"Give it everything you've got, Dr. Howle!" Nina said. "Try to outrun them!"

I don't know if we can keep the car safe with that much acceleration, I told myself.

I repeated my own point. "Yes, what if Pel and the kids get—"

—But then a shout of wyrmsong from an unexpected direction cut through my worries: "—Niner-niner," the wyrm said, "I've got visual confirmation on the bogey. It's in pursuit of an unidentified noodle." As processed by my brain, his voice sounded male.

Two wyrms shot up from the trees down below, knocking down several trunks in the process. They burst out from the canopy in a spray of pine needles.

"Unidentified noodle," a second wyrm said, also male.

"Does he mean me?" I muttered, asking my spirits.

"Yes," he said, "you with the car; get out of the way, now!"

I shuddered as my Vyx pursuer blazed a death ray down at me.

Good grief, those things made a terrifying sound. The surrounding air quivered like a mirage as the noise swept through it.

I managed to dodge by swerving down into the forest canopy. The trees around me weren't as lucky, though in a twist of fate, the smoke that billowed off the trees as they burned did give me some much needed cover. I dove through it while the two wyrms went the other way, charging at the Vyx ship, only to stop and do a massive double take as I slowed my perception of time to make sure I'd just seen what I'd thought I'd seen.

Holy shnoodle.

I hadn't been imagining it. One of the wyrms wore a laser tank; like, an actual, functioning tank. He'd strapped the vehicle to his arm like an oversized buckler, with a heat ray in place of the more traditional artillery. The other wyrm had threaded his body through a partially hollowed-out military aerostat, which he wore like a mechanical gambeson. The "sleeves" were positively festooned with high-caliber guns.

If, somehow, Rayph was seeing this, he was probably gushing over how cool it must have looked.

Summoning a plexus whose pataphysics snaked around his arm and activated the tank's laser, the tank wyrm stuck out his arm and blasted away at the oncoming Vyx module. He shuddered in the recoil.

Amazingly, despite being barely thicker than a laser pointer's beam, the military-grade heat ray managed to pierce the spaceship's shields.

Yeah, I couldn't believe it either.

At the same time, the aerostat wyrm banked in from the side and fired all his guns, pumping white hot metal into the break in the module's shields.

The gap in the forcefield widened.

The flower-ship pulled up, but it was too late. The hole in its shield was large enough—and the two wyrms close enough—that, breathing in tandem, the wyrms inundated the gap with concentrated spore breath. The spores ricocheted off the shield's inner surface and smothered over the ship's hull, which popped and sizzled, rapidly breaking out in black, bubbling ulcers that fumed smoke like a smoldering signal flare. Cracks spread out from the ulcers, sparking fire and jets of streaming blue. Whole sections of the hull flushed with glowing circuitry suddenly sputtered and went dark.

"Timberrrr!" the tank-wyrm yelled.

Slowing my flight speed, I turned around and hovered up from the forest just as the Vyx ship lost control and careened toward the trees.

Toward me.

"Get back!" The aerostat wyrm frantically waved his arms. "Up! Up!"

I obeyed, shooting up into the air, levitating the L85 along with me, and just in time, too.

The ship tore through a wide swath of trees and then met its end in a brutal crash that erupted with bonfires and blue thunder. The shockwave from the explosion pressed the surrounding trees flat against the ground and barbecued whatever remained of them.

I glanced down at the L85 as the two wyrms approached.

One of the back-seat windows was freshly coated in a film of jet-black vomit. I nearly screamed when I saw it, but then I saw Jules and Rayph's faces looking up at me through the rear window, nauseous and miserable, but still very much alive.

The two wyrms flanked me on either side, one in front, one behind.

"You're welcome, by the way," the aerostat wyrm said.

"Yes, yes," I said, nodding profusely, "I'm sorry." Coiling mid-air, I pressed one of my hands against my upper underbelly and folded the front quarter of my body in a wyrmly bow. "Y-You're absolutely right. Thank you."

