Once, there was a bird called a Heath Hen. It lived all along the coast of New England, from Virginia all the way to Maine. More abundant than wild turkeys, these grouse-like birds fed Americans native and colonist alike; some believe that it was actually heath hen that graced the table of the first Thanksgiving.
Yet countries grow, and so does the demand for food. Like the passenger pigeon, the bounty of heath hens seemed inexhaustible…until it wasn’t. By 1870, the heath hen was gone from the mainland, occupying only a tiny oasis on the island of Martha’s Vineyard; by 1900, there were only 70 in the world.
But humans had begun to notice the animals vanishing around us—to realize that there steps we could take to make it stop. Protections were put in place, and the birds began a recovery. In 1915, at least two thousand heath hens called the island home.
During the following nesting season, however, after years of misguided suppression measures, a wildfire ravaged the preserve, devastating the ground-nesting birds. Now lacking shelter, birds that survived the fire were easily picked off by predators. Efforts were made to rebuild yet again, but there just weren’t enough birds left. The final heath hen died in 1932, after having been alone for 4 years.
One of the stories that always sticks in my mind about heath hens comes from the people who went out searching for survivors after the fire. They spoke about finding female birds, burnt or suffocated by smoke, still sitting on their nests—their last act, to shield their young.
Those charred hens had no way of knowing that the eggs they guarded were some of the last the world would ever see—no conception of the ideas of rarity or foresight that might cause a human to go to lengths to protect such a nest. For them, it was enough to be a mother, whose child would always be as precious to her as if it had been the only one in the world, worthy of protecting with her life.
An epitaph of Jane Seymour, third queen of Henry VIII, who died in childbed, went, “Here lies a phoenix/by whose death/another phoenix life gave breath”. My above art was painted in acrylic medium blended with ink and the ashes of burnt feathers, and is titled ‘There Were No Phoenixes on Martha’s Vineyard’.
A little tiny microscopic dragon, rotifers passing by.
I've spent a lot of time peering down a microscope in the last few years, enjoying taking inspiration from the real tiny organisms to make one of my own.
The first ship that arrived was pretty matter of fact about its fate. The pilot introduced himself as Eric, then told us he was part of the first sublight resupply attempt in modern history. He then gave me and the ground control team his bad news.
“So,” he said. “Without real time telemetry, we weren’t even sure which half of your orbit you’d be in. That’s half a solar system’s worth of wiggle room. Decelerating enough to survive contact with your low orbit would take me two weeks, which, you know, it looks like we don’t have. That means that in order to get the second ship in before you lose orbital control to the Kresh, I’m gonna have to make a sacrificial flyby. Ten to the negative four torr is good enough for a lot of things, but at point-seven c it’s gonna be like sandblasting a soup cracker. Good news is that all the expensive toys are in the next ship, so this really ain’t costing you more than a ship and a pilot.”
“You knew,” I said. If they put the expensive toys in the second ship, they knew that the first was likely a sacrifice. No one smart enough to handle orbital physics would miss that.
“I did,” he replied. “But someone had to go first.”
That was, of course, a lie. No one had to go first. No else had had, at least. When our connection to the FTL network was lost, we’d understood that as the end of our reinforcements. Doing resupplies via sublight was just too risky. It was a testament to Earth that it had accepted the risk and continued anyway.
“Is there anything we can do for you?” I asked. This man had come here to die for us. I wasn’t sure how much I could give, but what I had was his.
“I do have a few requests,” he said. “First up, I need as much high-orbital data as you got. The whole lot.”
I began directing tightbeam resources to him immediately. It was an easy resource to exchange - it wasn’t like there was anyone else out to talk to anymore. When we lost FTL, we found ourselves very, very alone.
“Second,” he said. “Right, I know I’m gonna sound like a princess right now, but I have been stuck in this stupid tin-can for almost two-years now, and I seriously overestimated how much I like synth music. If you have anything that’s analog - I don’t care what kind of string or drum or brass you play, but I’d kill to hear something without a beep in it.”
I jumped my own queue in the tightbeam, and added a short playlist that I ripped from the local web. Human Music, it was labeled. 3 Terabytes. I prayed there was something on it that he’d like.
“And third,” he said. “Third. The uh, next pilot is pretty mad at me. Turns out this will just be one of those things left unfinished. That’s all death really is, I guess - a lot of unfinished things. Let him know that he was right: He is a better pilot than me. But tell him that wouldn’t have made a difference here. Bad luck beats skill, and this luck was shit.”
I promised, and he went silent after that. We could see what data he was analyzing, and the short answer was all of it - everything from atmospheric density to troop positions and his own ship’s blueprints. He knew he had one shot at this, and that if the price wasn’t paid here, it would be paid by whoever came next.
--- --- --- --- ---
Ground control didn’t get a verbal warning that he’d entered atmosphere. Just a ping. A little here-I-am, whispered in the dark.
After that, we could keep track with visuals alone.
He hit the outskirts of the exoatmosphere in his first pass, burning bright enough to be seen with the naked eye. He caught the sparse particles like a kite, trying to shed enough speed to hit actual low orbit. Automatic telemetry updates gave us the grim news for the ship: Thermals were holding up decently, but the ablative was wearing out fast.
