The command module aboard the center strider was more of a large closet than anything, barely large enough to fit all of General Tyrak-pack. There were six of them, floating in the command module at odd angles, limbs and tails and torsos brushing up against each other as they typed intently on half a dozen keyboards. Tablets and heavy workstations and screens were bolted all over the command module at every angle and position imaginable, some on the floor, walls, and ceiling, others clinging to scaffolding that jutted into the area, all of them linked to each other by a tangle of multicolored wires so thick that they obscured what lay beyond.
Surrounding this area were ring after ring and row after row of angular, austere-looking computing blocks, radially arranged and affixed to the hull of the center strider. There were over two thousand of them, each about the size of a large fridge, clad in dark grayish casings studded with blinking lights, with yet more cables as thick as Tyrak-pack’s wrists and cooling pipes bringing water from the hull to the computer clusters, snaking between and around all the blocks.
Tyrak-pack themselves wore the same dark gray coveralls with tail sleeves and QR codes as any other pack on the void strider or center strider. Only their presence in the command module, and the several chipped or missing teeth, faint scars, and scales just beginning to fade to the point that makeup could no longer cover it up.
“The optimal strategy is to position the major telescope so we really know about Hope’s city-graph,” said one member of Tyrak-pack. He reached out to two other members and laid his hands flat against their chests, bumping his snout against each of their faces in turn. “And to begin running the tactical engine in analysis mode,” he continued, “while learning the great-centrality cities with the best eval bar.” He caressed two more members of Tyrak-pack, then nuzzled them, with the same measured intensity as the first two. “And to learn the social graph of the officer set in the best time, before we arrive,” he finished. He reached out to the final member of the pack, caressing her thigh as she was awkwardly angled, floating near the ceiling. At his touch, she grabbed onto a mounted workstation and used it to reorient herself to face him, gazing adoringly at him.
“This is correct, yes?” said the first member of Tyrak-pack. The others twisted and reoriented around as best they could in the confined space, nodding and murmuring assent. Those who were close enough leaned over to touch their snouts against his. “Begin,” he said softly, almost nonchalantly.
All six of them began typing on various keyboards as screens flashed to life around them. Outside the center strider, a colossal telescope, its lens nearly twelve meters wide, began drifting away from the hull, attached to an unfolding boom. Once the boom was fully extended, the telescope began rotating up and down, clockwise and counterclockwise, each silent movement a little more subtle than the one before it, until it at last hung motionless in the void.
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On several screens in the command module, images of a star field with a small smudge of blue and green in the center were abruptly replaced with a new image: the gibbous disc of a planet, a bit blurry but still large enough to fill the screens. Most of this planet seemed to be water, though a few expanses of land could be seen scattered throughout. Six pairs of eyes locked onto it: four brown and two yellow.
The land was, to Tyrak-pack’s first impression, quite garish in its coloration. Great swathes had such a vibrant greenish hue that they could only be modern arable land, yet they were far too large for any city to support; indeed the more muted greens and browns of empty land were in the minority. One piece of land was, for some reason, apparently made entirely from ice. Vast white swirls and patches were scattered everywhere–clouds that masked whatever lay below–but in the thin, clear atmosphere, their edges were sharply delineated. And there was so, so much of that homogenous, almost hypnotizing deep blue, like a flat, featureless expanse of blood covering three quarters of the planet.
The night side was more promising. In the small crescent obscured from the sun by the planet’s bulk, city lights were visible. One member of Tyrak-pack zoomed in on the city lights, downloading the raw imagery as it came in and loading it into a graph solver to estimate the relationships between the cities. Another turned to the center of the pack, her ears angled in a grave expression. “Maybe the optimal strategy for us to understand a foreign city-graph is for our own eyes to look for patterns and resource-beautiful areas. I want to look for a long time,” she said. She sniffed derisively, casting a glance at one of the screens. “Yet! I think the night half will be more system-beautiful.”
“You’re quite dense, Kazun,” said a member of Tyrak-pack, his ears rising approvingly. He lit a pipe and took a long drag, then exhaled, watching the perfectly spherical puff of smoke float around the command module. He handed the pipe to Kazun, who put it in her own mouth and turned to bury her face in the screens, though their hands remained clasped.
On several other screens, a progress bar materialized: KENIT 28.3 ACTIVATION | ANALYSIS MODE | 1 CORE. The number of cores began slowly ticking up, and as it did so, the computing blocks went from a gentle humming and whirring to a loud whine interspersed with the occasional odd, mechanical clank. As each block began spinning up the tactical engine, more and more yellow and green and blue lights began to turn on in their metallic casing. As more and more cores came online, the command module began to heat up despite the water cooling pipes, and within a few minutes, most of Tyrak-pack were panting.
“Necessarily and quickly, we will speak so that the other officers know about this city-graph and the location of the first war will be known to us,” announced one member of Tyrak-pack at last, looking up from a screen split between a stream of adjacency matrices and a diagram of the top of the management tree, with photos of all the officers.
“The white land,” quipped another member, garnering a few trills. The previous speaker gave him a pointed look.
The center strider continued to hurtle through the void, with its companion, the void strider, traveling close by, just a few thousand kilometers apart. Their fusion engines continued to burn, and they continued to gently, almost imperceptibly decelerate.
