I had been given the designation 4L5AC-GG29073—truly, an evocative name, to be sure—and with my mental block I could finally stop correcting others who called me Kerf. Of course, I’m still Cheryuff, as I pronounce my name, although I’ve never heard anyone call me that. At the time, I thought I heard it once or maybe even more than once—but, since my brain had been altered by a form of conditioning, I wouldn’t know, now, would I?

Without my translation device, however, I would definitely never know what I was being called, as the digits and characters I knew and heard in my imagination as “four-el-five-ay”—along with the rest of my designation—had a myriad of differing pronunciations from all the beings who shared an assignment at the Academy of Security and Protection. From subsonic booms to whistles, my fellow cadets had more ways to articulate my designation than I can even imagine—and that’s without all the inventive ways that competitive recruits come up with nicknames.

The nickname that stuck on me was one that my rescuer came up with. I knew him as Jom, but he was actually the Taam Orik, Zhom Mal Akahn. Repeatedly saying that I was smarter than I had any right to be, he started calling me ‘Brownie.’ At the time, I thought it a cheap slur based on my skin color. Despite being part of a group of cadets whose exteriors ranged in color from translucent to metallic exoskeleton—as its own shade, really—I became self-conscious about my appearance.

I now know that brownies were the name for mischievous creatures from legend and myth. Jom would think that of me. And I guess my stubbornness made more of an impression than my intelligence, which makes a lot more sense to me, now that I think about it. I have never heard of anyone else who said no to being rescued by a Taam Orik. Although I said no—on many occasions, no less—I went along with the scheme anyway. That is, until I knew there was another way.

. . .

The Academy at the Core Hub of the commonwealth was part of a massive complex of buildings that also included a planetary transit center as well as my favorite pastime and source of amazement: the spaceport. Whenever I could be spared from my duties or had an errand to run—regardless of the actual destination—I found myself there.

Actually, I could see the spaceport from the common room in my dormitory. I hadn’t actually started training yet in the Academy—which was fortunate for me and my fascination with the spaceport—as much of the coursework actually took place off-world. While I could watch the activity at the hexagonally shaped structure for hours, I found that actually getting up close was the best way to feed my growing obsession.

Not that it matters how close I was to one of the six titanic space vessels that the spaceport could accommodate simultaneously—and still have room for a thousand smaller vessels—the behemoths were easily seen from the Academy despite the distance that separated the two structures.

The other recruits made jokes about my fixation, but some followed me nonetheless whenever I went to the spaceport. A gelatinous being I called Niner—in actuality, a Dzev designated 909B-something-something who traveled exclusively by gravity sled—was always glad to follow me to watch the arrivals and departures. We asked questions of pilots, maintenance workers and just about anyone who would talk to us about the spacecraft we admired.

Our translators worked overtime, as neither 909B nor I could speak a word of the other’s language. Just exactly how a Dzev could possibly speak without vocal chords or even a mouth was a question that I immediately dismissed as biased and—after all our conversations—not worth asking. By a trick of emitting a directed and re-constructed soundwave that inverted the sounds being made when communicating, our translation devices muted us, as far as the intended recipient was concerned. By manipulating the phase of the stereo sound (or for some species, quadrophonic or monophonic sources), the devices made it seem like the source of the translations I actually heard were the voices of the others I came into contact with. Thanks to the translator, it truly seemed like everyone I met spoke my language fluently.

Not that I was close to being fluent in the languages that most cadets spoke: mathematics. Yes, I was a remedial student. No, unlike the mental block that had been neurochemically implanted, I could not just have quadratics and derivatives squeezed into my synapses. Also, science. There was just so much to learn. At the time—and thanks to the mental block—I had no idea why I was so ignorant of so much.

I truly wondered if I would be reduced to hanging around spaceports my entire life. But, studying every night, testing every morning—yes, every morning—followed by seminars, discussions and labs each afternoon made it seem like I was already in the academy.

