.
Every ship, that is, except for D’armic’s cutter. He possessed a bit of trivia about burgeron that everyone else had overlooked. Although their metabolisms were extremely efficient, burgeron still produced waste. But their microgravity environment and extreme speeds created a unique problem. Dumping waste at the wrong time meant potentially shooting themselves down with their own feces later. Not a great way to go. As a result, the burgeron herd relieved themselves only once per run, at the one time the waste was guaranteed not to catch up with them.
The volume and pitch of the dialogue from the fleet of spectators changed as the emissions from the herd of burgeron struck their ships. The Turemok cruiser, by virtue of being nearest to the source, caught the worst of the foul maelstrom and suffered damage, but its power output was stable and it wasn’t losing atmosphere. The odds were good the only casualty was the Vel’s pride.
D’armic took in the scene, analyzing each element in detail. After a few moments of consideration, he recognized that all the necessary elements for a terrific bit of lowbrow humor were present. Some in vast quantities. He appreciated how funny it should be, but felt nothing. Not even an impatient chuckle struggled for freedom. Even more sobering, he realized with even a low dose of Humoric, he would be laughing too hard to respire.
The Resentitol sitting in his medicine drawer tempted him. Wait, wasn’t temptation an emotion? But then what of longing for food or the urge to breathe? That required contemplation. He took a final scan of the burgeron herd. The spectator ships, leery of a repeat performance, gave them a wide berth.
Satisfied they posed little danger to the wildlife, he maneuvered deeper into the nebula. Like the immense herd in his wake, D’armic’s migration was ongoing. He had to move on. The buoy network inspection loomed. He’d neglected it for several cycles in favor of potentially more stimulating assignments. Had he been procrastinating?
Maybe without realizing it, he had been avoiding the buoys for fear of boredom. Was it possible that intense positive experiences had been the wrong tunnel to natural emotions? Suddenly very interested in the answer, D’armic plotted course for the closest buoy and swung his cutter around. Boredom might be his solution, and the buoy network was certain to have tedium by the bucketful. After all, every frontier manager knew nothing remotely interesting ever happened in the Human Wildlife Preserve.
* * *
Vel Noric looked out his crippled patrol cruiser’s view screen, or more accurately, tried to look out the view screen. While the substance covering the external optical sensors (as well as most of the rest of the hull) was unmentionable, it should be mentioned that it was as sticky as it was abundant.
“I don’t believe this karking glot,” he said, covering his eyes with a hand. “Ship’s status?”
The jumpy crewman at the mechanic’s station straightened with a quiver and scrolled through menus and sensor reports. He was still digging when Noric lost patience.
“Well? Out with it!”
“Um, I don’t have a status, Vel. The gl—” The mechanic’s officer caught himself and averted personal catastrophe. On a Turemok ship, obscenity was a privilege of status. Glot only rolled down the ranks. “The debris is interfering with most of our external sensors. I can’t get an accurate measure of the damage.” He seemed to shrink three centimeters when he finished.
“Well, then,” said Noric, “why don’t you start by telling me what is working?”
“Yes, Vel. We have primary and secondary power. Life support is unaffected, and there appears to be no structural damage. Shipboard gravity is functioning normally. High-space generators are charged, but the projectors are clogged with refuse.”
“Hedfer-Vel!” Noric shrieked from his command perch. “Hedfer-Vel!”
“Yes, Vel?” replied a small voice impossibly close to the Vel’s ear.
Noric jumped and swallowed a startled expletive. His second-in-command was much too quiet.
“I apologize for startling you, Vel,” said J’quol. “I assumed you were aware of my presence.”
Too quiet, and far too clever, thought the Vel. His junior officer’s carefully worded apology indirectly called Noric’s alertness into question. He could feel the eyes of the rest of the bridge crew settling on him.
“How long have you been skulking there?” Noric blurted, his anger regaining lost ground.
“Not long, Vel. Only a few rakims.” J’quol was irritatingly calm. Shouting would be less wasted on a statue.
“Get down to the mechanic’s nest and coordinate damage control,” Noric barked.
“Immediately, Vel.” He turned and walked purposefully off the bridge.
Noric had come to think of J’quol as a bertel tree, with its short stalk and branches exposed to the sun, but deep roots below anchoring it against mountain winds and avalanches; outwardly small, yet nearly immovable.
Noric searched for another target. “Tactical, activate the sheath. I won’t have these clawless tourists snapping vacation holos of my cruiser covered in glot.”
The tac officer hunched over his console, but what started as a flurry of activity slowed to a light flutter.
“Um, Vel?” the tac officer said. He looked like a bungee jumper realizing halfway down that he’d measured the bridge in yards, but bought the cord in meters.
“Allow me to guess. We can’t sheath.”
“Correct, Vel. The debris has coated two-thirds of our sheath manipulators. We’ll have to have them cleaned when we reach port.”
“Under no circumstances will this ship pull into port in this condition.” Noric’s voice was as slow and deliberate as a lit fuse.
The tac officer mistook it for genuine calm. “But cleanup will take forever without a port!”
Noric’s eyes shrank to pinpoints. “Then imagine how much longer it will take using your scale brush.” The weight of his gaze buckled the tac officer’s knees. “Get in a hard-suit and report to the Hedfer-Vel for scrubbing detail.”
The tac officer shut down his console and slunk from the bridge, crest flat against his head.
Noric continued, “And the next blunt-toothed kark that mentions a port, dry dock, shipyard, or star base is going to join our tactical officer outside … without the luxury of a vacuum suit!”
It was at that moment that the report from the doomed asteroid platform orbiting past Mars reached Noric’s stricken patrol cruiser. Unfortunately, the cruiser’s ears were plugged up with burgeron droppings, so the message sailed onward unnoticed.
Glot happens.