The entire descent brought us more than two hour’s reprieve. The Kresh hadn’t expected to see a resupply, but they knew what one meant: Get it now, get it fast, or deal with a stream of new troops. They could buy themselves ten days' time by shooting this one ship down now.
That was an eternity during a siege.
The first loop lowered the speed by about a twentieth of light. The pilot responded by pulling the ship in tighter, trying to preserve more ablative plating by trading off with thermal. Seven fighters were close enough to fire off heat seekers. I don’t think the Kresh had ever anticipated shooting down a craft coming in that hot - the missile's decoy avoidance countermeasure actually made it steer around the thing, chasing down loose pieces of shrapnel. Cooled fragments, still hotter than an engine should be at full blast. The simple mistakes bought it enough time to enter pre-orbit, and the fighters had to stop their pursuit. They weren’t willing to die to stop the ship.
Our man, on the other hand, was already committed to that course.
A third loop followed a fourth. Ablative coating went from 65% integrity, to 30%, to 5%. Telemetry scans were exceptionally detailed - the pilot was making the flyby count. The last message we got from him was simple:
Are you EMP shielded? he asked, not even bothering to encrypt the text stream. He didn’t have time to process more than that.
Yes, we replied. We knew what he was thinking, but it was still a shock to see it. The fusion torch that was driving his ship flared hot, burning through the nozzle and feeding directly into the craft’s deuterium supply. The reaction went super critical, and the resulting neutron pulse set off everything in the ship with a z-count higher than iron. Three continuous seconds of EM interference screamed through the comms as the hulk burned brighter than the sun.
The explosion itself wasn’t powerful enough to reach the Kresh ships still in high orbit, but it made enough broadband radiation to blind both sides LADAR. The man must have been a hell of a pilot - half the shrapnel went down and burned up as it entered the standard atmosphere, sacrificed to move the other half past lagrange. Standard evasion would’ve made the pieces easy to dodge, but with LADAR down, all the Kresh could do was sit still and cower as the wrath of a dead man riddled them full of holes. Our best ace had managed to shoot down seven ships before this before getting shot down himself. The wreckage of the freighter took down six.
--- --- --- --- ---
The second ship came in stealth. One second, we were holding attrition in high orbit, the next, something the size of a small station came ripping through the atmosphere.
It did the same trick as the former - swapping between ablative and thermal loads, coming down at a speed that the Kresh fighters didn’t even try to match. Armies could be built in years, but skills like this took decades.
Telemetry connection was established almost as an afterthought. The way the ship casually ate through ablative armoring made my eyes water, but the pilot himself seemed pretty non-plussed.
“You’re down to fifteen percent coverage. You need-
“What I need,” he said, “is to see the previous ship’s telemetry as soon as I land. And I don't need your help landing it.”
He cut off my chance to reply by flicking the channel off. We watched, and we wrang our hands, but sure enough he came in six minutes later with 4% of the ablative left.
I met him on the landing pad. Under normal circumstances, we’d have needed twenty-four hours for the craft to cool enough to even approach, but we’d had cryo ready just in case. Three tankers of nitrogen, and the loading area, at least, was cool enough to touch. Safety would have to take a backseat to speed here - we needed the supplies fast.
But those both would take a backseat to a promised conversation with the second pilot. He was out of the craft as soon as the air was cool enough to avoid scalding his lungs, picking through the workers to try and find who had the telemetry data.
I found him first. The drive went into his hands, but I needed to keep my promise with Eric before letting go.
“You’re better than the first pilot,” I said, and I wasn’t lying. If the previous flier had been a saint, this one was a god. “But you wouldn’t have been able to manage the landing either. There just wasn’t time.”
“Let me see,” he said, tugging on the drive. “Just let me see. I have to know I couldn’t do it either. I have to know that someone had to die.”
I let go of the drive and he stalked back into his ship. I didn’t follow. I figured I’d pushed things far enough.
--- --- --- --- ---
The second pilot left the ship six hours later. He looked bleary in a way that put me at ease. I’d been up the last six hours directing supplies from the ship. Everything from ground-to-orbit rails to AGI targeting systems was inside - to call it gamechanging would be an understatement. It was good work, but I was tired, and I didn’t want to have to pretend otherwise. Seeing the other man with bags under his eyes meant we could just be frank with each other.
“I couldn’t have managed it,” he said, half-ashamed, half-relieved.
“It just wasn’t possible,” I agreed.
We sat there a moment longer. I didn’t mind the break. This was time well spent.
“Did it hurt?” he asked finally.
“Ablative failed before heating,” I said, which was the technical way of saying no. “He overloaded the reactor before the ship actually broke up and did some kind of slingshot maneuver - hit the main body of the Kresh fleet with half a space station’s worth of shrapnel.”
“Good,” he said.
I knew the signs. The tremor in his cheek, the way his jaw clenched - it wasn’t professional, but I hugged him anyway. Let him have the dignity of choosing to weep instead of having it wrenched out of him.
It was a gift we’d all been given at some point in this war. At least now, there was the hope it could be over soon.