"Chillax, dude," the tank wyrm said, sticking out his hand in a placating gesture. "It's alright. We're not, like, your enemy."

"And who are you, exactly?" I asked.

My kids were at a loss to make sense of what was happening.

The tank wyrm pointed a claw at his chest. "Call me Slick. I don't really do the whole 'rank' thing, ya dig? All are welcome in the tribe."

He seemed very… lax?

I guess that was one word for it.

On the other hand, the aerostat wyrm was much more professional. He snaked his head and neck down in between the aerostat and brought it within reach of his claws and saluted. "I'm Lieutenant Willem Dueright, field commission, formerly a mechanical engineer, Second Class. We're with the First Trenton Wyrm Squadron."

Stolen story; please report.

"The what?"

"Dude, chill," Slick said. He waved his hand. "Follow." He glanced at my car. "You must be gettin' tired luggin' that—"

All six of Slick's eyes bulged wide, his head and neck craning forward as he stared through the windows of my car.

"—Holy fucking shit! Are those humans? Duuuuuuuude…"

"They're my family," I said, amusedly bemused that wyrms could, apparently, come in the Stoner flavor, too.

Lieutenant Dueright glanced up at the sky. "Then that's all the more reason to get them out of the open, before we get caught in another skirmish."

I nodded. "Lead on."

We headed inland, though not far enough to lose sight of the coast as we continued down the side of the continent. After six minutes, the rolling hills and their woodlands flattened out into a broad, man-made plain.

Vernon hopped to the forefront of my mind the instant I caught sight of the buildings in the middle.

"Well, I'll be…" he said. "Fort Marteneiss Air Force Base. I'd never thought I'd see this place again."

"Any relation of yours?" Lark asked.

"My great-grandfather," Vernon replied. The pride in his voice was tinged with melancholy. "It was originally called Fort Sorten, back when it was just a training camp for cadets. You can still see the old Fort from here. Last time I was here, they were using it as staff housing."

The old Fort, an orderly brick quadrangle, enclosed several troop barracks—simple, in the old-fashioned style—as well as a medical clinic, and a munitions depot. Aside from the old Fort, the rest of Fort Marteneiss was a Fort in name only. It had no imposing fortifications, no sturdy walls or earthwork embankments, not even so much as a parapet. But, for a place like Fort Marteneiss, that was par for the course. Its purpose was to break barriers, not hide behind them. Besides, all that electrified fencing did an excellent job of keeping the riffraff out, and at a much cheaper cost.

The military complex sprawled parallel to the coastline. The line of taller buildings that studded its length seemed like smokestacks sticking up from a buried cruise ship. One of the structures had recently burnt down, but the fire had been neatly contained. What I still retained of Suisei's memories told me that was utterly unnatural.

Though military history wasn't my forté, even I knew how important Fort Marteneiss was to the history of Trenton aeronautics.

"Eh?" Lark's voice asked.

"The prototypes of what would become modern aerostats were designed, built, and tested on these grounds," I said.

Slick thumbed a claw at me. "Oh… looks like we got ourselves a history buff here."

I nodded. "Guilty as charged."

"Damn," Vernon said, "look at all that!"

Vernon was right to be surprised. The Fort's grounds sheltered a small army's worth of military vehicles. Tanks and some mounted heat rays were clustered around ramps leading into underground lots, while nine military-grade aerostats sat in two unequal lines on the main landing strip, parallel to the line of tall buildings.

"Grant," Lieutenant Dueright said, "we've got friendly company incoming."

Wyrmsong replied through the Fort's loudspeakers.

"Copy. You're cleared to land."

Following my escorts' lead, the three of us set down on a large plaza a moment later. The plaza was paved in a lopsided checkerboard of big beige stone squares that alternated with narrower rectangles made from a reddish granite. What appeared to be the facility's main building hugged the corner of the plaza at right angles. There was a ring of flags in the middle of the plaza, surrounding a display post bearing a mounted aerostat.