“Brownie? What are you going to do if you can’t meet the entrance requirements?” Niner asked. As I mentioned previously, the translator did the asking, having muted the original sounds emanating from the Dzev and sonically replacing them with the question I could understand. It was late afternoon, just before our meal, and Niner rested in their gravity sled while we observed the goings on at the spaceport.

“Not meet the requirements?” I stalled for time. “What am I going to do? Hmm. Let’s see. How does tipping you out of your bucket and dropping you off the top of a behemoth-class spaceship sound, Niner?” Answering a question with a question was once an alien concept to someone like 909B—and possibly to the entire species of Dzev—who found the concept perplexing at first.

“You do realize, of course, that I can expand my outer membrane and thus change my density to be lighter than air, right?” Niner said, getting the hang of the whole asking-questions-while-answering thing. The being preferred to hover near my eye level when we spoke—a practice that the Dzev thought facilitated communication.

I pushed on the gravity sled, but Niner knew to adjust the forces keeping the sled in place and push right back. I laughed, “And what a shock it would be if the genius Dzev, intellectual prize and gift to the galaxy, didn’t meet the entrance requirements for logic.”

“That’s sarcasm, correct? I have noted that your use of the verbal mannerism has increased when speaking to individuals who have less than eighty-five percent of your body mass, yet is noticeably absent when communicating with an individual massing greater—”

I’d like to think I would have noticed that a planetary invasion had started. But the attack on the spaceport itself came without warning, and I was actually listening intently to Niner when they had stopped talking. Truth be told, I completely missed seeing the higgs nullifiers neutralize the behemoths docked at the spaceport.

. . .

The Core Hub was under attack, and to me it looked like something that had never occurred in the one hundred generations since its founding. For all the security personnel supposedly trained in the ways of, well, security—I had yet to actually take any academy classes beyond my remediation, so I wasn’t exactly clear on what made up the curriculum—the instructors, staff and cadets just couldn’t seem to be able to get their collective act together. It was madness and complete chaos as beings of all shapes and sizes flew, hopped, ran, and otherwise made utter fools of themselves rushing around.

All of which would be understandable—as well as tragic—if the attack had produced any casualties.

From what I could tell, the attack was designed to create confusion and disorder, but not actually damage or destroy the Core Hub. The first wave of the invasion—and I was on the front row as a spectator—consisted of an assembly of the most motley collection of barely-space-worthy craft that I could imagine. I wanted to ask Niner about it, but they had left without even saying good-bye. I won’t say that the Dzev fled in a panic, but since that seemed to be the order of the day, then I say let the description fit the situation.

My translator device started buzzing, shouting orders in response to the attack that I couldn’t follow—not that I didn’t want to follow orders, but that the orders kept changing, or were just plain contradictory. At various points, I was ordered to the spaceport for defense as well as avoid the spaceport at all costs. I was ordered to assemble at the planetary transport for evacuation, and at the same time also report to the hospital to assist in triage where the expected dead and injured never materialized.

I had heard how the nullifiers used in the attack inhibited atomic decay and quantum tunneling, and wondered if Niner’s gravity sled would be affected. I didn’t linger, but couldn’t choose which of the conflicting orders I should follow. I thought I should return to my quarters to stay out of the way of all the madness. It seemed that the confusion could cause more harm than the actual invasion, and the reports coming via my translator conveyed exactly that scenario in the casualty reports. There had been a number of accidents, but no contact with the invaders had resulted in any loss of commonwealth citizens.

Systems began to shut down, yet emergency backup came online without any problems. In all, it was the most civilized attack I could imagine. Yet I couldn’t fathom what could be hope to be achieved. A brazen attack would demand an appropriate response, and when the commonwealth recovered—and recover it will, and soon, too—the behemoths and their support craft would make short work of the world or moon where these vermin would scurry after their bold and unprovoked attack ends.

But when?

The rag-tag squadrons flew directly over my head at one point. I felt an admiration for the invaders, if just for the bravery needed to fly between planets in what otherwise appeared to be just junk. I continued to the center of the spaceport, as I hoped to see clearly what the invaders were doing.

It didn’t take long, but I was just about to see quite clearly what they were up to, and just what they hoped to achieve.