Ryen-pack was huddled together in their nest, a mass of limbs and tails entangled with each other as they absently watched the clock tick by and the endless star field on their screen. Kyada took a deep and oddly labored breath, leaning up against the edge of the nest. The past few days, the weakness, nausea, and strange icy pains of cryo-sleep had gradually worn off, but now the air itself seemed strangely thin. She leaned over and intensely began licking Ractun’s face. “Hey!” she said, “We feel okay, no?”

  Ractun snapped shut the notebook she was drawing in. “No,” she said, before taking as deep a breath as she could, turning away from the pack and burying her face in a cushion.

  Kyada turned to the other two and caressed their faces. “Tauk and Roztek?” she said.

  “The amount of air is little. Should we go to the Nest Ring?” said Tauk, pulling down the little rope ladder that led out of their nest and beginning to unzip the flap.

  As if on cue, Cohort Alpha Takora-pack began speaking through the screen, with the individual voice doing the speaking changing every sentence. “We equal Takora Cohort Alpha. The reason for the reduced oxygen, done solely by the General, is acclimatization like mountaineers and that Hope’s atmosphere is sparse. We think speaking so that this cohort knows is good. Advice, if any unhealthy changes occur in anyone’s body’s systems, we should be informed in the best time. Thanks. The day is yours,” Takora-pack said.

  “Forget the General!” snapped Ractun.

  Roztek squeezed Ractun’s hand. “We should go up because now is the time for Takora-cohort,” he said. The four of them climbed up into the Nest Ring. It was fairly sparsely populated as usual, with a few packs from the last batch of cohorts still dropping or climbing into their nests and around thirty or forty packs in Takora-pack’s cohort scattered around the ring, and hundreds more from the ten other cohorts who shared this time-block on the Nest Ring, though only a few dozen packs were visible to Ryen-pack from where they stood, the rest obscured by the ring’s curvature and the life support blocks.

  They hurriedly made their way to the nearest life support block with a water dispenser and meat tank, their breathing labored as they strolled across the tops of the lower nests. There were a couple of packs who had gotten there first, a sight which Kyada bared her teeth at. One pack of five–Kaarie-pack, Kyada vaguely recalled their name to be–were filling a drinking bowl with water, their slight frames clustered around the dispenser.

  Meanwhile, a member of Cohort Alpha Takora-pack was pulling patties out of the meat tank with a pair of tongs and depositing them into their drinking bowl. One pair of hatchlings was play-fighting on the floor with one of the adults in Takora-pack, who effortlessly held off their snapping mouths full of tiny glass knives with just his hands as they trilled maniacally, at last dropping them both to the floor with one swift tail swing. He then gently lifted them up, whispering sweet nothings into their ears, and the process began all over again. Another smaller pair of hatchlings was riding piggyback on two more members of Takora-pack, their tiny claws digging into the adults’ shoulders as they sniffed the air intently. “Food! Now!” one of them chirped.

  At last Takora-pack was done at the meat tank and Ryen-pack swooped in, with Kyada dragging Tauk and Roztek by the hands, to take their place before Kaarie-pack could, ignoring a low growl from them. Roztek looked into the hot, smoky meat tank, using the tongs to poke at the precooked cylindrical slabs of microbe-grown meat, sniffing and staring intently, then at last pulling out several large grayish patties with a hint of blue, flecked with dark streaks of synthetic flavoring.

  Ractun gently laid a hand on Roztek’s arm. “I want a fake neuz,” she said.

  Roztek picked up a fourth patty, this one whitish-grey, and stacked it in the drinking bowl. “This is good, yes?” he said, licking Ractun’s snout. Ractun nodded.

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  Takora-pack was beginning to quietly slink away down the Nest Ring, but Kyada called out, “Cohort Alpha Takora!” Takora-pack stopped and turned slowly, almost sheepishly. “How do we regularize and prune the space-tree of items in a Nest Ring that doesn’t contain air?” she demanded, before taking a deep, laborious breath.

  One member of Takora-pack, balancing a hatchling on her hip, met Kyada’s gaze unblinkingly. “The oxygen will increase again at night. This instance of altitude training policy is because Hope contains a thin atmosphere,” she said.

  “We know Hope contains a thin atmosphere!” said Tauk indignantly. He and Kyada pointedly engaged in a brief, passionate licking of each other’s snouts.

  A second member of Takora-pack, with an intricate binary tree tattooed on the top of his head, did a similar display with another member of Takora-pack before they said, “We are trying to cause General Tyrak’s instructions and this cohort’s optimal strategy to be balanced. Request, everyone causes this to be easy.”

  “Our manager wants packs to manually transfer cargo from the path to the Nest Ring, around the Nest Ring, and back during their Nest Ring time-block because of their instructions,” chimed in another member of Takora-pack, “The reason for this is soldiers’ acclimatization being optimal in the best time, before the beginning of combat.” He inhaled deeply.

  Kaarie-pack, who had stepped away from the life support block as a throng of packs began jostling for their meat and water, stood a few meters away from Ryen-pack and Takora-pack, silently watching and appraising Ryen-pack. One member abruptly spat a mouthful of water back into the drinking bowl at Takora-pack’s last proclamation. “What?!” he choked.

  “No! It’s really ridiculous!” burst out Ractun, baring her teeth at Takora-pack.

  A member of Takora-pack held up her hand. “Yes. Acclimatization equal to the General’s instructions requires only vigorous activity for the entire time-block. Us not knowing a different example is the problem,” she said.

  Ryen-pack looked awkwardly at each other and the nests beneath their feet in silence.

  “Does the Cohort Alpha think cleaning is an instance of vigorous activity?” interjected a member of Kaarie-pack suddenly.

  A couple members of Takora-pack turned to glance at them. “Maybe, yes,” said one of them, “If the cleaning is really intensive, you all fix everything that breaks in your time-block and revert the Nest Ring to its prior state.” Ryen-pack and Kaarie-pack went back to their respective nests to eat in private, each pack holding hands to cut their way through the increasingly dense crowd of packs milling around the Nest Ring. Takora-pack watched them go. “This doubly connects nodes,” said one of them under his breath, “The soldiers will be acclimated and our manager will cease creating complaints because the Nest Ring is not clean after our time-block.”

  “Yes, if they are fully acclimated after this,” said another member, his ears drooping worriedly.

  “Tazuk. It concerns the gods,” said the previous speaker reassuringly. He licked Tazuk’s cheek, his tongue running sensually over the other’s zygomatic arch. “Random cargo movement for acclimatization was ridiculous anyway,” he said.

  Another one sighed heavily. “Inception and triangulation and social graphs,” she said, “Us being an Army manager is really fun.” She glanced down at one of the hatchlings, sitting on the floor, wolfing down the smallest patty out in the open. She swooped in from behind and lifted him high with the air of a raptor snatching its prey. “Do you think so?” she cooed, covering his snout and eyes with sloppy licks as she held him in midair, his legs flailing for purchase and his tail thwacking against her arm. “Ugh! You’re getting heavy!”

  “We like it!” said the hatchling happily.

  Another member of Takora-pack gasped. “A depth-two sentence-tree!”

  “Yeah! He’s created many recently!” said the one holding the hatchling, her ears rising.

  Takora-pack wandered back to their own nest, drinking bowls full of meat and water and two pairs of rowdy hatchlings in tow, for a few moments of peace and quiet before the acclimatization regimen began.