Vernon's memories told me the flags showed insignias of the various branches of Trenton's armed forces.

"Someone put the flags at half-mast," Vernon said.

All of the flags had been lowered, even the flag of the Second Republic—the ol' blue and green two-stripe.

I tamped my psychokinesis down to nothing as I cautiously lowered the L85 onto the pavement.

"Be careful, Genneth," Yuta said. "You know nothing about these wyrms."

I know, I thought-replied.

My two escorts had neatly coiled themselves in front of me. I took in our surroundings while I slithered toward them.

All things considered, the base was in surprisingly good condition. There was very little trash out in the open, and not a single corpse in sight. Even from the air, I'd only spotted a handful of clumps of &alon growing on the premises, and none of them had spread very far.

Had someone been pruning them? Heck, there were several conspicuously empty plots of soil nearby. These had obviously been intended to house trees, and must have done so until only recently, considering the holes in the dirt and the gravel scattered around the plots.

Just as I was about to sing my questions to them, I heard a faint knocking. I turned my head toward the sound.

Jules rapped her knuckles on the car window.

I craned my forepart over to the side of the car

She covered her mouth and coughed. "What's going on?" she said, though, mostly, I just read her lips.

I wove up some spore-text to explain the situation.

"Huh," Slick said. "Neat trick."

"Do you mind if I ask questions?" I asked, turning to face him.

Lt. Dueright shook his head. "I'd be worried if you didn't."

Looking around, of all the questions I could have asked, one stood out in particular.

"Why hasn't this place been blown to smithereens yet?"

Slick shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine, dude."

"One theory I've heard," Lt. Dueright said, "is that the Silverfish are conserving their firepower for when they need to deal with bigger, more dangerous targets."

"Silverfish?" I asked.

"That's what we've been calling the damn things," Dueright said.

"What kind of bigger, more dangerous targets are you talking about?" I asked.

"Considerin' what we've been doin'," Slick said, "not us, for sure."

That was my next question.

"Speaking of which," I said, "what have you been doing?" I stared at the aerostat among the flag poles. "And why'd you ask me to come here?"

"Safety in numbers," Dueright replied. "The Fort's underground storage spaces are built from reinforced concrete and steel. They're a great place to hide and weather a storm."

"And for anyone who doesn't want to sit on their ass all day," Slick said, "there's plenty of weapons for the taking. We're bringin' the fight to the Silverfish, one ship at a time."

That was more than a little surprising.

"Wait," I said, "your plan is to fight them? What in the world made you think you could defeat them?"

"Oh no," Dueright said, "you've got it all wrong. The goal isn't to beat them, it's to be pests. 'Be a pain in their side for as long as we can'; that's how the Brigadier General put it."

Slick slithered up to me and pointed his thumb claw over his shoulder. "Between you and me, I was just a beach lifeguard at a resort town a couple miles back before the world ended. Played a lot of Call of Honor in my down time. Then, when the whole world went to shit, I found my way here, and they told me they'd give me equipment to help shoot up some motherfuckers." He nodded and then shrugged happily. "And who says no to an offer like that?"

"Brigadier General Watterson thinks that giving transformees with a criminal record or anger issues an opportunity to work out their problems is better than letting them run amok in towns and cities," Dueright said, butting in.

"Working out their problems?" I asked.

"Blastin' bogies out of the sky," Slick said, with a nod.

"Violence can be therapeutic," Lt. Dueright said.

That… actually sounded almost reasonable.

"Don't get the wrong idea, though," the Lieutenant added, "you're under no obligation to join our forlorn little crusade. You don't have to fight if you don't want to."

"Genneth," Vernon said, "I hope I don't need to point out that all the spare wyrmpower lying around here could be a real useful asset for that quest of yours."

I know, I thought-said.

"So," Slick said, "…are you gonna join us, or what?"

"Actually, if you don't mind, I think I have an interesting proposal for you."

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