It had felt strange simply asking for information about the Kaydekee—sorry, Kaedekin’s—military. Or as they considered them, their ‘defense services’. It was hardly unusual for some states to take the moral stance that their military existed only for defensive purposes, so the term didn’t really raise any eyebrows among the ship’s analysts and officers.

  The exact details for what they used their forces for had.

  Their ‘Metro Rangers’ were literal military police who were also used as firefighters, a defense force in the event a settlement’s walls was breached by a ‘strange beast’—one of the few words the universal translator actually translated, though it sounded strangely familiar whenever he heard it—and detainment of… ‘supervillains’. Trout wasn’t sure he’d understood that properly. When he’d asked for clarification of what a ‘supervillain’ was, Rain had described someone who drove around near schools, offered candy to ‘little sisters’ and had a mattress in the back of their vehicle.

  Trout had quickly changed the uncomfortable subject.

  Field Rangers were apparently some kind of highly militarized and heavily armed forestry service who spent much of their time redirecting animal migrations and ‘strange beasts’ away from cities and infrastructure. Trout didn’t know why they did that instead of simply culling the animals and when he had asked he’d been told that would be ‘very disrespectful and impolite to the wildlife’, a statement that was probably going to give the analysts and various ‘-ologists’ on the ship fodder for all sorts of conclusions. Despite that, Field Rangers apparently had no problems arming themselves with heavy weaponry that involved mobile cannons, so perhaps the Kaedekin had a peculiar view of what was considered respectful and polite towards wildlife.

  Sky Rangers had initially seemed like they would be the equivalent of an air force, with Rain’s mention of ‘air support’… but they were also in charge of air traffic control, because apparently at some point their navigation beacons were opened for the use of civilian craft. Trout also got the sense that the Sky Rangers were seldom utilized.

  The Void Rangers had been confusing, and it was the first time that Trout had gotten the sense that Rain had been… not lying so much as being deliberately brief. She’d mentioned that Void Ranger’s deal with Void ‘strange beasts’, which were an order of magnitude larger the ‘strange beasts’ that the Field Rangers dealt with, and therefore required specialized modular equipment… and that had been it. No stories, no comparisons, nothing. It had been blatant in its blandness as Rain had immediately moved on to the next subject, the Star Rangers.

  She had become much more talkative then, expounding on how the military branch she was a part of maintained surveillance stations on every major planetary body in the system (“In case an ancient civilization sleeping beneath the surface awakens and tries to invade us”), maintained an extensive sensor network across the whole system (“In case extrasurceasetrial beings from beyond the dancer system arrives to invade us”), tracked the trajectories of comets and asteroids (“In case one is on a collision course for our planet again”), and prepared themselves to respond to indescribable, ever-shifting, chaotic, unknowable eldritch creatures that live in the darkness between the stars (“In case they try to invade and eat us all!”).

  Even if some of the scenarios they were preparing for were bizarre, Trout couldn’t actually fault their desire to be ready.

  Through the course of the day’s conversation, Trout had also begun to suspect that the Kaedekin had achieved a form of unified world government, which was notable even in the known galaxy. While humanity mostly presented itself as unified, it was hardly a secret that the Earth was still divided into multiple countries. Colonies tended to fracture, forming their own countries along nationalistic lines, and the few colonies that managed to form a unified planetary government… immediately declared their independence from whatever founding country they had originate from and dared them to make something of it.

  Unfortunately, Rain couldn’t stay all day.

  “Well, this is fun, but I’m afraid I need to go,” Rain said. Their voice had been getting progressively more hoarse over the past few minutes. “Unfortunately, my suit is out of drinking water, and my throat is getting a bit dry. Next time I’ll remember to bring more water.”

  “I understand. I’d offer you some of the ship’s water, but…”

  “That’s very kind, but I don’t have the necessary accessories to refill my suit’s water supply without breaking any of its air seals,” Rain said, sounding regretful. “However, before I leave, I would like to make preparations for tomorrow’s communication, if you are amenable?”

  “Of course. What did you have mind?” Trout asked.

  “After the same interval between our previous meeting and this one, we’ll begin transmitting a signal again, which will be in accordance to the third communications protocol in this book.” They patted the book that was still on the table. “If we can manage to establish a dialogue through there, I won’t need to walk over to speak with you. N-not that this isn’t a wonderful ship, and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to spacewalk, but with usable communications protocol other people on the station would have the opportunity to speak with you.”

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  Ah. Trout didn’t doubt that. He briefly wondered if there was any way to retain Rain as their only point of contact, before letting go of that thought with a sigh. Well, as the captain, he’d have to speak with the member’s of this planet’s government eventually. Hopefully they would be as reasonable as Rain seemed to think they were… despite being ‘officially evil’. And he supposed it would allow them to see their government in practice. While he was inclined to see the ‘administrative branch’ as the actual central power in their government, the way it was described made it sound more like the census bureau or an intelligence agency…

  Though given the sorts of things intelligence agencies could get up to, that might actually be appropriate.

  And given the implications that all of Kaedekin society was highly militarized…

  …

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Trout said neutrally. “Will you be exiting through the airlock again?”

  “It would probably be best. Until you can provide us with the bacterial and viral cultures so we can begin working on vaccines and counter-bacterials, our active protocols are to minimize possible contamination. If we use the airlock, the only thing that needs to be decontaminated is my suit and the picnic basket.”

  Trout could understand that. The quarantine room would be similarly decontaminated once their guest had left. “Very well. Until tomorrow, then.”

  “Until tomorrow. May the mass multiplied by acceleration be with you.”

  The analysis offices of the CIC were already awash in activity when Trout came down after writing down his initial impressions of the conversation, which would probably be added to the stack of materials the ship’s intelligence officers would be going over. He took in the mood of the room as analysts of different species used whatever strange dark magic intelligence officers were taught to try to make sense of a rather confusing overview about the workings of an alien civilization. Despite the brisk and deliberate-looking activity, there seemed to be an air of frustration to the room.

  It was the little things. Many people seemed to be frowning as they worked, and more than few pajhadin had the ends of their tentacles wrapped around their heads, with some of the female ones tugging at their hair. Rakido were moving with what for them was slow deliberation, clearly going over materials again and again as if making sure they were reading it correctly. Changers were sitting still, bowl-like workstations surrounded by pages of transcripts and multiple tablets as they read in all directions at once, with the only movement sometimes being a single manipulating pseudopod tapping at a keyboard or stylus. Tiwada analysts rooted into the soil of their own work stations were shaking as if in a light breeze despite the air being still as they read over their own materials.

  Walking over to a different part, Trout found analysts going over the books they’d been given. The data had been scanned and were being analyzed by communications and astrogation personnel, while the actual physical books had been placed in storage… in different a quarantine room on the ship. While their scans had detected no explosive compounds on the books, it was better to be safe until their could foist them off on someone else to decide whether they needed to be torn up for chemical analysis or put into some kind of museum.

  It took a while to scan the system and ascertain the planets were in the locations provided by the astrogation materials, as Trout had decided this wasn’t urgent enough to require scanning on the quantum bands and potentially tipping their hand that they had FTL scanners as well as engines. It was unlikely that the Kaedekin had the capability to detect those scans—it was one of the few technologies humanity had to itself, without an analogous technology anywhere else… that they knew of—but until they knew for sure it was best to keep the capability hidden. After all, waiting a couple of hours to confirm the locations of planets was no great difficulty. They were planets, where were they going to go?

  During this time, the scanning drones that had been left to watch Stargazer Fortress began to pick up an increase of space traffic. Or rather, the scanners finally picked up space traffic, small ships rising up from the dark surface of the planet and approaching Stargazer. The vessels were larger than the small ship Rain had approached the Venture in at about 50 meters long, their larger elongated bodies and wider wings clearly intended for atmospheric flight, implying that was what they were often used for despite the fact they clearly had orbital capability. Were they fighters? They were certainly the right size, and while surface to orbit fighters weren’t unheard of, it begged the question of why they were coming up from the surface at all. Stargazer Fortress was large enough that it certainly already carried a large complement of fighters, missile boats, warhead drones, and whatever else they used for warfare, so it wasn’t like they needed the added capacity, especially given how they were coming in such small numbers.

  It was another question about the Kaedekin, and no doubt another datapoint for the analysts to go over. Trout had already heard some of them muttering that the Kaedekin military was insane, and an organizational and logistics nightmare, though most of that seemed to be directed at the Metro and Field Rangers. Rolling a city’s police, firefighters, and emergency responders wasn’t all that strange—naval bases had their own of each after all—but the militarization of what Trout’s sensibilities considered a civilian function was concerning.

  Admittedly, that was just the human perspective, and even within the Confederacy there were parallels. On Changer worlds, law enforcement was generally the responsibility of their centers of learning, with students acting as a de facto police force. Among the pajhadin, law enforcement was the responsibility of a several inter-related non-government groups, each responsible for a subset of criminality, or for patrolling a specific area or type of area. That much he remembered from old lectures before going on shore leave on their planets, back when he’d been a lieutenant. He’d thought the way Changers had done it was insane too, but despite his expectations the city had been very peaceful the whole time he’d been there, so he supposed it worked for them. Presumably their way worked for the Kaedekin as well, although how much personal freedom they actually had was in question. But then, each species had their own idea of what was considered and acceptable amount of freedom.

  Exactly 23 hours after their visitor left the ship, the Venture began to receive a transmission. It was a frequency modulated radio transmission, and the ship’s communications officers had been prepared to receive it for hours.

  “Greetings, Earthlings! We come in peace! Please let us speak with your leader! Over!”